Abstract
Post-war Germany has faced a dilemma of how to remember, when memory underlies social esteem and cohesion and also means integration of an unconscionable period of history. Memory has a moral dimension, but as memory fades into history, so it must be assimilated into reality against the lure of illusion and the temptation of distortion and falsification. This process has been called Vergangenheitsbewältigung—coming to terms with the past—and with it has come the ethical problem of whether it could ever be finished and the political desideratum of forming a state with the capacity to bear its history. It brought the very public debate among intellectuals on the conflict between normalizing German history and questioning this conservative trend as an apologetics for a deeply tarnished history.
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Notes
- 1.
Fulbrook (2016) raises a question that we might see as a concrete example of Habermas’ point. She asks, ‘Do Polish people, for example, have a right to live on what has been described as one mass graveyard of European Jewry without being constantly troubled by memorial landscapes and reminders of the ghosts of the past’ (p. 108)?
- 2.
To be more precise, the Mitscherlichs argued that the narcissistic grandiosity essential to the Hitler regime was frozen in place; that the regaining of reality would entail a collapse of this narcissism . Mourning would, therefore, be a catastrophe . This aspect of the inability to mourn is consistent with historical scholarship on the persisting allegiance of the German people to Nazism, based on a bond with the leader . Psychoanalytically, it was an illusion that underlay the relentless refusal to surrender, followed by the immediate collapse of allegiance following the death of Hitler. Ian Kershaw’s conclusion, for example, that German allegiance rested on a peculiar bond to a structure of power represented by Hitler, but not embodied in him, supports the Mitscherlich’s view that a narcissistic collapse was the dominant mentality in the immediate post-war period (Kershaw 1999, 2011, p. 400).
- 3.
The Historikerstreit was a West German debate, but it will serve the purpose of highlighting the conflict within memory. It has been criticized for exacerbating a moralistic rectitude, which had more to do with intergenerational conflict and an aggressive relocation of the tarnish of Nazi perpetration by the second generation—the 68ers—onto the parental generation of the Nazi period.
Lipstadt (1994) argues that the Historikerstreit was a valuable public event, but also that professional historians used arguments that were very close to those of Holocaust deniers, and thereby gave credibility to them.Despite widespread criticism, the [historians] debate gave the German media and general public the imprimatur to conduct the kind of discussion about contemporary Germany’s relationship to its past that would never have been heard before. Calls for a ‘sanitized’ version of German history appeared in Germany’s most prominent newspapers…Those involved in the current antiforeigner campaign in Germany find this perspective on history particularly inviting. If Germany was also a victim of a ‘downfall,’ and if the Holocaust was no different from a mélange of other tragedies, Germany’s moral obligation to welcome all who seek refuge within its borders is lessened…These historians are not crypto deniers, but the results of their work are the same: the blurring of boundaries between fact and fiction and between persecuted and persecutor…Relativism, however convoluted, sounds far more legitimate than outright denial . These German historians have created a prototype that may prove useful for the deniers. (p. 215)It was, in Saul Friedländer’s (1993) view, of dubious value. ‘In the early sixties signs of a transformation appeared, and that new approach dominated the late sixties and the seventies. From then on various forms of denial and defensive reactions surfaced in a new guise. The Historians’ Controversy of the late eighties became an unusual case of acting out’ (pp. 124–5). Although Friedländer stands out among historians in his use of psychoanalysis in understanding history, he also does not cite Freud on the psychoanalytic concept of acting-out as an alternative to thinking: acting externalizes and dramatizes; thinking internalizes and reflects. Nor, therefore, does he consider that acting repeats the offence that it aims to mitigate, leading to repetition (and perhaps the seemingly endless futility of the Historikerstreit ).
LaCapra (1997) notes that prominent historians of Nazi Germany, such as Richard Evans and Ian Kershaw, think the Historikerstreit added nothing new, and that it was a form of acting-out. He argues, however, that acting-out can be an essential, preliminary stage in self-reflection. For him, the Historkerstreit remains an important preparation for remembering , mourning and reparation .
The history of the Historikerstreit has been surveyed by several authors, including Assmann (2013), Bartov (1992) and Eley (1988). In reassessing the Inability to Mourn (Mitscherlich and Mitscherlich 1967/1975), by Brockhaus (2008) sees a shift in German preoccupation with the past, from the guilt and shame of the perpetrator to an identification with the actual victims of Nazi perpetration, which underlies the building of a culture at ease with itself, including its memory . But there is always a tension between a forced enactment of contrition and a spontaneous, deeply held, internalization of a remorseful attitude. This tension surfaces repeatedly, exposing an ambivalence in remembering projects, such as memorialization.
In my view, the Historikerstreit remains central to German history as a public process, reinforcing a public, as opposed to the sham public of the Nazi Volksgemeinschaft. And it remains relevant as a moral challenge to possible misuse of facticity in ‘scientific’ historical methodology.
- 4.
Referring to the psychoanalyst, Edith Jacobson , he speaks of the psychoanalytic insight that ‘the process in which we learn to synthesize the initially competing images of the good and bad parents into complex images of the same person is a long and painful one. The weak ego acquires its strength only through nonselective interaction with an ambivalent environment’ (1986b, p. 235)—a need that survives in adulthood.
- 5.
Langer(1991) makes a similar point in comparing stark oral Holocaust testimonies with more continuous written narratives. The raw, helpless, unredeemable experiences expressed in the former can seem more managed, hopeful and mitigated by later experience in the latter.
- 6.
Hillgruber is reacting to a claim by Norbert Blüm, that prolonging the war also prolonged mass murders in concentration camps. I have not been able to track down this claim.
- 7.
Hillgruber also has in mind a living myth when he speaks of ‘sacrificial efforts of the German army and the German navy in the Baltic Sea, which sought to protect the population of the German East against the orgy of revenge of the Red Army, the mass rapes (Massenvergewältigungen), the wilful murders and the enforced deportations, and in the final phase to keep open to the East Germans the escape routes towards the West by land or sea’ (Hillgruber 1986, pp. 24–5). The Germans saw ‘Tannenberg’, a First World War total victory over the Russians, as a reversal of defeat at the hands of the Slavs 500 years earlier—for Hitler, an event that testified to the glory of Germany. The conviction that the German army in the East had the Russian army under control led to being unprepared for the massive offensive. Thus, there are world historical forces behind the scenes in the confined, empirical enquiry.
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Figlio, K. (2017). Conflicts of Remembering: The Historikerstreit . In: Remembering as Reparation. Studies in the Psychosocial. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59591-1_6
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