GERMANY MUST ADMIT THE WAR WAS NO ACCIDENT Young historians have taken the dangerous view that guilt over 1914 is unnecessary and nationalism was not to blame __________ It was one of Germany’s biggest film productions. Der Rote Baron (The Red Baron) starred the two biggest names in German cinema and Joseph Fiennes as Richthofen’s nemesis. But it flopped at the box office. Even now, in the run-up to the centenary of the catastrophe that enveloped Europe, and despite the efforts of publishers and the media, the Great War has not captured the imagination of the German public. ... There is, of course, the banal factor of time. ... Then there is the reticence of the government. Angela Merkel has been silent and is now on holiday. A centenary commission set up by the office of the president was quietly dissolved. ... Since 1945 Germany’s memory of the First World War has been part of its struggle to come to grips with the Second. Often discourse about the Second World War is clad in questions about the First. German guilt for 1914-1918 was rejected by the generation of historians who had started their careers in the Nazi era and who dominated postwar academia. The Treaty of Versailles was presented as an unjust “diktat”, and the main reason for Hitler’s rise to power. Obviously, this form of “memory politics” (Erinnerungspolitik), helped to exculpate the Germans (and the historians in question) of their responsibility for national socialism and its results. This intellectually and morally lazy form of remembrance was shattered in 1962 by the historian Fritz Fischer. He examined Germany’s aims in the First World War and found disquieting parallels with the second: not only the tactical similarities — the plan to knock out France quickly, neutralise Britain and then concentrate on the East — but also the idea of creating an eastern empire based on the subjugation of the Slavs. The Nazis, Fischer concluded, were no “accident of German history”. ... There have always been discontents — mostly grumpy old men to the right of the established parties — who envied Britain’s positive attitude to her war dead: Poppy Day and all that. But they are now being bolstered by younger German historians, among them Thomas Weber, who have challenged Fritz Fischer’s interpretation and the official line on the Great War. These revisionists feel encouraged by the success in Germany of The Sleepwalkers, by the Cambridge historian Christopher Clark, which gives renewed credence to the idea that Europe “slid” into the catastrophe of the Great War. They see it as a repudiation of the view that nationalism was responsible for the conflict. And if the war was an accident, the argument goes, the EU is the answer to a non-existent problem. And if German war guilt is a myth, why should Germany bear a special responsibility for the success of European integration? The rise of the revisionists coincides with the rise of a Eurosceptic party, the Alternative für Deutschland. The party praised Clark’s book and advocated a “Bismarckian” foreign policy, meaning a policy that balances Germany’s ties to the West with a greater “understanding” of Russia’s interests. It is disconcerting that the “Alternative” should have been welcomed by the British Conservatives as allies in the European Parliament. In an ironic twist, Conservative and Eurosceptic politicians in the UK are stressing that Britain fought a “just war” against Germany in 1914-1918 while their political allies in Germany are emphasising the opposite. Indeed, the German historian Jörg Friedrich has labelled Britain’s naval blockade of Germany in the First World War a “genocidal” war crime comparable to the allied destruction of Hamburg, Bremen and other German cities in the Second World War. This points to the main, and worrying, fact about all historical discourse in Germany. No matter what it purports to be about, in the end it all boils down to the Nazi past and to Germany’s relationship with the West. At present the resurgence of revisionism is a minority tendency, and the Alternative für Deutschland a minority party. One might be tempted to view both as signs that Germany is becoming a more normal nation. But “normal” in German terms has always meant less beholden to the West. It’s a good sign that Der Rote Baron flopped. It’s worrying that the producers felt it was time to give Germany a new war hero. __________ By Alan Posener The Times Alan Posener is politics and society correspondent of Die Welt. Daniel Finkelstein is away
Posted on: Sun, 03 Aug 2014 16:10:22 +0000
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