"War"-Time Thoughts on War-Anniversaries
With the Sixtieth Anniversary of the end of WWII safely behind us we can be sure that all we have believed over all those years has been reaffirmed and the that ceremonies of re-affirmation have become better and better over the years. As the NYTimes reported from Krakow on January 27, 2005, t he commemoration of the liberation of Auschwitz was “the largest ever,” bringing together “the presidents of Russia, Poland, Israel and Ukraine, as well as Vice President Dick Cheney and other world leaders”. Among them was Chancellor Schroeder who also presided over ceremonies during a week-long commemoration of Auschwitz in Germany at the end of January 2005. The NYTimes also reported on January 25, 2005 that the General Assembly of the UN commemorated the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Nazi death camps on Monday with “pledges of ‘never again’. . . . The day-long session, which began and ended with a minute of silence, was the first such commemoration at the General Assembly, where frequent denunciations of Israeli policy have stirred accusations of anti-Semitism.” The session had been requested by the U.S. asking that it be held on January 24 to avoid conflict with anniversary ceremonies in Auschwitz on January 27, 2005.
A year later, after a plethora of commemorative events eerily parallel to the worsening "war" in Iraq and other political developments, I heard two BBC journalists musing that in the effort of controlling Iran's nuclear ambitions, Israel's nuclear power might become an issue. Amused by the serious political ironies and contradictions of that very thought, they rejected it as "quixotic": the US would of course never allow that (January 16, 2006). And after Hamas's completely unexpected victory in a democratic election on January 25, "an urgent debate has erupted over whether Hamas will be able to modify its positions once in power, disavow violence and terrorism and come to recognize the existence of the state of Israel. Israel, Europe and the United States say they will not have dealings with Hamas until it does so." (Steven Erlanger, New York Times, January 28/29, 2006.)
The title of Erlanger's article is "Hamas Leader Vows to Pursue Stance on Israel," but the details of his report present a more differentiating scenario that might even lend some support to the argument that unilateral demands on Hamas are not the answer now. Despite Israel's aggressive unilateralism over many decades in its U.S. supported dealings with the Palestinians, there is an argument for engagement in mutual "dealings" with Hamas. These negotiations will have to reflect both the history of Israel's enduring occupational presence in Palestine and Hamas's new large and more moderate constituencies. But so far, Israel will have none of such attempts at seeking out mutual interests. Erlanger quotes a senior Israeli official that even statements by Hamas about a "willingness to disarm or to stop attacks on Israel and Israelis, or to make a distinction between Israeli soldiers and civilians, especially settlers living on occupied land, however defined . . . would not be enough, and that Israel would not deal with an Authority dominated by Hamas, even if titularly led by Mr. Abbas. More important, he said, is to try to appeal to the two-thirds or more of Palestinians who say they support a permanent settlement with Israel and to understand that many Palestinians voted for Hamas for reasons of internal reform, not to support jihad or terrorism. Nothing will happen quickly now, he said, but the international community should help ensure that Hamas is isolated not to try to compromise with Hamas, but to try to ensure that Palestinian support for it declines."
It is the old Israeli habit to focus exclusively on what is good for the Jews and not to trust the Arabs--a potentially disastrous position as Judah L. Magnes argued already in 1925 in his inaugural speech as the first chancellor of Jerusalem's Hebrew University. In the meantime, the world has again become much more dangerous, not the least because of Sharon's belief in the wisdom of this habit and making it an overriding military and political strategy (Avi Sahvit, "The General," The New Yorker, January 23 and 30, 2006, 52-63, 60). The coincidence of Sharon's exit from and Hamas's entrance into the political arena of the Middle East is a difficult new challenge for the world community that should not be wasted on upholding this strategy. Palestinian support for Hamas will not decline just by isolating and demonizing it as long as the lives of ordinary Palestinians are not improved; and in the current situation that would require a greater openness rather than exclusiveness in Israel's--America's, Europe's--dealings with Hamas. This would mean a greater willingness to question the political uses of Auschwitz that have been largely responsible for Israel's dangerously single-minded preoccupation with security. And it would mean to learn to trust, if circumspectly, "the Arabs" by dealing with them as political equals--Magnes's advice to Zionists in the Thirties.
This, of course, may be an overly optimistic scenario: right after its 60th anniversary , the politics of Auschwitz appear more secure than ever forever, a seemingly linear ascent in chronological time. But there is, come to think, a small and instructive exception: the "Bitburg affair" of the 40th anniversary. Politically intriguing, it caused a great deal of media-driven moral consternation both in Germany and the U.S. Largely forgotten in the U.S., “Bitburg” has remained “active” in German public remembrance to be called up whenever a German political leader is perceived insufficiently "sensitive" in matters of the Bad German past. In 1985 it was the monumentally “offensive” lack of Betroffenheit exhibited by Chancellor Kohl when he asked the American President Reagan to pay a formal visit to a military cemetery. Trust the dinosaur Kohl not to see that this act would obscure the distinction between perpetrator and victim crucial to German postwar political culture and American dependence on it. In German public conscience, lack of Betroffenheit--an untranslatable buzzword signifying the official perpetrator's show of remorse, and in that the counterpart to the official victim's "offended" reaction--has to this day been a highly serious matter. Never mind the new German Chancellor Merkel's unexpected demonstration of diplomatic skills at her recent American visit, and in good English. Remember, she is not a real guilty German because her country of origin, the communist German Democratic Republic, had a Russian-controlled bad conscience.
For real guilty Germans, official visits to any German military cemetery would always be morally challenging because all the dead buried there, no matter how they got into this war and how they had lived through it, not to speak of dying in it, would have been “militarist Nazi” soldiers undeserving, to say the least, of such honor. The discovery of the few SS graves at Bitburg so truly “offensive” to the American public would for the German public be just the icing on the Evil cake. Had the visit happened a few years later, it might have provoked even more bitter debates, perhaps also in America. Part of the reason for the, in the end, relatively moderate American reactions was Reagan’s vicarious and all the more powerfully accessible association with the “Good War” in Hollywood remembrance. It enabled him (and his party) to disregard Elie Wiesel’s and other Jewish leaders’ intense lobbying against his visit to Bitburg.
During the preparations for his official visit to the Bundesrepublik in early May 1985, Reagan had expressed the wish to visit the former KZ Dachau but the Bundesregierung did not think it appropriate in view of the occasion. Though appreciative of Germany's sensible attitude to Pershing missiles on German territory, Reagan declined a request to give a speech in the Bundesrepublik on May 8, the day of the 40th anniversary of Germany’s unconditional surrender, speaking instead before the European Parliament in Strasbourg. Finally, the Bundeskanzleramt persuaded him to go to the cemetery with Bundeskanzler Kohl on May 5 and lay down a wreath. The storm of American protests when the SS graves became an issue caused Reagan to fit in a visit to the former KZ Bergen-Belsen in the morning of May 5. There was much praise for his dignified conduct on this difficult mission and the equally dignified address to the Bundestag by Bundespraesident Richard von Weizsaecker on May 8. Known for his considerable diplomatic skills on all levels of mediation, he defined the German historical position 40 years after the end of the war in ways acceptable to both the international and the German public. If May 8 was to be celebrated as a day of liberation from National Socialist terror, this should not obscure the fact that the date also meant for many Germans the beginning of even greater suffering. This concession did not come without the familiar pedagogical admonition to “the Germans” to find the causes of mass deportation and political oppression in the beginning of the war and not in its ending: May 8, 1945 should not be separated from January 30, 1933, the beginning of Nazi rule by terror. Nevertheless, Weizsaecker also emphasized on this occasion the importance of a historical remembrance that would enable political reconciliation.
Three years later, with the implosion of the East Block imminent and the heated Historians’ Dispute of the meanings of recent German history at a stalemate, Weizsaecker would instead emphasize the enduring supra-historical singularity and centrality of “Auschwitz” for all Germans. This moral-political declaration would have far-reaching consequences for the future of German political culture, among them the protection of Israel's politics from all critical questions by branding them "anti-Semitic." Had his position changed significantly? Already in his 1985 speech, Weizsaecker had smoothly overridden millions of Germans who might have had some relevant reservations about the ending of the war. Many of them might have thought that it was time to express doubts about the wisdom of some of the victors’ decisions forty years earlier. For the next twenty years, neither Weizsaecker nor his successors would have been able to say anything even faintly critical about the victors’ just war; and this had not changed by 2005, the 60th anniversary of Germany’s unconditional surrender. Neither Weizsaecker’s invocations of the historical memory of Nazi oppression and American liberation in 1985, nor his postulating a redemptive memory of the uniqueness of “Auschwitz” in 1988 helped the German Chancellor Kohl to be included in the memorial celebrations of the 50th anniversary of D Day in 1994. It took another decade and the special invitation by Jacques Chirac for Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder to be able to participate in the 2004 D Day festivities.
Twenty years earlier, the controversy over Reagan’s visit to a military cemetery with a few graves of young SS men had divided American opinion. The media debated hotly whether he would or would not visit the cemetery and would or would not go to a concentration camp: well advised, he did both. God-knows what he "really" thought of the easily spooked betroffene Germans or the “offended “ Jewish leaders. Burdened with fear of what the world might think of their Bad past, “the Germans” have been curiously immune to the absurdities created by that fear. At the time of the visit, American approval and disapproval of “Bitburg” was almost even, and a small majority even agreed with Reagan’s remark that “German soldiers buried in the Bitburg cemetery were victims of the Nazis just as surely as the victims in the concentration camps.” Presumably he 'somehow' excluded from this humanely realistic assessment the few young SS men, as he would still have had to do in 2005.
The SS was declared a criminal organization at the end of the war and its members were treated accordingly, which after the first chaotic years of rough justice meant meting out punishment more or less according to their conduct during the war, in addition to general professional restrictions. But in today’s public imagination, both American and German, they still are collectively demonized as pure Nazi Evil. This may explain the public’s lack of interest in historical information about this large and quite varied organization. The young SS men buried at the Bitburg cemetery might have been conscripts: at the end-stage of the war, the Waffen-SS recruited sorely needed combatants by taking teenagers ‘from the school bench’ if they met certain physical specifications. Since their training and equipment would have been in any case better than that of other young conscripts who would die in droves on the Eastern front because they were thrown unprepared into vicious battles, even mothers hating the Nazis’ war might have preferred the elite fighting troop of the Waffen SS for their young sons because it gave them a slightly better chance at survival. Two, three weeks longer?--an eternity at the end of this war. It was common sense then, though it may seem painfully, even “criminally” skewed now. Was there nobody among the highly offended protesters in Germany and the U.S., not even military historians, who looked at the situation with some degree of historical information and commonsense?
Peter Novick in his The Holocaust in American Life reports that later that summer of 1985 a national survey commissioned by the American Jewish Committee found that “the educated were much more likely than the uneducated to approve of Reagan’s visit. Probably, a Committee staffer wrote, because they saw it as a contribution to international goodwill and ‘the healing of old wounds,’ while the less educated were more nationalist” (p.227). Novick also reports on the answers to another question in the Committee poll: do we need to be reminded of the Holocaust annually or should Jews stop focusing on the Holocaust after 40 years? 46% wanted annual reminders of the Holocaust, 40% thought it was time to let up on it. Novick adds: “My guess is that some part of the 40% reflected resentment at the embarrassment recently visited on a popular president” (p. 339, note 85). He may very well have been right. But the numbers for annual reminders now, and into an indefinite future, would be much higher today, 20 years later and without such embarrassment. Anniversaries of the end of W.W.II have on the whole demonstrated their contemporary political logic. Let's see what that will be in 2015; will it depend on what will have happened to our politics in the Middle East?
Related LinksDon Chapman: Reagan's Role in Ending the Cold War Is Being Exaggerated Ronald Wilson Reagan: Remarks at a Joint German-American Military Ceremony at Bitburg Air Base in the Federal Republic of Germany Mark Ames: The Latvia President Bush Didn't Talk About