Introduction National Socialism was the ideological foundation of Hitlerite Germany for twelve years. For the last sixty-five years, Germans have been struggling with its memory. This long period of stumbling through the past, acquiring and rejecting the images of the most dramatic modern history both for Germans and the rest of Europe is sometimes called a second history of Nazism. Social sciences use Pierre Nora s term, history of the second degree, to refer to the history of memory, of collective representations, their evolution and role in the process of shaping identity. 1 German memory is a subject of interest for many academic disciplines, as well as art, media and politics. For the first time in history, a nation publicly dealt with its own past in front of our eyes. We observe a particular experiment: generations of Germans participate in a process that is full of contradictions, and they have to confront both themselves and the outside world. The factors that affect this process are, for example, changes in internal political conditions and in international surroundings, as well as generational changes. The uniqueness of this phenomenon and the fascination in the subject that is sweeping through academic circles and the media can be explained by the fact that, despite numerous wars and barbarisms in the history of humankind, there is no commonly accepted standard, as the one in Sèvres, that would determine how a community, in whose name murders and violence were committed, should cope with the wrong that was done, what it should remember and for how long, and what the accepted forms of externalising memory are. The expectation that the departure from National Socialism would be a path that follows religious patterns confession, penance, absolution and reconciliation turned out to be an idealistic utopia. What should the narrative and debate on the murderous character of the Nazi system be? How can one be a German and a German patriot after Auschwitz? How can one confess a guilt that can stigmatise? How can a democracy be built on the ruins of dictatorship, in a society that is not convinced that democracy is the solution? In 1945, Germans and their political leaders faced numerous challenges, the character and size of which had been impossible to anticipate. Their long record 1 Popularisation of the term in Polish academic literature was aided by an international programme of the Centre for Historical Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Berlin, entitled Polish-German Realms of Memory, initiated by Prof. Dr. Hab. Hans- Henning Hahn and Prof. Dr. Hab. Robert Traba.
8 Introduction of running away from and returning to history has been rippled with disputes that are impossible to define equivocally. This process of evolution of the culture and policy of German memory is not over. It is marked by both subjective and objective contradictions that have been part of it from the beginning. Even the preliminary stage of semantic interpretation of the basic categories related to reckoning with the past caused fierce disputes. The terms perpetrator, victim, guilt, punishment, denazification, zero hour, overcoming the past, defeat and liberation all polarised public opinion. None of these terms were satisfactory, a common denominator was found for none of them and the division lines of German public opinion were not based on an unequivocal criterion. There was a gap between suppressed, repressed or unaware remorse and German society s sense of responsibility and the expectations of individual, group, national or state victims of the politics of the Third Reich. The perpetrators wanted to forget the old and build the new; the victims desired punishment for the perpetrators and commemoration of their suffering and losses. The feelings of victims and perpetrators are incompatible. The Hitlerite Third Reich fell in 1945 but a nation remained that had to face a justified accusation of carrying out a genocide on a scale never seen before. Those who were expected to honour and mourn the victims remained helpless. Hitherto, mourning practices defined grief as sorrow for one s own loss, for those who died in war. Death for one s country usually gave meaning to national identity. Modern history had not yet known a case of mourning for victims from other countries and nations by the nation in the name of which the crime was committed. How to go into mourning after losing common values? How to lament those who had been excluded from the German community long before and were seen as Untermenschen? How to commemorate the death of millions? Are Germans allowed to lament their own losses and victims? Historical experience of dealing with mourning shows that it can be easily used to manipulate, to mobilise crowds and to arouse conflicting feelings. The memory of the criminal nature and politics of National Socialism is distinguished by permanent asymmetry between the official, ritual policy of the past of the German state and individual reflection, between political correctness, moral command and an individual need to forget. This dualism has been a source of tension and conflicts. Debates on the past both in German states and in the united Germany have demonstrated that individuals do not seek justification for the dictatorship but for their own life. Strategies of releasing witnesses and minor players of the Third Reich from the charge of compliance in the Nazi system resulted from a need to get rid of the stigma of false people living in false times.
Introduction 9 Both in Germany and abroad, the issue of the price that had to be paid to build a new country is still controversial. Contradiction lay at the very foundation of building democratic structures in post-war West Germany. Some German intellectuals found collective silence after 1945 to be an element of an efficient political strategy, a necessary factor in the emergence of German democracy. Collective memory is one of the major factors that legitimises the political system of a country, and is a crucial element of identity. Post-war German democracy needed a positive identity to integrate around democratic values. However, what past should it refer to if the history of the previous twelve years included genocide and an exhausting war? In the first years after the war, negative memory conflicted with the process of creating a positive image of the new country. Against the expectations of idealists, it was not spiritual renewal or moral self-examination of Germans that constituted a sine qua non condition to build foundations of a democratic state, but, on the contrary, it was the state, its institutions and citizen values that formed a basis for inner freedom, and allowed Germans to face and accept history. The question, asked by many intellectuals, as to how to rebuild the spiritual substance of Germans was marked by ambivalence in spirit and in politics from the beginning. The writer Günter Kunert, struggling with his image of Germany, expressed it emphatically: The word Germans hardly passes through my mouth. It leaves an unpleasant taste on my palate. This term is like some kind of vessel, brimful of old and new contradictions. The inextricably linked Heinrich Heine and Heinrich Himmler, Weimar and Buchenwald, masterpieces of art and death as a master from Germany. A variety of artists and even more experts in memory tricks. 2 The exceptionality of Nazi crimes does not correspond with exceptionality of memory. Collective memory is characterised by the minimum amount of content and the maximum amount of symbols. Germans could not rise like a phoenix from the ashes and suddenly become citizens aware of their responsibility for political consequences of the criminal politics of the Third Reich. Reckoning with one s own involvement in the Nazi system requires, first of all, knowledge and understanding of the origin, process and consequences of the racist system. This demands temporal distance, generational change, a new language of education and new awareness. The difficulty of bearing the burden of responsibility in a democratic state results from the necessity for deep reflection: the compass of law should not get lost in the process 2 G. Kunert, Notgemeinschaft (Dezember 1988), in: F. Barthélemy, L. Winckler (Ed.), Mein Deutschland fi ndet sich in keinem Atlas. Schriftsteller aus beiden deutschen Staaten über ihr nationales Selbstverständnis, Frankfurt a. M. 1990, p. 33.
10 Introduction of overcoming a state of lawlessness and democratisation of anti-democratic structures should not deprive society of respect for democracy. The external world expects harmonisation, unequivocalness and uniformity of the image of the memory of the period 1933-1945, which influenced the fate of Europe and the world. In democracy, however, memory is heterogeneous. The culture of collective memory in a democratic state is a culture of dispute. Germans themselves are not sure whether they are acrobats or masters of historical reckoning with the past. As archival resources and primary source documentation were gradually made available, the quantitative and qualitative increase in academic and memoir literature contributed to the permanent revival and pluralisation of memory. The Holocaust research exhausted the hitherto prevailing formula of debate on perpetration. It turned out in the 1990s that a dichotomy of evaluation and interpretation of crime according to schematic division into intentionalists and structuralists does not correspond with the research results of many academic disciplines or with the broad interests of literature, art, and media. 3 Along with the development of research, the complexity of motivations for the perpetrators activity within the system of National Socialism is constantly revealing. There is no single, complete interpretation model. Memory of the Nazi crimes must absorb new knowledge of the history of the crimes, including overlapping research interests and aspects and contexts of different areas of life in the Third Reich and the occupied countries. On the threshold of the 21st century, 95% of German society consisted of people who were either born after 1945 or were under the age of twenty during the war. Thus, present and future historical discourse of Germans will be only a reconstructed memory of the times of the Holocaust. The agenda of public debate will include themes and questions raised by a generation that will look for a different form and language to commemorate the past. Geography of memory is changing. Immigrant members of the multicultural society that is emerging in Germany do not have to identify with the negative part of German history. Will this new community be a good carrier and guardian of memory? Universalisation and globalisation of memory is inevitable; collective memory is permanently transformed. The competition between communities of memory is constantly joined by new actors. First, Central and Eastern European countries, which, liberated from the corset of Cold War confrontation, demanded honour for their history, full of tragedy and humility. Ethnic groups, minorities and nations that had not so far had 3 More on the subject, see: P. Longerich, Tendenzen und Perspektiven der Täterforschung; Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte 14-15, 2007, pp. 3-7; H. Mommsen, Forschungskontroversen zum Nationalsozialismus; Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte 14-15, 2007, pp. 14-21.
Introduction 11 the opportunity to be noticed by the world s public opinion, made their voice heard. Communities that lost their countrymen in mass murders and rapes during the 20th century, symbolised by e.g. Srebrenica and Rwanda, do not want to be second category victims. Development of new techniques of human communication enriches the culture of memory by providing new forms of commemoration. However, it also brings new sources of conflict as we live in times when measures of memory and forgetting undergo a thorough revision. German struggles with memory, that is, collective recognition of the essence and efficiency of National Socialism and its mechanisms of seducing the masses, is a process in which what mostly matters is its influence on the present. Collective memory has a great political potential. Therefore, the quality of German citizens dialogue with the past is to a great extent determined by the quality of governance and the political class. Although intellectual and political reflection is rarely accompanied by the question whether and how a person can consciously and rationally draw conclusions from the past, Germans after 1945 had to face the question of who is ready to take responsibility for the traumatic heritage of Nazism, and how. The book that the Reader now holds in his or her hands is an attempt to examine both the obvious and less obvious ways in which Germans struggle with their Nazi past. It embraces only a small part of a complex problem, which is impossible for an individual author to grasp in its entirety and character. The main intention, which leads through a thick of actors, issues, institutions, events and phenomena, is a reflection upon the reasons for which German reckoning with the past turned out to be a process full of contradictions; a bumpy road rippled with political, intellectual and moral mines. This intention is accompanied by the question about the specific character of German collective memory in relation to the helplessness and moral condition of a person defending himself/herself and his/her nation in the face of unimaginable evil. These intentions determined the structure of the book. It includes an introductory part, which aims to clarify terminology and theoretical and definitional grounds on which the reflection on the collective memory has been based. Then the book leads the Reader chronologically through the period of occupation zones (1945-1949), divided memory in two German states (1949-1989) and the reunified Germany since 1990. In justified cases, the content of the book extends beyond the planned time borders. The last part is devoted to rituals of memory, mainly the celebrations of memory. What is their content, their choreography, whom do they serve and what function do they have? Commemorations of three anniversaries are the examples. Their choice has been dictated by the conviction that each of them commemorates an event that significantly influenced the identity and political culture of Germans. The memory of 8 May 1945 demonstrates the ambivalence of
12 Introduction liberation and loss, which is still present in German consciousness. The memory of the Night of Broken Glass on 9 November 1938 consists of emotions and the necessity of coping with the greatest trauma the Holocaust. The decision to choose the anniversary of 1 September 1939 resulted partly from a question that has been troubling me: why a nation that was the first victim of World War II was seen as the last and barely registered in memory. The book does not end with any conclusions, as the subject of this work has no end. The dialogue with the past, not only the German one, remains open. Each generation introduces new problems and doubts into the dialogue, looks for their own ways of conciliation with the past. It is future generations who, with their maturity and courage, will determine whether the memory of National Socialism will remain a burden or will become liberation.