Germans know that toppling a few statues isn't enough to confront the past | Géraldine Schwarz

Géraldine Schwarz
Tue 23 Jun 2020 12.28 BST

Before the second world war, remembering history served only to glorify nations, to stir up revanchism or to sanctify heroes. Then Germany invented Vergangenheitsbewältigung, the attempt to deal with its Nazi shame by collectively confronting the unspeakable crimes of the Third Reich rather than evading them. This process, which started at the end of the 60s after two decades of collective amnesia, allowed something positive to grow from a negative legacy: Germany’s rehabilitation and reconstruction into one of the strongest democracies in the world.

Germany’s culture of remembrance could inspire countries such as Britain which have trouble understanding that in order to transform the weight of the past into wealth, it must confront history’s shadows – not ignore them.

...For the past to help us make our present better, it is not enough to name a few culprits from history and to tear down their statues. Certainly, anger is understandable when authorities allow figures such as King Leopold II of Belgium, or the slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol, to go on being honoured in public places without any contextualisation. But iconoclasm often only serves an illusion of justice. Soon after comes the forgetting. The missed opportunity to use our past to know ourselves better is all that remains.

“Our history tells us what man is capable of,” the German president Richard von Weizsäcker said in a historic speech to the Bundestag in 1985.

The men honoured in statues were able to do what they did because entire societies in Europe, in the Americas, as well as in the Arab world and the Ottoman empire, thought like them. They may not have had actual blood on their hands, but many people benefitted directly or indirectly from the cruel and savage domination of man over man that slavery and colonialism entailed. The complicity of this mass of people with a criminal system seems much more central a question to me than the guilt of an individual slave trader or a sadistic colonist.

And such societal responsibility seems less relevant in the obscurantist era of Christopher Columbus, when most non-white human beings were considered soulless, than in more modern times. How, in the 19th and 20th centuries, could countries such as the US, Britain and France, which boasted of how they championed democracy and freedom, unscrupulously oppress and exploit people under the pretext of “enlightening” them?

The oppression continued long after the second world war, after they had proclaimed their moral superiority over fascism. To what extent has this double standard damaged the model of parliamentary democracy worldwide? Millions of American and European citizens took part in this unbearable hypocrisy, this immorality.

This reflection is central, because it sends each one of us back to our present-day responsibilities. It helps us become aware of our own contradictions and of the consequences of our behaviour. One doesn’t have to serve an unfair system directly to be complicit with it. Following the crowd through indifference, opportunism or conformism is also form of complicity.

In Germany, those who follow the crowd are called Mitläufer. My German grandfather was, like the majority of Germans under the Third Reich, a Mitläufer. In 1938, he took advantage of antisemitic Nazi policies to buy a business from a Jewish family for a low price. After the war, the only survivor of this family, the rest of whom perished in Auschwitz, demanded reparations, but my grandfather refused to acknowledge his responsibility. After the defeat of Nazism, most Germans lacked the hindsight to realise that though the impact of each Mitläufer was tiny on an individual level, their small everyday acts of cowardice, opportunism and turning a blind eye created the conditions necessary for the functioning of a criminal system.

It took the courage of my father’s generation to pull the German population out of amnesia and make the Mitläufer central to this task of coming to terms with the past. This helped to sharpen younger citizens’ awareness of their fallibility, their malleability and to arm them against demagogues and manipulators of hatred and lies. As a result they were able to transform collective guilt into democratic responsibility. But even Germany is not immune. In 2017 an extreme right party, AfD, entered the German parliament for the first time since the end of the war. The mobilisation of media, politics, justice and civil society to combat this threat to democracy proved to be effective: the party’s support has plummeted in the polls to 8%. Nevertheless, learning from the past is a process that needs to be continually nourished and rethought, just like democracy.

Facing up to the shadows of history shouldn’t be done in a culture of guilt. Nor should it be instrumentalised to stir up hatred or sectarianism, or to nourish an anachronistic and Manichean vision of the past. However, coming to terms with the past is impossible without an essential step: taking the perspective of the victim, the oppressed, the occupied, the humiliated. And being able to apologise.....