Gertrud Mackprang Baer: Germans Wrestle With Culture of Memory

Gertrud Mackprang Baer, in the Toronto Star (4-29-05):

[Gertrud Mackprang Baer is the Ottawa-based author of In the Shadow Silence - From Hitler Youth to Allied Internment: A Young Woman's Story of Truth and Denial, which was short-listed for the 2002 Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction]

The 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz has produced an extraordinary global response. Leaders have met at the former extermination camp and in the German capital of Berlin, after 10 years of bickering and three years of construction, architect Peter Eisenman's monument to the Holocaust is now ready for inauguration on May 8.

I visited the memorial last summer when it was still a muddy construction site. Built almost atop the former Reich Chancellery and the Fuehrer-Bunker, the four-acre monument of dark-grey slabs discourages easy analysis.

One message, however, is clear: This must be the final line; man cannot create anything darker, more emotionally withdrawn than this symbol of history's most appalling atrocity.

In 1989, German politicians optimistically marked the country's unification as the end of the postwar era. They could not have been more wrong. The discussion of guilt, suppressed or avoided through earlier decades, erupted in the late '80s and escalated during the '90s.

The Holocaust Memorial, the unyielding reminder in the centre of Germany's wildly innovative capital city, may well symbolize the quintessential outcome of this belated debate: Lest they forget (again). To understand Germany's struggle with its past, one has to understand its background.

In 1945, stunned by the lost war and overwhelmed by the horrors of the death camps, Germans fell silent. There were no words to express their shame, no pity left for their own losses.

The political climate also discouraged expressions of grief and outrage for the country's 4 million fallen soldiers, the 12 million civilians expelled or fleeing from Eastern Europe (of whom 2 million perished), or the 600,000 others killed by Allied air raids. Germans who cultivated such memories were suspected of trying to balance numbers against numbers - thereby devaluing the monstrous fact of the Holocaust.

The political pressure was strong enough to be felt in every family. Mourning was perceived as a way to hang onto the values of a criminal regime and a disgraced army. It also blurred cause and effect, perpetrators and victims.

During the early postwar decades, as the crimes of the Nazi era became subsumed by the exigencies of the Cold War, West German politicians built their new democracy on the strength of a booming economy that overcame the ravages of war in record time. The past became remote.

While large sums of money were spent on reparations, there was little political will to deal with the guilty or guilt.

When in the late '80s the Nazi horrors finally penetrated complacency and denial, an alienated postwar generation, deeply resentful of the shameful mess they had been forced to grow up with, continued to suppress the public discussion of Germany's own losses. Instead, the country engaged in a process of self-revelation and remorse.

The outcome is today's Erinnerungskultur (memory culture), a new political and moral view that places the Jewish genocide, symbolized by Auschwitz, not only above all other losses, but above other national or international issues.

There can be little doubt that Germany's memory culture enjoys broad popular support among the postwar generations and even among the rapidly shrinking number of Hitler contemporaries.

Paradoxically, this hard-won inner peace has allowed an old conflict to re-emerge: Germany's losses have suddenly become an issue that seems no longer easy to suppress.

Demands for the country's own Erinnerungskultur are loudest among the NPD, a far-right party with a modest following, except in Saxony, where it recently denounced the Dresden bombing of February 1945 as a "British-American Holocaust."

Despite its neo-Nazi polemics, the NPD presents no threat to the country's stability. Its demands for Germany's own memory culture, however, are finding an increasing response.

In 2002, three books put a dramatic end to a half-century of silence, beginning with literary Nobel laureate and former political activist Gunther Grass's novel Im Krebsgang (Crabwalk). The small book told of the January 1945 sinking of the German ship Wilhelm Gustloff by Russian submarines. Nine thousand refugees lost their lives, making this the greatest single marine disaster in history. The novel shocked Grass's intellectual brethren and aroused excitement in the national and international press.

Meanwhile, Jorg Friedrich's Der Brand (The Fire) presented the first detailed account of Allied area bombing of German cities causing some 600,000 deaths. And British historian Antony Beevor's The Fall of Berlin 1945 drew a horrifying picture of murder and mass rape of German civilians by Red Army soldiers.

The emergence of this previously unspoken historic dimension prompted the weekly Die Zeit to huff: "Do Germans want to be victims now too?"...