Abstract
Over six decades since the end of the Second World War, public discourse in Germany continues to refer to memory of the National Socialist past and the importance of remembrance. Memory is evoked as part of the language of ritual, for example at commemorations for the victims of Nazism. Historical research seeks to preserve and contextualise memory of the period. Popular interest in the Nazi period explains its presence in the media. Finally, references to memory have a didactic purpose in emphasising the view that atrocities such as the Holocaust should never occur again.
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Notes
See Maurice Halbwachs (1968) La mémoire collective (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France).
Jan Assmann (1999b) Das kulturelle Gedächtnis. Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen (München: Verlag CH. Beck)
Paul Connerton (1989) How Societies Remember (Cambridge-New York-Melbourne: Cambridge University Press)
David Sutton (1998) Memories cast in stone. The relevance of the past in everyday life (Oxford: Berg)
Harald Welzer (2001) Das soziale Gedächtnis. Geschichte, Erinnerung, Tradierung (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition)
James Fentress and Chris Wickham (1992) Social Memory. New Perspectives on the Past (Oxford UK-Cambridge USA: Blackwell).
The concept of ‘willing executioners’ refers to Daniel Goldhagen’s controversial thesis that ‘eliminationary anti-semitism’ led Germans to support and perpetrate crimes against the Jews. See Daniel Jonah Goldhagen (1996) Hitler’s Willing Executioners. Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (London: Little, Brown).
Karl Jaspers drew the distinction between criminal, political, moral and metaphysical guilt. In his view, all Germans were politically guilty as members of a nation in whose name the atrocities of the Second World War had been committed, and criminally guilty if responsible in legal terms. Moral guilt was however a matter for the individual conscience, the individual being responsible for his own actions. Metaphysical guilt concerned non-action, that is, a failure to try and stop the atrocities of the Third Reich or to show solidarity with the victims. See Karl Jaspers (1974) Die Schuldfrage. Von der politischen Haftung Deutschlands [originally published in 1946] (München: Piper Verlag), especially 42–7.
German citizenship was formerly based on blood according to the ius sanguinis principle. However, new citizenship laws introduced in 1999 mean that citizenship relates instead to the ius soli (territorial) principle, whereby nationality can be granted according to where someone is born. German citizens thus do not necessarily have blood links to the Third Reich. Viola Georgi has conducted an interesting study into attitudes towards the Holocaust and the Third Reich amongst children of ethnic minorities in Germany. Some identify themselves with the Jews, feeling discriminated against on account of their skin colour or religion. Others, however, express a sense of association with German history. See Viola B. Georgi (2003) Entliehene Erinnerung. Geschichtsbilder junger Migranten in Deutschland (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition).
Adenauer also had to deal with the millions of ethnic Germans expelled from Central and Eastern Europe after the war. By 1950, some eight million expellees had settled in West Germany, comprising approximately 16.5 per cent of the West German population. Another four million had settled in East Germany. Although integration did happen, many expellees remained bitter about the loss of their homelands to what became eastern bloc countries. See Bill Niven (2002) Facing the Nazi Past. United Germany and the Legacy of the Third Reich (London: Routledge), 96.
There were three such debates — in 1965, 1969 and 1979 — on whether the 15-year statute of limitations on prosecution for National Socialist crimes should be lifted. In 1979 it was decided that the 15-year period would not apply, so it was not possible for war criminals to escape punishment with the passage of time. See Jeffrey Herf (1997) Divided Memory. The Nazi Past in the Two Germanys (Cambridge Massachusetts-London, England: Harvard University Press), 335–42.
They are also not restricted to the Holocaust: Robert Hughes, for example, argues that contemporary American culture is being corroded by a ‘culture of therapeutics’ where confessing one’s’ sins’ is tantamount to redemption. See Robert Hughes (1993) The Culture of Complaint: the fraying of America (New York-Oxford: Oxford University Press).
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© 2008 Caroline Pearce
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Pearce, C. (2008). German, European and Global Recollection of the Nazi Past. In: Contemporary Germany and the Nazi Legacy. New Perspectives in German Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230591226_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230591226_2
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