>From IntellectualCapital.CoM A Lingering European Memory of War by Anne Applebaum Thursday, March 04, 1999 Comments: 75�posts <Picture> Once again, the Germans started it. To be precise, Michael Naumann, Germany's culture minister, started it. "Britain," he recently told an interviewer, "is obsessed with the war. It is the only nation in the world that has decided to make the Second World War a sort of spiritual core of its national self, understanding and pride." Once again, the British responded in kind. In the wake of Naumann's attack, columnists opined, editorials raged, and most of all, the Sun newspaper took aim, printing an enormous picture of Auschwitz victims beneath the headline "Why We Will Not Forget the War, Herr Naumann." The scars of history Every so often, minor European misunderstandings shed light on major European divisions, and this particular quarrel was a textbook case. For in fact, Naumann was right: The British are obsessed with the war. <Picture: London after the Blitz> London is shown after the Great Blitz of January 4, 1941 during World War II For the past 50 years, Britain's views of international politics have been shaped by the British experience of the war. Britain's interpretation of 20th-century history has been colored by the war, and Britain's view of its postwar allies has been formed by the war. Even now, hardly a week goes by without some war story or war criminal appearing in the British media. Indeed, the only country in Europe that might possibly rival Britain in its obsession with the years between 1939 and 1945 is ... Germany. Or maybe France. Or Russia. Or Poland. Or any other European country that was part of the conflict. In part because it was so apocalyptic, in part because it touched -- and destroyed -- so many people's lives, in part because the years since 1945 have been, for the world's major powers at least, years of relative peace, World War II remains the single most influential event in the national memory of most European countries, and of many Asian countries as well. Yet the war is not remembered everywhere in the same way, and the same lessons from it are not everywhere drawn. Hence these periodic misunderstandings between German culture ministers and British tabloids. The German obsession I once spent an hour arguing this point with a Danish politician at an otherwise forgettable lunch. He asked me why the British did not "draw the correct lessons from the war" -- namely that all good Europeans must now band together, abandon their petty pretensions to national sovereignty and form one great, United Europe with a single currency and a single government. That view would be fine for the citizens of formerly occupied Denmark, I noted, but the British experience of the war naturally led Britain in precisely the opposite direction. It led to the belief that no other European nation can be trusted (look how fast France fell), that Britain acts best when acting alone (or in concert with non-European countries) and, most of all, that armies work, national sovereignty is a good thing and the single currency is dangerous. The Danish politician just shook his head sadly. The Germans' understanding of the British view is even weaker because their obsession with the war, while far more powerful than that of Britain, is completely different. Measure it by the frequency of Holocaust controversies. The past few years have seen an enormous row over the plan to build a Holocaust monument in Berlin; a fuss when a well-known German writer asked when the world would stop bludgeoning Germany with the memory of Auschwitz; numerous debates over reparations still owed to Jews and others by German companies. More than 50 years later, German television is still full of Holocaust documentaries. A book by an American author, Daniel Goldhagen, on German responsibility for the Holocaust recently became a best seller. However much they want to be faithful to the memory of the war, or however much they want to forget it, postwar Germany's "spiritual core" is wholly determined by it. The official policy of pacifism, the dedication to the discarding of symbols of national identity (the Deutschmark, the Bundeswehr), and again, the open desire to subsume German power in a United Europe -- all are evidence of the obsession. But the Germans and the British are not alone. France's postwar politics, almost wholly dedicated to tying Germany into a web of economic and military alliances, have been determined by the war. The Polish fight to join NATO was fueled by memories of the war. Just an excuse to bad-mouth Britain For a glimpse of what it really means to be obsessive about the war, have a look at the vast war memorial park in Moscow. For decades, war propaganda was vital to the Soviet Union's facade of legitimacy, and war propaganda continues to contribute to Russia's national paranoia and sense of isolation. To call Britain the "only nation in the world" that has made World War II a vital part of its identity was indeed an odd choice of words. >From the evidence of his interview, one can only conclude that either Naumann does not know much about the rest of Europe, or that -- in a traditional, nationalist sense -- he just does not much like Britain. Giving him the benefit of the doubt -- surely Germany's culture minister is a well-traveled man -- my guess is the latter. Anne Applebaum is a writer for London's Evening Standard. She is a regular commentator for IntellectualCapital.com. <Picture>Related Links Jacob Heilbrunn of The New Republic also has trouble with Naumann. The BBC took up Naumann's accusation and asked readers what they thought. CNN reports on the proposed Holocaust memorial. Paul Fussell, author of The Great War and Modern Memory, about the cultural impact of WWI, discussed his more recent WWII book, Doing Battle in The Atlantic. Also see the BBC's nifty clickable map of Euroland. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Via HotLink from above article September 19, 1998 Will Germany Deny The Past? By JACOB HEILBRUNN WASHINGTON -- With the German election a week away, Gerhard Schr�der, the Social Democrat who is favored to defeat Chancellor Helmut Kohl, has been modeling his campaign on Bill Clinton's 1992 strategy of promising economic innovation and generational change. ���Unfortunately, Clinton-style opportunism appears to be Mr. Schr�der's dominant trait, particularly in his recent denunciation of Mr. Kohl's support for a Holocaust memorial in the center of Berlin, near the Brandenburg Gate and the American Embassy. In so doing, Mr. Schr�der has recklessly politicized the Holocaust. ���The issue had been dormant. Now Mr. Schr�der, encouraged by Michael Naumann, a former book publisher whom Mr. Schr�der has recruited as a possible culture minister, has said that Germany should become a "self-assured" nation and that a memorial would set the wrong tone. He wants German-American ties to be "more strongly determined by visions of the future than by the burden of the past." ���Mr. Naumann has gone even further. Picking up on a pet project of German neo-conservatives, he has said that instead of constructing a memorial, Germans should rebuild Kaiser Wilhelm's palace, which was demolished by East German Communists after World War II. ���Such demagogy is a remarkable change for the Social Democratic Party. Traditionally it has emphasized contrition and repentance for the German past. When Willy Brandt, a Social Democrat, was Chancellor, his most famous act was to fall to his knees at the Warsaw ghetto in December 1970. ���Neither Mr. Schr�der's nor Mr. Naumann's stated reasons for, in effect, abandoning this tradition are remotely persuasive. The memorials at concentration camps far from Berlin do not serve the same purpose that a memorial in the center of the new German capital would. ���Dodging confrontation with the Nazi era is hardly a way of displaying "self-assurance." And calling for the reconstruction of Kaiser Wilhelm's palace is childishly provocative. ���Yet Mr. Schr�der's position has received the support of many intellectuals on the left as well as the right. ���G�nter Grass and other left-wingers who signed a manifesto to Mr. Kohl saying that a memorial was "indispensable" in 1989 have now signed a new letter opposing it. ���For these intellectuals Mr. Kohl's strong support of the project is one reason to oppose it. ���Another is that they want Mr. Schr�der to be elected, and a recent poll indicated that a majority of Berliners are against the memorial. ���Young intellectuals on the right oppose the memorial because they want to create a self-confident Berlin republic that dispenses with the self-effacement of the defunct cold war Bonn republic. Writing in the daily Die Welt, Tilman Krause, an essayist for the paper, hailed "an end to leftist national masochism." ���"What nation would come up with the idea of putting the most horrible acts of its own history in such an exposed position in gigantic dimensions in its capital?" Mr. Krause asked. ���In denouncing the memorial, then, Mr. Schr�der and Mr. Naumann are exploiting the worst sentiments on both sides of the spectrum. If Mr. Schr�der becomes Chancellor, he should think hard about whether the founding act of the new Berlin republic should be to repress the memory of the destruction of European Jewry. ��� Jacob Heilbrunn is a senior editor at The New Republic. ~~~~~~~~~~~~ >From IntellectualCapital.CoM EU Uncertainty and the Resurgence of the Right by Anne Applebaum Thursday, November 07, 1996� <Picture> He regularly poses for photographs in bikers' short, calls Hitler's employment policies "orderly" and erected anti-immigration billboards around Vienna, proclaiming that the city "must not become Chicago." But Joerg Haider, the politician who leads the far-right Freedom Party in Austria, is neither a joke nor a flash in the pan. He won 27.9 % of the vote in elections to the European parliament earlier this month, and his success sparked off a new round of debate about the increasing number, and the increasing popularity, of "far-right" political parties in Europe. "Nobody asked us" Every time this debate begins, however, I recall a conversation I once held with a French historian, an old acquaintance. I asked her if she could explain the support for Jean Marie Le Pen's anti-immigration, anti-European integration National Front party in France. She shrugged, and said it wasn't that hard to explain. So many things were changing in France -- corruption is being exposed, power is slowly being transferred from Paris to Brussels, the capital of the European community, the French franc is soon to disappear into a European currency -- that voting for the National Front, the only party that openly advocated French sovereignty, was simply a way to protest. "Nobody asked us," she explained, "about any of these things." While "Nobody asked us" -- about European integration, about immigration, about increasing corruption -- does not provide the whole explanation for either the solidifying support for the National Front -- which won 15 percent of the vote in the last French presidential elections -- nor for Joerg Haider's success in Austria, it does go part of the way. The same can be said for the success of other oddball right-wing parties across the continent: the Vlaams Blok Flemish national party in Belgium and Gianfranco Fini's National Alliance in Italy, as well as a handful of nationalist parties in Scandinavia. Not that the success of all such parties is always reported in those terms. Every time Haider's name is mentioned, it is almost exclusively in the context of his famous declaration of support for Nazi employment policies. The same is true of the National Front, whose platform generally attracts attention only when its nastier followers attack Arabs in Paris. Similarly, outside of Italy, Gianfranco Fini is mainly known as the man who revived Mussolini's old party: In the aftermath of the National Alliance's first parliamentary success, all sorts of worthy Europeans, including Francois Mitterrand, a veteran of Vichy France, rose up to denounce them. Words employed to explain them include far-right, neo-fascist, nationalist and racist. Some of them may be some of those things. But anyone who believes that their appeal is strictly racist, or that their success is merely a repeat of the 1930s, will also misunderstand part of what is going on in European politics right now. Look, for example, more closely at Haider's recent success. It is true that Mr. Haider's father was a high-ranking Austrian Nazi, and it is true that he is given to provocative comments about the immigrants who have poured into Austria in recent years. Disquiet and dissent But it is equally true that since the war, Austria has been run by two parties, the Christian Democratic People's Party and the Social Democrats, often operating in coalition. The two have literally divided up the perks of power -- ministries, chairmanships of nationalized industries, government contracts -- between them, hindering private enterprise and encouraging corruption. It is as if Republicans and Democrats agreed to throw away their differences, to share the Speakership of the House, to divide up the cabinet between them, and rotate the presidency. Joerg Haider is the only politician to campaign openly against the political system -- a system that bears distinct resemblance's to the one that operates elsewhere in Europe, most notably in Italy and Belgium, two other countries that also have seen the growth of right-wing parties as well. Haider is also the only politician to campaign openly against Austrian membership in the European community. Austria, which only recently joined the European community, also is typically European in its attitudes toward European integration. All of the mainstream Austrian political parties are in favor of a more tightly integrated Europe, including a single European currency -- just like the main parties in France, Germany, Belgium and nearly every other European country except Britain. Yet in Austria, as in most of Europe, there is a great deal of disquiet about the progress of integration in general, and about the single currency in particular. Oddball politicians -- like Haider or Le Pen -- are often the only ones who will speak up for those who feel the disquiet; those who feel that "Nobody asked us" whether they were prepared to lose their currencies and their control over national economic policy, both of which will clearly be consequences of greater European integration. This is not to excuse the open racism of Haider or Le Pen, or the fascist allegiances of Gianfranco Fini. But it does help explain their parties' popularity. Europe is not awash with proto-Nazi emotions right now. It is, however, afflicted by a general disquiet -- disquiet about the loss of national sovereignty which European integration is bringing; disquiet about the transfer of power away from democratically-elected governments and toward European Union bureaucrats; and finally, disquiet about the corruption that is endemic in Continental politics. Increased immigration bothers people too, but it is seen as a part of that problem. Far right parties give voters a chance to express that disquiet, if not to exorcise it. For that reason alone, we may see their popularity grow. Anne Applebaum is a writer for London's Evening Standard. She is a regular commentator for IntellectualCapital.com. ~~~~~~~~~~~~ A<>E<>R The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes. -Marcel Proust + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority. -Thomas Huxley + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + Forwarded as information only; no endorsement to be presumed + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, this material is distributed without charge or profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this type of information for non-profit research and educational purposes only.
