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Holocaust Memory in Germany - Coggle Diagram
Holocaust Memory in Germany
1946:
Friedrich Meinecke: The German Catastrophe
Plea for the rescuing of the German Geist and for fundamentally distinguishing this Geist from the 'Nazi un-culture'
Nazism and the war catastrophe for Germany, rather than for its victims - Germany as the first victim of Nazism
Karl Jaspers, The Question of German Guilt
Criminal - as perpetrators
Political - as Germans; a people answers for its polity
Moral - the ones who knew, or could know, and yet closed their eyes to events, or permitted themselves to be intoxicated, seduced, or bought with personal advantages, or obeying from fear.
Metaphysical - lack of absolute solidarity with the human being as such. This solidarity is violated by my presence at a wrong or crime; if it happens, and if I was there, and if I survive where the other is killed, I am guilty of being still alive.
Kogon: The SS and German guilt
Eugen Kogon, The Theory and Practice of Hell (1946)
Buchenwald main camp: political prisoners
Nazism enemy of Western values; SS social misfits separated from German society
Kogon anti-Nazi and anti-Communist: politically convenient: 135,000 copies sold by 1947
Periodisation
1945-1949: The Question of Guilt :
1949: 1959: the Adenauer Restoration
1959-1985: the Consensus Unravels
1986: The Historians' Dispute
1990s - : The Berlin Republic
Adenauer
Chancellor 1949-1963.
1946, demanded that Western allies 'finally' stop punishing harmless followers of the few Nazi fanatics who had hijacked the German state.
The Adenauer resotration
Adenauer: Establishment of democracy required less memory and justice and more integration of former Nazis
Kurt Schumacher (SPD): democracy must bring guilty to justice and settle accounts
Relative lack of emphasis on memory of Nazi crimes
Integration vs justice and memory
Cold War
Postwar trials partial success; denazification total failure, followed by amnesties
Hans Globke
Post-War
State Secretary of Chancellery and Chief of its Personal Division (1953-1958)
Pre-War
Helped formulate emergency legislation that gave Hitler dictorial power
Co-author of official commentary on Nuremberg Laws
Initiator of idea of compelling all German Jews to adopt middle names of Israel and Sarah
Dominant 1940s discourse about Nazism
Entire blame on small clique of fanatics. Hitlerism. SS as misfits.
Ordinary Germans as victims
Passive constructions when discussing the Nazi past. 'Crimes committed in Germany's name'
Legacy of Nazism no danger for democracy.
1950s:
1952: 37% of Germans agreed with statement: 'It would be better for Germany not to have any Jews in the country'
1953: 55% of Germans disagreed with the statement 'German soldiers of the last war can be reproached for their conduct in the occupied countries'
1952: Adenauer signed reparations to Israel but 'in an overwhelming majority, the German people abhorred the crimes committed against the Jews and did not participate in them.' At the same time, important minority spoke about the Holocaust
Late 1950s: the consensus unravels
Generations
Easing of Cold War tension
Swastika wave. Display of Neo-Nazism
Eichmann and Auschwitz trials
Extension of statute of limitations
1968:
Student movement: links between authoritarianism, 'fascism' and the Nazi past. Quite obsessed with the relatively recent past. Established continuities between Nazi past and current government. Younger generations openly talking about fascism, even if they didn't know much about it.
Ulrike Mienhof (fairly well known journalist, writing for a political newspaper, became radicalised and then became part of the Red Army Faction), in 1967: 'I really see no difference left between the policy terrorist methods that we have already seen in Berlin, and that threaten us now, and the terrorism of the SA in the 1930s'
Willy Brandt 1969-1974
More democracy, more memory, confrontation with Nazi past and Ostpolitik
Political shift
We need more democracy, and so we need more memory, and so we need to confront the Nazi past
1979: Holocaust
Holocaust situated Holocaust at the centre of West Germany's memory politics
Generated an enormous debate in Germany. Like a massive therapy session.
Very collective response. Very politicised.
Helmut Kohl 1982-1998. Another conservative turn politically. Chancellor who presided over the reunification. Had an agenda for the place of memory in German history.
Centrality of public memory to his political project of creating positive German self-image
Return to traditional German values but confronting Nazi past - 'mercy of late birth' - born in the late 1930s - couldn't have done anything wrong as he was a child
Need to downplay centrality of Holocaust: not unique/not exclusively Germany. Not an easy task.
Historikersterit: Nolte v Habermas. A debate about Holocaust uniqueness.
Started by conservative historian Nolte, who undermined the idea that the Holocaust was unique. Toning down of the importance of the Holocaust in German history.
Habermas - nothing salvageable about German history.
Bitburg
1985
President Ronald Reagan visited a German military cemetery containing Waffen-SS graves, sparking international criticism and debate over historical memory and reconciliation
Rather than allowing Nazi past to pass away, Kohl sparked national discussion on it and turned it into political issue
Politics of memory under Kohl
Themes
The master of the past: should the Nazi past be allowed to pass away, or should it remain central to the political culture of the Federal Republic?
The Holocaust in German history. How important was the Nazi past, and the Holocaust in particular, relative to other periods in German history? Does all Germany history lead to the Third Reich? Or was the Third Reich twelve years of history? Clear political divisions in how the Third Reich should be remembered.
Political divisions
Left and Centre
Reject normalisation
Holocaust at the centre of German identity
Holocaust unique
Only patriotism allowed is constitutional patriotism
Right
Normalisation
German suffering
Germans as victims
Reconciliation with German history
Relativisation Holocaust
May 8: day of defeat or day of liberation?
Bitburg
Historikerstreit
Von Weizsäcker's Speech on 8 May 1985
Historical responsibility: all Germans have to preserve memory of past crimes
Germans as perpetrators. Germans were not primarily victims of Nazism, but complicit in all its crimes
Victims: Jews, Sinti and Roma, homosexuals, mentally ill, members of the Resistance, communists, and soldiers. Becomes a more or less standardised list.
8 May - day of liberation not a day of defeat,
Today we mourn all the dead of the war and the tyranny.
In particular we commemorate the six million Jews who were murdered in German concentration camps.
We commemorate all nations who suffered in the war, especially the countless citizens of the Soviet Union and Poland who lost their lives
As Germans, we mourn our own compatriots who perished as soldiers, during air raids at home, in captivity or during expulsion
We commemorate the Sinti and Romany Gypsies, the homosexuals and the mentally ill who were killed, as well as the people who had to die for their religious or political beliefs
1 more item...
Link between contrition and patriotism. A good German is one who wants to actively remember and commemorate these events.
Bitburg 5 May 1985
Kohl: emphasise forty years of peace and partnership with US and symbolise normalcy of FRG
Bitburg would symbolise end of German guilt and positive identification with German national identity
Controversy when discovered that Waffen SS were buried at military cemetery at Bitburg; Reagan agreed to include visit to Bergen-Belsen before Bitburg
Brandt: guilt of the mournful German
Kohl's 'privilege of late birth' marked new stage in official FRG confrontation of the Nazi past: Holocaust memory downplayed in the quest for positive national identity in light of democratic present
Historikerstreit 1986-1988
1200 texts, but debate played out almost entirely in the printed press, with little interest from TV and radio. Politics of memory, not historical research.
Context: post-Bitburg and during debates on historical museum projects championed by Kohl
Uniqueness/comparability of the Holocaust
Ernst Nolte: Holocaust was response to previous Soviet crimes
Habermas: no link, Holocaust was unique and unprecedented
Identification with historical actors of Nazi period
Andreas Hillgruber, Zweierlei Untergand (Two Kinds of Ruin): Geramn historians should identify with German troops fighting on Eastern Front in 1944-5
Critics questioned need to identify with historical actors, and especially with German soldiers. How many victims would have survived had the front collapsed earlier?
Normalisation of Nazi past
Michael Stürmer: Germany needed identification with national history.
Jürgen Habermas: German history is tainted; Germans should identify with Constitution ('constitutional patriotism')
German historical controversies marked political shifts
Fritz Fischer, Germany's Aims in the First World War (1961) marked end of Adenauer period and onset of SPD reformism.
Historikersteit marked end of that period and onset of neoconservative cultural politics.
Neue Wache Central Memorial of the Federal Republic of Germany for the Victims of War and Tyranny
Original plans to establish national memorial to commemorate German soldiers since 1982, but abandoned in 1985 for political disagreement over need for monument honouring victims of German crimes and German victims of war.
Announced and completed in 1993 without parliamentary discussion
1816-8: Neue Wache (New Guardhouse) built
1931: Converted into 'Memorial to those who fell in the World War'
1960: Rededicated as 'Memorial to the victims of Fascism and militarism'
1993 established as 'the central memorial of the FDR'
Lumping together of Holocaust victims with their perpetrators
Central Council of Jews in Germany threatened to boycott opening ceremony
Kohl promised to support construction of Holocaust memorial and to add plaque listing victims in format similar to Von Weizsäcker speech
Käthe Kollwitz, Mother with Her Dead Son
Kollwitz important figure in West German peace movement and East German official pacifist iconography
Her statue symbolises reconciliation among Germans, but traditional Christian icon of pietà used to remember victims of genocide, especially Jewish victims
The Holocaust in Germany's official memory culture in the 1990s
Despite potentially misleading symbols and relativisation of its memory, Neue Wache clearly signals advance of Holocaust in German official memory culture.
8 May 1995: Focus from all political parties on the Holocaust rather than on the meaning of the day for Germans
Monuments: before mid-1980s, most FRG monuments and memorials dedicated to German soldiers killed in WW1 and WW2. Since mid-1980s tenfold increase in number of state-supported monuments and museums dedicated to other victims of National Socialism
Mid 1990s:
Daniel Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners (1996)
Most successful scholarly study of the Holocaust
Did away with complex theoretical interpretations in favour of mono-casual explanation and graphic descriptions.
Germans killed Jews because they wanted to.
Provided third generation with means to expose crimes of previous generations while exempting them from directly sharing their burden of guilt.
Crimes of the Wehrmacht (1995-1999)
Organised by Hamburg Institute for Social Research
1400 photos and commentaries documenting crimes against humanity carried out by the army (not the SS)
Destroyed popular myth of the 'clean' Wehrmacht
When it reached Munich in 1997, exhibition became national political case: conservative CDU MPs criticised it for being unpatriotic; SPD and Green MPS described burden of guilt imposed on them by parents who had bought into Nazi ideology
2005: Memorial to the murdered Jews of Europe
1989: original idea by Eberhard Jäckel and Lea Rosh; endorsed by Central Council of Jews in Germany and World Jewish Congress
1992-3: supported by government and Kohl himself
1995: two projects shortlisted; both rejected
1997: second shortlist: Peter Eisenman's project selected
1999: MP's accept smaller and less obtrusive version of Eisenman's project and learning centre
1999-2005: delays (contract with Degussa for graffiti-resistance painting rescinded because Degussa was SS supplier of Zyklon-B)
10 May 2005: opening
2008: Memorial to Homosexuals persecuted under Nazism
Agreed by Parliament in 2003; inaugurated on 27 May 2008
Designed by Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset
2012: Memorial to Sinti and Roma victims of National Socialism
Agreed by Parliament in 2003; inaugurated on 24 October 2012
Design by Dani Karavan
2000s - Germans as Victims
Flight and expulsion from the East
Günter Grass, Crabwalk (2002)
Die Grosse Flucht (The Great Escape, Guido Knopp, 2001)
Die Flucht (Kai Wessel, 2007)
Bombing of German cities
W. G. Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction (1997)
Jörg Friedrich, The Fire: The Bombing of Germany, 1940-1945 (2002)
Dresden (Roland Suso Richter, 2006)
Rape of German women
Anonymous,, A Woman in Berlin (2003)
A Woman in Berlin (Max Färberböck, 2008)
A German Catastrophe Reloaded?
The Downfall (Oliver Hirschbiegel, 2004)
Generation War (Philipp Kadelbach, 2013)