In the UK the BBC and other media are hanging a series of articles and programmes around the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. I have not had time to see many of them, but I was discussing them with an old German friend of mine, who escaped as an 11 year old with her mother to north Italy early in 1933 to set up a holiday boarding house, and who is Jewish. But her mother was also working in the civil rights movement. And I know from a long well-conducted tour of Dachau that in that concentration camp at least there were hardly any Jews until the mass incareration of Jews from Vienna at the time of the Anschluss. So her mother must have fled because she was a liberal and a democrat not specifically because she was Jewish.
My old friend, who is so bitter about anything German, which was actually her cultural inheritance even more than being Jewish, failed to connect with anything positive in a 10 minute introduction to the video of the excellent German television set of programmes about the tragic histories of the families of Thomas and Heinrich Mann, despite the fine denunciation by Thomas Mann in 1941 of Nazi Regime, on the grounds that their suffering was mild compared to that of many.
Just in passing she told me that she had an uncle who was let out of Dachau after a couple of years in about 1937 and saw no deeper meaning when passed on the information that in the early years of Dachau the average duration of detention was 18 months.
The point is that even now, the true history of what happened seems to me to be seriously distorted by the appalling horror which is exploited as much as it is explained. The tendency is still towards an almost exclusive concentration on the slaughter of 6 million Jews, to the exclusion of the more puzzling questions about timing and change in even this nightmare, and about the 6 million others whose deaths had a political and economic significance. The ghastly irony that the concentration camps only became the standard form of annihilation because, despite Daniel Goldhagen recounting the zeal of the Einsatzgruppen in occupied Poland and Soviet lands there was enough passive resistance among the military for this to remain the standard form of oppression without damaging military morale.
I believe that the true history can still not be told or accepted, because it is close to the doctrinaire marxist perspective which was delivered in a dogmatic and simplistic form and without deeper discussion about the granularity of the awful but less dramatic conflicts, which are inseparable from a society going through revolutionary changes. The broad picture is of course that Hitler and other constructed the National Socialist Workers Party in order to compete with the rising popular attraction of the radical socialist and communist workers movement, and with the specific intention of carrying out a putsch, or better still a revolution.
Although anti-semitism was endemic and at times vicious in German *as in all other European societies* and provided the emblems, for the Nazi coup, the real purpose was to break the solidarity of bourgeois human rights, and bourgeois democracy. Yet the story is still told in a way that harps on the moral weakness of individuals interspersed with occasional counter-examples of "Civil Courage".
The fact that a key part of the constellation of forces out of which their coup became possible was the simultaneous effective threat but also disastrous strategic miscalculation of the German Communists, (not uninfluenced by the wider "problems" shall we say in the international communist movement) cannot be put centre stage in the analysis *even now" because it would state quietly and clearly that these mind-numbing horrors can only be understood if they are put in the context of the violent twists and turns of a massive historical conflict of economic and political power between working people and the owners of capital that stretches across several centuries.
So the images of horror and held up continually to mesmerise us, (just as *indirectly* they were used by the Nazis to spread partially spoken fear widely among the population.) The English can get morally righteous about the historical ignorance of wild Prince Harry wearing a Nazi armband at a humourous fancy dress party and forget that our former King, shortly after abdication, managed to make a covert Nazi salute on a visit to Nazi Germany. While the Germans wallow in guilt. And the lands in which communist parties instituted a dictatorship of the proletariat, had no experience of wrestling openly within civil society with latent problems of anti-semitism and other violations of human rights that occur every day under capitalism, because they could all be explained away by simplistic marxist formulae, unconnected with concrete reality.
There are some good programmes and articles being written, which start to reflect on the complexity of what happened.
But the holding up of the liberation of Auschwitz as a symbol of the new ideology which we must embrace, is I suggest, still a highly problematic act of historicisation that should be contested, for the sake not just of people of Jewish cultural descent, nor just of ordinary German people, like my deaf old friend who is both, but for the sake of the ordinary people of the world.
Chris Burford
London
