With support from the University of Richmond

History News Network

History News Network puts current events into historical perspective. Subscribe to our newsletter for new perspectives on the ways history continues to resonate in the present. Explore our archive of thousands of original op-eds and curated stories from around the web. Join us to learn more about the past, now.

Thomas Piketty accuses Germany of forgetting history as it lectures Greece

Related Link Germans Forget Debt History Lesson in Greece Crisis (NYT)

With a flurry of exclamation points and curt rebuttals, Thomas Piketty, who rocketed to stardom last year with his treatise on inequality, told a German newspaper that the Germans are being hypocritical in the way they're treating Greece.

A number of prominent economists have raised concerns about Germany's approach to the Greek debt crisis, which Germans say reflects a need to force changes in Greece's economy so that it never again has such a crisis.

But in the interview with Die Zeit, Thomas Piketty went even farther, saying that the Germans are only in the strong economic position they are today because they benefited from the forgiveness of their neighbors after World War II.

It was in the 1950s, he notes, that Germany benefited from a massive — and, in those days, surprisingly common -- round of debt forgiveness that catapulted its rise into a peaceful economic power. Greece was one of the nations forgiving Germany's debts. In other words, Piketty suggested, when it comes to how to handle Greece in 2015, the best argument against Germany might be ... Germany, circa 1953.

“When I hear the Germans say that they maintain a very moral stance about debt and strongly believe that debts must be repaid, then I think: What a huge joke!” Piketty said in the interview, translated by the site Medium.com(though later taken down due to copyright concerns). “Germany is the country that has never repaid its debts. It has no standing to lecture other nations.”

Piketty continued:

We cannot demand that new generations must pay for decades for the mistakes of their parents. The Greeks have, without a doubt, made big mistakes. Until 2009, the government in Athens forged its books. But despite this, the younger generation of Greeks carries no more responsibility for the mistakes of its elders than the younger generation of Germans did in the 1950s and 1960s. We need to look ahead. Europe was founded on debt forgiveness and investment in the future. Not on the idea of endless penance. We need to remember this.

Read entire article at Huffington Post