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. Germanys 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.

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.

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

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 antiSemitic 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.

Ian Buruma, The Wages of Guilt Memories of War in Germany and Japan. New York, Farrar Straus Giroux, 1994, p. 249. 4

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.2 Germanys 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

2 3

Ibid., p. 8. Ibid., p. 80. 4 Ibid., p. 21. 5 Ibid., p. 59. 5

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

6 7

Ibid., p. 211. Ibid., p. 155-156. 8 Ibid., p. 69. 9 Ibid., p. 76. 6

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

10 11

Ibid., p. 60. Ibid., p. 188. 12 Ibid., p. 56. 13 Ibid., p. 214. 7

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 Holocaust played 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

14 15

Ibid., p. 217. Ibid., p. 88. 16 Ibid., p. 181. 17 Ibid., p. 182. 8

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.

18 19

Ibid., p. 203. Ibid., p. 204. 20 Ibid., p. 142. 21 Ibid., p. 218. 9

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 book Divided Memory The 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

22 23

Ibid., p. 17. Ibid., p. 91. 24 Ibid., p. 307. 10

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.28 In 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
25

Jeffrey Herf, Divided Memory The 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. 11

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 national 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

31 32

Ibid., p. 1-2. Ibid., p. 8. 33 Ibid., p. 382. 34 Ibid., p. 384. 12

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 only time 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

35 36

Ibid., p. 390. Ibid., p. 393. 37 Ibid., p. 375. 38 Ibid., p. 6. 39 Ibid., p. 40. 40 Ibid., p. 69. 41 Ibid., p. 105. 13

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

42 43

Ibid., p. 160-161. Ibid., p. 163. 44 Ibid., p. 13. 45 Ibid., p. 14. 14

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.

46 47

Ibid., p. 38-39. Ibid., p. 376. 48 Ibid., p. 200. 49 Ibid., p. 3. 15

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 rightwing revolt that would undermine a still fragile democracy, Herf explains. So democracy had to be built on a shaky foundation of justice delayed - hence denied and 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

50 51

Ibid., p. 201. Ibid., p. 7. 52 Ibid., p. 266. 53 Ibid., p. 389. 16

Kurt Schumacher, the Social Democratic leader, spent most of the years under the Third Reich in concentration camps. The most outspoken politician against the former regime, Schumacher advocated for the complete exclusion of former Nazis in the new republic and sought to push conservatives towards a greater recognition of past crimes. During the early years of the Federal Republic, the left and right had opposing views regarding the role of memory and democracy. Adenauer sought to incorporate former Nazis into the tenuous democracy, but Schumacher wanted the courts to bring those responsible for past atrocities to justice. Integration was the key word for Christian Democrats, while justice was just as important for the leaders of the democratic left.54 While acknowledging that Adenauer deserves much credit for supporting restitution as well as the new state of Israel, Herf also argues for the central role played by Schumacher. His pressure played a key role in Adenauers decisions, as The prospect of Social Democratic victory increased pressures within West Germany in favor of a hard line toward the Nazi past.55 Without Schumachers prodding and initiative, a West German democracy would have emerged with far less memory, far less justice, and far less compassion for survivors.56 Why the reticence to fully face up the crimes of the Nazi era? Another important reason why the West acted as it did was because, as in the East, the Cold War played an enormous role in the suppression of the memory of Nazi crimes. The breakdown of Allied unity, the emergence of the Cold War, and the perceived need for a loyal West German ally, Herf writes, shifted Western, especially American, policy away from denazification to Cold War anticommunism.57 While noting that There was a great discrepancy between the West German discourse of repentance and acceptance of restitution obligations on the one hand and the paucity of justice on the other, Herf notes that it is also important to remember that in this fundamentally

54 55

Ibid., p. 267. Ibid., p. 12. 56 Ibid., p. 333. 57 Ibid., p. 265. 17

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

58 59

Ibid., p. 287. Ibid., p. 394. 60 Ibid., p. 334. 61 Ibid., p. 372. 18

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.63 Saadahs 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

62

Anne Saadah, Germanys Second Chance Trust, Justice, and Democratization. Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1998, p. 5. 63 Ibid., p. 1. 64 Ibid., p. 55. 19

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

65 66

Ibid., p. 5. Ibid., p. 3. 67 Ibid., p. 4. 68 Ibid., p. 9. 20

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

69 70

Ibid., p. 56. Ibid., p. 3. 71 Ibid., p. 4. 72 Ibid., p. 5. 73 Ibid., p. 11. 74 Ibid., p. 277. 21

Saadah emphatically endorses the former approach, as she concludes that 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

75 76

Ibid., p. 57. Ibid., p. 141. 77 Ibid., p. 142. 22

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

78 79

Ibid., p. 8. Ibid., p. 238. 80 Ibid., p. 276. 23

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 beautiful.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

81 82

Ibid., p. 279. Ibid., p. 280. 24

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 of a 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 Guilt Memories 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.

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