The Holocaust debate
Edward Marston
Berlin The effect of Holocaust on the German people has been cathartic. For the first time in the 34 years since the end of the Nazi mass extermination programme the population of West Germany is facing up to its implications, with horror. Fin Volk begegnet seiner Schuld — a people confronts its guilt — ran a headline in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. I suspect that most of the 15 million Germans who watched the last instalment would not accept the formula of 'collective guilt'. Wir haben es nicht gewusst — we didn't know about it — is a defence to which many who reached the age of responsibility in the Third Reich still cling. How, they ask, can we be held 'guilty' of crimes about which we knew nothing? We had enough to occupy ourselves with at home. The mass murders were carried out under conditions of secrecy far away in the eastern provinces. Their children remain sceptical. For their part, however, they often claim not to feel any particular responsibility because of the accident of their birth. There is a tendency to regard it as a problem for their parents, or all Europeans, or mankind, or even 'capitalism', rather than one for themselves, specifically, as Germans. But at least they are talking about it. One is bound to ask: why only now?
Why has the trauma been repressed for so long? It is not inappropriate to turn to Nietzsche for an answer. 'My memory', begins one of his aphorisms, 'tells me I did that. I cannot have done that, declares my pride, and remains inexorable. Finally — memory gives way.' Furthermore it is not what they did that the elder generation are now discussing: it is what they left undone, what they ignored. That is more easily forgotten. Arguably we also contributed to this repression. 'I agree with Burke', Churchill announced in the early discussions on the future of post-war Germany, 'You cannot indict a whole nation.' In practice the allies proceeded to do just that. A reeducation programme predicated on the thesis of 'collective guilt' was in large measure counter-productive. The Nuremberg trials, whatever else they achieved, did little to help German people to come to terms with their recent past. The blanket charges produced some defensive solidarity: as if the British had never begun a war, as if the French had never committed war crimes. It did almost appear, as Montgomery commented afterwards, that the defendants were being condemned for losing a war. Worse, these blanket charges tended to obscure the unique awfulness of Nazi crimes. The point about the mass murders is precisely that they are not war crimes. Where the allies failed, West German scholars and educationalists have not succeeded. Despite over a hundred television documentaries, despite excellent material available free from Federal and provincial offices for political education, despite a fine body of scholarship, the massive, and in part incredulous, reaction to Holocaust proves — ex post facto — that the message has not got through. The people have not been moved.
This is the achievement of the American soap opera. Richard Ingrams' observation in these columns that 'the re-enactment of atrocities does not move viewers, it tends to excite them' may be a general rule. If so, the showing of Holocaust in Germany is an exception. No-one with whom I saw the film was unmoved by the later scenes of senseless cruelty and destruction. It is true that it is imbricated with sentimentality and kitsch. The Jewish family is quite implausibly handsome and healthy and upright and well-coiffeured to the last. Yet I think it succeeded in Germany as much because of these qualities as in spite of them. Emotional identification with the 'heroes' overwhelmed the cerebral defence of 'not wanting to know'. If it excited viewers, it excited them to inquiry (more than 30,000 telephoned the broadcasting station in the course of the week), and sometimes to remorse.
After the indictment you have the trial. And a very fair one it has been. In the television discussions following each episode many of the distortions of the film were corrected. The experts were able to put across a mass of information to an audience whom they would otherwise never have reached — the last evening some seven million viewers kept their sets switched on for the debate. The phone-in panel faithfully relayed questions like 'Why are so many ex-Nazis still in high positions in the Federal Republic?'
The press has been similarly frank. Stern magazine, for example, carried a personalised letter from its Editor-in-Chief, Henri Nannen, headed 'Yup, I was too chicken-hearted'. It is written rather in the style of an agony column: soul-searching, tear-jerking. But, like the sentimentality of the film, that may be all to the good. Stern has a circulation of over one and a half millions. If you are to reach the common man you must find a common tone. This does not prevent Nannen from hitting very hard: 'If the victory over Poland was a German victory and not merely the victory of the Bock and Rundstedt army groups, if the victory at Dunkirk was a German victory and not merely the success of the 18th army, if Tobruk was a German victory and not merely Rommel's private achievement — then the murder of the Jews is a German murder.. . . We should have known about it — if only we had wanted to know.. . . Yes, I knew about it, and was too cowardly to oppose it.' This courageous statement matches the more cautious verdict of the historian: that before the end of the war the majority of the German people could have found out at least the bare fact that mass murders were being carried out, if they had wanted to. What they could have done about it is another question. This is a problem which all Germans must face, in the East as well as the West.
In the Federal Republic the popular reaction to Holocaust will have political consequences. Franz-Josef Strauss used to say that West Germany's economic achievements had earned it the right not to be reminded of its Nazi past. Perhaps rightwing politicians will be more cautious about saying things like that in the future. The CDU/CSU union are proposing to elect a former member of the SA and Nazi Party as President of the Federal Republic, on the thirtieth anniversary of its foundation. Will anyone have second thoughts?
The coming year will also see the debate on the Statute of Limitations for murder. Its effect would be to prevent any new proceedings being started in cases of murders committed more than 30 years ago. Several East Germans have expressed to me the hope that Holocaust will make it impossible for conservative politicians to carry the vote in favour of the Statute. I think their hopes will not be disappointed. It is significant that the comment comes from this quarter. The constitution of the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) specifically precludes the possibility of limitation for such crimes. The East German record on the prosecution of Nazi criminals is strikingly better than that of the Federal Republic. A state less than half the size of its neighbour, it has nearly twice as many convictions for Nazi crimes to its credit. It is widely held that the younger generation in East Germany know more about the violence done by the Hitler regime than their contemporaries in the West. On the other hand, it is unthinkable that they could participate in a public discussion of the quality and openness which the Federal Republic has seen in the last week. But then of course the German Democratic Republic is not a democracy.
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