Germans Are Now Finding Heroes in WW II to Celebrate
Clare Murphy, at BBC News Online (July 19, 2004):
Less than a decade ago, a book by an American historian which declared that the Holocaust was possible because Germans had a congenital urge to kill Jews shot to the top of the bestseller list in Germany.
Daniel Goldhagen, author of Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, was awarded the country's prestigious Democracy Prize in 1997. The honour had last been bestowed upon east German activists who helped precipitate the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Despite being lambasted by many historians of the Third Reich as simplistic and subjective, the "non-book" - as one dubbed it - was grabbed from the shelves by a generation of Germans who embraced the notion of collective guilt on a scale never suggested before.
But it appears Germany has left at least some of that 20th Century burden of guilt behind in the last millennium.
This year, the 60th anniversary of an attempted coup against Hitler by a group of military officers has provided the occasion for a rather sunnier perspective on the past, offering up courageous figures whom the country can celebrate rather than castigate.
"Germans can't go on forever feeling nothing but guilt - it's not possible," says prominent German journalist Henryk Broder.
"We had the protestations of utter innocence immediately after the war, then the all-consuming guilt. It's time for something different - it's perfectly natural to want to start highlighting the positive."
Less than a decade ago, a book by an American historian which declared that the Holocaust was possible because Germans had a congenital urge to kill Jews shot to the top of the bestseller list in Germany.
Daniel Goldhagen, author of Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, was awarded the country's prestigious Democracy Prize in 1997. The honour had last been bestowed upon east German activists who helped precipitate the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Despite being lambasted by many historians of the Third Reich as simplistic and subjective, the "non-book" - as one dubbed it - was grabbed from the shelves by a generation of Germans who embraced the notion of collective guilt on a scale never suggested before.
But it appears Germany has left at least some of that 20th Century burden of guilt behind in the last millennium.
This year, the 60th anniversary of an attempted coup against Hitler by a group of military officers has provided the occasion for a rather sunnier perspective on the past, offering up courageous figures whom the country can celebrate rather than castigate.
"Germans can't go on forever feeling nothing but guilt - it's not possible," says prominent German journalist Henryk Broder.
"We had the protestations of utter innocence immediately after the war, then the all-consuming guilt. It's time for something different - it's perfectly natural to want to start highlighting the positive."