OTHER CITIES: LONDON MEMORYSCAPE
Class, Memory, and the Narrative of Enlightenment:
A Nazi Youth between Berlin, London, and ‘the East’
with Stephanie Bird, Mary Fulbrook, Zoltán Kékesi and Stefanie Rauch
20 March 2025
Like many urban centres around the world, London has long been seen as a place of personal transformation, where ‘the world opens up’ and change occurs. While it has been remembered as a place of refuge as well, the following conversation takes a close look at one of the interviews from ‘Final Account: Third Reich Testimonies,’ an oral history collection in UCL’s Digital Collections, and reflects on the reminiscences of a former member of the Nazi League of German Girls who visited the city on the eve of the Second World War.
In September 1938, Gabriele L-A. (1918–2016) travelled from Berlin to London to spend a year at a commercial school. She had grown up in a prosperous middle-class family and as a member of a number of organisations: a völkisch association for cultivating ties to ethnic Germans living abroad, especially in Eastern Europe; the Nazi League of German Girls; and the Reich Labor Service, another Nazi organisation. London “opened up the world” for her, as she states in her interview for “Final Account: Third Reich Testimonies,” an oral history collection created by the British filmmaker, Luke Holland (1948–2020).
Her testimony focuses especially on three periods: 1933–4 and her subsequent membership in the League of German Girls; 1938–9 and her time in London; and 1939–44 and her studies in Berlin, as well as her first marriage to a man who Nazi laws categorised as a “quarter Jew.” While we tend to imagine the Third Reich’s Nazified youth as enclosed in a social environment controlled by the Nazi state, her narrative revolves around three spaces, experienced successively, that she claims shielded or distanced her from Nazi views: her middle-class background, her year in London, and her studies with Max Vasmer (1886–1962), a Slavist with anti-Nazi views and close ties to Eastern Europe. Her testimony concludes with an account of the so-called German Sonderweg and of Britain as Germany’s democratic antithesis, both of which play a central role in her narrative.
Stephanie Bird: Can I say something first about the mise-en-scène? She has this acute awareness of her bourgeois, her Bildungsbürgertum, background. What we see on one side is a whole row of books, and of course, directly over the other shoulder, we have a grand piano. So those two great symbols of the Bildungsbürgertum, the educated middle class, that you are musical, you understand the particular German inheritance of the musical tradition, and you also have your books, are reinforcing the whole element of her identity.
Zoltán Kékesi: She also portrays her social class as immune to Nazism due to their education and culture. She claims that they were blind to any distinction between Jews and non-Jews in German society:
Stefanie Rauch: What I find so interesting about this anecdote is that it is not really about the Jews and why they emigrated. It’s about her and her family not having been Nazified, not about the reasons why Jews were emigrating en masse.
Z. K.: And her account of her own views of the time is quite contradictory. Although she recalls her year in London as an experience that made her “revise everything that she had thought”—such as that “Poles were our enemy,” a euphemism for the notion that Germans needed to colonise “the East”—, she downplays the role of political education and claims, for example, that the League of German Girls was not political, merely “girl talk.”
Mary Fulbrook: I don’t see how she could claim that the League of German Girls was apolitical. The Bund Deutscher Mädel was lived politics, basically. They’re embodying, they’re incorporating what it means to be a German Maiden through absolutely every activity that they do. And if she’s blind to that and sees political education purely as some formal instruction, she’s clearly blind to her own underlying political assumptions.
S.R.: The fact that she speaks up in the very different setting of the International Friendship League in London to defend Germany or Germany’s reputations, suggests that she was politicised, more than she realised or is claiming with hindsight:
S.B.: A lot of her narrative is about how she broke away from the expectations of her parents and what they wanted her to do, which was to go into the family business. And so, she constructs a narrative of enlightenment, which fits with the trip to England and all the people she meets, and that she starts seeing something completely different. She emphasises how she gets an education against the wishes of her parents and has to get a job because they refuse to support her…. And then the anecdote about her naivety in standing up in the meeting, and saying there’ll never be a war with Hitler, and how brave she was to stand up. So there is this very strong sense of self. She projects that she was strong enough to break with her family. She basically grew out of naivety into reflection. So yes, it is a sort of enlightenment…
M.F.: a Bildungsroman.
S.B.: A Bildungsroman that she presents us with. Yes, and she further adds to this impression of being a type of enlightened European by criticising the German Obrigkeitsdenken, or authoritarian thinking:
S.B.: She seems to argue that the respect for authority is part of German history and connected to the late development of the bourgeoisie, as opposed to the British who don’t have that. She certainly idealises the British in the most ridiculous way. So not only does she see herself as someone who can personally develop, but as someone who has also acquired the historical overview and can discuss why Nazism could probably only have happened in Germany. In her view, at the time, and even now, Germany isn’t properly democratic. She casts herself as someone with enlightened insight into the current state of affairs. She idealises the British, holding Britain up as a much more democratic and liberal society. And it’s the German Sonderweg that she’s interested in.
M.F.: The concept of the Sonderweg, however, had this notion of a late development: despite the sudden rise of the bourgeoisie, the old aristocracy retained political power, even as it was losing economic power. Whereas the bourgeoisie gained economic power, but did not get political power. This was for a long time the prevalent myth and she is repeating it. I think there is a very peculiar configuration in the 1920s and 1930s, which not only allowed Hitler to come to power, but also allowed the German-educated bourgeoisie to think they weren’t ‘really Nazis’ because they were above it all. At the same time, they continued to want to maintain their status in the political system through conformity and rising through the ranks while ignoring the whole…
Z.K.: I find it very interesting how her class identity informs her narrative – did you mean that her class somehow led to her appreciation of the Sonderweg narrative?
M.F.: Yes.
Z.K.: Also because this narrative portrays the bourgeoisie in a good light, right?
M.F.: And it sort of absolves them of any responsibility, too.
Z.K.: It detaches them from carrying political responsibility because power was elsewhere.
S.R.: But then every part of society claims similar things. Working class people claimed they were aloof from National Socialism, the aristocracy said much the same. Every class or socio-economic group found ways to distance themselves from National Socialism, no matter how closely they might have aligned themselves with it.
Z.K.: Beside Berlin and London, it is Eastern Europe that played a special role in her life. She says that she decided to study Slavonic Studies because she felt like she knew “enough of the West,” but she hardly knew “anything about the East.” This seems to contradict the fact that at a very young age, she joined an organisation in which she was part of a branch dedicated to nurturing contact with ethnic Germans in Eastern Europe, and in that context, she travelled to East Prussia. Her statement that she didn’t know anything about Eastern Europe, I think, could be read in two different ways. It could mean that she rejected that education and how the Nazis and previously völkisch ideology imagined Eastern Europe, and wanted to learn more about Eastern Europe, which I think is one way to understand what she’s saying. Or it can mean that she didn’t want to talk about what it was that she knew about Eastern Europe, because all of that was influenced by Nazi ideology, and she wanted to obscure the education that she did have.
S.R.: It might be more likely that, like other young people she might have been excited about the prospect of Lebensraum in the East, studying Eastern European history and Slavonics, to be ready for…
M.F.: Go to help with the government.
S.B.: But what is the political outlook of this professor who was her doctoral supervisor? The implication is that he was actually very sympathetic to Poland.
Z.K.: She describes Max Vasmer and his assistants as anti-Nazi and the department as a “small island,” detailing Vasmer’s efforts to help deported Polish colleagues, yet omitting her own membership in the NSDAP and role as student representative.
S.B.: Well that’s an interesting combination. Interesting in the sense that it’s difficult to imagine it coexisting: not only is she in the NSDAP, she’s also the Nazis’ student representative, and is yet nevertheless apparently working quite closely with someone who is potentially critical of what the Nazis are doing in Poland in relation to their eastern ambitions. Perhaps she can’t hold it together, which is why she doesn’t talk about the Nazi side.
M.F.: Yes, because what I think is interesting is that she was deeply imbued with or influenced by or formed by her social environment growing up. She was deeply affected by being in the Bund Deutscher Mädel and the Reich Labour Service to such an extent that she’s not even able to self-reflect on that and sees it as not being political when it was in its very essence a political experience. So the lived experience of growing up in that milieu and under Nazism as a young person affected her deeply in ways that she can’t even identify. And then she has this jolt, the experience from outside, and becomes more self-reflective, but is still not completely capable of reflecting on what she’s saying or how she’s saying it because the war stories are so confused.
Z.K.: When she is asked whether she knew anyone who joined the SS, she eventually relates how her first husband joined Division Brandenburg, a Wehrmacht special forces unit, and served on the Eastern Front. She claims that her husband’s unit was transferred to the SS in 1944 while stationed in Serbia. Yet, there is little information in the interview on her husband’s involvement in the war.
M.F.: She’s separating her husband from any possibility of having been tainted by what he undoubtedly had to participate in because that’s what his military service in the Brandenburg Division entailed.
Z.K.: She learns how to see national socialism critically, for example, when it comes to the idea of Lebensraum, or German “living space,” and at the same time, she’s not willing to see the involvement of her own husband.
S.B.: Or herself.
Z.K.: Or herself, even.
M.F.: And she’s not willing to engage with Luke’s persistent questions about atrocities in the East and what she knew about them. And she wilfully, completely misinterprets that as what she knew about the atrocities against Poles because that’s what her teacher, her idealised professor, was concerned about, protecting Polish academics from Nazi atrocities or Nazi murder. And so, she keeps coming back to what she knew about that. But she never engages with Luke’s question, really, about what she knew about the extermination of Jews. And that is a significant absence. And given that her husband’s Division was involved in that and was involved in significant massacres and pogroms (whether or not he was himself present at any of them specifically), it’s very curious that she doesn’t say, actually, yes, my husband told me about it. She sticks with what her professor knew about the anti-Polish elite’s atrocities, so it is Holocaust distortion by omission.
S.B.: As is her membership in the Nazi party, which doesn’t fit with the ‘enlightenment’ trajectory. That’s a bit of a leap, to put it mildly.
M.F.: Yes, it’s extraordinary that it comes after the development.
S.R.: It’s a beautifully crafted development, really. A 94-year-old woman looking back, I can see why she would be looking for a story like that.
M.F.: And a practised narrator, as a Zeitzeuge.
S.R.: And her development is bookended by her own engagement as a Zeitzeuge, now contributing to the education of others.
S.B.: But I also think identity isn’t hermetically sealed. It might be that the experience of living in London was very important for her even if she was then in the Nazi party. I get the sense that the experience either was or has become very significant. It has allowed her to think about herself in a certain way, as maturing and becoming enlightened. But that doesn’t mean that everything she says has to cohere for it to be authentic. These things co-exist.
STEPHANIE BIRD is Professor of German Studies and Comparative Literature at UCL.
MARY FULBROOK, FBA, is Professor of German History at UCL.
ZOLTÁN KÉKESI is a research fellow at the Centre for Collective Violence, Holocaust and Genocide Studies at UCL. His work on “Final Account: Third Reich Testimonies” is generously supported by the Pears Foundation.
STEFANIE RAUCH is Head of Collections at The Wiener Holocaust Library, London.
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Edited by MARTHE LISSON
Proofreading by ALICE-ANNE PSALTIS
Lead image: Detail of photograph D 9314 (London near Trafalgar Square in 1942) from the collections of the Imperial War Museums.
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