The Use and Abuse of Memory

Interpreting World War II in Contemporary European Politics

Christian Karner

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351296540
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

Decades after the previously unimaginable horrors of the Nazi extermination camps and the dropping of nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, their memories remain part of our lives. In academic and human terms, preserving awareness of this past is an ethical imperative. This volume concerns narratives about—and allusions to—World War II across contemporary Europe, and explains why contemporary Europeans continue to be drawn to it as a template of comparison, interpretation, even prediction.

This volume adds a distinctly interdisciplinary approach to the trajectories of recent academic inquiries. Historians, sociologists, anthropologists, linguists, political scientists, and area study specialists contribute wide-ranging theoretical paradigms, disciplinary frameworks, and methodological approaches.

The volume focuses on how, where, and to what effect World War II has been remembered. The editors discuss how World War II in particular continues to be a point of reference across the political spectrum and not only in Europe. It will be of interest for those interested in popular culture, World War II history, and national identity studies.

1
Genocide Memorialization and the Europeanization of Europe

Henning Grunwald

In his book Europe Does Not Need the Euro, the German populist Thilo Sarrazin argues that Chancellor Angela Merkel is clinging to the Euro in misguided atonement for German sins in World War II. History, or rather a misreading of history, holds her hostage. In a precise reversal of this accusation, the British New Statesman charges her with forgetting these (and other) lessons of the past. More pernicious than Iran’s quest for nuclear capabilities, Merkel is the greatest threat to Europe (and the world) since Hitler (Sarrazin 2012, anonymous leader, New Statesman 141, 25 June: 7).

Others are even more explicit. In the Daily Mail, Simon Heffer writes that the Euro bailout amounts to an “economic colonisation of Europe by stealth by the Germans.” “Once,” Heffer continues, it would have “taken an invading military force to topple the leadership of a European nation. Today, it can be done through sheer economic pressure.” We are witnessing, in other words, the “rise of the Fourth Reich,” in which Germany is “using the financial crisis to conquer Europe . . . a loss of sovereignty not seen . . . since many were under the jackboot of the Third Reich.” Such arguments are by no means to be found only in the popular and conservative British press. The Guardian’s Simon Jenkins warns of “German supremacy,” which would bring us “back to the ghoulish first half of the 20th century.” It’s a good thing, he muses, that contemporary “Germany has no panzer divisions” (Evans 2011: 23).

Against the backdrop of the Euro crisis, this volume and the Nottingham conference where it was conceived appear timely and topical. Nonetheless, the editors wisely resisted the temptation of making the crisis-spawned surge of rhetoric saturated in suspect claims about Europe’s past an explicit focal point of our deliberations. Whether (and how) one can extrapolate from Europe’s past to its future is a far more fascinating and complex question than the knee-jerk fashion in which many such arguments are deployed would suggest.

In what follows, I will attempt to survey European memory regimes since 1945, in broad brushstrokes and necessarily without any claims to comprehensiveness. Still, I hope that the many and obvious omissions and shortcomings are at least partially offset by the attempt, in contrast to the great majority of contributions, to eschew a national focus when considering European memory politics. What I hope to achieve are two things. Firstly, to remind readers of the historicity of founding myths and identity ascriptions, including European ones. Such ascriptions pretend as though they had always already existed when in fact they can wax and wane—and sometimes be produced—with astonishing speed, under very specific conditions.

Take for example the rhetorical equation of Germany with Nazi-era aggression and state crime. The last wave of such rhetoric swept over Britain in the early 1990s. It was in fact an expression of anxiety—about reunification. Among historians, the meeting Margaret Thatcher convened at Chequers is legendary. It discussed, in the words of a participant, the “abiding part[s] of the German character: in alphabetical order, angst, aggressiveness, assertiveness, bullying, egotism, inferiority complex, sentimentality.” But you did not have to be conservative to fear a German backsliding into jackboots. The Economist, for instance, thought it likely that a reunified Germany would seek its own nuclear deterrent. The Daily Mirror, infamously, had footballer Stuart Pearce scream “Achtung! Surrender. For you, Fritz, ze Euro 96 championship is over” on its front page as it “declare[d] football war on Germany . . . England’s old enemy . . . defeated in two world wars and one World Cup.” As Richard Evans reminds us, before this wave of national anxiety, the primary British association with Germany was economic efficiency, dependability, et cetera, positive attributes much like the ones prevalent about Germany in Greece before the current crisis (Evans 2011: 24).

Secondly, I want to take a look at the European and Europeanizing dimensions of the violent and genocidal past of the “dark continent” (as Mark Mazower has labeled twentieth- century Europe) and of the representations of this past. Most papers assembled here focus on national discourses and practices of memory, and the national controversies they provoke or catalyze. There can be little doubt, however, that memories and memorialization, both popular and institutionalized, inform and underpin European identities and discourses. Fragile and contingent as European-ness, however defined, is revealed to be in the twin absence of a European public sphere and (powerful) democratic representation on the European level, there is more to the evocation of the war-torn, genocidal past than mere reassertion of national particularism. The en masse enslavement of forced laborers in World War II, the forced resettlement of millions of ethnically defined undesirables in the course and wake of conflict, and the destruction of the European Jews were crimes transnational in their conception, perpetration, and certainly in their consequences. To what degree is this true also of their memorialization? Is Europe really on the verge of becoming a “community of memory,” as Aleida Assmann argues? Or do the last few years since the onset of the sovereign debt crisis not highlight the divisive potential of remembering Europe’s violent twentieth century? How much does Europe owe (in both senses of the word) to the “negative founding myth” that Dan Diner sees in the Holocaust (Assmann 2007, Diner 2003)?

My argument is that, despite attempts at political manipulation, the memory and memorialization of genocide had a Europeanizing dimension. This is true, I argue against Tony Judt and Jeffrey Herf, even with the “freezing of memory” (or the “memory hole”) during the Cold War (Judt 2002: 157, Assmann 2007: 15). The alignment with ideological exigencies was neither complete nor unambiguous, nor is it likely ever to be.

Take the vociferous reactions to Ronald Reagan’s travel plans in 1985. During his visit to Bitburg military cemetery Reagan made remarks that seemed to equate the German soldiers buried there with the Jews killed in the SS camps (both termed “victims”). The speech provoked an outcry, and as a consequence a visit to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp was hastily tacked on to the itinerary. There, however, protesters not only demonstrated against Reagan’s visit, but also against the perceived marginalization of Holocaust memory in West German political culture. In deliberately leaving camp memorials out of the initial plans for Reagan’s visit, no doubt the last thing Chancellor Kohl’s aides envisaged were German policemen manhandling Hasidic protesters to clear the way for the presidential motorcade into Bergen-Belsen. Meanwhile, Youri Vorontsov, Soviet ambassador to France, laid a wreath in Oradour-sur-Glane, site of an infamous SS massacre in 1944, to honor the “eternal memory of French patriots and Soviet patriots.” This move, poignantly affirming the European and historical friendship binding France and the Soviet Union, attracted not only the applause of the French CP, but also the much more unlikely acclamation of Margaret Thatcher (Rousso 1986: 55–6).

The Bitburg affair signals one of the ways in which the manipulation or political cropping of wartime memories was limited and could even prove counter-productive. Contrary to Kohl’s intentions, more, not less attention was paid to the Nazi persecution of the Jews, and the ahistorical and insensitive Americanization of Holocaust memory contrasted unfavorably with the European affirmation of anti-Fascist solidarity.

The relationship between (collective) memory of genocide and a strengthening European identity is complex. Not only is Holocaust memory tied to factors transcending Europe, but even insofar as it is a European phenomenon presents itself as fraught with contradictions. Indeed, while memory can serve as a unifying force, it can also prove divisive, not only erecting barriers between communities but also creating fractures within them. As Konrad Jarausch puts it, “efforts to cope with German catastrophes” has resulted in “an insecure memory culture, full of taboos and given to controversy,” and the “emphasis on particular suffering has prevented the realization of the interconnectedness of the historical sources of pain which might encourage greater compassion.” The “intensely partisan politics of memory” have failed to give rise to a “coherent and generally accepted reading of the German past” (Jarausch 2001: 189–91). Hence, the notion of France as a country of resisters relegated stories about French complicity in the deportation of Jews to the margins of newspapers and national identity. It is emblematic for this that French guilt in the Rafle, the roundup of some 13,000 Parisian Jews almost exactly seventy years ago, in July 1942, and French complicity in Nazi crimes more generally, was only acknowledged in 1995, by Jaques Chirac. Just as Polish self-categorization as the primary sufferers of Nazi occupation was cast in national and then political terms, thus leaving little room for the commemoration of Jewish victims as such, so the Austrian self-stylization as the Nazis’ first victims obstructed acknowledgment of Austrian responsibility in the genocide and supported a general view that:

All suffering of the Jews during this period was inflicted upon them by the Germans and not by the Austrians; Austria bears no guilt for all of these evil things, and where there is no guilt, there is no obligation for restitution. (Uhl 2005: 57)

Holocaust memory, in other words, is by no means the driver of a straightforward, unidirectional process of Europeanization.

This paper has three parts. The first discusses the concepts involved, namely collective memory, collective identity, and Europeanization. A second, more empirical section aims to survey memory regimes from 1945 to 2000, while the third comments on the implications for the future (if any) of Europeanization.

Collective Memory and Europeanization

Both the study of Holocaust memory and the study of Europeanization have expanded greatly in the last two decades. Are these two developments related? The existence of a memory boom (or wave, or even mania) in the humanities is no longer disputed, merely celebrated or bemoaned (Confino 2006: 170–1, Lenz 2007: 7, Kansteiner 2002: 182). Certainly, surging interest in Holocaust memorialization is an important factor in the disciplinary ascendancy of memory studies. Jan-Werner Müller argues that the Holocaust, by virtue of passing from “communicative memory” (i.e., living) into “cultural memory” drives a preoccupation with memory as “a final battle over the content of a future cultural memory is being waged by witnesses and as the intellectual legacies to be passed on and the dominant representations of the past are being contested” (Müller 2002: 13–17). Jeffrey Olick links to the Holocaust the increase in redress claims and the “politics of victimization and regret” as strategies for political conflict in multicultural societies, while Aleida Assmann underscores this point in less stark terms when she argues that the Holocaust provides a language and a template for the perception and articulation of other traumatic experiences (Assmann 2007: 14, Müller 2002: 16, note 65). Whether or not one agrees with Pierre Nora’s assertion that “whoever says memory says Shoah,” it is clear that one can plausibly argue for a link, a mutual reinforcement between Holocaust memorialization and memory studies (Raulff 1998).

But what about Europeanization? For that, we must first take a look at the terms collective memory and collective identity. Collective memory can be defined as “collectively shared representations of the past.” Most users trace their understanding of the term to Maurice Halbwachs (a student of Durkheim), though many are uncomfortable with his emphasis on the social determination of memory (Kansteiner 2002: 181). In most contexts, collective memory implies a constructed and somehow official, elevated version of the past—Gedächtnis, Andenken rather than Erinnerung. Official memory is often infused with a telos, most pertinently that of the nation. In the words of Jeffrey Olick, “memory and the nation have a peculiar synergy. Even when other identities compete with or supplant the national in postmodernity, they draw on the expanded role for memory generated in the crucible of the nation-state” (Olick 1998: 379, Delanty 2005: 95–6). Despite their best intentions, even scholars interested in applications of the concept transcending the nation-state find it hard at times to escape the implications of this synergy (Müller 2002: 3, 27).

For us today, inquiring into the relevance of memory and memorialization of trauma and genocide for European identity, this is anything but a trivial point. How closely is the construction of Europe related to the—in retrospect highly deliberate—construction of national communities? The creation of a shared and to some extent mythical past, imbued with the values and meanings a nation’s self-appointed intellectual midwives, from Treitschke to D’Annunzio, wished to espouse has been widely commented on (see Patel and von Hirschhausen 2010 for an overview). Collective memory is emphasized by those arguing for an emerging European identity as well as by those contesting it. Klaus Eder and Willfried Spohn, for example, set out to investigate “transnational interest networks, transnational institutions and transnational communications spheres as mechanisms of the evolution of a European civic identity and memory.” Does it smack of Treitschkean teleology, Europeanized, to posit “the development of a European identity due to the reconstruction of national identities in an emerging Europe public sphere, where collective memories are contrasted, debated and reorganized” (Spohn 2005: 1–2)? Pieter Lagrou and Tony Judt, by contrast, emphasize the elaborate and conflict-laden construction of particular versions of the recent past, the contested nature of war memories, and the difficulties in reconciling them (Lagrou 2000; Judt 2002). Lutz Niethammer connects the very origins of the term collective identity in the writings of Carl Schmitt, Georg Lukács, and Carl Gustav Jung to a sense of crisis; it is worth asking, then, whether the current popularity of the term is not an index of the lack of a clear sense of purpose and direction for the European project (see Assmann 2007: 12).

Less contentious than the emergence of a European identity is probably the adaptation of national identities in light of increased European experiences. For evidence of increasing European experiences, we have but to think of the revolution in European travel wrought by budget airlines, deregulation, and the Schengen accord; of the European convertibility (at least in principle) of tertiary education credits and the resultant Europeanization of studies; of the links fostered by trade and business; or of the popularity of European competition in sports like soccer, handball, and golf. As much as, and quite probably more than increasing political cooperation and supra-national governance, this everyday Europe exerts pressure on the adaptation of national identities. Nonetheless, political science has used Europeanization primarily as a means of measuring the adaptation of national political institutions, legal frameworks, and governance to EU standards (usually prior to or following admission to the Community).

Europe is identified as a space of particularly dense and contested collective memory or memories (Osiel 1995: 476–7, Dewandre 1994: 97). This is often inextricably linked with Europe as the site of the Holocaust. As Dan Diner states, “Europe—the realm of the old continent [is] where the Holocaust was after all perpetrated, and where its remembrance certainly has a real impact on political discourse and political reality to come” (Diner 2003: 39). Aleida Assmann takes the point up:

In Europe, the historical site of the German genocide of the Jews, Holocaust memory has a different quality and resonance. . . . In Europe this memory is anything but abstract and removed, but rather deeply engraved in local and national history. (Assmann 2007: 14)

Such statements reveal the palpable move away from considering national contexts in isolation and toward a more transnational perspective (Karlsson 2003: 7). Scholars disagree, however, on whether there is an adaptation of national identities to accommodate another layer of identity (Kohler-Koch’s model), or whether we are beginning to witness a supplanting of separate and incompatible national memories with a European collective memory, or at least with a permanent substantial modification of national memories to allow for their partial merging into a “shared collective memory,” as Assmann and Müller appear to suggest.

Holocaust Memorialization in Postwar Europe

Although the horror of the camps forbids romanticizing the internationalism of the forced community of victims they created, it is striking that affirming international solidarity within the camp community played a prominent role in shaping inmates’ ideas about memorializing their plight and defiance. A little more than a week after the liberation of Buchenwald, for example, on 19 April 1945, in a carefully choreographed ceremony, a temporary memorial was dedicated by a committee of survivors. Though most of the inmates and most members of the organizing committee were German, it was a matter of course that the pledge of remembrance and anti-Fascist defiance was read out in a number of languages. The highlight of the ceremony was an oath to continue the struggle—“We will only cease our struggle when the last of the guilty ones has been sentenced in the court of all nations”—that cast an international community (“of all nations”) as the counterweight to Nazi oppression (Knigge 1997: 94–5).

Both the makeshift nature of...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction: Memories and Analogies of World War II
• 1 Genocide Memorialization and the Europeanization of Europe
• 2 Appeasement Analogies in British Parliamentary Debates Preceding the 2003 Invasion of Iraq
• 3 How Deeply Rooted Is the Commitment to “Never Again”? Dick Bengtsson’s Swastikas and European Memory Culture
• 4 Cultural Memories of German Suffering during the Second World War: An Inability Not to Mourn?
• 5 From Perpetrators to Victims and Back Again: The Long Shadow of the Second World War in Belgium
• 6 L’Histoire bling-bling— Nicolas Sarkozy and the Historians
• 7 The Pasts of the Present: World War II Memories and the Construction of Political Legitimacy in Post–Cold War Italy
• 8 “The Nazis Strike Again”: The Concept of “The German Enemy,” Party Strategies, and Mass Perceptions through the Prism of the Greek Economic Crisis
• 9 Who Were the Anti-Fascists? Divergent Interpretations of WWII in Contemporary Post-Yugoslav History Textbooks
• 10 Multiple Dimensions and Discursive Contests in Austria’s Mythscape
• 11 World War II in Discourses of National Identification in Poland: An Intergenerational Perspective
• 12 From the “Reunification of the Ukrainian Lands” to “Soviet Occupation”: The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in the Ukrainian Political Memory
• 13 “Often Very Harmful Things Start Out with Things That Are Very Harmless”: European Reflections on Guilt and Innocence Inspired by Art about the Holocaust in the 1990s
• 14 Epilogue
• List of Contributors
• Index