The birth and development of remembrance policy in Germany
What should we remember when we think of the major conflicts of the 20th century in Germany? Remembrance culture has its own unique importance across the Rhine. There is definitely a tragic past to be remembered, the country (East Germany, at any rate) having lived through two world wars and two totalitarian regimes. Today, however, the remembrance of these events differs in many aspects.
German remembrance culture is sometimes seen from outside as oversized, given that the country was rebuilt after the Second World War on the idea of rediscovering successive strata of history, which were gradually enriched by a process of coming to terms with the past (Vergangenheitsbewältigung) and a refusal to forget. Multiple tools have been brought into play, and film-makers, writers and civil-society actors have at times had a more important role than the university and research spheres. Post-war West German society was built on the idea of an overt consensus between the different classes of the population, so that any historical advance undermining that process, namely in the 1970s, had to be negotiated before being incorporated into a new societal plan. A number of sequences can be identified in this process: the First World War being relatively forgotten compared to the omnipresence of the Second, the latter’s military and civilian dead following a different remembrance trajectory.
One thing is for sure: there is an unquestionable asymmetry between France and Germany in terms of remembrance. The first difference is immediately visible when you visit the two countries: the two conflicts that did not take place on German soil, i.e. the Franco-Prussian War, which led to the proclamation of the German Empire in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, and the First World War, which culminated in the no less famous Treaty of Versailles, inspire relative indifference.
German infantrymen making their way to the front. Postcard bearing the title: “What the German troops look like as they make their way to the trenches”. Photo: Paul Hoffmann, 1914. © akg-images
The relatively forgotten early Franco-German conflicts
The Franco-Prussian War is a victim of its remoteness in time and of the prevailing “presentism” (relationship with time that accords a disproportionate place to the present) which François Hartog saw as increasing from the end of the Second World War.
The only visible traces are often collective graves or cenotaphs in the older German cemeteries. The year 2021 also saw two virtual exhibitions, one in Dresden (Krieg macht Nation: wie das Deutsche Kaiserreich entstand, at the military museum), the other in Hannover (Hannover und der Deutsch-Französische Krieg 1870/71, at the history museum), but the subject was of interest above all to specialists.
More surprising was the near absence of the First World War in public places until the centenary commemorations. It is also noteworthy that there are far fewer historians in Germany working on the subject than on the Second World War. If it was the “great seminal catastrophe” of the short 20th century, to use George F. Kennan’s phrase, it was largely repressed in the memory of the German people. The horrors of the nights of bombing and the evacuations during the Second World War erased the memory of the trenches and battlefields of the Somme and Verdun. Indeed, unlike the Belgians and the French, the Germans did not experience the First World War on their own soil. Besides the existence of a culture of war, which included children too, for many inhabitants of the Kaiserreich their only experience of war took the form of death notification letters, censored postcards, and shortages, the latter affecting everyone. To be sure, over the last more than half a century, work has been done to set the records straight regarding the First World War. The first and one of the most controversial theories was put forward by historian Fritz Fischer, who in the 1960s asserted that the Germans were ultimately responsible for the outbreak of the First World War. This prompted an international debate, the “Fischer controversy”, which became a domestic debate in Federal Germany, but also spilled over into the German Democratic Republic. In 2014, a book by Australian historian Christopher Clark revived interest in the Great War, selling 200 000 copies in Germany between October 2013 and May 2014. In it, he described the war as the “avoidable outcome of a dense sequence of events and decisions”, thus partly letting Germany off the hook. Despite successive attempts to rekindle the flame since François Mitterrand and Helmut Kohl stood hand in hand at Verdun, the federal government has until now appeared reluctant to embrace the major national commemorations of the outbreak of the war over 100 years ago.
German chancellor Angela Merkel opens an exhibition on the First World War
at the Berlin history museum, 28 May 2014. © Thomas Peter/AFP
In Germany, the First World War does not lend itself to the creation of national myths – and certainly not to celebration.
The Second World War: between military remembrance and civilian remembrance
The Second World War was the pivot for the reconstruction of social and political life in the Federal Republic of Germany post-1945. However, given the scale of the destruction, it gave rise to two different remembrances, which are at times connected, at others asynchronous. This was due precisely to the nature of the war, which, aside from considerable military losses, like the First World War also affected the civilian population, but on an unprecedented scale: over five million German soldiers were killed, the war in the air resulted in 570 000 victims in Germany, and some 14 million Germans fled or were driven out of what were at the time Germany’s eastern territories. Nearly six million Jews were murdered, along with hundreds of thousands of Roma and Sinti, disabled and sick people.
The creation of a culture of remembrance of dead service personnel was initially down to the military themselves. Let us remember that the 1950s were a decade of deliberate repression of memory, symbolised by Ludwig Erhard’s economic policy and what has been termed the “economic miracle”. Let us also consider that the Germans sought to build themselves a new identity by non-military means, as shown by the great pride which the country took in winning the 1954 World Cup.
Remembrance of the dead in the 1950s was either a private affair, or else involved the military lying low waiting for better days. The Bundeswehr was re-formed in 1955-56, in a hitherto unknown configuration which was a direct consequence of the blind obedience shown by many German soldiers regarding the massacres they were ordered to perpetrate. The idea was to set up, under the aegis of NATO, a German army of citizens in uniform, who should be able to understand orders before they carried them out. However, there was a paradox in this desire to overhaul military culture – both in the West and in the East: the very people to set up the new architecture were Wehrmacht personnel, who had served under the Third Reich. The result was a lasting continuity of memory.
Some barracks were named after generals who had blindly served during the Hitler period, while the officers involved in the assassination attempt against Hitler on 20 July 1944 were banished as traitors from the collective military memory. Since the largest sector of the German population had no interest in military affairs, Second World War remembrance was initially confined to what was conveyed by service personnel, and it was not until the 1970s that things would change.
It was then that the tradition which had been passed on from the Wehrmacht to the Bundeswehr without much hindsight was called into question, in the light of a decree of 1965. With the considerable development of historical knowledge on the Wehrmacht’s role in the Second World War, that decree was complemented in 1982 by another document that questioned the orientation of military remembrance in the thirty years since the war. It stipulated that only what was in accordance with the German Constitution was worthy of forming part of Bundeswehr tradition.
The separation between civilian and military values was abolished, and it was emphasised that tolerance, the desire for peace and a form of conscious obedience were now required from service personnel, which in no way excluded the desire to fight. The ties between the Bundeswehr and Wehrmacht veterans became less close, especially with the movements of former members of the Waffen-SS. In the absence of clearer rules, the issue of tradition was shelved in the 1980s and 90s.
A new shock came with the touring exhibitions of 1995 and 2004 on the crimes of the Wehrmacht, intended to raise the general public’s awareness that there were not two armies under the Third Reich, one ideologically conditioned, the other more ethical, but only one. In 2018, Ursula von der Leyen, then Minister of Defence, published a decree extending the decree of 1982 and including new details, such as the end of the Cold War, the overseas operations of the Bundeswehr, the dissolution of the GDR’s People’s Army and the end of compulsory military service.
The Neue Wache – or “New Guardhouse” – is a federal memorial to the victims of war and tyranny © DR
Obviously, the difficulties of military remembrance in the Federal Republic were linked to the context in which the soldiers were killed, particularly when it involved criminal acts, so that the erection of any commemorative monument was prevented before the renovation of the Neue Wache in Berlin in 1993. Meanwhile, three monuments to the army, air force and navy were in fact inaugurated, by they were very vague about the cult of the dead to avoid any reference to the political context.
Mother with her Dead Son, by Käthe Kollwitz, a famous Pietà exhibited at the Neue Wache. © DR
Without doubt one of the pivotal moments in the restoration of memory was federal president Richard von Weizsäcker’s remembrance speech on 8 May 1985, in which he listed the different groups of military and civilian victims. It was applauded throughout the world Since then, on the Day of National Mourning (Volkstrauertag), both soldiers and civilian victims are remembered, the latter in particular inspiring the general public’s sympathies. Against the geopolitical backdrop of a European Union of rising stature, in which the Bundeswehr was set to play an important role, note how Angela Merkel dedicated the Day of National Mourning in 2006 not only to the soldiers who fought in the two world wars, but also to those killed in overseas operations. Meanwhile, the monument unveiled on 8 September 2009 at the Ministry of Defence in Berlin, the first since the end of the Second World War, was in memory of the service personnel of both wars, and all those, soldiers or civilians, who had lost their lives in the course of their duties.
Remembering the victims of the Third Reich
While remembrance of the soldiers killed in action has had its ups and downs – they did serve a totalitarian regime – the question of the victims of Nazism, closely associated with the horror of the conflict, has also seen a growing acknowledgment, but in the far broader context of German society as a whole. It isn’t possible in just a few lines to go into detail, but we can give a rough outline. The Nuremberg Trials were the first step in this process of remembrance to avoid putting a whole nation on trial. According to the Charter of the International Military Tribunal of 8 August 1945, the charges included: crimes “against peace”, which meant primarily the planning and execution of a war of aggression; war crimes such as murder, ill-treatment, the deportation of civilians and prisoners of war for forced labour, the killing of hostages, pillage, the destruction of towns and villages; and crimes against humanity, including murder, extermination, enslavement of the civilian population and political, racial or religious persecution. In the 1950s and 60s, German society preferred to turn the page, until the past caught up with it, with the intergenerational conflict of 1968-69 and the development of remembrance around the world.
With the adoption by the United Nations General Assembly, in November 1968, of the Convention on the Non-Applicability of Statutory Limitations to War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity, the Bundestag increased to 30 years the limitation period for war crimes, thus allowing the justice system until the end of 1979 to investigate as yet unsolved Nazi war crimes. Finally, in July 1979, the Bundestag followed the international norm and determined that statutory limitations were no longer applicable to such crimes. In other words, prosecutions could be made even if the crime had been committed several decades earlier and its perpetrator was now in their old age.
Memorial to Homosexuals Persecuted under Nazism, Berlin, 19 September 2019. On the front side of the cube is a window,
through which passers-by can watch a short film showing two men and two women kissing. © DR
Compensation payouts to victims, and with them their inclusion in the remembrance sphere, occurred gradually over the years that followed the war: as early as 1947, Jewish victims could claim back their stolen property. In 1956, the Bundestag adopted the Federal Compensation Act, which was extended several times until 1965. Some one million people, most of them German Jews, who had been imprisoned in concentration camps and ghettos and had survived the Holocaust, received compensation worth approximately 43 billion Deutsche Mark (DM). By 2002, the Federal Republic of Germany had paid out a total of 60 billion DM to the victims of persecution under the Nazi regime. By way of comparison, the financial benefits enjoyed by German refugees and expellees from Germany’s former eastern territories under the Law on Equalisation of Burdens of 1952 amounted to 104 billion DM.
The Roma and Sinti had to wait until the 1960s for the Federal Court of Justice to revoke the earlier case-law and include acts of violence prior to 1942 in compensation payouts. Considerable political pressure was required right through to the 1980s for all those concerned to receive compensation. One of the last groups to be acknowledged as victims of the Second World War were the millions of former forced labourers in the 1990s, when collective actions brought by some of them threatened German companies in the United States, forcing the industry gave in and the red-green coalition government of the time to seek a procedural approach for compensation payouts. Finally, the homosexual victims of the Nazi regime, they too mentioned in President von Weizsäcker’s 1985 speech, were also recognised in 2008, and a memorial was unveiled in Berlin in acknowledgement of the genocide of the Herero and Nama peoples.
The German remembrance sphere is continually opening up to new fields and more contemporary issues.
A visible remembrance space
Beyond merely acknowledging the crimes, it is the inclusion of that acknowledgement in the public domain that is significant. Few European countries present the same characteristics as Germany in this area, with strong synergies between academia and society, and a considerable media impact. The reconstruction of remembrance plays a decisive role in German architecture: the Jewish Museum Berlin, whose design by Daniel Libeskind made the news headlines at the time of its original construction; controversies around the Humboldt Forum, where part of the ethnographic collections of the former ethnological museum were to be transferred; memorials like the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, as well as more ordinary traces in the urban landscape,
like the Stolpersteine, found in towns and cities across Germany since 1990, which mark the place where Jewish families lived.
Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Berlin. © Franck Viltart
Filmmakers go on returning almost obsessively to the Second World War, with films that have sparked considerable debate, like Michael Verhoeven’s The White Rose (1984), about resistance to national socialism, or Oliver Hirschbiegel’s Downfall (2004), about Hitler’s end. German-language literature, too, has seen contemporary witnesses of the wartime generation writing about their experiences 50 years on or more (Günter Grass, Victor Klemperer, Martin Walser), while those born after 1940 have gone in search of their own family histories (Julia Franck, Christoph Hein, Uwe Timm). They have not sought to understand how things really happened, but to draw lessons from their memory – their own and that of others.
As new themes addressed in the public arena throw up different topics of interest, the culture of conflict remembrance is enriched with new subjects, overcoming the ever renewed focus on the Nazi past.