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Claus Leggewie
Battlefield Europe
Transnational memory and European identity
Europeans, the world's largest "people in spe", must develop a
pan?European historical awareness if only to be able to deal better
with common political problems, argues Claus Leggewie. Yet a
definition of European memory cannot be reduced to the Holocaust and
the Gulag alone, no matter how central these are. It must also include
the experience of expulsion, Europe's colonial history and the
Armenian question, for example, and be able to compare memories
without offsetting each against the other.
It has long been a cliché that Europe is in crisis. First it was a
crisis of "widening", then it was a crisis of "deepening", now it is a
constitutional crisis.
The French EU presidency, despite a hyperactive president Sarkozy,
could do little to alter that, while the Czech Republic's current
presidency, with the Euro?sceptic Vaclav Klaus in charge, has hardly
given cause for more hope.
So it would be a pleasant surprise if the European Parliamentary
elections, which will take place in what is now a total of 27 EU
states between 4 and 7 June this year, were at least to receive the
attention they deserve.
Unfortunately, the opposite is likely to be the case.
The European Union's political future continues to be uncertain, it
seems. Not so with the European past. Since the Museum of Europe
opened in Brussels in the autumn of 2007,1 there has been no shortage
of sarcastic comments along the lines that while Europe might not have
a constitution, at least it has a museum. Given Europe's political
problems, then, is it not perhaps premature to devote a museum to it?
Probably a more serious question is whether Europeans ?? the many
millions of EU citizens, but also Swiss citizens and Ukrainians, Turks
and Norwegians ?? in other words the world's largest "people in spe",
have shared memories and a common historical consciousness.2 Or should
have, if only to be able to deal better with their political
problems. Individual European nations have built up a stock of
master?narratives and myths enabling solidarity within established
borders. But what about united Europe? In what sense is its memory
"divided"? Is European memory divided between European nations, as a
"shared memory"? Or does European memory divide European nations off
from one another, causing a "memorial divide"?
Sceptics ?? be they in London, Paris or Athens, not to mention Warsaw
?? distrust any supra?national diffusion of the European idea because
it intrudes upon the national and parliamentary sovereignty of
member?states.3 For those who sense such dangers, a common European
commemoration is not worth the effort, since it only re?awakens old
conflicts.
This is proved by the bitter conflicts over expulsions and ethnic
cleansing since 1944.4 Nothing illustrates more drastically how
historical conflicts can be instrumentalized than the Polish
president's recent comment in connection to the debate on the European
constitution that Nazi victims should be included in any reckoning of
Poland's share of the vote in today's Europe. For the
nationally?minded, Europe is essentially a free?trade zone that acts
collectively only in the case of attack from outside; worth
commemorating are, if anything, wars against external enemies and
internal barbarians such as the Nazis.
The defeat of the latter in May 1945 is indeed commemorated almost
everywhere on the continent.5 However, the kind of conflict that can
also trigger could be observed in the Estonian capital Tallinn in
2007. The relocation from the city centre of a Soviet memorial ?? seen
in the Baltics, understandably enough, as a monument to decades of
occupation and repression ?? led to a bona fide national crisis
between Estonia and Russia.
Remarkable was that it did not lead to crisis between the EU and
Russia, an indication of how little the EU felt involved in the
events. It was with the eastern European experience of Soviet
occupation in mind that Jorge Semprún, speaking on the sixtieth
anniversary of the liberation of the Buchenwald concentration camp
(where he was a prisoner between 1943 and 1945), commented that EU
enlargement could only succeed both culturally and existentially "when
we have shared and united our memories".6
My thesis, then, is that anyone who wishes to give a European society
a political identity will rate the discussion and recognition of
disputed memories just as highly as treaties, a common currency and
open borders.7
The first circle: The Holocaust as negative founding myth This raises
a general problem: Europe cannot attest to heroic deeds, like its
member nations used to do, but can only recall, in historical
deep?focus, the catastrophes of the long twentieth century.8 It must
make a point of involving avowed outsiders and erstwhile enemies. This
attempt to counteract the re?nationalization of memory stands a chance
if the markers of a supra? and transnational memory ?? its anchors
and vanishing points, so to speak ?? are put down in concentric
circles, exemplifying dates and sites beginning with 27 January 1945.
The date of the liberation of Auschwitz is today commemorated
throughout Europe as Holocaust Memorial Day.9 The common evocation of
the singular crime against humanity that was the murder of the
European Jews provides Europe with a negative founding myth.10 The
Europeanization of German memory politics ?? Timothy Garton Ash has
spoken ironically of the "German DNA norm"11 ?? appears plausible at
first sight, since anti?Semitism and fascism were indeed phenomena
that affected the whole of Europe, and since the murder of the Jews
would have been impossible without the broad collaboration of European
governments and people. Today, a Mémorial de la Shoah in Paris seems
self?evident, while in Poland, after the debate about the pogrom in
Jedwabne (by no means an isolated incident), a similar process of
realization is beginning, which given the latent anti?Semitism in the
country is likely to take years.12
Can the Holocaust be a political caveat for contemporary Europe? This
was what the Stockholm International Forum on the Holocaust held in
January 2000 was supposed to institutionalize. Its sole mandate was
put to the test (for the first and last time) the same year in
Austria, when Wolfgang Schüssel's ÖVP (Austrian People's Party) formed
a coalition with the FPÖ (Austrian Freedom Party), led by the
notorious Holocaust trivializer Jörg Haider.13 This gave rise to
German?led initiatives in 2007 for an EU?wide ban on Holocaust
denial. Whether bringing the Holocaust into the present day in this
way is morally and ethically necessary, and whether its
instrumentalization should be something that practical politics needs
to concern itself with, is open to question.14
However this is also a problematic route to take in terms of
commemorative culture. Certainly, the "mega?event" of WWII affected
all Europeans, including the peripheral and neutral nations, and
continues to be an issue for them to this day. However for many people
in the UK or Portugal, the Holocaust has little to do with their own
nation. This governing perspective becomes yet more problematic when
imposed as the matrix for dealing with the crimes against humanity
committed by communist states throughout central and eastern Europe.
The second circle: Soviet communism ?? equally criminal?
With the denial of the Holocaust punishable across much of Europe, the
question arises whether the denial of Soviet crimes should also be
illegal.15 When the Lithuanian MEP and former head of the Lithuanian
parliament Vytautas Landsbergis posed this question at the European
level, he found no advocates among western politicians and the matter
was dropped. This takes us into the second circle, or to be more
precise, into the other half of the circle, insofar as one is aiming
for a complete overview of totalitarian experiences in the twentieth
century. For nations occupied by the Red Army, the 8/9 May 1945
remains the beginning of another occupation16 that intellectual
spokespeople from central and eastern Europe consider to be "equally
criminal" (the phrase used by Sandra Kalniete at the Leipzig Book Fair
on 24 March 2004). They are unable to accept it as the date of a
collective liberation, as Russian commemorative culture asserts with
increasing aggression.17
Like all crudely drawn and politicized variants of the totalitarianism
thesis, this rapidly leads to the uneven ground of relativization, and
the offsetting of one event against the other, on one or both sides,
something that since 1990 has also dominated German commemorative
culture. The difficulty of European commemorative culture lies in
establishing what was singular about the rupture to civilization
constituted by the industrial?bureaucratic annihilation of the
European Jews, without in the process dogmatically refusing historical
comparison and downplaying the systematic attrition of the "class
enemy" and "enemies of people" in the Soviet realm.18
That an ostensibly anti?fascist consensus kept quiet about the Gulag
(or offset it against the Shoah) was due to the polemic constellation
of the Cold War, which ?? see Tallinn 2007 ?? has by no means been
overcome. Competition and hierarchy between Holocaust memory and Gulag
memory ?? if you'll excuse the crude, rather businesslike terminology
?? is probably the most significant baggage of a "divided" memory that
wishes not to separate but to synthesize. However not all acts of
violence of the twentieth century can be brought into connection with
the icon of the negative ?? the Holocaust.
Speaking at Buchenwald, which after 1945 was used as a camp by the
Russians, the former communist party member Semprún expressed the hope
that "at the next commemorative occasion in ten years' time, the
experience of the Gulag will have been incorporated into our
collective European memory.
Lets hope that Varlam Shalamov's Kolyma Tales will by then sit
alongside the books of Primo Levi, Imre Kertész or David Rousset. For
one thing, that would mean that one half of us is no longer crippled;
it would also mean, however, that Russia has taken a decisive step in
the direction of democracy."19
"Eastern central Europe" as a single entity is a western fiction that
fails to recognize differences between nations, something that applies
to memory as well. Stefan Troebst has distinguished four zones: in the
Baltic states, Croatia and Slovakia a clear anti?communist consensus
predominates, while in Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and
Ukraine, the past is dealt with in a way that is (increasingly)
controversial. Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia, Macedonia and Albania share
an ambivalence or indifference towards the communist past, while
Russia, Belarus, Moldova and other CIS countries exhibit a high degree
of continuity in terms of elites and ideology.20 In this latter group,
Stalin is often seen as the sole commander of the "Great Patriotic
War", an apologist view that even extends to his repressive and
murderous character within Russia itself.21
In the latent authoritarianism of post?Soviet power structures, a
criminal past that has yet to be addressed proves potentially
explosive: it blocks the path towards democracy. Russia's possible
self?exclusion from Europe is not only expressed in an affirmative and
apologetic politics of history ?? it may also have its deeper causes
there.
A preliminary summary produces three reasons for the existing
asymmetry of European memory. First, the assumption of the singularity
of the Holocaust (particularly from the German perspective), combined
with the recognition of Russian suffering in WWII, has unwittingly
obstructed awareness about "red totalitarianism". That also goes for
the way the history of the GDR has been addressed in Germany,22 where,
in part, the lazy anti?fascist consensus of the GDR persists and where
there has been a tendency to relativize the crimes of the SED
(Socialist Unity Party, the East German communist party) just like the
crimes of Nazism in West Germany after 1945. Conflicts in eastern
Germany over policy towards public memorials and museums' handling of
the legacy of the GDR are part and parcel of this. One can only hope
that recent regulations will form a better basis for the principle
that whoever wishes to speak of fascism should not keep quiet about
Stalinism ?? and vice versa.
Second, the asymmetry of the perception of the Gulag and the Holocaust
is explained by the fact that the murder of the European Jews became
far more visible. The crimes of communist regimes, which from 1917 up
to present?day China and North Korea have claimed the lives of around
100 million people, have not been iconized nor medialized to a
comparable degree. To put it another way: the Nazi Germans
predominantly killed other people, the communists in Russia and China
predominantly their own. Yet this is also wrong, if one is to be
correct and to take into account the persecution of the populations of
eastern central Europe, Central Asia and Tibet by Russian and Chinese
"colonial powers".
A third reason sometimes cited is that this murderous experience
remained eastern European at its core. Yet in western Europe one
cannot seriously claim to have been completely unaffected by
Stalinism; the sheer size of communist parties west of the Iron
Curtain contradicts this, as does, ex negativo, anti?anti?communism's
identity?forming function in western Europe for many years. While it
provided the basis for the peaceful co?existence with the so?called
people's republics, and may have overcome the division of Europe, it
did so, as has since been proven, at the expense of human and civil
rights groups.
The third circle: Expulsion as a pan?European trauma?
The dominant memory of WWII recollects population transfers taking
place across wide areas and affecting millions of people. In this
perspective, which begins with the collapse of the great empires of
the nineteenth century, the Holocaust comes to be seen as a
particularly awful case of ethnic cleansing.23 The big scandal of the
German Historikerstreit was the historian Andreas Hillgruber's attempt
to reclaim a "double memory", in other words to offset the memory of
"Auschwitz" and the European Jews against that of "Nemmersdorf"24 and
the German victims of expulsion and rape.25 Richard von Wiezsacker's
dictum that Germans during and after WWII were also victims of a
history that began in 1933 has since entered the public discourse, yet
without the apologetic tone and the offsetting that for a long time
clung to the discussion about the "crime of explusion".26 Its European
dimension is only just becoming clear, however, and this ?? the
memory of the "population transfers" of the twentieth century from the
Armenian genocide to the former Yugoslavia ?? is where the third,
highly controversial circle opens up. It includes the deportations
that the totalitarian dictatorships carried out in territories under
their occupation, however also the ethnic cleansings that, since the
nineteenth century, were almost inevitable wherever nation?state
building (including its democratic variants) succumbed to the mad idea
that internal and external security and political legitimacy was
attainable only on the basis of an ethnically homogeneous collective.
The particular problem that, for example, Czechs today have with
regard to the political?moral recognition of the expulsion of the
Sudetenland Germans probably lies in the fact that a
bourgeois?democratic government under Eduard Benes issued the
decree.27 Similarly, the biggest obstacle to addressing the
Yugoslavian catastrophe from 1991 onwards could be that it was not the
authoritarian Tito regime that was responsible for causing the
antagonism between the incompatible Serbs and Croats, Bosniaks and
Kosovo?Albanians, so much as the illiberal democracies, whose
nationalist majorities could not ?? and cannot ?? care less for the
protection of ethnic and religious minorities.
The history of ethnic cleansing can hardly prima facie contribute to
the development of a common memory because it is not yet "water under
the bridge", in other words complete, and continues to divide memories
like a knife does a wounded body. Initiatives such as the European
Network of Memory and Solidarity campaign against a purely national
and backwards?looking commemoration of the sort advocated, according
to its critics, by the German Zentrum gegen Vertreibung (Centre
Against Expulsion). In the course of the debate,28 the initiators of
the centre, above all the League of Expellees, had to integrate a
European and global dimension into events and exhibitions;29 thus the
Centre could, in the end, form part of a European network. However it
will probably be a long time before Poles and Germans can get used to
the idea of jointly?authored school text books, as has become possible
in the German?French case (albeit after a period of reconciliation
lasting 40 years30).
The example of expulsion illustrates the controversial nature of
shared memory both for domestic and foreign policy. In the West, such
conflicts are an occasion for a reassertion of the Right?Left schema,
while in the East they pit national(ist) forces (including on the
Left) against pro?European, liberal circles. Geopolitical and
geostrategic divisions within "Old Europe" that had been frozen by the
bloc confrontation of the Cold War superpowers re?appear.
Yet it is not old conflicts that are hindering a unification of the
new Europe, but rather new conflicts ?? over security, energy,
permissiveness etc. ?? and it is these that bring about the
continuation of a "Europe of nations".
Moreover, they are reheated by domestic political quarrels: Polish
intransigence about the issue of expulsion of course has to do with
the long?suppressed but then hysterically addressed communist past. In
all post?communist societies, the heirs of the nomenklatura and the
descendents of an often compromised authoritarian Right do battle for
historical legitimacy, the lack whereof they compensate for with
ethno?nationalist sentiment.
The fourth circle: The Armenian question A fourth circle opens up with
the question as to where Europe's borders lie, and thus to what extent
supra?national EU intra?identities extend transnationally at the
European and non?European levels. Many euro?sceptics have hinted that
especially Turkey, due to its "different" cultural and religious
history, could never share Europe's "common destiny";31 even the
biggest supporters of Turkish membership, the British, have indirectly
endorsed this view by understanding the Union as a free trade zone
without a cultural memory.32 In no other issue are the divisive
dimensions of a shared memory more clearly evidenced than in the
supposed cultural boundary between a blanket definition of "Islam" and
"secular" Europe. Regardless of the actual degree of
"de?Christianization" in Europe, many see in it a historical community
of memory and destiny that is opposed to Islam and Turkey. At the same
time, Kemalism was the prime example of a westernization process, and
the secular Turkish republic the best proof that such a process is
possible. If Europe were to take its secularity seriously, religious
affiliation would not pose an obstacle to integration, either within
migrant communities or in relation to non?EU countries. However other
things no doubt would, for example deficits in democracy and
development, and the "Armenian question". A majority of liberal as
well as secular Turks resolutely refuse to acknowledge the weight of
historical responsibility for the "genocidal murder" (if not the
genocide) of hundreds of thousands of Armenians in 1915. The question
thus morphs into an informal membership criterion, one clearly
articulated both in national and supranational parliaments.
The French and the Swiss have made much of the issue and, taking "the
Auschwitz lie" as a precedent, have outlawed the denial of the
Armenian genocide; the German parliament has taken a more cautious
approach, issuing statements geared towards consensus.33 As far as the
Armenian question is concerned, it seems that before the wider Europe
can come together, it will be commemoratively split. Yet there can
only be consensus when the approached is reversed, in other words when
Turkey comes to terms with the Armenian issue in a European fashion,
both internally and with old allies and enemies on the international
stage. While the term "genocide" is occasionally used inside Turkey,
generally speaking there is an insistence on the essential difference
between a "massacre" (katliam or kiyim), which is acknowledged to have
taken place in WWI and which is regretted, and "genocide" (soykirim),
which is strongly denied.
The controversy has taken on a transnational dimension not least
because it is an emotive issue for the Turkish diaspora, which in turn
competes with the Armenian diasporas in the US and France. This first
became noticeable in March 2006, when ultra?nationalists, led by the
former Turkish President Süleyman Demirel and the former president of
the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus Rauf Denktash, called in
highly martial tones for a "Talaat?Pasha rally"34 in Berlin.35
Mobilization was limited, however the incident shows how transnational
migration easily causes unresolved conflicts over European history to
become domestic political issues. The Armenian question, which the
Turks consider to be a strictly domestic matter, is connected with an
equally ethno?nationalist reflex against critics of the migration
policy of the Turkish and Islamist umbrella organizations, whose
representative legitimacy is contested.36
The fifth circle: European periphery
There is no monument to the victims of the Armenian genocide at
Steinplatz in Berlin, near where Talaat?Pasha was murdered and where
the "hundreds of thousands" of Turkish nationalists wanted to
march. Yet at different ends of this rather unkempt park one can find
two memorials to the victims of Stalinism and National Socialism,
erected in the early 1950s. Steinplatz could almost, then, symbolize
the history of European memory sketched above.
However a further memorial site would be missing, one included in the
fifth circle, that of European colonial history. The occasion
commemorated might be the Berlin Conference in 1884, at which, under
the aegis of the Germans, the Belgian Crown Colony of Congo was
divided up between European interests. In Germany one came to speak
relatively late, and only in the course of the more general process of
"coming to terms with the past", about the colonial crimes committed
above all against the Herero and Nama. For this reason, colonial
apologetics and nostalgia does not really exist in Germany,37 unlike
in other countries, where there have even been attempts to pass laws
making it compulsory to include the "positive aspects" of colonialism
in school curricula.38
This broad field encompasses a historical period from slavery to the
neo?colonial economic policy of the present. To allude to the complex
with just one example: in 2006, the European Union, having been
requested to do so by the United Nations, sent troops to the Congo to
oversee the orderly running of the elections there. That would have
been a debate worth having.
Either in general terms, about whether it is right, when in doubt, to
support democratization using external military means, or about
whether postcolonial Europe, given a past that was rarely more brutal
than in Central Africa, can ethically afford such an
intervention. However a debate at a genuinely European level never
took place; each nation evaluated the intervention in its own way and
according to its own tradition. Mostly it was argued that the Congo
has plentiful natural resources, and that instability in the country
would increase migration to Europe and offer a haven for
terrorists. Is the establishment and reinforcement of democratic
conditions in a country afflicted by dictatorship and a weak state, by
civil war and warlords, not an end in itself? While this was what the
EU declared, its main concern was to demonstrate the readiness and the
ability of its troops ?? in other words, to show that it was a "global
player".
Remarkably, in Germany the parliamentary debate about military
engagement in the Congo barely took on a moral tone, either on the
part of opponents or supporters, unlike with other "out of area
operations".39 In 1999, the Social Democratic and Green Party
ministers Rudolf Scharping and Joschka Fischer had justified
intervention in Kosovo with an argument ("Auschwitz") that until then
had legitimized their refusal. Now, it was apparently because of
"Auschwitz" that military intervention for humanitarian reasons was
called for.
After Afghanistan, as well, a sense of moral duty dictated against
abandoning America in the "War on Terror". It was only in 2003 that
"national interest" deemed further military engagement alongside the
US in Iraq inappropriate. In contrast, the European colonial past was
not mentioned once, despite the leftwing opposition in the national
and EU parliaments speaking of a neo?colonialism underwritten by
military force. Ought this not to have been responded to? After all,
the same sleaze does continue to exist in the form of the pact between
European foreign policy and companies who want peace in Congo
primarily in order to be able to do business there undisturbed. In its
dimensions, of course, it is nothing like the colonial exploitation of
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; however anyone seeking to
bring sustainable development and democracy to Central Africa needs to
take this sinister history into account. If one were to make a slogan
to this effect, it would be: whoever in Europe wishes to talk about
the Holocaust should also not keep quiet about colonialism.
This is only partially accomplished in the Royal Museum for Central
Africa in Tervuren near Brussels. Founded in 1910, the museum had
until recently depicted the history of Belgian policy in the Congo as
adventurism.
Belgium's blame and responsibility for a monstrous system of
exploitation and repression during the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries is now half?heartedly acknowledged at best, in the face of
opposition from Belgian society itself, which after two world wars had
got used to seeing itself as the victim of German aggression. However
there is no doubt that the extraction of natural resources, above all
ivory and rubber, which relied heavily on compulsory labour, at times
had genocidal features. The fact that there was an underlying
civilizing tone to the colonial mission of Leopold II incriminates
today's military engagement still further. The fatal trinity of
military violence, misanthropic greed for profit and proselytizing
zeal makes every postcolonial engagement liable to this
suspicion. This gave weight to the "Hands off Congo" and "Africa to
the Africans" campaign; however, after seeing the appalling TV images
and press photos from Darfur and in retrospect Rwanda, the same public
opinion that had preferred isolationism demanded a little bit more
internationalism after all.
The Congolese case makes the demand for a politics of history that
goes beyond Europe plausible, however it also shows the limits and the
pitfalls of a globalization of commemoration and memory under the
aspect of a Holocaust stripped of temporal and spatial
co?ordinates. Once again, the thesis of the singularity of the murder
of the Jews must not be allowed to narrow the perspective and to
underpin what is, ultimately, a hierarchy of victims that assumes
racist stereotypes. The intricate relation between German colonial
histories exists; the non?affirmative comparison between the Shoah as
a historically specific phenomenon and colonial genocide is not taboo;
during the reign of Leopold II, up to ten million people in the Congo
were brutally murdered ?? there too, "the unimaginable" became
reality. The racial anthropologist Eugen Fischer began his harmful
career in German Southwest Africa and ended it on the ramp of
Auschwitz ?? this personal continuity
represents just one facet of the connection. Compensation claims by
people affected by the slave trade and colonial persecution remain
unfulfilled and are probably more difficult to fulfil in
general. However a Eurocentric interpretation of the causes and
effects of genocides based on the thesis of singularity would be a
misunderstanding of the cultural pluralism of modern societies, and an
anachronism.
Sixth circle: Europe as migration continent
The sixth circle of European memory, that will only be mentioned here
in brief (undeservedly so), has to do with the massive transnational
migration to Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and
above all since the 1950s. Since this is also a history of asylum and
migration to escape poverty, it is closely connected to Europe's
colonial and postcolonial history. The museums in western Europe
dedicated to migration, still in their early stages, deal with
numerous facets of cultural globalization.40 However the question
remains whether these museums merely deal with the success or
otherwise of migration from the perspective of the migrants and/or the
difficulties connected with their social, political and cultural
integration from the perspective of the majority, or whether they go
beyond this and reflect on migration's relation to the criminal and
catastrophic history of the Shoah and the Gulag. This definitely did
not affect migrants and their parents, however it does pose itself as
a question to their children in the second and third generations,
offering a perspective from where they can observe and evaluate their
"own" history, from which they have meanwhile become alienated.41
European sites of memory, starting with the Roman heritage and relics
of the Middle Ages, can no longer be communicated without bearing in
mind how to make these comprehensible to migrants of the third
generation, strongly confronted as they are with non?European identity
options from the Islamic umma, for example. Hence, a European memory
will only become transnational when migrant Europeans (insofar as they
are recognized as citizens) take on responsibility for crimes and
events that lie outside their country of origin, and when, at the same
time, European human rights and asylum policy can be applied in
international crises without their being used as a normative shield
for protecting Eurocentric interests.
The seventh circle: Europe's success story after 1945 To summarize:
Europe's collective memory after 1989 is just as diverse as its
nations and cultures and just as divided ?? in the double sense ?? as
its national and social world. Memory cannot be regulated
"mnemo?technically" via official of acts of state or routinized
commemorative rituals such as 8/9 May or 27 January. However it is
possible to establish a European way to remember past crimes together
and to carefully extract lessons for present?day European
democracies. The strong and recurring impulse to believe that
forgetting is better than remembering in and for Europe is
understandable, and has attracted prominent advocates ?? in
postcolonial France as in post?Franco Spain and in post?socialist
Poland.
On the other hand, there is the slogan of one prominent member of the
opposition: "Amnesty yes, amnesia no!"42 Experience shows that
processes of democratization in transitional societies ?? which is
what almost all European nations were after 1945 ?? remains precarious
and incomplete if they fail to conduct a critical review of their own
past. Just as European democracies no longer wage war upon one
another, so the democratic process itself offers sufficient
legitimization by means of an increasingly European politics of
history, in which local grassroots initiatives are equally as involved
as school text?book commissions and state and supra?state events.
At this point, it is perfectly justified to capitalize, both
pedagogically and politically, on the success of western Europe after
1950, which in the Brussels exhibition receives equal emphasis. Since
that date, Europe has taken a course of development that leads out of
the cycle of totalitarianism and the ideological division of East and
West. The eastern European view of this history, on the other hand, is
marked by envy and sorrow, since during the Cold War the success and
happiness of the West was relativized by the unhappiness and failure
on the other side of the Iron Curtain. One can hardly claim that the
eastern enlargement in 2004 has already mended this rift. Yet one need
not also be afraid of building a European museum that addresses this
success.
1Housed in the Thurn and Taxis Palace, it is unpretentious and
successful overview of "our history" intended to go beyond national
history and provide a history of Europe since 1945.
See: http://www.expo?europe.be/index.php?lang=3Den 2Cf: Dan Diner,
Gegenläufige Gedächtnisse. Über Geltung und Wirkung des Holocaust,
Göttingen, 2007; Natan Sznaider, Gedächtnisraum Europa.
Kosmopolitismus: jüdische Erfahrung und europäische Vision, Bielefeld
2008; Tony Judt, Postwar.
A History of Europe Since 1945, NY/London 2006; Wolfgang Schmale,
Geschichte Europas, Wien und Böhlau 2001.
3Ralf Dahrendorf is the most nuanced exponent of this position. See
his Die Krisen der Demokratie, Ein Gespräch mit Antonio Polito,
München 2002. The least nuanced exponent is the rightwing EU
parliamentary group Union for Europe of the Nations.
4Mahmood Mamdani, "The Politics of Naming. Genocide, Civil War,
Insurgency", in: London Review of Books, 8.3.2007. See:
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n05/mamd01_.html 5Michael Schwartz,
Michael?Hartmut Mehringer and Hermann Wentker (eds.), Erobertoder
befreit? Deutschland im internationalen Kräftefeld und die Sowjetische
Besatzungszone 1945/46, München 1999.
6Jorge Semprún, "Niemand wird mehr sagen können: 'Ja, so war es'", in:
Die Zeit, 16/2005.
7On the sociological preconditions for this premise, see: Georg
Simmel, Soziologie, Berlin 1908 and other classics. Cf. also Gerd
Nollmann, Konflikte in Interaktion, Gruppe und Organisation: zur
Konfliktsoziologie der modernen Gesellschaft, Opladen 1997; as well as
Albert O. Hirschmann, "Social Conflicts as Pillars of Democratic
Market Society", in: Political Theory, 2/1994, S. 203?218. For a
description of the historical conflicts, see: Claus Große Kracht et
al. (eds.), Zeitgeschichte als Streitgeschichte.
Große Kontroversen seit 1945, München 2003; as well as Claus Leggewie
and Erik Meyer, "Ein Ort, an dem man gerne geht". Das
Holocaust?Mahnmal und die deutsche Geschichtspolitik nach 1989,
Munchen 2005.
8Bernhard Giesen, Triumph and Trauma, Boulder/CO 2004.
9The Yom HaShoah on 27 January, the day of the liberation of
Auschwitz?Birkenau, is observed in Israel as a national day of
mourning and in the meantime, supported by the European Parliament
(2000) and by the United Nations (Declaration in 2005), also observed
in many eastern European nations.
10Birgit Schwelling, "Das Gedächtnis Europas. Eine Diagnose", in Timm
Beichelt et al. (eds.), Europa Studien. Eine Einführung, Wiesbaden
2006, 81?94.
11Timothy Garton Ash, "Mesomnesie ?? Plädoyer für mittleres Erinnern",
in Transit 22 (2002), 32?48. See:
http://www.eurozine.com/journals/transit/issu e/2002?06?01.html 12See
the debate around Jan Gross' book, Fear: Anti?Semitism in Poland After
Auschwitz, New York 2006.
13Jens Kroh, Transnationale Erinnerung. Der Holocaust im Fokus
geschichtspolitischer Initiativen, [Diss.] Frankfurt a. M. and Gießen
2007.
14Horst Meier, "Holocaustgedenken und Staatsräson", in: Merkur,
12/2005, 1167?1172.
15Cf. Baltic Times, 3?9.3.2005, 1.
16Eva Clarita Onken, "The Baltic States and Moscow's 9 May
Commemoration: Analysing Memory Politics in Europe", in: Europe Asia
Studies, 1/2007, 23?46.
17Andreas Langenohl, "Staatsbesuche. Internationalisierte Erinnerung
an den Zweiten Weltkrieg in Rußland und Deutschland", in: Osteuropa,
4?6/2005, 74?87.
See: http://www.eurozine.com/journals/osteuropa/issue/2 005?04?26.html
English trans. "State visits. Internationalized commemoration of WWII
in Russia and Germany", in Eurozine, see:
http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2005?05?03?l angenohl?en.html 18Claus
Leggewie, "Historikerstreit transnational", in: Steffen Kailitz (ed.),
Die Gegenwart der Vergangenheit. Der 'Historikerstreit' und die
deutsche Geschichtspolitik, Wiesbaden 2008.
19Semprún, op. cit.
20Stefan Troebst, "Jalta versus Stalingrad. GULag versus Holocaust.
Konfligierende Erinnerungskulturen im größeren Europa", in: Berliner
Journal für Soziologie, 3/2005, S. 381?400.
21 Lev Gudkov, "Die Fesseln des Sieges. Rußlands Identität aus der
Erinnerung an den Krieg", in: Osteuropa, 4?6/2005, 56?73. See:
http://www.eurozine.com/journals/osteuropa/is sue/2005?04?26.html
22Martin Sabrow, "Geschichte als Herrschaftsdiskurs. Der Umgang mit
der Vergangenheit in der DDR", Cologne 2000.
23Norman M. Naimark, Flammender Hass. Ethnische Säuberungen im 20.
Jahrhundert, München 2004; Wolfgang Benz, Ausgrenzung, Vertreibung,
Völkermord. Genozid im 20. Jahrhundert, München 2006; Boris Barth,
Genozid. Völkermord im 20. Jahrhundert. Geschichte ?? Theorien ??
Kontroversen, München 2006.
24Today Mayakovskoye in Kaliningrad, formerly East Prussia. The town
became known as the site of the first massacre of German civilians by
the Red Army on 21.10.1944. The events surrounding it are highly
contested. See: Bernhard Fisch, Nemmersdorf, Oktober 1944, Berlin
1997.
25Andreas Hillgruber, Zweierlei Untergang. Die Zerschlagung des
Deutschen Reiches und das Ende des europäischen Judentums, Berlin
1986.
26Cf. Philipp Ther, "Die Last der Geschichte und die Falle der
Erinnerung", in: Transit, 30 (2005/06), 70?87. English translation,
"The burden of history and the trap of memory", in Eurozine. See:
http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2006?08?21?t her?en.html.
See also: Harald Engler, "Deutscher Opferdiskurs? Neue Arbeiten zu
Vertreibung und
Zwangsmigration", in: Jahrbuch für die Geschichte Mittel? und
Ostdeutschlands, 51 (2005/06), 119?146; Samuel Salzborn, "Opfer, Tabu,
Kollektivschuld. Über Motive deutscher Obsession", in: Michael Klundt
u.a. (eds.), Erinnern, verdrängen, vergessen. Geschichtspolitische
Wege ins 21. Jahrhundert, Gießen 2003; Helmut Schmitz (ed.), A Nation
of Victims? Representations of German Wartime Suffering from 1945 to
the Present, Amsterdam und New York 2007.
27Barbara Coudenhove?Kalergi and Oliver Rathkolb (eds.), Die
Benes?Dekrete, Wien 2002.
28Extensively documented at:
www.zeitgeschichte?online.de/md=3DVertreibung? Inhalt
29For background on the German?Polish debate over the Zentrum gegen
Vertreibung, see: Philipp Ther, "The burden of history and the trap of
memory", in Eurozine:
http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2006?08 ?21?ther?en.html
30German edition: Histoire/Geschichte ?? Europa und die Welt seit
1945, Leipzig 2006 (Gymnasiale Oberstufe (11.?13. Klasse); French
edition: Histoire/Geschichte ?? L'Europe et le monde depuis 1945,
Paris 2006 (Classe de terminale/BAC).
31Hans?Ulrich Wehler, in: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ),
19.12.2003; Heinrich August Winkler, in: FAZ, 11.12.2002.
32Helmut König and Manfred Sicking (eds.), Gehört die Türkei zu
Europa? Wegweisungen für ein Europa am Scheideweg, Bielefeld 2005;
Claus Leggewie (ed.), Die Türkei und Europa. Die Positionen, Frankfurt
a. M. 2004.
33Cf. Antrag der Fraktionen SPD, CDU/CSU, Bündnis 90/Die Grünen und
FDP (Bundestags?Drs. 15/5689), 15.6.2005; Protokoll der
Bundestagsdebatte, Tagesordnungspunkt 6, 21.4.2005,
Bundestags?Drs. 15/4933; sowie Aschot Manutscharjan, Eine äußerst
sperrige Last der Erinnerung, in: Das Parlament, 18.4.2005.
34Mehmed Talat (1874?1921), also known as Talaat?Pasha. The Ottoman
interior minister in 1915, Talaat?Pasha passed the law regulating the
resettlement of Armenians that set in motion the genocide. He fled
Turkey after 1918 and was assassinated in Berlin ?? ed.
35Claus Leggewie, "Die armenische Frage in der transnationalen Liga",
in: Universitas, 5/2006, S. 476?489.
36See Claus Leggewie, "Between national church and religious
supermarket. Muslim organizations in Germany and the problem of
representation" in Eurozine:
http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2007?1 0?19?leggewie?en.html 37Jochen
Zeller and Jürgen Zimmerer (ed.), Völkermord in
Deutsch?Südwestafrika. Der Kolonialkrieg (1904?1908) in Namibia und
seine Folgen, Berlin 2003; Stephan Malinowski and Robert Gerwarth,
"Der Holocaust als 'kolonialer Genozid'? Europäische Kolonialgewalt
und nationalsozialistischer Vernichtungskrieg", in: Geschichte und
Gesellschaft, Bd. 33, 2007, S. 439?466.
38Cf. the law brought before the French National Assembly in
23.05.2005; also Andreas Eckert, "Der Kolonialismus im europäischen
Gedächtnis", in: Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte, 1?2/2008, S. 31?38.
39Claus Leggewie, "Paradoxe Intervention: Pazifisten im Krieg", in:
Angelika Ebrecht?Laermann und Emilio Modena (ed.), "Zeitgemäßes über
Krieg und Tod", in: Psychosozial, 24 (2001), S. 83?96.
40Paris is the role?model; compare the partially implemented
initiatives of the German DOMiD. Cf. Jan Motte und Rainer Ohliger
(eds.), Geschichte und Gedächtnis in der
Einwanderungsgesellschaft. Migration zwischen historischer
Rekonstruktion und Erinnerungspolitik, Essen 2004.
41Viola Georgi, Entliehene Erinnerung. Geschichtsbilder junger
Migranten in Deutschland, Hamburg 2003.
42Adam Michnik, "Die auferstandene Unabhängigkeit und die Dämonen der
samtenen Revolution", in: Transdora, 20 (1999/2000), special edition:
10 Years of Transformation in Poland, 5?15.
Published 2009?04?28
Original in German
Translation by Simon Garnett
Contribution by Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik
First published in Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik
2/2009 (German
version)
© Claus Leggewie
© Eurozine
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2009-04-28- leggewie-en.html
Claus Leggewie
Battlefield Europe
Transnational memory and European identity
Europeans, the world's largest "people in spe", must develop a
pan?European historical awareness if only to be able to deal better
with common political problems, argues Claus Leggewie. Yet a
definition of European memory cannot be reduced to the Holocaust and
the Gulag alone, no matter how central these are. It must also include
the experience of expulsion, Europe's colonial history and the
Armenian question, for example, and be able to compare memories
without offsetting each against the other.
It has long been a cliché that Europe is in crisis. First it was a
crisis of "widening", then it was a crisis of "deepening", now it is a
constitutional crisis.
The French EU presidency, despite a hyperactive president Sarkozy,
could do little to alter that, while the Czech Republic's current
presidency, with the Euro?sceptic Vaclav Klaus in charge, has hardly
given cause for more hope.
So it would be a pleasant surprise if the European Parliamentary
elections, which will take place in what is now a total of 27 EU
states between 4 and 7 June this year, were at least to receive the
attention they deserve.
Unfortunately, the opposite is likely to be the case.
The European Union's political future continues to be uncertain, it
seems. Not so with the European past. Since the Museum of Europe
opened in Brussels in the autumn of 2007,1 there has been no shortage
of sarcastic comments along the lines that while Europe might not have
a constitution, at least it has a museum. Given Europe's political
problems, then, is it not perhaps premature to devote a museum to it?
Probably a more serious question is whether Europeans ?? the many
millions of EU citizens, but also Swiss citizens and Ukrainians, Turks
and Norwegians ?? in other words the world's largest "people in spe",
have shared memories and a common historical consciousness.2 Or should
have, if only to be able to deal better with their political
problems. Individual European nations have built up a stock of
master?narratives and myths enabling solidarity within established
borders. But what about united Europe? In what sense is its memory
"divided"? Is European memory divided between European nations, as a
"shared memory"? Or does European memory divide European nations off
from one another, causing a "memorial divide"?
Sceptics ?? be they in London, Paris or Athens, not to mention Warsaw
?? distrust any supra?national diffusion of the European idea because
it intrudes upon the national and parliamentary sovereignty of
member?states.3 For those who sense such dangers, a common European
commemoration is not worth the effort, since it only re?awakens old
conflicts.
This is proved by the bitter conflicts over expulsions and ethnic
cleansing since 1944.4 Nothing illustrates more drastically how
historical conflicts can be instrumentalized than the Polish
president's recent comment in connection to the debate on the European
constitution that Nazi victims should be included in any reckoning of
Poland's share of the vote in today's Europe. For the
nationally?minded, Europe is essentially a free?trade zone that acts
collectively only in the case of attack from outside; worth
commemorating are, if anything, wars against external enemies and
internal barbarians such as the Nazis.
The defeat of the latter in May 1945 is indeed commemorated almost
everywhere on the continent.5 However, the kind of conflict that can
also trigger could be observed in the Estonian capital Tallinn in
2007. The relocation from the city centre of a Soviet memorial ?? seen
in the Baltics, understandably enough, as a monument to decades of
occupation and repression ?? led to a bona fide national crisis
between Estonia and Russia.
Remarkable was that it did not lead to crisis between the EU and
Russia, an indication of how little the EU felt involved in the
events. It was with the eastern European experience of Soviet
occupation in mind that Jorge Semprún, speaking on the sixtieth
anniversary of the liberation of the Buchenwald concentration camp
(where he was a prisoner between 1943 and 1945), commented that EU
enlargement could only succeed both culturally and existentially "when
we have shared and united our memories".6
My thesis, then, is that anyone who wishes to give a European society
a political identity will rate the discussion and recognition of
disputed memories just as highly as treaties, a common currency and
open borders.7
The first circle: The Holocaust as negative founding myth This raises
a general problem: Europe cannot attest to heroic deeds, like its
member nations used to do, but can only recall, in historical
deep?focus, the catastrophes of the long twentieth century.8 It must
make a point of involving avowed outsiders and erstwhile enemies. This
attempt to counteract the re?nationalization of memory stands a chance
if the markers of a supra? and transnational memory ?? its anchors
and vanishing points, so to speak ?? are put down in concentric
circles, exemplifying dates and sites beginning with 27 January 1945.
The date of the liberation of Auschwitz is today commemorated
throughout Europe as Holocaust Memorial Day.9 The common evocation of
the singular crime against humanity that was the murder of the
European Jews provides Europe with a negative founding myth.10 The
Europeanization of German memory politics ?? Timothy Garton Ash has
spoken ironically of the "German DNA norm"11 ?? appears plausible at
first sight, since anti?Semitism and fascism were indeed phenomena
that affected the whole of Europe, and since the murder of the Jews
would have been impossible without the broad collaboration of European
governments and people. Today, a Mémorial de la Shoah in Paris seems
self?evident, while in Poland, after the debate about the pogrom in
Jedwabne (by no means an isolated incident), a similar process of
realization is beginning, which given the latent anti?Semitism in the
country is likely to take years.12
Can the Holocaust be a political caveat for contemporary Europe? This
was what the Stockholm International Forum on the Holocaust held in
January 2000 was supposed to institutionalize. Its sole mandate was
put to the test (for the first and last time) the same year in
Austria, when Wolfgang Schüssel's ÖVP (Austrian People's Party) formed
a coalition with the FPÖ (Austrian Freedom Party), led by the
notorious Holocaust trivializer Jörg Haider.13 This gave rise to
German?led initiatives in 2007 for an EU?wide ban on Holocaust
denial. Whether bringing the Holocaust into the present day in this
way is morally and ethically necessary, and whether its
instrumentalization should be something that practical politics needs
to concern itself with, is open to question.14
However this is also a problematic route to take in terms of
commemorative culture. Certainly, the "mega?event" of WWII affected
all Europeans, including the peripheral and neutral nations, and
continues to be an issue for them to this day. However for many people
in the UK or Portugal, the Holocaust has little to do with their own
nation. This governing perspective becomes yet more problematic when
imposed as the matrix for dealing with the crimes against humanity
committed by communist states throughout central and eastern Europe.
The second circle: Soviet communism ?? equally criminal?
With the denial of the Holocaust punishable across much of Europe, the
question arises whether the denial of Soviet crimes should also be
illegal.15 When the Lithuanian MEP and former head of the Lithuanian
parliament Vytautas Landsbergis posed this question at the European
level, he found no advocates among western politicians and the matter
was dropped. This takes us into the second circle, or to be more
precise, into the other half of the circle, insofar as one is aiming
for a complete overview of totalitarian experiences in the twentieth
century. For nations occupied by the Red Army, the 8/9 May 1945
remains the beginning of another occupation16 that intellectual
spokespeople from central and eastern Europe consider to be "equally
criminal" (the phrase used by Sandra Kalniete at the Leipzig Book Fair
on 24 March 2004). They are unable to accept it as the date of a
collective liberation, as Russian commemorative culture asserts with
increasing aggression.17
Like all crudely drawn and politicized variants of the totalitarianism
thesis, this rapidly leads to the uneven ground of relativization, and
the offsetting of one event against the other, on one or both sides,
something that since 1990 has also dominated German commemorative
culture. The difficulty of European commemorative culture lies in
establishing what was singular about the rupture to civilization
constituted by the industrial?bureaucratic annihilation of the
European Jews, without in the process dogmatically refusing historical
comparison and downplaying the systematic attrition of the "class
enemy" and "enemies of people" in the Soviet realm.18
That an ostensibly anti?fascist consensus kept quiet about the Gulag
(or offset it against the Shoah) was due to the polemic constellation
of the Cold War, which ?? see Tallinn 2007 ?? has by no means been
overcome. Competition and hierarchy between Holocaust memory and Gulag
memory ?? if you'll excuse the crude, rather businesslike terminology
?? is probably the most significant baggage of a "divided" memory that
wishes not to separate but to synthesize. However not all acts of
violence of the twentieth century can be brought into connection with
the icon of the negative ?? the Holocaust.
Speaking at Buchenwald, which after 1945 was used as a camp by the
Russians, the former communist party member Semprún expressed the hope
that "at the next commemorative occasion in ten years' time, the
experience of the Gulag will have been incorporated into our
collective European memory.
Lets hope that Varlam Shalamov's Kolyma Tales will by then sit
alongside the books of Primo Levi, Imre Kertész or David Rousset. For
one thing, that would mean that one half of us is no longer crippled;
it would also mean, however, that Russia has taken a decisive step in
the direction of democracy."19
"Eastern central Europe" as a single entity is a western fiction that
fails to recognize differences between nations, something that applies
to memory as well. Stefan Troebst has distinguished four zones: in the
Baltic states, Croatia and Slovakia a clear anti?communist consensus
predominates, while in Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and
Ukraine, the past is dealt with in a way that is (increasingly)
controversial. Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia, Macedonia and Albania share
an ambivalence or indifference towards the communist past, while
Russia, Belarus, Moldova and other CIS countries exhibit a high degree
of continuity in terms of elites and ideology.20 In this latter group,
Stalin is often seen as the sole commander of the "Great Patriotic
War", an apologist view that even extends to his repressive and
murderous character within Russia itself.21
In the latent authoritarianism of post?Soviet power structures, a
criminal past that has yet to be addressed proves potentially
explosive: it blocks the path towards democracy. Russia's possible
self?exclusion from Europe is not only expressed in an affirmative and
apologetic politics of history ?? it may also have its deeper causes
there.
A preliminary summary produces three reasons for the existing
asymmetry of European memory. First, the assumption of the singularity
of the Holocaust (particularly from the German perspective), combined
with the recognition of Russian suffering in WWII, has unwittingly
obstructed awareness about "red totalitarianism". That also goes for
the way the history of the GDR has been addressed in Germany,22 where,
in part, the lazy anti?fascist consensus of the GDR persists and where
there has been a tendency to relativize the crimes of the SED
(Socialist Unity Party, the East German communist party) just like the
crimes of Nazism in West Germany after 1945. Conflicts in eastern
Germany over policy towards public memorials and museums' handling of
the legacy of the GDR are part and parcel of this. One can only hope
that recent regulations will form a better basis for the principle
that whoever wishes to speak of fascism should not keep quiet about
Stalinism ?? and vice versa.
Second, the asymmetry of the perception of the Gulag and the Holocaust
is explained by the fact that the murder of the European Jews became
far more visible. The crimes of communist regimes, which from 1917 up
to present?day China and North Korea have claimed the lives of around
100 million people, have not been iconized nor medialized to a
comparable degree. To put it another way: the Nazi Germans
predominantly killed other people, the communists in Russia and China
predominantly their own. Yet this is also wrong, if one is to be
correct and to take into account the persecution of the populations of
eastern central Europe, Central Asia and Tibet by Russian and Chinese
"colonial powers".
A third reason sometimes cited is that this murderous experience
remained eastern European at its core. Yet in western Europe one
cannot seriously claim to have been completely unaffected by
Stalinism; the sheer size of communist parties west of the Iron
Curtain contradicts this, as does, ex negativo, anti?anti?communism's
identity?forming function in western Europe for many years. While it
provided the basis for the peaceful co?existence with the so?called
people's republics, and may have overcome the division of Europe, it
did so, as has since been proven, at the expense of human and civil
rights groups.
The third circle: Expulsion as a pan?European trauma?
The dominant memory of WWII recollects population transfers taking
place across wide areas and affecting millions of people. In this
perspective, which begins with the collapse of the great empires of
the nineteenth century, the Holocaust comes to be seen as a
particularly awful case of ethnic cleansing.23 The big scandal of the
German Historikerstreit was the historian Andreas Hillgruber's attempt
to reclaim a "double memory", in other words to offset the memory of
"Auschwitz" and the European Jews against that of "Nemmersdorf"24 and
the German victims of expulsion and rape.25 Richard von Wiezsacker's
dictum that Germans during and after WWII were also victims of a
history that began in 1933 has since entered the public discourse, yet
without the apologetic tone and the offsetting that for a long time
clung to the discussion about the "crime of explusion".26 Its European
dimension is only just becoming clear, however, and this ?? the
memory of the "population transfers" of the twentieth century from the
Armenian genocide to the former Yugoslavia ?? is where the third,
highly controversial circle opens up. It includes the deportations
that the totalitarian dictatorships carried out in territories under
their occupation, however also the ethnic cleansings that, since the
nineteenth century, were almost inevitable wherever nation?state
building (including its democratic variants) succumbed to the mad idea
that internal and external security and political legitimacy was
attainable only on the basis of an ethnically homogeneous collective.
The particular problem that, for example, Czechs today have with
regard to the political?moral recognition of the expulsion of the
Sudetenland Germans probably lies in the fact that a
bourgeois?democratic government under Eduard Benes issued the
decree.27 Similarly, the biggest obstacle to addressing the
Yugoslavian catastrophe from 1991 onwards could be that it was not the
authoritarian Tito regime that was responsible for causing the
antagonism between the incompatible Serbs and Croats, Bosniaks and
Kosovo?Albanians, so much as the illiberal democracies, whose
nationalist majorities could not ?? and cannot ?? care less for the
protection of ethnic and religious minorities.
The history of ethnic cleansing can hardly prima facie contribute to
the development of a common memory because it is not yet "water under
the bridge", in other words complete, and continues to divide memories
like a knife does a wounded body. Initiatives such as the European
Network of Memory and Solidarity campaign against a purely national
and backwards?looking commemoration of the sort advocated, according
to its critics, by the German Zentrum gegen Vertreibung (Centre
Against Expulsion). In the course of the debate,28 the initiators of
the centre, above all the League of Expellees, had to integrate a
European and global dimension into events and exhibitions;29 thus the
Centre could, in the end, form part of a European network. However it
will probably be a long time before Poles and Germans can get used to
the idea of jointly?authored school text books, as has become possible
in the German?French case (albeit after a period of reconciliation
lasting 40 years30).
The example of expulsion illustrates the controversial nature of
shared memory both for domestic and foreign policy. In the West, such
conflicts are an occasion for a reassertion of the Right?Left schema,
while in the East they pit national(ist) forces (including on the
Left) against pro?European, liberal circles. Geopolitical and
geostrategic divisions within "Old Europe" that had been frozen by the
bloc confrontation of the Cold War superpowers re?appear.
Yet it is not old conflicts that are hindering a unification of the
new Europe, but rather new conflicts ?? over security, energy,
permissiveness etc. ?? and it is these that bring about the
continuation of a "Europe of nations".
Moreover, they are reheated by domestic political quarrels: Polish
intransigence about the issue of expulsion of course has to do with
the long?suppressed but then hysterically addressed communist past. In
all post?communist societies, the heirs of the nomenklatura and the
descendents of an often compromised authoritarian Right do battle for
historical legitimacy, the lack whereof they compensate for with
ethno?nationalist sentiment.
The fourth circle: The Armenian question A fourth circle opens up with
the question as to where Europe's borders lie, and thus to what extent
supra?national EU intra?identities extend transnationally at the
European and non?European levels. Many euro?sceptics have hinted that
especially Turkey, due to its "different" cultural and religious
history, could never share Europe's "common destiny";31 even the
biggest supporters of Turkish membership, the British, have indirectly
endorsed this view by understanding the Union as a free trade zone
without a cultural memory.32 In no other issue are the divisive
dimensions of a shared memory more clearly evidenced than in the
supposed cultural boundary between a blanket definition of "Islam" and
"secular" Europe. Regardless of the actual degree of
"de?Christianization" in Europe, many see in it a historical community
of memory and destiny that is opposed to Islam and Turkey. At the same
time, Kemalism was the prime example of a westernization process, and
the secular Turkish republic the best proof that such a process is
possible. If Europe were to take its secularity seriously, religious
affiliation would not pose an obstacle to integration, either within
migrant communities or in relation to non?EU countries. However other
things no doubt would, for example deficits in democracy and
development, and the "Armenian question". A majority of liberal as
well as secular Turks resolutely refuse to acknowledge the weight of
historical responsibility for the "genocidal murder" (if not the
genocide) of hundreds of thousands of Armenians in 1915. The question
thus morphs into an informal membership criterion, one clearly
articulated both in national and supranational parliaments.
The French and the Swiss have made much of the issue and, taking "the
Auschwitz lie" as a precedent, have outlawed the denial of the
Armenian genocide; the German parliament has taken a more cautious
approach, issuing statements geared towards consensus.33 As far as the
Armenian question is concerned, it seems that before the wider Europe
can come together, it will be commemoratively split. Yet there can
only be consensus when the approached is reversed, in other words when
Turkey comes to terms with the Armenian issue in a European fashion,
both internally and with old allies and enemies on the international
stage. While the term "genocide" is occasionally used inside Turkey,
generally speaking there is an insistence on the essential difference
between a "massacre" (katliam or kiyim), which is acknowledged to have
taken place in WWI and which is regretted, and "genocide" (soykirim),
which is strongly denied.
The controversy has taken on a transnational dimension not least
because it is an emotive issue for the Turkish diaspora, which in turn
competes with the Armenian diasporas in the US and France. This first
became noticeable in March 2006, when ultra?nationalists, led by the
former Turkish President Süleyman Demirel and the former president of
the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus Rauf Denktash, called in
highly martial tones for a "Talaat?Pasha rally"34 in Berlin.35
Mobilization was limited, however the incident shows how transnational
migration easily causes unresolved conflicts over European history to
become domestic political issues. The Armenian question, which the
Turks consider to be a strictly domestic matter, is connected with an
equally ethno?nationalist reflex against critics of the migration
policy of the Turkish and Islamist umbrella organizations, whose
representative legitimacy is contested.36
The fifth circle: European periphery
There is no monument to the victims of the Armenian genocide at
Steinplatz in Berlin, near where Talaat?Pasha was murdered and where
the "hundreds of thousands" of Turkish nationalists wanted to
march. Yet at different ends of this rather unkempt park one can find
two memorials to the victims of Stalinism and National Socialism,
erected in the early 1950s. Steinplatz could almost, then, symbolize
the history of European memory sketched above.
However a further memorial site would be missing, one included in the
fifth circle, that of European colonial history. The occasion
commemorated might be the Berlin Conference in 1884, at which, under
the aegis of the Germans, the Belgian Crown Colony of Congo was
divided up between European interests. In Germany one came to speak
relatively late, and only in the course of the more general process of
"coming to terms with the past", about the colonial crimes committed
above all against the Herero and Nama. For this reason, colonial
apologetics and nostalgia does not really exist in Germany,37 unlike
in other countries, where there have even been attempts to pass laws
making it compulsory to include the "positive aspects" of colonialism
in school curricula.38
This broad field encompasses a historical period from slavery to the
neo?colonial economic policy of the present. To allude to the complex
with just one example: in 2006, the European Union, having been
requested to do so by the United Nations, sent troops to the Congo to
oversee the orderly running of the elections there. That would have
been a debate worth having.
Either in general terms, about whether it is right, when in doubt, to
support democratization using external military means, or about
whether postcolonial Europe, given a past that was rarely more brutal
than in Central Africa, can ethically afford such an
intervention. However a debate at a genuinely European level never
took place; each nation evaluated the intervention in its own way and
according to its own tradition. Mostly it was argued that the Congo
has plentiful natural resources, and that instability in the country
would increase migration to Europe and offer a haven for
terrorists. Is the establishment and reinforcement of democratic
conditions in a country afflicted by dictatorship and a weak state, by
civil war and warlords, not an end in itself? While this was what the
EU declared, its main concern was to demonstrate the readiness and the
ability of its troops ?? in other words, to show that it was a "global
player".
Remarkably, in Germany the parliamentary debate about military
engagement in the Congo barely took on a moral tone, either on the
part of opponents or supporters, unlike with other "out of area
operations".39 In 1999, the Social Democratic and Green Party
ministers Rudolf Scharping and Joschka Fischer had justified
intervention in Kosovo with an argument ("Auschwitz") that until then
had legitimized their refusal. Now, it was apparently because of
"Auschwitz" that military intervention for humanitarian reasons was
called for.
After Afghanistan, as well, a sense of moral duty dictated against
abandoning America in the "War on Terror". It was only in 2003 that
"national interest" deemed further military engagement alongside the
US in Iraq inappropriate. In contrast, the European colonial past was
not mentioned once, despite the leftwing opposition in the national
and EU parliaments speaking of a neo?colonialism underwritten by
military force. Ought this not to have been responded to? After all,
the same sleaze does continue to exist in the form of the pact between
European foreign policy and companies who want peace in Congo
primarily in order to be able to do business there undisturbed. In its
dimensions, of course, it is nothing like the colonial exploitation of
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; however anyone seeking to
bring sustainable development and democracy to Central Africa needs to
take this sinister history into account. If one were to make a slogan
to this effect, it would be: whoever in Europe wishes to talk about
the Holocaust should also not keep quiet about colonialism.
This is only partially accomplished in the Royal Museum for Central
Africa in Tervuren near Brussels. Founded in 1910, the museum had
until recently depicted the history of Belgian policy in the Congo as
adventurism.
Belgium's blame and responsibility for a monstrous system of
exploitation and repression during the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries is now half?heartedly acknowledged at best, in the face of
opposition from Belgian society itself, which after two world wars had
got used to seeing itself as the victim of German aggression. However
there is no doubt that the extraction of natural resources, above all
ivory and rubber, which relied heavily on compulsory labour, at times
had genocidal features. The fact that there was an underlying
civilizing tone to the colonial mission of Leopold II incriminates
today's military engagement still further. The fatal trinity of
military violence, misanthropic greed for profit and proselytizing
zeal makes every postcolonial engagement liable to this
suspicion. This gave weight to the "Hands off Congo" and "Africa to
the Africans" campaign; however, after seeing the appalling TV images
and press photos from Darfur and in retrospect Rwanda, the same public
opinion that had preferred isolationism demanded a little bit more
internationalism after all.
The Congolese case makes the demand for a politics of history that
goes beyond Europe plausible, however it also shows the limits and the
pitfalls of a globalization of commemoration and memory under the
aspect of a Holocaust stripped of temporal and spatial
co?ordinates. Once again, the thesis of the singularity of the murder
of the Jews must not be allowed to narrow the perspective and to
underpin what is, ultimately, a hierarchy of victims that assumes
racist stereotypes. The intricate relation between German colonial
histories exists; the non?affirmative comparison between the Shoah as
a historically specific phenomenon and colonial genocide is not taboo;
during the reign of Leopold II, up to ten million people in the Congo
were brutally murdered ?? there too, "the unimaginable" became
reality. The racial anthropologist Eugen Fischer began his harmful
career in German Southwest Africa and ended it on the ramp of
Auschwitz ?? this personal continuity
represents just one facet of the connection. Compensation claims by
people affected by the slave trade and colonial persecution remain
unfulfilled and are probably more difficult to fulfil in
general. However a Eurocentric interpretation of the causes and
effects of genocides based on the thesis of singularity would be a
misunderstanding of the cultural pluralism of modern societies, and an
anachronism.
Sixth circle: Europe as migration continent
The sixth circle of European memory, that will only be mentioned here
in brief (undeservedly so), has to do with the massive transnational
migration to Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and
above all since the 1950s. Since this is also a history of asylum and
migration to escape poverty, it is closely connected to Europe's
colonial and postcolonial history. The museums in western Europe
dedicated to migration, still in their early stages, deal with
numerous facets of cultural globalization.40 However the question
remains whether these museums merely deal with the success or
otherwise of migration from the perspective of the migrants and/or the
difficulties connected with their social, political and cultural
integration from the perspective of the majority, or whether they go
beyond this and reflect on migration's relation to the criminal and
catastrophic history of the Shoah and the Gulag. This definitely did
not affect migrants and their parents, however it does pose itself as
a question to their children in the second and third generations,
offering a perspective from where they can observe and evaluate their
"own" history, from which they have meanwhile become alienated.41
European sites of memory, starting with the Roman heritage and relics
of the Middle Ages, can no longer be communicated without bearing in
mind how to make these comprehensible to migrants of the third
generation, strongly confronted as they are with non?European identity
options from the Islamic umma, for example. Hence, a European memory
will only become transnational when migrant Europeans (insofar as they
are recognized as citizens) take on responsibility for crimes and
events that lie outside their country of origin, and when, at the same
time, European human rights and asylum policy can be applied in
international crises without their being used as a normative shield
for protecting Eurocentric interests.
The seventh circle: Europe's success story after 1945 To summarize:
Europe's collective memory after 1989 is just as diverse as its
nations and cultures and just as divided ?? in the double sense ?? as
its national and social world. Memory cannot be regulated
"mnemo?technically" via official of acts of state or routinized
commemorative rituals such as 8/9 May or 27 January. However it is
possible to establish a European way to remember past crimes together
and to carefully extract lessons for present?day European
democracies. The strong and recurring impulse to believe that
forgetting is better than remembering in and for Europe is
understandable, and has attracted prominent advocates ?? in
postcolonial France as in post?Franco Spain and in post?socialist
Poland.
On the other hand, there is the slogan of one prominent member of the
opposition: "Amnesty yes, amnesia no!"42 Experience shows that
processes of democratization in transitional societies ?? which is
what almost all European nations were after 1945 ?? remains precarious
and incomplete if they fail to conduct a critical review of their own
past. Just as European democracies no longer wage war upon one
another, so the democratic process itself offers sufficient
legitimization by means of an increasingly European politics of
history, in which local grassroots initiatives are equally as involved
as school text?book commissions and state and supra?state events.
At this point, it is perfectly justified to capitalize, both
pedagogically and politically, on the success of western Europe after
1950, which in the Brussels exhibition receives equal emphasis. Since
that date, Europe has taken a course of development that leads out of
the cycle of totalitarianism and the ideological division of East and
West. The eastern European view of this history, on the other hand, is
marked by envy and sorrow, since during the Cold War the success and
happiness of the West was relativized by the unhappiness and failure
on the other side of the Iron Curtain. One can hardly claim that the
eastern enlargement in 2004 has already mended this rift. Yet one need
not also be afraid of building a European museum that addresses this
success.
1Housed in the Thurn and Taxis Palace, it is unpretentious and
successful overview of "our history" intended to go beyond national
history and provide a history of Europe since 1945.
See: http://www.expo?europe.be/index.php?lang=3Den 2Cf: Dan Diner,
Gegenläufige Gedächtnisse. Über Geltung und Wirkung des Holocaust,
Göttingen, 2007; Natan Sznaider, Gedächtnisraum Europa.
Kosmopolitismus: jüdische Erfahrung und europäische Vision, Bielefeld
2008; Tony Judt, Postwar.
A History of Europe Since 1945, NY/London 2006; Wolfgang Schmale,
Geschichte Europas, Wien und Böhlau 2001.
3Ralf Dahrendorf is the most nuanced exponent of this position. See
his Die Krisen der Demokratie, Ein Gespräch mit Antonio Polito,
München 2002. The least nuanced exponent is the rightwing EU
parliamentary group Union for Europe of the Nations.
4Mahmood Mamdani, "The Politics of Naming. Genocide, Civil War,
Insurgency", in: London Review of Books, 8.3.2007. See:
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n05/mamd01_.html 5Michael Schwartz,
Michael?Hartmut Mehringer and Hermann Wentker (eds.), Erobertoder
befreit? Deutschland im internationalen Kräftefeld und die Sowjetische
Besatzungszone 1945/46, München 1999.
6Jorge Semprún, "Niemand wird mehr sagen können: 'Ja, so war es'", in:
Die Zeit, 16/2005.
7On the sociological preconditions for this premise, see: Georg
Simmel, Soziologie, Berlin 1908 and other classics. Cf. also Gerd
Nollmann, Konflikte in Interaktion, Gruppe und Organisation: zur
Konfliktsoziologie der modernen Gesellschaft, Opladen 1997; as well as
Albert O. Hirschmann, "Social Conflicts as Pillars of Democratic
Market Society", in: Political Theory, 2/1994, S. 203?218. For a
description of the historical conflicts, see: Claus Große Kracht et
al. (eds.), Zeitgeschichte als Streitgeschichte.
Große Kontroversen seit 1945, München 2003; as well as Claus Leggewie
and Erik Meyer, "Ein Ort, an dem man gerne geht". Das
Holocaust?Mahnmal und die deutsche Geschichtspolitik nach 1989,
Munchen 2005.
8Bernhard Giesen, Triumph and Trauma, Boulder/CO 2004.
9The Yom HaShoah on 27 January, the day of the liberation of
Auschwitz?Birkenau, is observed in Israel as a national day of
mourning and in the meantime, supported by the European Parliament
(2000) and by the United Nations (Declaration in 2005), also observed
in many eastern European nations.
10Birgit Schwelling, "Das Gedächtnis Europas. Eine Diagnose", in Timm
Beichelt et al. (eds.), Europa Studien. Eine Einführung, Wiesbaden
2006, 81?94.
11Timothy Garton Ash, "Mesomnesie ?? Plädoyer für mittleres Erinnern",
in Transit 22 (2002), 32?48. See:
http://www.eurozine.com/journals/transit/issu e/2002?06?01.html 12See
the debate around Jan Gross' book, Fear: Anti?Semitism in Poland After
Auschwitz, New York 2006.
13Jens Kroh, Transnationale Erinnerung. Der Holocaust im Fokus
geschichtspolitischer Initiativen, [Diss.] Frankfurt a. M. and Gießen
2007.
14Horst Meier, "Holocaustgedenken und Staatsräson", in: Merkur,
12/2005, 1167?1172.
15Cf. Baltic Times, 3?9.3.2005, 1.
16Eva Clarita Onken, "The Baltic States and Moscow's 9 May
Commemoration: Analysing Memory Politics in Europe", in: Europe Asia
Studies, 1/2007, 23?46.
17Andreas Langenohl, "Staatsbesuche. Internationalisierte Erinnerung
an den Zweiten Weltkrieg in Rußland und Deutschland", in: Osteuropa,
4?6/2005, 74?87.
See: http://www.eurozine.com/journals/osteuropa/issue/2 005?04?26.html
English trans. "State visits. Internationalized commemoration of WWII
in Russia and Germany", in Eurozine, see:
http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2005?05?03?l angenohl?en.html 18Claus
Leggewie, "Historikerstreit transnational", in: Steffen Kailitz (ed.),
Die Gegenwart der Vergangenheit. Der 'Historikerstreit' und die
deutsche Geschichtspolitik, Wiesbaden 2008.
19Semprún, op. cit.
20Stefan Troebst, "Jalta versus Stalingrad. GULag versus Holocaust.
Konfligierende Erinnerungskulturen im größeren Europa", in: Berliner
Journal für Soziologie, 3/2005, S. 381?400.
21 Lev Gudkov, "Die Fesseln des Sieges. Rußlands Identität aus der
Erinnerung an den Krieg", in: Osteuropa, 4?6/2005, 56?73. See:
http://www.eurozine.com/journals/osteuropa/is sue/2005?04?26.html
22Martin Sabrow, "Geschichte als Herrschaftsdiskurs. Der Umgang mit
der Vergangenheit in der DDR", Cologne 2000.
23Norman M. Naimark, Flammender Hass. Ethnische Säuberungen im 20.
Jahrhundert, München 2004; Wolfgang Benz, Ausgrenzung, Vertreibung,
Völkermord. Genozid im 20. Jahrhundert, München 2006; Boris Barth,
Genozid. Völkermord im 20. Jahrhundert. Geschichte ?? Theorien ??
Kontroversen, München 2006.
24Today Mayakovskoye in Kaliningrad, formerly East Prussia. The town
became known as the site of the first massacre of German civilians by
the Red Army on 21.10.1944. The events surrounding it are highly
contested. See: Bernhard Fisch, Nemmersdorf, Oktober 1944, Berlin
1997.
25Andreas Hillgruber, Zweierlei Untergang. Die Zerschlagung des
Deutschen Reiches und das Ende des europäischen Judentums, Berlin
1986.
26Cf. Philipp Ther, "Die Last der Geschichte und die Falle der
Erinnerung", in: Transit, 30 (2005/06), 70?87. English translation,
"The burden of history and the trap of memory", in Eurozine. See:
http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2006?08?21?t her?en.html.
See also: Harald Engler, "Deutscher Opferdiskurs? Neue Arbeiten zu
Vertreibung und
Zwangsmigration", in: Jahrbuch für die Geschichte Mittel? und
Ostdeutschlands, 51 (2005/06), 119?146; Samuel Salzborn, "Opfer, Tabu,
Kollektivschuld. Über Motive deutscher Obsession", in: Michael Klundt
u.a. (eds.), Erinnern, verdrängen, vergessen. Geschichtspolitische
Wege ins 21. Jahrhundert, Gießen 2003; Helmut Schmitz (ed.), A Nation
of Victims? Representations of German Wartime Suffering from 1945 to
the Present, Amsterdam und New York 2007.
27Barbara Coudenhove?Kalergi and Oliver Rathkolb (eds.), Die
Benes?Dekrete, Wien 2002.
28Extensively documented at:
www.zeitgeschichte?online.de/md=3DVertreibung? Inhalt
29For background on the German?Polish debate over the Zentrum gegen
Vertreibung, see: Philipp Ther, "The burden of history and the trap of
memory", in Eurozine:
http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2006?08 ?21?ther?en.html
30German edition: Histoire/Geschichte ?? Europa und die Welt seit
1945, Leipzig 2006 (Gymnasiale Oberstufe (11.?13. Klasse); French
edition: Histoire/Geschichte ?? L'Europe et le monde depuis 1945,
Paris 2006 (Classe de terminale/BAC).
31Hans?Ulrich Wehler, in: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ),
19.12.2003; Heinrich August Winkler, in: FAZ, 11.12.2002.
32Helmut König and Manfred Sicking (eds.), Gehört die Türkei zu
Europa? Wegweisungen für ein Europa am Scheideweg, Bielefeld 2005;
Claus Leggewie (ed.), Die Türkei und Europa. Die Positionen, Frankfurt
a. M. 2004.
33Cf. Antrag der Fraktionen SPD, CDU/CSU, Bündnis 90/Die Grünen und
FDP (Bundestags?Drs. 15/5689), 15.6.2005; Protokoll der
Bundestagsdebatte, Tagesordnungspunkt 6, 21.4.2005,
Bundestags?Drs. 15/4933; sowie Aschot Manutscharjan, Eine äußerst
sperrige Last der Erinnerung, in: Das Parlament, 18.4.2005.
34Mehmed Talat (1874?1921), also known as Talaat?Pasha. The Ottoman
interior minister in 1915, Talaat?Pasha passed the law regulating the
resettlement of Armenians that set in motion the genocide. He fled
Turkey after 1918 and was assassinated in Berlin ?? ed.
35Claus Leggewie, "Die armenische Frage in der transnationalen Liga",
in: Universitas, 5/2006, S. 476?489.
36See Claus Leggewie, "Between national church and religious
supermarket. Muslim organizations in Germany and the problem of
representation" in Eurozine:
http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2007?1 0?19?leggewie?en.html 37Jochen
Zeller and Jürgen Zimmerer (ed.), Völkermord in
Deutsch?Südwestafrika. Der Kolonialkrieg (1904?1908) in Namibia und
seine Folgen, Berlin 2003; Stephan Malinowski and Robert Gerwarth,
"Der Holocaust als 'kolonialer Genozid'? Europäische Kolonialgewalt
und nationalsozialistischer Vernichtungskrieg", in: Geschichte und
Gesellschaft, Bd. 33, 2007, S. 439?466.
38Cf. the law brought before the French National Assembly in
23.05.2005; also Andreas Eckert, "Der Kolonialismus im europäischen
Gedächtnis", in: Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte, 1?2/2008, S. 31?38.
39Claus Leggewie, "Paradoxe Intervention: Pazifisten im Krieg", in:
Angelika Ebrecht?Laermann und Emilio Modena (ed.), "Zeitgemäßes über
Krieg und Tod", in: Psychosozial, 24 (2001), S. 83?96.
40Paris is the role?model; compare the partially implemented
initiatives of the German DOMiD. Cf. Jan Motte und Rainer Ohliger
(eds.), Geschichte und Gedächtnis in der
Einwanderungsgesellschaft. Migration zwischen historischer
Rekonstruktion und Erinnerungspolitik, Essen 2004.
41Viola Georgi, Entliehene Erinnerung. Geschichtsbilder junger
Migranten in Deutschland, Hamburg 2003.
42Adam Michnik, "Die auferstandene Unabhängigkeit und die Dämonen der
samtenen Revolution", in: Transdora, 20 (1999/2000), special edition:
10 Years of Transformation in Poland, 5?15.
Published 2009?04?28
Original in German
Translation by Simon Garnett
Contribution by Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik
First published in Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik
2/2009 (German
version)
© Claus Leggewie
© Eurozine
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress