The home of the German Historical Institute
in downtown Warsaw is a handsome, 19th-century neo-Renaissance
residence with arched doorways and a tranquil, cobbled courtyard.
It is one of the few structures in Warsaw that the Nazis
didn't raze during their 1939-45 occupation of the Polish
capital. "Ironic, isn't it?," says Katrin Stoll,
a young German researcher there. "A building the Germans
didn't manage to destroy and now we're here."
Supported by Germany's ministry of science and education,
the institute was established in 1993 to promote collaborative
research, scholarly discourse, and exchanges between Germany
and Poland, with a particular emphasis on the dictatorships
and violence of the 20th century. It houses 14 historians
and researchers—two-thirds of whom are German, the
others Polish—whose publications at the institute include
more than 75 books and hundreds of shorter studies.
In its high-ceilinged, patrician halls, the institute hosts
an impressive range of conferences, lectures, and panel discussions;
the topics never stray far from the events that compelled
the Yale historian Timothy Snyder to label these territories—Central
Europe from the Baltic coast to the Black Sea—as the "bloodlands" in
his 2010 book Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin
(Basic Books).
Eduard Mühle, a German historian and the institute's
director, takes pains to explain the institute's purpose.
Mühle is acutely aware of the awkwardness of Germans,
of all peoples, appearing to "tell the Poles how to
do it."
"We are modest participants in Polish historiography," he
says. "We're working together with Polish colleagues
and helping them put Polish history in a European context.
We share in their discussions and try to bring over ideas,
concepts, and trends from German academia. German historiography
has something to offer, but it has to be done cautiously,
with the past in mind."
Yet some of the institute's topics are prickly ones for
Poles and their neighbors, like the Baltic states and Ukraine.
Stoll, for example, studies the fate of Polish Jews in 1946-7
Poland, after the Germans capitulated. The subject is a sensitive
one here, as anti-Semitism was rife in postwar Poland, prompting
vicious pogroms in some parts of the country.
"The Holocaust didn't end when the Red Army entered
Poland in 1944," says Stoll, who last year organized
a conference at the institute titled "To Stay or Go?
Jews in Europe in the Immediate Aftermath of the Holocaust." "It's
a difficult topic for Poles," she says, but at the conference, "they
were discussing it openly in a way I don't think they were
15 years ago."
So how can Germans, and in particular German historians,
aid their eastern neighbors—if at all—in the
former bloodlands? The question arises whether Germany is
in a position to "export," as the British historian
Timothy Garton Ash puts it, its experience in coming to terms
with an ignominious past.
The Germans have special, notoriously difficult-to-translate
terms for their rigorous processing of the past, namely Vergangenheitsbewältigung
and Aufarbeitung der Geschichte. Perhaps Garton Ash comes
closest to the mark in translating them as "past-beating." This
complex treatment spans disciplines—from law to theology—and
categories from truth-seeking and atonement to reconciliation
and remembrance. At West Germany's universities, tough-minded
historians played a critical role in probing and questioning
the taboos of early post-World War II years, at a time when
politicians and society alike preferred to concentrate on
economic recovery.
Postwar Germany's battle to come to terms with its past
stands out as unique—and uniquely successful. Germans
understand this process, which happened in fits and starts,
and sometimes in the face of trenchant opposition, as integral
to their forging a liberal democracy out of the ruins of
the Reich. Today postwar Germans stake their republic's legitimacy
on this "negative memory" and go to great lengths
to ensure that future generations imbibe its lessons. Moreover,
the Germans went about it not once but twice: with Nazism's
legacy and then, after the cold war, with the Communist past
in the unified country's eastern states.
In fact, so exemplary is the German experience that it has
been adapted—with wide-ranging, country-specific variations—in
post-totalitarian societies from South Africa to Chile. But
those countries do not have such deeply traumatic relationships
with Germany as do Central and Eastern Europe.
Germany may have something to pass on to the Central Europeans,
explains the Polish intellectual Konstanty Gebert, of the
foreign-affairs think tank the European Council on Foreign
Relations. "The problem is that Germany cannot decently
offer it."
"So, you come in, you show us how to kill the Jews,
and now you come in and show us how to be sorry?" he
says. "It can't work."
There are many instances of German endeavors, says Gebert, "like
an educational program or an exhibition that we can borrow
from if they're good ideas. On the individual level, the
obscenity of it is absent. But you put it at a general level,
then hell, no, we're done learning from Germany!"
Whether in politics, economics, or historiography, Germany's
every move in Central Europe after the Wall carries the potential
to rub salt in old wounds. An independent Polish state was
wiped off the map as a result of the 1939 Hitler-Stalin pact
and then fully occupied by the Nazis as of 1941. Nazi Germany
used Polish territory to exterminate millions of Jews and
other enemies, including more than two million non-Jewish
Poles. Germany marched into or set up quisling regimes—or
both—in the lands from the Baltic all the way to the
Mediterranean. Scholars like Mühle and Stoll don't dare
say it, but there are plenty of German historians—as
well as colleagues in Europe, the United States, and Israel—who
feel that Central Europe could do with a good dose of German-style,
self-critical introspection. Jan-Holger Kirsch, a historian
at Potsdam University, argues that for better or for worse,
Germany has become a kind of "international aid worker
in the business of processing the past."
Micha Brumlik, a German historian in Frankfurt, and his
colleague the Polish Germanist Karol Sauerland, argue that
the Central and Eastern Europeans—to different degrees
in different countries—have been inexcusably slow to
confront the dark sides of their World War II pasts, and
in particular their role in the Holocaust. These scholars
are not alone in arguing that a rigorous wrestling with that
past is long overdue and an inescapable part of a thoroughgoing
democratization process. The International Holocaust Task
Force, an American and Israeli-dominated organization of
which Germany is a member, requires its members to meet certain
criteria in confronting their histories, like opening Holocaust-related
archives, committing to Holocaust education, and establishing
a Holocaust Memorial Day.
Concerns about Central Europe's memory politics are not
without basis. After all, nationalist politicians and far-right
populists rely on patriotic historical narratives that glorify
authoritarian, chauvinistic figures from their pasts for
legitimacy, as well as for ammunition against their leftist
and liberal opponents. Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, Croatia,
and the Baltic lands had ultranationalist, Nazi-allied governments
that willingly participated in the war as well as in the
Holocaust. In Nazi-occupied Poland, many Poles actively cooperated
in the interning and killing of Jews.
Today in Hungary and Romania, nationalist politicos have
led efforts to rehabilitate the likes of Admiral Miklos Horthy,
an ally of Hitler, and Romania's wartime ruler Marshal Ion
Antonescu, both of whom sent tens of thousands of Jews to
their deaths. The current right-wing government in Estonia
is drafting legislation to honor former Estonian members
of the SS.
Countries in which these discourses are strongest usually
have high levels of anti-Semitism and other illiberal values.
Those ideologies can be reflected not just in party programs
but also in textbooks, museums, and the mass media. The Museum
of Genocide Victims, in Vilnius, capital of Lithuania, devotes
vast space to a heroic Lithuanian resistance against the
Soviet occupation but scant attention to the Lithuanians
who helped Nazis send more than 200,000 Lithuanian Jews to
their deaths. Some of the nastiest far-right movements, like
the neo-fascist Jobbik party, in Hungary, grew out of right-wing,
revisionist history departments.
The Central and Eastern Europeans have by no means been
inactive, since the Soviet bloc's collapse, in coming to
terms with their pasts. But they've concentrated on the more
recent legacy of Communist rule. In addition to the opening
of archives such as those of Communist-era secret police
and ruling parties, there have been legal proceedings against
the administrators of the ancien régime as well as
emotional debates over the relevance of the past and its
representation, in museums and memorials, for example.
But the Central and Eastern Europeans have been markedly
less enthusiastic about delving into their World War II pasts,
especially into periods during which their nations were perpetrators
and not victims. And scholars who lift those rocks, such
as the Polish-American historian Jan T. Gross, author of
the 2001 book Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community
in Jedwabne, Poland, are set upon by the right for damaging
Poland's image abroad.
At the German Historical Institute in Warsaw, an array of
research projects examine aspects of the Nazi and then the
Soviet occupation of Poland, which together spanned 50 years.
With the East bloc's demise, Polish historians, like many
of their colleagues throughout Central Europe, made a priority
of research into Soviet rule in their countries during the
cold-war decades.
"There was an incredible, untouched trove of archival
and other materials that were suddenly open to historians," says
Mühle. But the Central Europeans were "focusing
very much on Communist domination and occupation, emphasizing
what Poles, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, and the peoples of Southeastern
Europe suffered rather than how Jews suffered under them."
"There is no one way or one model that can be 'exported,'" says
Norbert Frei, a historian at the Friedrich Schiller University
of Jena and author of several works on Germany's treatment
of its past. "Even this so seemingly perfect German
model took its time to develop. It took the Germans until
the early 1980s to have a societal consciousness of the Holocaust.
This took place only 30 years after the fact, so it takes
time. And it will in Central Europe, too."
Well-heeled Germany is generous in financing a wide range
of projects and programs—from exhibitions and professional
museum training to book translations and scholarships—that
bear on confronting the past.
For instance, various German institutions, both private
and public, sponsor conferences that bring together Eastern
and Western European scholars. One is the annual International
Conference on Holocaust Research, which attracts scholars
from across Europe as well as from Israel and the United
States. The conference's 2011 topic was "Helpers, Rescuers,
and Networkers of Resistance."
Along the same lines, in recent years major German universities
like those in Munich, Freiburg, Frankfurt, Heidelberg, and
Berlin have hosted high-level academic conferences that focus
on World War II-era issues, with special attention to Central
and Eastern Europe. German foundations like the Goethe Institute,
the Heinrich Böll Foundation, and the Robert Bosch Foundation
have also sponsored conferences that expose European scholars
and practitioners to new ideas and methodologies in memory
studies.
Germany has also reached deeply into its pockets for publications
and translations. Just one example is the in-progress, 16-volume
series titled "The Persecution and Extermination of
the European Jews by Nazi Germany 1933-1945," eight
volumes of which will be primary sources dealing explicitly
with Central and Eastern Europe.
Such conferences and publishing projects promote quality
research in a way that appears to have no critics.
"International cooperation is always better than individual,
isolated work, and that goes for everybody, including Germans," explains
Christoph Dieckmann, a German historian who specializes in
Nazi Germany's 1941-44 occupation of Lithuania. "Just
imagine Germans or Americans or whoever working all alone.
You're going to get less perspective."
German universities like those in Munich, Potsdam, Frankfurt,
and the eastern college town of Jena have Central European
institutes that attract students and scholars from the regions
under study. The Imre Kertész Institute, in Jena,
provides 10 scholarships a year to students and researchers
from Central and Eastern Europe. In the German institutions,
those students, and more-senior scholars as well, can enjoy
an academic freedom they don't experience in their own countries,
particularly when nationalist-minded administrations are
in power.
Perhaps two of the most prominent examples of Germany's
research presence in Central and Eastern Europe are the German
Historical Institutes in Warsaw and in Moscow. The institutes "and
the German historians do a fantastic job," says Feliks
Tych, a Polish historian and former director of the Jewish
Historical Institute in Warsaw. "What they bring to
Poland is very important, and I admire the way they work.
They speak the bitter truth."
Yet there is obviously something more that Germans—and
other countries—believe they can provide the Central
Europeans. The historian Frei, for example, travels regularly
in the region to speak about the German track record in confronting
its fascist history. "Sure, if they ask us to tell them
about the way we did it, we can do that," he says.
The German historian Volkhard Knigge, the country's leading
expert on history didactics and director of the Buchenwald
and Mittelbau-Dora Memorials Foundation, goes further. Recently
returned from the countries of former Yugoslavia, Knigge
says civil-society organizations there were "interested
in the German experience because they know that this is important
to establish a society based on human values, based on human
rights."
"If you want to establish a real democratic culture," he
says, "you cannot avoid this self-critical view on their
own past, even if it hurts—and it hurts. You can't
avoid going through all of these discussions. Germans have
to stay modest because we also have our debates on how to
remember the German past, German suffering, and we also have
people thinking in nationalistic terms. But I think it's
something that might instruct other nations."
Ljiljana Radonic is a Croatian-born historian at the University
of Vienna who teaches a course on Central Europe and the
politics of memory. She believes that the German experience
is at least in part transferable.
"There is a tradition in Germany of gaining positive
German identity through this negative memory," she explains. "And
for the Germans, it had a political function in that it dampened
down nationalism while giving Germans something to be proud
of. When this is transferred as knowledge to Eastern Europe,
it can serve a similar function."
"When we look at the role that Germany has in the discourse
of these countries," Radonic says, "it's quite
useful for the liberal and left political forces who want
to deal critically with the past. They can say, and this
has actually happened in Croatia, 'Look what Germany did.
That's what we want to do, too." But ultimately, she
says, the impetus has to come from within these societies.
The representation of memory, for example in monuments,
memorials, and museums, is an area where Germany and the
Central Europeans tend to part company.
"A lot of the new museums built in Central Europe address
national suffering and exclude those chapters of history
that cannot be painted in black and white," explains
Knigge. Two of the most egregious examples of slanted historiography,
he says, are the Warsaw Rising Museum, in Warsaw, and Hungary's
House of Terror, in Budapest, both of which have come under
heavy criticism for their highly politicized exhibitions.
The Warsaw museum, conceived and financed by conservative
Polish political forces, bombards the visitor with emotional,
interactive multimedia that portray the uprising against
the Nazis as the purest of patriotic endeavors, without ever
mentioning, for example, that the cause was a lost one from
the beginning, opposed even by the exile Polish government
in London. The Budapest exhibition, a product of the current
ruling party, outdoes its Polish counterpart, crudely equating
the German Nazi occupation of Hungary (1944-45) with Communist
rule during the postwar decades.
In Europe, Knigge argues, museums and monuments have to
be "sensitive to the bad heritage of nationalism." Exhibitions
can't tell people what to think, he says. "They have
to present facts and pose questions."
But according to Knigge, there is a right way and a wrong
way for Germany to communicate that mind-set to Central Europe.
In the 1990s, he says, the West tried, somewhat condescendingly,
to "teach" or "update" the East. Today
historians, curators, and educators are sitting down to talk
with one another like equals. He cites as exemplary a German
Research Foundation-sponsored program to support young scholars
who critically analyze the newest museums in Central Europe.
Moreover, he is working with Russian historians on an exhibition
about the Soviet gulag.
"As historians we have to take into consideration that
the Central European historical experience of the 20th century
is horrible," says Knigge. "The Central Europeans
had to experience the National Socialist aggression and then
Communism. We have to underscore the very complicated past
that they have to reflect on."
When approached modestly, the wide range of cooperative
projects tends not to raise hackles, or when it does it is
primarily among conservative nationalists. But there are
programs that have come under fire, both from the Central
Europeans and from German historians.
Two of those are the German organization Erinnerung, Verantwortung,
Zukunft (Remembrance, Responsibility, Future), or EVZ and
the Task Force for International Cooperation on Holocaust
Education, Remembrance, and Research. The EVZ, financed by
the German government and the private sector, offers educational
programs, scholarships, research projects, and other endeavors,
many of them in Central Europe, that link treatment of the
past with human rights and democracy.
The task force, founded in 1998, is an intergovernmental
body "whose purpose is to place political and social
leaders' support behind the need for Holocaust education,
remembrance, and research, both nationally and internationally." It
has a stringent set of criteria that its members—and
those countries wishing to become members—must adhere
to.
"Some individuals and organizations, and they're not
just Germans, understand it their mission to tell the 'truth
about the past,'" says Dieckmann, the expert on Nazi
occupation of Lithuania. "Their attitude is very sanctimonious;
it's, 'I know all about the Holocaust and no one else does.'
They go about it as if they're in the possession of the truth
and everybody else has to follow them. They set out to teach
a certain set of values, which isn't what history is all
about. They insinuate that if you don't do as they say, you're
not civilized, and you'll go down a wrong road."
But, says Johannes Houwink ten Cate, a professor of Holocaust
and genocide studies at the University of Amsterdam who is
associated with the task force, if the organizations are
a little pushy, there's reason for that.
"When it comes to Holocaust awareness, some Eastern
European diplomats and politicians object to being pushed
around" by the task force, he says. "They feel
like schoolchildren being told to do their homework. But
they probably wouldn't have done anything if the IHTF hadn't
pushed."
"The problem with an approach like this," says
Radonic about the EVZ, "is that everything to do with
World War II and the Holocaust has to be linked to a diffuse
and imprecise human-rights discourse. This is something they
even force their partners to implement in order to get financed.
Everything has to end in a 'Yes, we have learned our lesson
from the Holocaust ,and in a very general way today we are
talking about human rights.'"
"It turns critically dealing with World War II into
only a moral issue," she says. "So you lose all
the details on who were the perpetrators, what happened exactly.
Everything is lost in this moralistic, wishy-washy, human-rights
discourse."
"The fact is that pushing is probably going to be counterproductive
and force a negative reaction," says Frei. There are
cases, like Poland, he and others agree, that are leagues
beyond where they were just 10 years ago in confronting their
pasts. That is a result of professional, conscientious historians
in Central Europe, international support and collaboration,
and political liberalization.
The German historians say a distinction must be maintained
between their scholarship and the political battles fought
between left and right in parliaments and the media.
Dieckmann argues that the groundbreaking research on the
World War II period emerging from Lithuania is the result
not of external pressure, but of the collective efforts of
Western academics, among them Germans like himself, Lithuanian
historians, and scholars of the Lithuanian diaspora. When
the political rulers enable the historians to have the freedom
they require to do their work, as is the case now in Lithuania,
they do it with impressive results, says Dieckmann.
As Knigge puts it, "It's all about the difference between
history and memory."
chronicle.com
|