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A memorial stone unveiled in Berlin on the 80th anniversary of VE Day. Photograph: Derek Scally <\/p>\nBerlin is filled with non-places, strange spots where history feels like a force field keeping people away. One such place is a patch of grass, empty except for some randomly-placed trees, adjacent to the modern chancellery.<\/p>\n
Few who pass this way know it was once the site of the Kroll opera house, demolished in 1951. From 1933, after the mysterious fire in the Reichstag opposite, the opera house became Germany\u2019s provisional seat of parliament. It was here that German MPs voted out democracy for fascism, and where Hitler justified his invasion of Poland in 1939, triggering the second World War.<\/p>\n
On Thursday, 80 years after the war ended, a memorial stone was unveiled on the vacant site to remember the unspeakable horrors Germany inflicted on Poland. Among those attending the opening was Florian Mausbach, the former head of Germany\u2019s federal building office, whose 2017 open letter for such a memorial got the stone rolling \u2013 against considerable opposition.<\/p>\n
\u201cOne journalist asked me why we wanted another \u2018wreath dumping ground\u2019,\u201d he said after laying flowers. \u201cBut people need places to mourn \u2013 and Germans need to be reminded just how the Nazis planned to eliminate Poland and extinguish Polish life and culture.\u201d<\/p>\n
Eventually a German-Poland historical house will be added to the site. That even this simple memorial has taken so long tells its own tale.<\/p>\n
A memorial stone unveiled in Berlin on the 80th anniversary of VE Day. Photograph: Derek Scally <\/p>\n
Despite decades of educational work, a representative survey last year found just one in five Germans know how many Poles were killed during the Nazi wartime occupation. The most common guess was one million, the real number is five times that.<\/p>\n
The same survey showed one third of Germans either do not know who started the second World War \u2013 hint: their grandparents and great-grandparents \u2013 or believe other nations were involved.<\/p>\n
Even eight decades after Nazi Germany agreed \u2013 twice \u2013 to a complete capitulation, ending what Winston Churchill called \u201cthe German war\u201d, the shadows of the past are encroaching once more on the present. That was most obvious when Russia\u2019s war on Ukraine meant Moscow representatives \u2013 and Russian flags \u2013 were excluded from Thursday\u2019s official ceremonies.<\/p>\n
In a national address President Frank Walter Steinmeier dismissed claims that Vladimir Putin\u2019s war continues the \u201cfight against Nazi tyranny\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis historical lie is nothing more than a smokescreen for imperial madness,\u201d he said. \u201cThe liberator of Auschwitz has become an aggressor.\u201d<\/p>\n
Turning to his audience in the Bundestag, and those watching at home, the German president tackled an uncomfortably consistent statistic from the 1960s to today: how every second German favours \u201cdrawing a line\u201d under the Nazi past.<\/p>\n
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The memorial stone. Photograph: Derek Scally <\/p>\n
\u201cWhat\u2019s that supposed to mean, exactly? That we forget what we know?\u201d he asked. \u201cOur history is not a prison but a precious treasure trove of experience, and the key for us, our children and our grandchildren to master the crises of the present and the future.\u201d<\/p>\n
Not everyone agrees. One in four Germans support a political party, the Alternative for Germany, that rejects the country\u2019s official memorial narrative as a \u201cguilt cult\u201d.<\/p>\n
This is just the latest of the self-exonerating mental leaps in this country since the capitulation.<\/p>\n
In 1949, socialist East Germany was founded as an \u201canti-fascist state\u201d, an elegant piece of magical thinking that allowed its 18 million citizens view the former fascists in their midst as an ideological impossibility.<\/p>\n
Even in West Germany, where studies show three-quarters of government ministries were ex-Nazis, the first \u2013 staunch anti-Nazi \u2013 chancellor Konrad Adenauer declared the opposite. In April 1961 he said \u201cin the German national body, in the moral life of the German people, there is no longer any National Socialism, no National Socialist feeling\u201d.<\/p>\n
It wasn\u2019t until 1985 when the West German president Richard von Weizs\u00e4cker, the son of a Nazi diplomat and convicted war criminal, reframed May 8th as a \u201cday of liberation\u201d from National Socialism.<\/p>\n
That kick-started decades of real interrogation of the past, and in the last 20 years a stream of memoirs from children and grandchildren of Nazi-era perpetrators. A recent addition is Blind Spot by German-Jewish psychologist Louis Lewitan, discussing the \u201clip service\u201d in modern German memorial work.<\/p>\n
For him popular German terms like Trauerarbeit (mourning work). or Vergangenheitsbew\u00e4ltigung \u2013 (coming to terms with the past), sound \u201csuspiciously like an administrative act…with a punch clock, three-shift system and breaks\u201d.<\/p>\n
After postwar decades \u2013 first of shamed silence, then focus on Nazi victims \u2013 Lewitan is not alone in hoping the future brings more empathy, emotion and critical self-reflection.<\/p>\n
A common reflection on Thursday was how much of how Germany deals with its past depends, in the future, on the appetite of ordinary people to acknowledge the perpetrators, opportunists and fascist fellow travellers in their own family trees.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe war didn\u2019t just break out, it was started,\u201d said Pastor Kathrin Oxen at Berlin\u2019s calling, the official anniversary memorial service. The 80th anniversary was, she said, a date \u201cfull of mourning for what people did, and allowed happen, but also full of thanks for the liberation and the new beginnings\u201d.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Berlin is filled with non-places, strange spots where history feels like a force field keeping people away. One…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":85477,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5310],"tags":[2000,299,1824,24939],"class_list":{"0":"post-85476","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-germany","8":"tag-eu","9":"tag-europe","10":"tag-germany","11":"tag-second-world-war"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114474017595581239","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85476","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=85476"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85476\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/85477"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=85476"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=85476"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=85476"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}