Germany: Don't Mention the War

[This section is in the earliest stages of development: 12 July 1999 – 9 September 2004]

Being British, I am burdened with a cultural upbringing in the late 1950s and 1960s in which the Allied defeat of the expansionist designs of Nazi Germany was perpetually glorified (“Two world wars and one world cup.”). The reason why Basil Fawlty (Fawlty Towers, a BBC sitcom) still draws a nervous laugh when he implores: "Whatever you say, don't mention the war." is, at least in part, because the Second World War lives on vividly in the minds of many people in Britain who were not born until decades after that war ended. Lives on, that is, in both the glory of victory (like the final match of the 1966 Football World Cup between the English and German national football teams); and in the horror of unspeakable evil perpetrated on so many people; as well as in many other complex and personal ways.

Each time I visit Amsterdam, I make my pilgrimage to the Anne Frank Haus. I first heard about Anne Frank from my mother when I was a child. Later, when I was a teenager, I read her diary, of which I now have a new edition on my bookshelves. During 2004, I visited a travelling exhibition in Sunderland, UK, about Anne Frank.

When I visit Ile de la Cité in Paris, I usually try to descend into the Jewish memorial to the people who were killed in or by Nazi concentration camps. I have attended factual and artistic exhibitions about the Nazi concentration camps, and images of the entrance, the shunting yards, and the gas chambers lie buried only shallowly beneath the surface of my awareness. I read Schindler's Ark, by the Australian writer Thomas Keneally, long before the U.S. director Steven Spielberg made a movie of the re-titled Schinder's List. I watched, with horrific fascination, the film of U.S. writer William Styron's novel, Sophie's Choice. I have read all of Christopher Isherwood's partially autobiographical stories about his time in Berlin during the 1930s, and have watched many times the film Cabaret, starring Michael York and Liza Minelli, which conflates much of Isherwood's material. I have watched several times the film Mephisto, starring Klaus Maria Brandauer, based on the book of the same name by Klaus Mann. I suffered reading The White Hotel by D.M. Thomas. Who in Britain, born between 1940 and 1970 has not read Nineteen Eighty Four, by George Orwell (Eric Blair), or seen the film starring Richard Burton? The novel is about Britain in the post-war years 1947-8, portraying socialist Britain (the Labour Party won a landslide victory in the 1945 General Election) as totalitarian Airstrip One ruled by IngSoc. I have read four times Tolkein’s the three volumes of Lord of the Rings, and have a copy of each of the DVDs. I am part of a culture that will not, and cannot, forget the Second World War. As a person I have been shaped by that war, and am at least partially defined by it.

I feel doubtful, however, that the British government and the British people were as innocent regarding the holocaust as may be implied by the depth of anti-German (not distinguished from Nazi) sentiment that persists in Middle England even today. Methinks they protesteth a little too enthusiastically. I believe that, for reasons of imperial domination and commercial competition/opportunism, successive British governments from 1918-1939, by desiring that the German economy remained weak, effectively nursed Nazism into being. The seeds of intolerance, xenophobia, militarism and fascism exist in most societies, it requires only the appropriate environment for those seeds to germinate. Moreover, I believe that the threat of (Russian) communism was seen by many as a greater threat than that of Nazi Germany, and that diplomatic alliances with Nazi Germany to oppose the Soviet Union were real possibilities. That the British government remains capable of withholding even humanitarian support for regimes it claims to dislike is evidenced most recently in the Balkan war: the state of Serbia received no reconstruction funds (for untold damage perpetrated by NATO bombers) until Slobodan Milosovich was removed office. Iraqi people suffered the privations of an economic blockade, receiving little or no aid until the regime of Saddam Hussein was blasted out of Baghdad, despite the fact that his position was propped and strengthened by the West when Hussein's regime was opposing the regime of Iran's Ayatollah Khomeni. I find it hard not to believe that the international behaviour of the western powers fans the flames of fascism, as has been shown in Algeria, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, where poverty and repression have combined to produce (what appears to the west as) fanatical fundamentalism. In Northern Ireland the British government permitted the perpetration of injustice by the Protestant majority on the Roman Catholic minority, the consequence of which was the re-emergence of the IRA. I cannot believe that British governments, presiding over a world map, much of which was coloured pink (indicating the extent of the British Empire), can be seen as innocent bystanders in the deaths of millions of people in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s.

In various respects, the British population in the 1930s was deeply polarised. Social class distinctions were all but immutable. Economic depression had exacerbated the distance between rich and poor. Many people with modern ideas were attracted to socialism and communism, which set them at odds with people whose ideas were much more conservative. Anti-Semitism was more prevalent, more popular, and less covert than it is today. Many people were attracted to notions of strong government and a strong leader. Such people may have felt uncertain why Adolf Hitler was considered by the British government to be a bad fellow.Very close to home, Oswald Mosely's Brownshirts (fascists) had their Durham (UK) headquarters in the shop that is (at the time of writing) Stephenson's newsagents, next door to the office I used for some years on Claypath in Durham City centre. I believe that British people in the 1930s showed a much greater political awareness and commitment than appears typical of the UK in 2004, an awareness that condemns their inaction. The substantial delay between the British authorities receiving intelligence reports about the terrors being inflicted on the Jewish people of mainland Europe, there was also, I understand, intense suspicion specifically of German Jews, and a deep reluctance to permit them entry into Britain. In France, over recent years, there has been a reluctant recognition that not everyone fought for the Résistance, and that there were many people who co-operated, or even collaborated, with the Nazi and Vichy regimes. Maybe Basil Fawlty is not just socially embarrassed to remind German guests "who won the war/cup", but also recognises that the finger of implication could also be turned to himself.

It is hard to accept that I bear some of the responsibility for what took place during the Second World War, particularly as I was not born until after the first Soviet Russian satellite had orbited the earth. I am saddened by the demand made by many people in Britain, directly or indirectly, that German people younger than me, the same age, ten years older, twenty years older, bear some responsibility for the Second World War, whereas their British counterparts shoulder none. German people thirty years older and forty years older than me, how much influence did they have over the rise of Nazism? Nazism was and remains an evil political system, and British domestic politics and international diplomacy played a role in permitting Nazism to flourish.

Having visited the Hanseatic city of Lübeck in northern Germany, it choked me to accept that British and US warplanes intentionally devastated the undefended, non-military city in order to sap the morale of the German people during the Second World War. In addition to all the mothers and fathers, girls and boys, grandparents, aunts and uncles, killed by the bombing, as in Dresden, Coventry and Hiroshima, centuries of European historical identity were erased overnight. That was a nightmare violation of the soul or spirit of generations that have gone before and of those yet to come. Our historical identity is perhaps our only birthright. Without doubt the Nazi military machine erased not only the identity (with the intention of writing a new history) but also the existence of millions of people. However, it is not okay, in my opinion, to answer barbarism with barbarism. Neither is it sufficient to suggest that different rules apply during war, for if we behave no differently from those with whom we fight, we make ourselves no different from them, and ultimately we become one of them.

I am who am because of the myths and memories I carry within me, and because of the myths and memories carried by the society in which I live. I have a multitude of memories. The following list, imperfect and hugely incomplete, is typed quickly from memory. I have been repeatedly tempted to amend and augment it, but to do so would miss the point: the list represents the construction of myself that I carry around with me on a daily basis. The pyramids and Pharaohs of ancient Egypt, the people of Israel, Socrates & Plato and other philosophers of ancient Greece, Alexander the Great, the Roman Empire, Julius Caesar, Roman Palestine and Jesus of Nazareth, the Jewish Diaspora, Celtic Britain, Roman occupation, the spread of Christianity, King Arthur, Saxon occupation, the Prophet Mohammed, the Lindisfarne Gospels, Viking raids, Norman occupation, feudalism, the spread of Islam, Jewish pogroms in English towns and cities, Geoffrey Chaucer, Piers the Ploughman, Agincourt, the defeat of Llewellyn ap Grufydd and the reduction of Wales to a Principality, the thuggish Christian overthrow of cultured Islamic Spain, Richard the Third, Henry the Eighth and the Dissolution, the Church of England and wresting of spiritual authority from Rome, Lady Jane Grey, Marco Polo, Christopher Columbus, the Spanish Armada, William Shakespeare, the slave trade, the 'Unification' of England and Scotland, the King James Bible, the English Civil War and the Commonwealth, the rise of Quakerism, the Black Death and the Roses of Eyam, the Great Fire of London, the French Revolution, coffee houses, the Industrial Revolution, the US War of Independence, Trafalgar, the Tolpuddle Martyrs, Waterloo, the Penny Black postage stamp, the Peterloo Massacre, the Chartists, Edward Jenner, James Watt, steam-powered locomotives, George Stevenson, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Michael Faraday, the abolition of the slave trade David Livingston, Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud, Marie et Pierre Curie, Albert Einstein, the Wright brothers, Captain Scott and Oates, the sinking of the Titanic, the First World War (trench warfare, chemical warfare, shellshock, poetry), the formation of the Soviet Union, the Irish Free State, the Great Depression, the rise and expansionism of Nazism, the Spanish Civil War, Mussolini, Oswald Mosely, the Second World War, Pearl Harbour, the atomic bomb, the formation of the state of Israel, the formation of the state of India, the formation of the state of Pakistan, the formation of the People's Republic of China, the Korean War, the Chinese invasion of Tibet, the Berlin Wall, the Cold War, Aldermaston and CND, the Suez Crisis, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Crick and Watson, the first commercial computer, the first artificial satellite, Martin Luther King, JFK, the space race, the Beatles, Harold Wilson and the moderate Labour governments of 1964-66 and 1966-70, the Open University, the Pill, the Aberfan Disaster, Neil Armstrong & Buzz Aldrin, the Vietnam War, Edward Heath and the moderate Conservative government, CIA overthrow of Allende government in Chile, Britain's entry into the EEC, British miners' strike and powercuts, Richard Nixon and Watergate, Jimmy Carter and the Iranian Revolution, in the Winter of Discontent the British trades unions brought down the moderate Labour government of James Callaghan, Margaret Thatcher and right wing Conservative government, Ronald Reagan, US government support for right-wing Contras against left-wing Sandanista government of Nicaragua, star wars, Greenham Common and CND, personal computers, mobile phones, yuppies minting money on the stock markets, the Falklands War and the sinking of the General Belgrano, British miners' strike, the Iranian fatois against Salman Rushdie, Poll Tax riots in London, UK house price crash and negative equity, fax machines, the European Union, the Velvet Revolution, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the political collapse of the Soviet Union, the Tianamen Square massacre, Bill Clinton, Tony Blair and the new Labour government, IRA ceasefire, Bosnia, Monica Lewinsky and the Starr Report, the Good Friday Agreement regarding Northern Ireland, the launch of the Euro, Kosovo.

   p.g.h@btinternet.com