The meaning of Merkel's visit to Jerusalem

22 March 2008

First person by Kamal Dib

Most media reports interpreted German Chancellor's Angela Merkel's visit to Jerusalem this week in the context of the Arab-Israeli conflict and the current US-Iranian confrontation. This is evident from newspaper headlines and TV excerpts where Merkel's comments about Israel and its enemies were highlighted, both in Israeli and Arab media. The deeper significance of the visit for Germany and the German people was missing in the media coverage.

Merkel expressed "shame" for the Holocaust in her speech to the Israeli Parliament. She said, "Germany and Israel are, and will always remain, linked in a special way through the memory of the Holocaust." She also laid a wreath at Jerusalem's memorial to victims of the Nazi genocide. "The Holocaust fills us Germans with shame ... I bow before the victims, I bow before the survivors, and before all those who helped them so they could survive," she said. This was a similar gesture to that of Helmut Kohl in Auschwitz, Poland, in 1989.

Observers of the German scene would realize the importance of remembrance of the events of World War II in shaping the foreign policy and the national identity of contemporary Germany. The fact that public debates continue to rage over the various aspects of  World War II and what happened, the magnitude of responsibility for Nazi crimes, and how to commemorate victims, are all live issues in Germany today. Books, movies, TV documentaries, public speeches, monuments, etc., appear very frequently.

In the period 1933-45, Germany fell under Adolph Hitler's totalitarian regime of the Third Reich. This period had lasting political, economic, cultural and social impacts on post-war Germany. Public debates over the past 20 years are evidence that the country is still curing the trauma caused by the Nazi nightmare and is still coming to terms with the past. It is through this crucial exercise that Germany is reasserting its enlightened heritage that preceded the Third Reich.

In 194, Hitler had absolute powers as he declared himself f?hrer (supreme guide) by combining the offices of president and chancellor into one. Hitler's Nazi Party gained power by exploiting Germany's misfortunes and period of crisis in the 1930s, and deployed effective propaganda and Hitler's charismatic oratory to gain popularity. The party emphasized nationalism and anti-Semitism as its primary political expression. The Nazis rearmed the German forces and gradually penetrated and controlled every aspect of public life, including women and children. Mass gatherings took place mostly to listen to Hitler's speeches. The regime then pursued an aggressive foreign policy with the goal of controlling Western Europe and seizing Lebensraum in Eastern Europe. While the Nazis enjoyed success in the early stages of World War II, they were defeated and their state collapsed in 1945. Hitler's bid for territorial conquest and racial subjugation of neighboring countries caused the deaths of tens of millions of people, including the genocide of millions of Jews.

For two generations after the war, Germans had a long list of moral and political issues to deal with. Here was a country that endured 12 years of military dictatorship and four years of harsh Allied military occupation. The immediate postwar period included the deportation of 12 million ethnic Germans from their ancestral homes in Eastern Europe who then became poor refugees in Germany. Recent books in Germany detail the heavy and cruel Allied bombardment of German cities, such as Dresden and Hamburg, and talk about the wanton physical destruction of the country. The German people, freed from Nazi dictatorship, endured postwar hostility and negative stereotypical views in the media of the victors, including tasteless Hollywood films about Germans. The list of German defeats after 1945 goes on to include the disarmament of Germany, losing core territory to neighboring countries, the erection of the Berlin Wall, the division of the country into two states, and the continued indirect 1949-1990 occupation by the four powers.

May 8, 1945, was the zero-hour for Germany. People were hopeful that it was an hour in which Germany removed the Nazi yoke at the cost of destruction and occupation so that it can rebuild and heal. This positive hope for the future was what successive German governments tried to achieve. However, until 1985, West Germany was focused on economic development but relatively ignored the memory of the Nazi period. As time went by, actions to demolish or build over concentration camps and other sites of Nazi crimes (intentionally or unintentionally) were seen by critics as hiding an uncomfortable past. Critics said that if re-utilizing, demolishing, or constructing over Nazi sites were to continue unchecked, it would have been difficult, if not impossible, for memorialization of victims to take place.

Besides hiding the physical evidence, a revisionist attempt to rewrite the history of the Nazi era was taking place. The revisionists argued that if concentration camps were to be understood in the light of the Soviet gulags, they would also have to be assessed in the light of general human fallibility. These revisionists argued that it was all relative, and that it was the communists - meaning Russia - who started concentration camps. German historian Ernst Nolte argued that the Soviet gulags preceded Auschwitz, and that Hitler followed Stalin's example. Nolte's approach minimized Nazi crimes and denied the "singularity" of the Holocaust, shifting ultimate responsibility for it to Bolshevism. It would also imply that Nazism and what it did were acts of a totalitarian state, and this is what dictatorships around the world usually do: mass gatherings and mass killings.  

Meanwhile, between 1949 and 1985, communist East Germany did not do better in coming to terms with the Nazi era. As a self-proclaimed birth child of anti-fascist resistance, its leaders interpreted their state as a triumph of communism in the ongoing struggle between Nazism and communism in Germany between 1930 and 1945. The communist government did not feel particular responsibility for the Holocaust or its memory as it claimed to represent those who resisted Nazism - they were the victims as well. More so, East Germany accused West Germany of not being as committed to removing the fascist past. 

Both Germanys hid behind the Cold War and had no incentive to pick up the pieces of history. But when Germany was reunified in 1990 and the Cold War ended, the Federal Republic with Berlin as its capital could no longer use anti-fascist or anti-communist motifs to explain away responsibility and the need for commemoration. There was a need for a united Germany to face the past with a single national narrative, and reunification was a good thing for Germans to join efforts to think about the past and learn from it for the future.

In the 1990s, healthy debates took place in the media and public discourses, and some highlights of the period included the Crimes of the Wehrmacht (the Nazi army) exhibition in 1995 and the publication of controversial books (for example "Hitler's Willing Executioners" by Daniel Glodhagen, an American writer). Goldhagen argued that the Holocaust was deliberate and intentional. He said that not only Nazi officers at the death camps were responsible for the mass killings of Jews, but rather it was a wholesale responsibility of the German people. He attacked the assumption that lingered for many decades that few Germans knew about the Holocaust or that it was all Hitler's fault, and that people around Hitler simply followed his orders. Goldhagen's simple narrative appealed to the masses, but his suggestion that German anti-semitism went back for generations was in fact a falsification of history. In 1918-1933, Germany welcomed Jewish fugitives from Eastern Europe, and in 1940-45, victims of Nazism included millions of Germans, Gypsies, Russians and others who were not Jewish. German Jews contributed to episodes of illustrious German history in science, literature, and the arts.

Still, such books or movies or exhibitions in the 1990s, brought a national feeling that Germany needed to study history to moralize and learn lessons. However, there was resistance to coming to terms with the past. Until 1998, there were those who downplayed the Holocaust or denied it for nationalistic reasons, and those who reinforced it and promoted a mentality of guilt. One side accused the other that it did not like any positive national German feeling, national symbols, or even feelings of patriotism (for example, during the World Cup in 2006 that took place in Germany), or campaigns to promote patriotism. However, J?rgen Habermas, a German philosopher, argued that the Nazi racist ideology has led to an unprecedented mass annihilation of Jews, and this cannot be overlooked. His quest was sensible: If Germany needed patriotism, it should be a civic type oriented toward the constitution and not a narrow nationalistic patriotism.

Coming to terms was not easily accepted. It was seen by some as coercing Germans into shame; that the Holocaust memory was an instrument to impose on the German people a "mental state of disgrace" (Schande); that Germans should not need feel shame or guilt; and that commemoration should be an active reflection on the past and not a ritual. There was a concern that the new generation may be implicated in negative feelings of "guilt," "disgrace," and "shame." Why would young people feel guilt when guilt is associated with the perpetration of a crime? Should Germans remain in a self-condemnatory state of mind, or a negative nationalism of defining oneself as European and not as German?

The debates of the 1990s bore fruit and helped open up new horizons for German national identity. Germany would not hide its past, and would deploy resources to understand recent German history, and seek ways to commemorate it. This new direction led to actions, and since 1998, several memorial sites were constructed particularly in Berlin. German President Herzog said that there should be no feeling of guilt but of remembrance so that it will not happen again; that the "responsibility" is not one about the past, but for the future. 

Merkel's visit to Jerusalem was part of this soul-searching in Germany. But it should be noted that her visit was not the first by a German chancellor and it was not the first time a German Chancellor addresses the Knesset in German. Former Chancellor Konrad Adenauer visited Jerusalem in 1966, so did Willy Brandt, Helmut Kohl (twice), and Gerhard Schroeder. German presidents Richard von Weizsacker, Roman Herzog, Johannes Rau and Horst Koehler also visited Israel, and the latter two also addressed the Knesset, in German.

Merkel's visit was special for two reasons: First, her remarks in the Knesset about German shame went well in mending fences back home. Prior to 1998, her party, the CDU, took a conservative position in the national debate about the Holocaust. Secondly, Merkel herself has a special position vis--vis Israel. She visited Israel three times in less than two years, and she feels particular responsibility toward Jews. Not only because of the Holocaust, but because she grew up in communist East Germany, a country that maintained close relations with socialist Arab states. East German people and most East Europeans felt gratitude toward the United States for contributing to the collapse of communist regimes after 1989, and may share current US strategic interests in the world, and adopt its special relations with Israel.

So much is understood of Merkel's visit to Jerusalem. However, contemporary German identity is not one that turns around the Holocaust, but one that has universal application. Germany would not participate in aggressive wars nor would follow policies that victimize other people, whether minorities within Germany or countries struggling for their rights.

What remains to be seen now is a balancing act between Merkel's sense of responsibility for the Jewish Holocaust on the one hand, and her duty toward the Palestinians. As such, Berlin has promised to host meetings to help the Palestinians. The irony of the situation was that Merkel's participation in commemorating 60 years of Israel's founding, was also the 60 anniversary of the Palestinian suffering in their own land at the hands of the Israelis.

Kamal Dib is a Canadian economist and an observer of German culture. His e-mail address is kamaldib@videotron.ca.

Copyright The Daily Star 2008.