Open Democracy, UK
May 6 2005
On the eve of Victory in Europe Day, Matthias Matussek demands the
British give up their obsession with Second World War triumphalism
It seems to be an act of public suicide for a post-war German to
criticise the British view of history on a day like VE day. To do so
is to be cursed as a Nazi nostalgic or an irredeemable loser.
But several British colleagues have asked me for an strongly worded
polemic about the British obsession with Germany and the war.
So, here goes: we Germans consider VE day the day when the Hitler
terror was finally vanquished.
We have learnt the meaning of mourning and have a determination never
to allow another genocide.
In contrast, our British neighbours have not learnt much more than
the triumphalist trumpeting of the victor.
We Germans confront the guilt and shame of our past daily, and more
thoroughly and obsessively than probably any other nation on earth
has done. Even 60 years after the end of the horrors, we are still
preoccupied, perhaps even more so now than before. In the heart of
the capital a holocaust memorial in the shape of a forest of grey
cement posts has just been inaugurated.
Every German schoolchild knows the tales of German atrocities. But in
England Prince Harry parties with a swastika arm band. Eighty per
cent of youngsters don’t know what Auschwitz was about, but each one
will be familiar with the heroic films about the “Battle of Britain”
as if they personally had kicked the Hun up the backside.
Where does this giddy pride come from – and the lack of sensitivity
toward the victims?
The Russians in the meantime consider us friends, even though they
lost 25 million people in the fight against the Nazi horde. They
respect us as a hard-working, peace-loving people who have emerged
renewed from the devastation.
The British, who only survived thanks to the Russians and Americans,
behave as if they had conquered Hitler’s hordes single-handedly. And
they continue to see us as Nazis, as if they had to refight the
battles every evening. They are positively enchanted by this Nazi
dimension.
The British love to hate us Germans. So much so that my ten year old
son was chased by English school kids chanting “Nazi, Nazi”. In fact,
the hunt for Nazis has become a neurotic English parlour game. The
British really enjoy raking over the German past instead of devoting
themselves to their own. In psychoanalysis this is called a
“substitute act”.
Perhaps VE day is, as my friend Anthony Barnett from openDemocracy
wrote to me, the perfect point in time for the British to grow up and
say goodbye to their subterfuges. For example, the delusion that war
was declared on Germany in solidarity with the persecuted Jews, as
Tony Blair claimed not so long ago in an Observer interview.
This is far from the truth, as is well known outside the island. The
British policy of appeasement handed Hitler a victory over
Czechoslovakia. By delaying the war it made it worse. Nazi Germany
enjoyed great sympathy, above all from the British aristocracy.
Israel’s prime minister Kazav rightly pointed this out during the
recent Auschwitz ceremonies: the British did nothing to stop the
holocaust.
The English history books say nothing about the passivity of the
Allies towards the holocaust. They also ignore, as recently
demonstrated in the Independent, other dark sides to the empire. A
new revisionism is afoot. Gordon Brown has just declared that there
is nothing about the Empire of which the British need be ashamed.
Instead, New Labour increasingly philosophises about the blessings of
being British, with no sense of their being a dark side, as with all
other peoples.
Back to the war. The Churchill government had evidence from Polish
resistance forces about the Nazi camps as early as 1940. And by 1944
there were precise aerial photographs of the Auschwitz concentration
camp. A few bombs targeting the railway lines would have stopped the
death transports. Nothing like this happened. Instead of saving Jews,
the British preferred bombing Dresden and other German towns in order
to destroy the cultural face of their hated neighbour once and for
all.
Of course this is terrible.
Even when the horrors of the Nazis were laid bare, the British
colonial powers did not exactly treat the Jews with great care. I
have never understood how the British colonial masters could send the
starved survivors of the concentration camps who hoped to emigrate to
Palestine straight back, often to the very camps from which they had
been released.
This is not talked about. Instead the British peruse the third
post-war German generation carefully for signs of Nazi contamination.
This was evident again recently. I had been asked to a panel
discussion about Oliver Hirschbiegel’s film The Downfall.
The panellists, chaired by Max Hastings, insisted on seeing the film,
which showed Hitler’s last dark days in the bunker, as evidence of a
new German Hitler nostalgia.
This was supported by the daftest arguments. For example: the music
had been very tragic. What is one supposed to expect in a film about
murder and suicide, about senseless soldierly loyalty and the
sinister swallowing of cyanide capsules? The Beatles?
The film showed youngsters abandoning their loyalty to Hitler in the
final days of the war. Didn’t happen, the panellists pronounced. They
were all enthusiastic Hitler youths, right to the end. And that makes
the foundations of the new Germany highly suspect, even today.
Some thought Hitler had been portrayed as too human, others felt he
was shown to be too inhuman. It was his inhumanity that made the
German people look like victims. And so on. You can twirl these
pirouettes of interpretation endlessly. But the intention is always
the same: to show the barbaric nature of Germans, that they are still
not civilised. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung recently, and
rightly, called this “moral arrogance”.
Meanwhile the British have no shortage of good subjects for debate. I
suggested to the panel that my British friends should occupy
themselves with the problems of Britain’s past, with the massacres of
the Boer war, with the infamous Opium wars, with the concentration
camps of Kenya in the 50s.
There was a fluster of excitement about this in the press. But that
evening I received applause for these remarks. Applause from a
thoughtful British public.
I believe the official British triumphalism has to do with the Iraq
war. If you continuously inflate your self importance with memories
of grandeur in the Second World War, if you endlessly replay your
“finest hour”, you will have a distorted view of the moral problems
of today.
A Britain which assumes itself too much in possession of all virtue
has dangerously self-aggrandising features. Through deception and
manoeuvrings you can find yourself going into a war that breaks
international law and costs thousands of innocent civilian lives –
simply because of an uncritical faith in a historic mission. For Tony
Blair, it seems to me, “Rule Britannia” applies to the moral sphere
as well.
I have learnt from history that Germany did not lose on VE Day, but
on the day when Hitler took power. On the day, when a leader and
manipulator appeared, who was convinced of his own historic mission
and trampled on right and humanity.
On this day the losers were German culture, spirit, decency. The
losers were Luther, Goethe and Bach. VE day also is the day on which
they won again, with the help of the Russians, the Americans and the
British.
And incidentally, if it had not been for VE Day I would not be here
today. My father, who as a Catholic had a mistrust of the regime
(though he had been dazzled in the early days) told me how he had
longed for this VE Day. Not least because he did not want to die in a
senseless war that had already been lost two years earlier in the
battle for Stalingrad.
For me VE Day is an occasion for joy and gratitude, but also for soul
searching. Like so many of my generation I have visited Buchenwald
concentration camp – near Weimar, where Goethe and Schiller shaped
the pinnacle of German classic culture, and I was stunned to the core
at what man can do to man. And sad. Sadder than I ever could tell.
And helpless.
And the worst of it: I knew that this continues. Man continues to do
this to man. War, massacres, holocaust, these are – sadly – not
German specialities. They are universal. Perhaps that is one of the
lessons we should all learn from VE day: that those too are guilty
who look the other way and don’t interfere when a people is
decimated, whether Jews, Tutsi, Armenian, Cambodian, Russian or
Chinese.
We all must learn, losers as well as victors, British and Germans
together. Only then will this VE day be one for mankind.