How Germans View the Holocaust

Holocaust Memory in East and West Germany Introduction In Bernhard Schlink’s Guilt about the Past, the author writes about it what it is like to live under the “long shadow of the past” (26). Schlink states that the Germans felt oppressed by this guilt that their soldiers committed.

They are happy to forget it, for example, when the German soccer team scores a goal at the World Cup and shouts, “We are somebody again!” as though the goal erased everything, as though the German soccer team somehow brought respectability to the German nation once more. It was an instance of a man wanting to get back into the light. Yet, after WWII, there was not much light to get into. Just like after WWI, the Germans were saddled with guilt.

Only this time, after WWII, they were really made to feel it. They learned that their people had committed a Holocaust—something that was done in secret—there was no written command or record of this secret Holocaust—only the words of the Allies and the confessions (suspect because forced in many cases) of the German soldiers.

Regardless, the Germans were sent to the death camps to see in person the lampshade made of human Jew skin and the ashtray made from a Jew’s hip bone. Atrocity was the word—and the Holocaust was hung like a sign over the heads of the German people for long after the war, just like a sign that read “King of the Jews” was hung over the head of Christ crucified.

The Germans in their own way had to figure out how to atone, how to memorialize the Holocaust and pay for the crimes that their soldiers had committed in secret. This paper will show how the Germans tried to engage or disengage from this history of the war, of the Holocaust, and how now they have come to accept it and desire to move on from it.

The Past is Prologue Schlink states that the Holocaust has become so familiar to the German people today that they have become bored with it: it is the effect of over-saturation. There is too much of it everywhere they turn—and they are not even allowed to question it or to probe into this moment in history. When some do, they are arrested and thrown into prison (Kelly). If the Holocaust is a black cloud over the Germans, there is a black cloud over the Holocaust.

The Germans must be always sorry for it and promise never to let something like it happen again, but no one is permitted to discuss it beyond that, to wonder at it in a doubtful way. They are told their people did this, and after so many decades it has become something of a problem: “The legacy for the next generation is dangerous.

The ennui sometimes exhibited by schoolchildren concerning the Third Reich and the Holocaust has its roots in the deadening frequency with which they are confronted with the past by their teachers and the mdia” (Schlink 27). In other words, they are told too much of their guilt. They do not want to hear about it anymore.

Indeed, Schlink warns: “The careless to cynical tone they sometimes adopt in speaking about the past is partly a result of being steeped in comparisons whose heavy tone of moral pathos does not always carry a corresponding moral weightiness” (27). The problem for them and for everyone is how to approach this Holocaust. The Germans themselves struggled with this idea in the post war period. In effect, there were two Germanys after the war, not just one.

Two Germanys Before the Berlin Wall finally fell, Germany was separate in two parts: East and West. This division was because after WWII, the Allies divided Germany. The Soviet Union took the East half. The Western Allies oversaw the West half. East Germany was Communist. West Germany was Capitalist. During the Cold War, East and West were cut off from one another by the Wall that the Soviets placed to keep the West from interference.

The West Germany was supposed to be open and free and President Kennedy went there to talk about the symbol of the wall in Berlin. He said that it was a symbol of the closed-off nature of Communism. After WWII, Germans had to confront the role of Germany for its crimes in the war as according to the Nuremberg Trials. This was difficult for Germans on both East and West side. They had to struggle with this idea of Holocaust because it made no sense to them.

It was said to be in secret and a Final Solution of the German military and Hitler. Most Germans do not feel they are a part of this Holocaust. But they are told in the West they must pay for this crime. In East Germany, they do not want to hear this. In West Germany, they are more open because as Kennedy said, they were not closed off like the Soviet Union.

West Germany could look at the Holocaust idea but even still this was hard for them to do because of their belief in German culture and German people—why would German people do this? They did not want believe it. As The Local puts it: “The former Cold War communist state of East Germany did not accept culpability for the Nazi past, stating that it was instead a result of Western capitalism.

West Germany, although confronting the past more directly, also struggled with the process of denazification and memorialisation.” It is a hard thing to do to swallow these horrors, to say, “My people did this, now so what do I do to obtain forgiveness?” The question is left unanswered because the world does not forgive crimes such as this. Only it is after Germany is together again and no long divided in the 1990s that Germany begins to truly memorialize the Holocaust idea.

Until the reunification of Germany in 1990 after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Germans in both East and West could not bear to think much on the idea of the Holocaust because it was too horrific and they did not want responsibility for it. Once there was no more division though it was a new Germany and a new era and Holocaust memorialization became something that all Germany would now consider more deeply.

Auschwitz The main memorial today is the memorial site at Auschwitz, where the majority of the Jews were said to be killed in the Holocaust. Yet for many years this site was not kept up and was not well preserved. As Benz (1994) states, the state “lacked the money for its preservation, and Germany lacked interest in the memorial site” (98).

This shows that while East and West was still divided, there was no sense of a unified effort to do anything to memorialize the Holocaust in full. The site was open for visitors to inspect, as some did like David Cole and Fred Leuchter, who went and filmed and collected samples to test. Today, the site is much more secure and one cannot go and poke about like that. The site is more of a memorial. It is presented to the world as a monument of German guilt.

The Germans themselves see another monument to the horror of the Holocaust, though. They see the rise of the police state, of the surveillance state, coming out of the shadows again. They see it everywhere and they fear it. Their fear now is that the state will be like it was in the past. Perhaps the Germans did not move quickly enough to atone for the crimes they were told they committed.

Perhaps in the East, where they denied all responsibility, and in the West where they at least listened to what they were told they did and accepted it, there should have been more willingness to act and begin a better memorial. Now the state is watching everything they do (Trojanow et al.). The Germans today are fearful of a global threat, a global Holocaust. Perhaps the world did not care about the memorials.

The Germans today are reminded of the fear they felt during the Cold War: “We were afraid. In the morning, we woke up with the Iron Curtain on our minds, and wondered: what terrible things were in store for us? Newspapers reported on young people who were so deeply worried they could no longer sleep. Hundreds of thousands were out on the streets, protesting against nuclear weapons” (Trojanow et al. 272).

They are afraid today because their country has been opened to foreigners from the Middle East, and there is a rise in crime in their state and more immigration and a sense among Germans that they have lost their country again (Hanslmaier et al.).

As Schlink points out, the questions of why Germany are still felt among the Germans: they do not talk about it much openly because they know they are not supposed to, but these questions are there and Schlink identifies them: “What is both historically unique and persistently disturbing about the Holocaust is that Germany, with its cultural heritage and place among civilized nations, was capable of those kinds of atrocities.

It elicits troubling questions: if the ice of a culturally-advance civilization upon which one fancied oneself safely standing was in fact so thin at that time, then how safe is the ice we live upon today? What protects us from falling through it? Individual morality? Societal and state institutions?” (29). Schlink laments that “we accused our parents, teachers, professors and politicians of blindness, cowardice, opportunism, the ambitious and ruthless pursuit of their careers, and a lack of moral courage” (30).

The problem is that one individual versus a state could do what? There is nothing one could do. The Germans wrestle with this guilt and do not know what to do with it. Too much talk about it and the German youth turn off. Not enough talk about it and the sites where they say it happened go to ruins. German Angst Zimmermann states that German angst (fear) is strong: the Germans do not want to be seen as bad Germans.

However, they also did not want to be painted as villains. After the war, the U.S. wanted to memorialized the Holocaust and the Germans were sensitive about how this was does, Zimmermann shows. They did not want the U.S. to make the Germans look like monsters. German leaders, politicians, and diplomats all tried to mute the extent to which Holocaust memorialization was conducted prior to German reunification. For example, they “perceived the representations of Germany in the U.S.

and tried to neutralize the effects of the emergence of a highly visible Holocaust memorial culture there that might perpetuate a negative image of the Federal Republic” (Zimmermann 1). At the same time, West Germans wanted to be on a good footing with the U.S. so they did not complain too much. Zimmermann notes that even after the war, Germans did not perceive Jews as victims. Germans themselves felt like they were the victims. It was the same as after WWI.

The Germans felt like the whole world was against them. So today even it is true as Zimmermann shows: on the one hand the Germans of today accept what is theirs—the long shadow of the past as Schlink puts it: on the other hand, they want to be free from this shadow and feel rather that they are not permitted to shed this past. They must continue to be crushed by it.

There is no forgiveness for them because the Holocaust is the albatross around the neck, just like in the famous poem by Coleridge. The German must wear it, that is what the war reparations of WWII are that the German must pay. Zimmermann says that Germans do not want to wear the albatross but do because they have no choice and so they see “Germany as the victim of American Holocaust memorial culture” (1).

In other words, Holocaust memorialization is not something they would do themselves, and after the war they did not do much of it at all, but after the Berlin Wall fell it was pressed upon them more to do something to memorialize the Holocaust now that the country was whole again. As The Local notes, “Since reunification in 1990, much more has been done by Germany to remember the atrocities of the 1940s.

It is noticeable that the majority of the memorials in Berlin have only emerged over the last 25 years.” The reason for this is just as Zimmermann says: the Germans have been unwilling for the most part to embrace Holocaust memorialization. It is only because Germany is now under major influence from the West to memorialize the Holocaust like what has been done in the U.S. that these memorials exist at all. January 27th is now Holocaust Memorial Day in Germany.

It was declared such in 1995, half a decade after the Berlin Wall fell down. January 27th was selected because that is the day Auschwitz was liberated. Today, the UN recognizes January 27th as Holocaust Memorial Day. Germany took the first step in marking that date on the calendar and showed the world it was ready to begin.