bernard von bothmer - the politics of the past: german memory of world war ii

8/6/2019 Bernard von Bothmer - The Politics of the Past: German Memory of World War II

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Bernard von Bothmer

The Politics of the Past: German Memory of World War II

Ian Buruma, Jeffrey Herf, and Anne Saadah

I. Introduction

Nations, much like individuals, often have difficulty honestly facing past transgressions.

Those seeking to explore a nations past sins face many challenges, such as public apathy,

popular misinformation, and the difficulties of bringing forth a history that might be critical of

the pasts of political elites, many of whom might have been involved in past crimes. Germa nys

effort to confront its behavior in World War II is especially problematic, for to many the

Holocaust is the single greatest crime of Western civilization. The magnitude of the atrocities

committed in the murder of two thirds of European Jews is almost beyond comprehension. How

does one even begin to confront such mass murder, the scale and organization of which is almost

unprecedented in the history of humanity?

The issue is further complicated by the fact that Germany was split at wars end into two

ideologically hostile nations, a struggle that became part of a much larger one between the

worlds two superpowers. Any post-war memory of Germanys Nazi past would be colored by

the Cold War battle already in progress. The temptation to distort the Nazi past, already strong at

the end of World War II, only became stronger as communism and capitalism battled for world

supremacy. Memory soon emerged as another arena in which to fight the Cold War.


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What is the German memory of the Third Reich? How was it expressed, and how has it

changed over time? Why were there such pronounced differences of this memory in both East

and West Germany? How did the Cold War influence it? More generally, what is the relationship

between dictatorship, democracy, and memory? What processes form a countrys national

identity? How does one forgive and move a nation forward in a democracy without forgetting the

memory of the victims?

The scholarship of Ian Buruma, Jeffrey Herf, and Anne Saadah help answer these

questions, using a journalistic perspective, a historical approach, and a theoretical political

science framework. What emerges from these studies is that Germany was, for the most part, able

to honesty confront the crimes of the Nazi era. West Germany, however, while far from perfect,

was much more open than East Germany, whose Communist ideology encouraged a memory of

the war that only recognized the ideological components of the Nazis crimes at the expense of

any discussion of its racial component. The Cold War played a major role in shaping and

distorting memory in both nations as well.

West Germanys relative success was primarily due to the emphasis its political leaders

placed on strengthening democratic institutions and of incorporating rather than alienating past

supporters of the Nazis into this framework. By doing so, they paved the groundwork for the

creation of a political climate that increasingly allowed criticism of Germanys past to enter into,

and even dominate, public discourse, while simultaneously gradually minimizing any chance of

Germany reverting back to dictatorship. Though far from flawless, Germany provides a workable

model by which other countries seeking to honestly face their own pasts should be encouraged to

follow, learning from its mistakes, while hopefully emulating the many things that it did

correctly.


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II. Germany, Japan, and Notions of Guilt

How does a nation decide moral responsibility for past tragedies? Had Germany learned

from its past mistakes? Were Germanys historic enemies justified in fearing what a united

German would mean for the future of Europe? These questions are central to London based

author and journalist Ian Burumas 1994 book The Wages of Guilt Memories of War in

Germany and Japan. Written shortly after German unification, Burumas work of cultural history

explores issues of guilt and nationalism by examining the commentary of historians, artists,

journalists, and intellectuals. He visited museums and war memorials, studied textbooks, and

interviewed regular citizens, former German soldiers, Holocaust survivors, and politicians from

across the political spectrum. His study contradicts the Marxist argument that wars are about

economics, not ideology, as his travels throughout Japan and Germany reveal the enormous

power of ideas and beliefs to shape a nations foreign policy, public opinion, and memory of the

past.

The differences within and between nations in dealing with the past also demonstrate to

Buruma the power of educational and political institutions to mold a nations outlook. The latter

hold special significance, as he blames faulty political arrangements for the tragedies of both

Japan and Germany. Rather than ascribing to the notion that some nations are predisposed to

commit horrible acts of violence, Buruma emphasizes weaknesses in each nations political

structure instead of blaming some aspect of a nations supposed character. Institutions, not

heritage or genes, shape a countrys memory. Burumas recipe for preventing future acts of mass

genocide involves creating a healthy dose of political democracy as well as stressing the

importance of education, as he argues that the horrors of World War II occurred in part because

people became overly susceptible to propaganda. He concludes that when society has become


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sufficiently open and free to look back, from the point of view neither of the victim nor of the

criminal, but of the critic, only then will the ghosts be laid to rest.1

Though in both Germany and Japan pacifism was expressed as anti-Americanism,

Buruma finds many striking differences between the two countries regarding how they remember

World War II. Buruma is especially critical of how Japan has chosen not to face its wartime past.

Unlike Germany, Japan has no monuments to the wars victims. Japan is also more openly anti-

Semitic than Germany. Buruma believes that Japanese historians have not been as vigorous as

their German counterparts in investigating the causes of World War II. Many Japanese, far more

than Germans, still believe that wartime atrocities such as at Nanking were exaggerated, and

excuse them as having been committed in the heat of battle. Unlike the Germans, the Japanese do

not blame their own behavior for the Allied bombings of their nation, but instead blame both

racism and an odd Western interest in science as the principle reasons for the attacks.

Buruma concludes that Germany has been much more open and honest than Japan in

dealing with its past, for a variety of reasons. Not all of them are the fault of Japan, as he ascribes

a large part of the blame on the American imposed constitution, which he argues retarded

political maturity in Japan. But to Buruma most of the explanations for Japans historical

amnesia are internal. For one, there is the greater role of religion in Japan than in Germany,

which serves to discourage independent thought. And the far right, far more popular in Japan

than in Germany, also does not encourage self-criticism, nor does Japans cult of the emperor.

And Japan, unlike Germany, has the power of Hiroshima to make them look like victims in the

eyes of the world. Buruma also notes that the Tokyo war crimes trials produced a very different

result than did the Nuremberg trials. And education also played an important role in shaping

memory. Whereas in German textbooks political resistance is celebrated, in the Japanese ones

there is no similar treatment of those who did not support the government.

1Ian Buruma, The Wages of GuiltMemories of War in Germany and Japan. New York, Farrar Straus Giroux,

1994, p. 249.


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Ultimately, the Germans feel much more guilt than do the Japanese about their conduct

during World War II. The German war was not only remembered on television, on the radio, in

community halls, schools, and museums; it was actually worked on, labored, rehearsed, he

observes. One sometimes got the impression, especially in Berlin, that German memory was

like a massive tongue seeking out, over and over, a sore tooth.2Germanys effort to face up to

its past is far from perfect. There are still some pockets of anti-Semitism and hostility to

democracy in Germany, and Buruma found much hostility to foreigners and immigration.

But he was quite impressed overall with the German peoples desire to acknowledge their

Nazi past, especially with the enormous progress they have made. In the first two decades after

the war, few Germans were keen to preserve the sites of Nazi crimes at all, he writes. But there

are many Germans now, especially in the West, who regard the maintenance of former

concentration camps as a sacred duty.3 Buruma ascribes some of the causes for this obsession to

face the past as part of the legacy of their defeat in World War II. The frequent admonishments

in Germany to mourn the past, to do the labor of mourning, are part of an act of purification,

he claims. Germans did this to shield themselves not only from punishment or guilt but also

from the sense of utter impotence following their defeat.4

But there are tremendous differences between East and West Germany. Buruma describes

layers of mutual mistrust that existed between them, tensions that surfaced as unification seemed

a real possibility after years of division. Fears were especially pronounced in the East. To

lifelong antifascists who had always believed that Federal Republic was the heir to Nazi

Germany, he writes, unification seemed so they said almost like a restoration of 1933.5

Much of this distrust can be seen in the ways each country remembered the war. Whereas East

2Ibid., p. 8.

3Ibid., p. 80.

4Ibid., p. 21.

5Ibid., p. 59.


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Germany relied upon official propaganda to shape the memory of the Nazis, West Germany

essentially came to terms with it.

One of the sharpest differences concerns the memory of Jews in World War II, which the

East colored above all by ideology. In communist dogma, the war against the Jews did not really

exist, notes Buruma. World War II had been a class war, waged by fascists and plutocrats

against the People. Jews, like gypsies, were not essentially different from the other victims of

fascism.6 Ideology also influenced the prosecution of former Nazis, trials used to prove

ideological superiority rather than to seek justice. The antifascist German peoples republic did

a better job than the Federal Republic in weeding out Nazis in high places, Buruma writes, but

smaller Nazis were left alone as long as they were obedient communistsAs state propaganda

ceaselessly pointed out, the guilty were all in the West.7

Whereas Japanese memory is dominated by the atomic bomb, Germanys is most

influenced by the Holocaust. As Buruma explains, Auschwitz is the past that refuses to go away,

the dark blot on the national psyche.8

Since almost all the death camps were in the East, the

memory of them was used to triumph a specific ideology. Auschwitz is a museum, but it is also

much more than that,9

he observes. Rather than emphasizing the murder of Jews, East Germany

made Auschwitz into a monument representing antifascist resistance to capitalism. The interest

in memory of World War II in the East was the result not of a desire to honestly face the past but

of a national sadness that understood unification to mean the triumph of the West. Buruma notes

that:

Rarely was the word Auschwitz heard more often than during the time of unification,

partly as an always salutary reminder that Germans must not forget, but partly as an

expression of pique that the illusion of a better, antifascist, anticapitalistic, idealistic

6Ibid., p. 211.

7Ibid., p. 155-156.

8Ibid., p. 69.

9Ibid., p. 76.


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Germany, born in the ruins of 1945, and continued catastrophically for forty years in the

East, had now been dashed forever.10

And East Germanys distorted analysis of the Nazis could potentially lead to political

extremism. Enforced worship of heroes in the East was part of totalitarian propaganda and a

gross distortion of history, he writes. In the East, When the heroes crumbled to dust, and the

propaganda lost its force, hundreds, maybe thousands of disillusioned youngsters rebelled by

reviving the heroes and symbols of the earlier dictatorship. They cried Sieg Heil in the streets

and worshipped the Nazi leaders.11

Though Buruma sees a more constructive view of memory in the West, it was not always

so honest and open. The early Cold War encouraged West Germany to forget the past, as the rise

of a totalitarian regime in the East shifted attention away from past crimes against the Jews and

towards a new battle with communism. Such feelings influenced scholarship, as West German

memory of the Nazis began to whitewash communisms gallant efforts to combat the Nazi state.

To some people the Cold War simply confirmed what they had known all along, he comments.

Germany had always been on the right side, if only our American friends had realized it

earlier.12

Western memory was influenced by the perception of growing horrors rising in the East.

Uncomfortable realities, such as the fact that Buchenwald, along with other concentration camps

in East Germany like Sachsenhausen and Ravensbruck, remained in full operation until 1950,13

served to focus the Wests moral anger away from past crimes of the Nazis and towards current

repression under communism. Buchenwald, then, became the handy focus of a viewthat the

Communist state had been a kind of continuation of the Third Reich, he writes. In a way, it was

10Ibid., p. 60.

11Ibid., p. 188.

12Ibid., p. 56.

13Ibid., p. 214.


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argued, the GDR had been worse than the Third Reich: it lasted more than forty years, whereas

Hitler was around for only twelve.14

But memory in the West changed. Much of the impetus for Germany to face its past came

from outside sources. Buruma emphasizes the tremendous role that the American Hollywood

mini-series Holocaustplayed in informing German consciousness about Nazi horrors. Germans

enthusiastically welcomed Holocaust, first shown in West Germany in 1979. Its reception was

unprecedented, seen by 20 million people, about half the adult population of the Federal

Republic; 58% wanted to see it repeated. Of the 12,000 letters and 5,200 phone calls to the

station, 72.5 percent were positive, 7.3 percent negative.15

The East state-run media was

unwilling to allow shows such as these to be aired.

Differences in the educational systems account for much of the discrepancy in memory

between the East and the West, found most strikingly in their textbooks. Buruma concludes that

East Germans know little about the history of the war period, where the years between 1933 and

1945 are taught with an emphasis on morality. In the East German texts, the Third Reich is not

presented as a logical outcome of the darker strains of German idealism. Instead, it is shown as

a story of continuity, following the unbroken laws of continuity. The Hitler Regime was simply

the last and most violent stage of bourgeois capitalism.16

In the East, Atrocities and genocide

are less in evidence in these texts than the heroism of Soviet liberators and Communist rebels,

whereas texts in the Federal Republic contain few photographs of resistance heroes, but many of

the Holocaust.17

Buruma also examines how war memorials, museums, and the trials of former Nazis

explain how Germany remembers the Nazi era. Monuments have been used not so much to honor

the dead as to instruct and warn the living of the horrors of war. Whereas Before World War II

14Ibid., p. 217.

15Ibid., p. 88.

16Ibid., p. 181.

17Ibid., p. 182.


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there were no warning monuments in Germany, after the war the Germans built monuments

not to glorify but to warn; Denkmal became Mahnmal.18

Changing times produced a very

different reaction to war. The warning monuments and memorial placesare mostly products

of the reaction, which set in during the 1960s, propelled by the postwar generation, as eager to

warn and remember as their parents were to forget.19

But Buruma suggests that there has also been a dangerous overlapping of justice and

moralizing. Regarding the trial of the former Nazi Josef Schwammberger, he notes that Just as

belief belongs in church, surely history education belongs in school. When the court of law is

used for history lessons, then the risk of show trials cannot be far off.20

Buruma is also critical

of German museums that attempt to explain history with a specific ideology. A memorial is a

religious or quasi-religious monument where remembrance of the past is a collective ritual, he

writes. But a museum is a secular institution, which ought, in a liberal society, to strive for

independent scholarship.21

The danger to Buruma is that when emotion becomes the driving force for public debate,

there exists the possibility that ones perspective might be become distorted. Buruma visited

Germany in 1991 during the first Gulf War, and shows how the left exaggerated American

actions. One activist described the American bombing of Iraq as the greatest crime since

Hitler.22 Just as advocates for peace were in short supply during the Nazi era, many today have

gone overboard in the other direction.

Buruma applauds Germanys efforts to reflect upon the Nazi era, but is also wary of too

much emphasis on the past. Auschwitz was a German crime, to be sure, he argues. But it

was a different Germany.23 In the end, Buruma is optimistic about the future of memory in

Germany, and finds much hope in the actions of young Germans in confronting the nations past.

18Ibid., p. 203.

19Ibid., p. 204.

20Ibid., p. 142.

21Ibid., p. 218.


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But the single most important factor in making this possible to Buruma is the nations solid

foundation of democratic institutions. Human nature has not changed, but politics have, he

concludes. The rascals can be voted out.24

III. The Politicians Response

But how were these political institutions formed after the war? How did German political

elites deal with the Nazi past, and why did politicians, since the Nazis enjoyed such deep public

support, choose to raise the issue of the Holocaust at all? Jeffrey Herfs 1997 bookDivided

MemoryThe Nazi Past in the Two Germanys examines how politicians addressed these issues.

Herf, a professor of history at the University of Maryland, demonstrates that there was an

incentive by both East and West Germany to manipulate the Nazi past in order to serve

contemporary political concerns. He believes that both Germanys distorted the memory of

Nazism, and as a result the search for justice was ultimately impeded.

Why study elite political leaders, rather than employing a bottom-up cultural approach as

Buruma does? Herf defends his methodology with several explanations. A narrower focus on

national politics facilitates reflection over a longer period of time, he writes. Furthermore, the

history of politics and the history of beliefs, ideas, ideology, discourses, narratives, and

representations are inseparable from one another.25

Most important, both the main causes of

World War II, the Holocaust, and the shame and disgrace which descended on defeated Germany

as well as the most important means of preventing the renewal of aggression and genocide were

political.26

Herf makes a very strong case for placing politics at the center of any debate over

memory.

In Herfs analysis, the division of postwar memory between East and West occurred

primarily because of Allied victory and postwar occupation, multiple restorations of other

22Ibid., p. 17.

23Ibid., p. 91.

24Ibid., p. 307.


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Germanys, and the personal experience of shared solidarity and persecution among the founding

generation. The first destroyed Nazism, while the second and third brought to the forefront

German political leaders who all shared an essential hatred of Nazism, as all of them had

suffered as a result of their political opposition to the Nazis.27 Such divisions are especially

interesting because they could not have been foreseen in 1945. At the end of World War II,

neither the emergence of memory of the Holocaust in West Germany nor its suppression in East

Germany was a foregone conclusion, he explains. The contingencies and possibilities of the

early postwar period suggested the possibility of the opposite outcome.28In fact, After 1945,

reasonable people might think that the natural home for those mercilessly targeted by Hitler

fascism would be the antifascist Communist regime in East Berlin.29

How and why did these roles reverse? Unlike either Buruma or Saadah, Herf explains

German memory of the Nazis by examining the political environment of Germany in the years

before World War II. Understanding how and why postwar political memory divided as it did

requires placing it in the historic context of the ideologies and experiences of pre-1945 German

and European history, he writes. This is especially important because All of the leading

political figures of early postwar political life in West and East Germany came of political age

between 1900 and 1930. They experienced Nazism, World War II, and the Holocaust in their

mature rather than their young and formative years.30

Of equal importance is the legacy of the struggle between the Soviet Union and the

United States, the international context of shifting and reversing alliances from World War II to

the Cold War.31

During the Cold War, memory of the Holocaust was distorted in the West, as

the question of the forgetting or deficient memory of the Jewish catastrophe in the postwar years

25Jeffrey Herf,Divided MemoryThe Nazi Past in the Two Germanys. Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1997.

p. 9.26

Ibid., p. 10.27

Ibid., p. 373.28

Ibid., p. 380.29

Ibid., p. 5.30

Ibid., p. 3-4.


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was inseparable from the forgetting of World War II and what Winston Churchill aptly called the

unnatural alliance of the Soviet Union and the West which had made possible Nazisms

defeat.32

As countries changed sides, memory became a casualty of the Cold War. This was

even more pronounced in the East, as external influences shaped the nationa l narratives,

andshifting international alliances influenced memory of the Nazi past.33 Herf emphasizes

how the depth of hostility to Jews in East Germany colored memory of the Nazi era. The East

German regime was not an anti-Semitic regime in the sense that the Nazi regime was, he

observes. But then neither did it display the kind of warmth or empathy that might be

expected from any German government after the Holocaust. The East Germans were willing to

adopt the language of traditional European anti-Semitism.34

Herf sees striking differences in how the Nazi past was treated during the Cold War.

While the East Germans were able to freeze political memory, with some minor modifications,

in the dogmas of the 1950s, In West Germany political freedom and open debate fostered

criticism of the shortcomings of the Adenauer era and a growing knowledge of the Nazi era.35

In

the East the communist concepts of remembrance succeeded until the regimes downfall in the

1980s, but efforts in the West to erase memory of the Holocaust failed both before and after

unification. In fact, over time, memory of the Holocaust assumed an even greater role in West

German public discussion.36

To explain this development Herf examines an often-neglected area of Cold War history.

In 1945, German Communist leaders returned from exile in Moscow. Concluding that a majority

of Germans supported Nazism, they expressed a great distrust of democracy. Herf emphasizes the

importance of this frequently ignored group. Understanding the experiences of German exiles,

he writes, is indispensable for explaining the subsequent history of memory of the Nazi era in

31Ibid., p. 1-2.

32Ibid., p. 8.

33Ibid., p. 382.

34Ibid., p. 384.


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the two Germanys.37

The case of Paul Merker best explains how and why East German acted as

they did. The East German Communist suppression of the Jewish question, Herf explains, at

whose center stands the case of the non-Jewish German Communist Paul Merker, constitutes one

of the most significant chapters of German communism, postwar German history, Jewish history,

and the history of the Cold War.38

Merker spent the war in Mexico, not Moscow. He returned to the region under Soviet

control, and immediately began protesting against anti-Semitism and in support of reparation

payments to Jews as well as of the Jewish state of Israel, joining other German Communist

migrs to bring the issue of Jewish suffering from the periphery to the center of the narratives of

Communist antifascism for the first and onlytime in its history.39

This period saw genuine

hope for bringing the plight of the Jews to the forefront of East German policy, as in the relative

openness of the first several postwar years, veteran Communists could find plausible political

grounds to buttress hopes that the Jewish question might shift from the periphery to the center of

Communist antifascist thinking.40

But these positions changed as the Cold War intensified and persecution of Jews

increased in the Soviet Union. Merker and others were harassed for their beliefs, charged with

favoring the West as a result of their having spent time there. While Merkers views on Jewish

matters were tolerable during the wartime emigration and the immediate postwar era, they

became intolerable heresies as the wartime alliance collapsed and was replaced by the new fault

lines of the Cold War. Soon, in the struggle for power and influence in the Politburo, his

sympathies for the Jews would now be held against him.41

35Ibid., p. 390.

36Ibid., p. 393.

37Ibid., p. 375.

38Ibid., p. 6.

39Ibid., p. 40.

40Ibid., p. 69.

41Ibid., p. 105.


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Never again would there be sympathy for Jews in the East. The winter purge of 1952-53

constituted the decisive and irrevocable turning point in the history of the regime regarding

Jewish matters and the politics of memory in East Germany, Herf explains. ...The purges and

trials of these years left wounds that never healed and forms of memory and politics which over

time deepened the gap between communists and the vast majority of Jews inside and outside

Germany.42

By 1953 The repression of the Jewish question had become a constitutive element

in the consolidation of the second twentieth-century German dictatorship.43

Merker wished to emphasize the racism of Nazism, whereas East Germany wanted to

emphasize its economic aspects. The East was especially concerned with stressing the

persecution of communists rather than of Jews under the Third Reich. Those who sought to

place the persecution of the Jews at the center of Communist antifascism, Herf explains, were

also out of step with a politics focused on class struggle and the centrality of the Soviet Union.44

Antifascism was expressed in the East by complete devotion to the state. Fascism could only

flourish, they argued, under a capitalist state, and West Germany was viewed as merely a

continuation of fascism. The aspect of Communist antifascism most instrumental in shaping

postwar policy was the Cominterns famous assumption that fascism was essentially a

dictatorial, terrorist, and imperialist form of finance capitalism.45

There were other reasons why Merkers emphasis on Jewish suffering during the war

became de-emphasized. Interest, ideology, and experience combined to keep the persecution of

European Jewry on the margins of the dominant current of German communism, argues Herf.

Among these were the long-standing pejorative association of the Jews with capitalism, and

the primacy of the romance of Soviet suffering and victory over the tragedy of unmitigated

42Ibid., p. 160-161.

43Ibid., p. 163.

44Ibid., p. 13.

45Ibid., p. 14.


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Jewish loss.46

Many of the reasons for East Germanys response to the Jews could also be found

in pre-war Marxist ideology. The suppression and marginalization of the memory of the

Holocaust in East Germany reproduced the subordinate position of the Jewish question in

Communist ideology before 1933, Herf writes, as Marxist and Communist theory had

consistently placed Jewish matters on the margins of the class struggle.47

Most of all, there existed the political and strategic realities of the day, as the Cold War

greatly contributed to the hardening of opinions regarding Jews. The marginalization of the

Jewish catastrophe was inseparable from the forgetting of the Soviet Unions wartime alliances

with the West, he concludes. And this new climate would see opposition to Israel as a central

component of East German foreign policy. Ideology alone soon dominated all other reasons for

explaining East German alliances, as The East German argument that antifascism should

logically lead to helping the armed adversaries of the Jewish state indicated how a totalitarian

ideology had substituted fantasy for common sense and theories of universal liberation for the

burdens of local knowledge and memory.48

How did the West handle such issues? Herf examines the political leaders of the three

major parties in West Germany, and argues that West Germany did a much better job of honestly

facing its Nazi past. It was in the Western zones and then in the Federal Republic, the land of

restored capitalism and liberal democracy, he writes, rather than in the Soviet zone and the

antifascist German Democratic Republic, that the issues of anti-Semitism and the Jewish

catastrophe assumed a central place in the public discourse of national political leaders.49

Only

in the West, Herf observes, was financial restitution given to Jewish survivors, more trials

conducted, and close relations with Israel established.

46Ibid., p. 38-39.

47Ibid., p. 376.

48Ibid., p. 200.

49Ibid., p. 3.


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One key reason for these differences is because West Germanys leaders differed from

their Communist counterparts in one fundamental way: they all believed in liberal democracy and

in the absolute necessity of preventing another German dictatorship. The dilemma they faced

was that their own ideology and experience of the Nazi era were at cross-purposes as they

sought to establish rule by and for a people who had fought for Nazism to the bitter end. 50 This

emphasis on the desire for democracy best explains how the West handled the delicate issue of

its Nazi past in the post-war era. While parties wanted to distance themselves from the Nazis,

there also existed the necessity of reaching out to the many supporters of the former regime in

order for the parties to win elections. In the West, Memory and justice might produce a right-

wing revolt that would undermine a still fragile democracy, Herf explains. So democracy had

to be built on a shaky foundation of justice delayed - hence deniedand weakened memory.

The West Germans could foster either memory and justice, but not both.51

Konrad Adenauer sought to incorporate these supporters into the Christian Democrats.

Yet he also in his public statements blamed the country for the sins of the Third Reich, while also

supporting Israel and compensation for the Jewish property that was taken during the war. Critics

have dismissed Adenauers efforts as merely symbolic, but Herf demonstrates that Adenauers

statements were actually quite bold, for Adenauer faced the larger problem that Daring more

democracy gave voting power to citizens who vehemently opposed a public discussion of the

Nazi past.52 In Herfs formulation, Adenauers actions demonstrated enormous political

wisdom. Adenauer struck a bargain with compromised Germans: in exchange for his reticence

about the Nazi past, they would agree to accept the new democracy, or at least try not to destroy

it.53

50Ibid., p. 201.

51Ibid., p. 7.

52Ibid., p. 266.

53Ibid., p. 389.


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conservative era dominated by the Cold Warthe Jews past and present were a footnote to the

main drama.58

Overall, however, Herf is quite impressed with the progress West Germany accomplished

in directly dealing with Germanys Nazi past. Though in the West justice could have been faster

and memory could have been much stronger, there was more of both than in the self-described

antifascist East German state. And while justice in the 1950s was not nearly enough, seeds

were planted which eventually grew into a broader and more vigorous public memory.59 Thus

Adenauers policies also set the framework for future restoration to be done.

Herf argues that since the 1960s, discussion of the Nazi past did expand in West German

politics and society, and the relationship between democracy and memory in the Adenauer era

was challenged and reversed.60 Evidence for this expansion can be found in the debates that

were held on extending the statue of limitations on prosecution of Nazi war crimes, the speeches

of Helmut Schmidt about Auschwitz and Jewish persecution by the Nazis, and the various trials

of death camp personnel. And though the 1990s saw an upsurge in neo-Nazism and xenophobia,

Herf concludes that efforts to expunge from the national political memory or minimize the

weight of the Holocaust and other crimes of the Nazi era had failed.61

He views West

Germanys handling of its Nazi past an unqualified success, especially considering the restraints

Germanys political leaders were under during the post-war era.

IV. Two Theoretical Frameworks

Further insight into how well Germany confronted memory of the crimes of World War II

can be found by examining how a unified Germany dealt with the memory of a tarnished past for

58Ibid., p. 287.

59Ibid., p. 394.

60Ibid., p. 334.

61Ibid., p. 372.


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a second time, this time of the human rights violations of the former communist part of its nation.

Anne Saadahs 1998 book Germanys Second Chance Trust, Justice, and Democratization

examines how Germany dealt with its past after both 1945 and 1989. Saadah, a professor of

political science at Dartmouth, emphasizes that debates about reconciliation are inseparable

from and indicative of the redefinition of political issues and alliances that take place after a

regime change.62

Among the questions she seeks to answer are: Who should be excluded from a new

constitutional regime? How does one deal with those who supported the previous regime? How

should a nation implement democracy after living through years of dictatorship, and can a true

democracy follow a brutal dictatorship? How should a unified Germany deal with its Nazi past,

as well as the GDRs treatment of it? Most important, how is one to balance notions of justice,

which would entail either imprisoning, exiling, or killing those responsible for previous crimes,

with strategies that might achieve stability and order, but that would necessarily involve the

incorporation into the political processes of supporters of the previous regime? Clearly, a delicate

dance with the past needs to be performed.

A democratizing regime may execute or imprison or temporarily disenfranchise some

figures from the preceding dictatorship, but it will not be able to exclude all individuals who

supported the fallen regime, she writes. Democracy offers more of the compromised and

many who are more than just compromised a second chance.63Saadahs main argument is

that strategies of reconciliation shape the process and results of democratic consolidation

through their more immediate impact on patterns of trust, legitimation, and partisan

competition.64 Democracies that follow dictatorships are faced with two options in building a

62Anne Saadah, Germanys Second ChanceTrust, Justice, and Democratization. Cambridge, Harvard University

Press, 1998, p. 5.63

Ibid., p. 1.64

Ibid., p. 55.


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new society: institutional strategies, which tend to put order first, and cultural strategies,

which tend to out victims first.65

Institutional strategy is above all concerned with pragmatism and stability. Rather than

prosecuting individuals connected with the prior regime, it seeks to incorporate them into the

new democracy. It is A strategy that tends to assign chronological and causal priority to the

creation of a community of behavior, and that stresses the ability of that community to

engender a pattern of behavior that may not correspond to the to the inner convictions or the

past political commitments of individual actors, but one that can also reshape political culture

and common conceptions of justice.66

Institutional strategies are concerned with the here and now of current politics. They

speak to the immediate political needs of a fledging democratic regime in search of a majority,

and enable young democratic regimes to survive despite nondemocratic electorates; negatively

put, they prevent a reversion to dictatorship. They do not focus on the actions, either past or

present of the masses, but instead propose a top-down solution to the problems of democratic

consolidation. They ardently believe that if older generations were shaped by dictatorship,

younger generations will respond, culturally as well as behaviorally, to the different incentives

established by democratic institutions.67

Nor are they concerned with the inner life of its citizens, as they make a special effort to

not judge behavior. Though they cannot make people trustworthy, institutional strategies can

make people reliable in limited arenas. Good intentions can induce people, even bad people, to

play good roles.68

The past is used only when needed to preserve the legitimacy of the new

order. As a result, institutional strategies limit the emphasis on memory and punishment to the

65Ibid., p. 5.

66Ibid., p. 3.

67Ibid., p. 4.

68Ibid., p. 9.


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minimum necessity to delegitimize the old regime as a regime and to incapacitate its political

leadership.69

Again, they are most concerned with preserving stability and order.

Cultural strategy, on the other hand, is focused primarily on the individual, not on the

larger structure of the state. It thus tends to assign greater immediate importance to the creation

of a community of conviction, in the sense of a self-conscious constitutional consensus

undergirded by a democratic political culture.70

Advocates of cultural strategies argue that after

a dictatorship confrontation is in fact indispensable to the creation of functional patterns of

legitimation and trust.71 Notions of justice and values shape this option much more than they do

institutional strategy. Cultural strategy is often uncompromising and much less eager to overlook

past crimes. As a result, cultural strategies are bottom-up strategies of democratization. Their

proponents focus much more closely on the floor, and they worry about the consequences of

using rotten boards. They warn that institutions can be emptied of meaning if used by people who

do not respect their spirit.72

But it is a strategy destined to produce disappointment. The transition to democracy from

dictatorship creates not one but two sets of losers: the defenders of the old regime and the

advocates of cultural strategies, as the latter soon turn negative and cynical as it becomes clear

how cautiously the old regimes elites and supporters will be treated. As advocates of cultural

strategies become more and more marginalized, soon the entire notion of memory is sacrificed.

Those in favor of cultural strategy argue that Without memory it is not possible either to

distinguish trustworthy from untrustworthy compatriots or to understand why the old regime was

illegitimate.73

Those who advocate cultural strategies believe No trust, no democracy, as well

as no truth, no trust.74

69Ibid., p. 56.

70Ibid., p. 3.

71Ibid., p. 4.

72Ibid., p. 5.

73Ibid., p. 11.

74Ibid., p. 277.


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Saadah emphatically endorses the former approach, as she concludes tha t reconciliation

is a better path to follow than that of punishment and indictment. The historical record would

seem to provide a powerful empirical argument for institutional strategies, she writes, and the

success of the strategy is its primary moral defense against the charges of transitory justice.75 To

support her conclusions she compares Germany after both 1945 and 1989 with France after the

Terror of the 1790s and with Americas treatment of Loyalists after the Revolutionary War. In

both cases, she argues, the emerging democratic nations successfully compromised. In the United

States, for example, an institutional strategy enacted the Constitution, while a cultural strategy

brought about the Bill of Rights.

Saadah accepts that many uncomfortable compromises must be made along the way, as

the Nazi dictatorship left a legacy of experiential and moral lack of community, and that

West Germanys institutional strategy legitimized a large decree of private and public avoidance

of the issues and experiences that underlay this lack of community.76

Nevertheless, she

concludes that West Germanys handling of not only this legacy from the Nazis but also of

unprecedented unemployment without lapsing into a political crisis any deeper than that of any

other major Western democracy should remind us of the strengths and benefits of institutional

strategies, even at their worst.77

A major strength of the institutional strategy is that it lays the groundwork for future

positive changes. In important ways, the implementation of institutional strategy is her

prescription for modern transitions. We see this most especially after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

An institutional strategy was significantly modified by the incorporation of elements normally

associated with cultural strategies, she writes. Unified Germany could afford to adopt

elements of a cultural strategy precisely because the institutions of the Federal Republic were

75Ibid., p. 57.

76Ibid., p. 141.

77Ibid., p. 142.


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secure enough to withstand the turbulences thus risked, and it was prodded to do so because of

the unique character of its past.78

After examining politics in the newly unified Germany, Saadah hypothesizes that

Previous experiences with anti-system and extremist parties in established democracies - and

the Federal Republic is an established democracy - suggest that German democracy would be

well served if its elites decided to overcome an alibi culture with an institutional strategy.79

Again, incorporation, rather than judgment, is the most successful approach. In the German

setting, she notes, an institutional approach that makes cooperative relations with the PDS

possible seems a better response to the crisis of representation than a cultural strategy that

discourages cooperative arrangements.80

But can one find success at the micro level in additional to that found at the macro level?

Saadahs illustrates the strengths of institutional strategies in her analysis of the case of Hans

Schneider, a former Nazi who changed his name after the war to Hans Schwerte and then began

again his pre-war career from scratch, re-earning his doctorate in literature and re-marring his

wife. He became very successful, eventually becoming the rector of the Technical University in

Aachen.

Saadah raises several important questions regarding the political and moral legitimacy of

this transformation. Is it enough, from a democratic point of view, to assume a virtue? she

asks. What kind of trust can assumed virtue sustain? Saadah acknowledges that we can

never really know who Schneider/Schwerte really is, and that even he may not even know this.

But she concludes that An institutional strategy accepts this fact as an insurmountable feature of

the human condition generally, especially during transitional situations in particular. But

78Ibid., p. 8.

79Ibid., p. 238.

80Ibid., p. 276.


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instead of insisting on the connection between identity and action, it insists on the connection

between institutional structures and action.81

Though they may oftentimes disappoint, institutional strategies also frequently work.

Most of all, they build working democracies on the more or less intact ruins of a dictatorship;

they assume that the new buildings will be more attractive than the ruins, and that workers within

the buildings will eventually come to feel at home there and to find the architecture beaut iful.82

While it may be a stretch to say that Germans fell in love with the democracy building, at least it

can be said that they did not set in on fire.

V. Conclusion

The theoretical framework as described by Saadah confirms the findings of both Buruma

and Herf. Neither one of them uses the exact terms that she does, which is not surprising since

Saadahs text was published after each of theirs. But they clearly agree with her

recommendation to use institutional strategies instead of cultural strategies. The evidence they

examine wholeheartedly confirms the success of the former approach, despite its shortcomings.

Honoring the memory of a wars victims, while at the same time incorporating supporters

of the regime that committed those atrocities, is a very difficult juggling act. The temptation to

punish those who supported or at least condoned such violence appears, on the surface, to be the

moral thing to do. In the wake of an atrocity as unparalleled in human history as that of the

Holocaust, the urge to do so is even greater. The fact that Germany resisted such a temptation is

testament to the wisdom of its political leaders in the period following World War II.

That is not to say that ideology and morality have no place in politics. But as the example

of East Germany aptly demonstrates, ideology has the enormous power to distort history in order

to reaffirm a nation states ideological agenda. When taken to its extreme, as done in East

Germany following World War II, instead of serving justice it merely serves to ignore victims of

81Ibid., p. 279.

82Ibid., p. 280.


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a conflict if they do not play an essential role in promoting the states ideology. One sees this

clearly in how East Germanys memory of World War II completely ignored the sufferings of

European Jews in the conflict.

Memory, as each of the above scholars has shown, is shaped by not only internal events,

such as the decisions of a states political leaders, but also by external alliances and conflicts, in

this case most especially by the Cold War. To ascribe a nations memory to either one of these

without taking into account the other ignores the tremendous complexity of how memory is

created and sustained by a nation state. It is in the subtle interplay of internal and external factors

as well as in the political atmosphere ofa nations past that memory is formed. Political leaders,

after all, as Herf stresses, are primarily shaped and influenced by a climate that predates the apex

of their careers by at least half a generation.

20th century German history is particularly sad and depressing, but the way in which

Germany has openly acknowledged at least some of its past history can be seen as one positive

development of that nations recent past. Above all, in order for a nation to clearly look at its past

it needs a vision that is firmly planted in the future. Germanys ability to successfully implement

Saadahs institutional structures and to resist cultural strategies required political leaders able to

envision a future Germany that had a firm foundation of democracy and that had all but

eliminated the chance of a dictatorship taking hold. These strong foundations enabled the

Germany that Buruma visited in the early 1990s to serve as a model for a nation interested in

honestly facing a horrific past. And it is most important to continue such work, as denying the

memory of past sins can color current-day policy. For example, the United States refusal to

adequately confront its own crippling legacy of African-American slavery and Native American

genocide still haunts this nation today. When democracy is firm, healing can begin. The steps

needed to create such an environment are far from perfect, but the alternatives are surely far

worse.


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Bibliography


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Buruma, Ian. The Wages of GuiltMemories of War in Germany and Japan. New York,

Farrar Straus Giroux, 1994.

Herf, Jeffrey. Divided Memory The Nazi Past in the Two Germanys. Cambridge,

Harvard University Press, 1997.

Saadah, Anne. Germanys Second Chance Trust, Justice, and Democratization.

Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1998.

bernard von bothmer - the politics of the past: german memory of world war ii

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