Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (164 page)

The explicit message of the latest round of memorials contrasts sharply with the ambiguity and prevarication of an earlier generation of lapidary commemorations. The Berlin memorial, occupying a conspicuous 19,000-square metre site adjacent to the Brandenburg Gate, is the most explicit of them all: far from commemorating ecumenically the ‘victims of Nazism’ it is, quite avowedly, a ‘Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe’.
⁴¹⁸
In Austria, young conscientious objectorscould now choose to replace military service with a period in the state-financed
Gedenkdienst
(‘Commemorative Service’, established in 1991), working at major Holocaust institutions as interns and guides. There can be little doubt that Western Europeans—Germans above all—now have ample opportunity to confront the full horror of their recent past. As the German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder reminded his audience on the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, ‘the memory of the war and the genocide are part of our life. Nothing will change that: these memories are part of our identity’.

Elsewhere, however, shadows remain. In Poland, where a newly established Institute of National Memory has striven hard to encourage serious scholarly investigation into controversial historical subjects, official contrition for Poland’s own treatment of its Jewish minority has aroused vociferous objections. These are depressingly exemplified in the reaction of Nobel Peace Prize winner and Solidarity hero Lech Wałesa to the publication in 2000 of Jan Tomasz Gross’s book
Neighbours
, an influential study by an American historian of a wartime massacre of Jews by their Polish neighbours: ‘Gross’, Wałesa complained in a radio interview, was out to sow discord between Poles and Jews. He was a ‘mediocre writer . . . a Jew who tries to make money’.

The difficulty of incorporating the destruction of the Jews into contemporary memory in post-Communist Europe is tellingly illustrated by the experience of Hungary. In 2001 the government of Viktor Orbán inaugurated a Holocaust Memorial Day, to be commemorated annually on April 16th (the anniversary of the establishment in 1944 of a ghetto in wartime Budapest). Three years later Orbán’s successor as prime minister, Péter Medgyessy, opened a Holocaust Memorial Centre in a Budapest house once used to intern Jews. But much of the time this Holocaust Centre stands nearly empty, its exhibits and fact sheets seen by a thin trickle of visitors—many of them foreign. Meanwhile, on the other side of town, Hungarians have flocked to the
Terrorhaza
.

The
Terrorhaza
(‘House of Terror’), as its name suggests, is a museum of horrors. It tells the story of state violence, torture, repression and dictatorship in Hungary from 1944 to 1989. The dates are significant. As presented to the thousands of schoolchildren and others who pass through its gloomy, Tussaud-like reproduction of the police cells, torture equipment and interrogation chambers that were once housed there (the House of Terror is in the headquarters of the former Security Police), the
Terrorhaza
’s version of Hungarian history draws no distinction between the thugs of Ferenc Szálasi’s Arrow Cross party, who held power there from October 1944 to April 1945, and the Communist regime that was installed after the war. However, the Arrow Cross men—and the extermination of 600,000 Hungarian Jews to which they actively contributed—are represented by just three rooms. The rest of the very large building is devoted to a copiously illustrated and decidedly partisan catalogue of the crimes of Communism.

The not particularly subliminal message here is that Communism and Fascism are equivalent. Except that they are not: the presentation and content of the Budapest
Terrorhaza
makes it quite clear that, in the eyes of the museum’s curators, Communism not only lasted longer but did far more harm than its Nazi predecessor. For many Hungarians of an older generation, this is all the more plausible for conforming to their own experience. And the message has been confirmed by post-Communist Hungarian legislation banning public display of
all
representations of the country’s undemocratic past: not just the swastika or the Arrow Cross symbol but also the hitherto ubiquitous red star and its accompanying hammer and sickle. Rather than evaluate the distinctions between the regimes represented by these symbols, Hungary—in the words of Prime Minister Orbán at the opening of the Budapest House of Terror on February 24th 2002—has simply ‘slammed the door on the sick twentieth century’.

But that door is not so easy to close. Hungary, like the rest of central and eastern Europe, is still caught in the backdraft.
⁴¹⁹
The same Baltic states which have urged upon Moscow the duty to acknowledge its mistreatment of them have been decidedly slow to interrogate their own responsibilities: since winning their independence neither Estonia nor Latvia nor Lithuania has prosecuted a single case against the surviving war criminals in their midst. In Romania—despite former President Iliescu’s acknowledgement of his country’s participation in the Holocaust—the ‘Memorial of the Victims of Communism and anticommunist Resistance’ inaugurated at Sighet in 1997 (and supported by the Council of Europe) commemorated assorted inter-war and wartime Iron Guard activists and other Romanian fascists and anti-semites now recycled as martyrs to Communist persecution.

In support of their insistence upon ‘equivalence’, commentators in eastern Europe can point to the cult of the ‘victim’ in contemporary Western political culture. We are moving from winners’ history to victims’ history, they observe. Very well, then let us be consistent. Even if Nazism and Communism were utterly different in intent—even if, in Raymond Aron’s formulation, ‘there is a difference between a philosophy whose logic is monstrous, and one which can be given a monstrous interpretation’—that was scant consolation to their victims. Human suffering should not be calibrated according to the goals of the perpetrators. In this way of reasoning, for those being punished or killed there, a Communist camp is no better or worse than a Nazi camp.

Similarly, the emphasis upon ‘rights’ (and restitution for their abuse) in modern international jurisprudence and political rhetoric has furnished an argument for those who feel that
their
sufferings and losses have passed unrecognized—and uncompensated. Some conservatives in Germany, taking their cue from international condemnation of ‘ethnic cleansing’, have re-opened the claims of German communities expelled from their lands at the end of the Second World War. Why, they ask, was theirs a lesser form of victimhood? Surely what Stalin did to the Poles—or, more recently, what Miloševič did to the Albanians—was no different in kind from what Czechoslovakia’s President Beneš did to the Sudeten Germans after World War Two? By the early years of the new century there was talk in respectable circles of establishing in Berlin yet another memorial: a ‘Center Against Expulsions’, a museum devoted to all victims of ethnic cleansing.

This latest twist, with its suggestion that
all
forms of collective victimhood are essentially comparable, even interchangeable, and should thus be accorded equal remembrance, aroused a spirited rebuttal from Marek Edelman, the last surviving commander of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, when he signed a petition in 2003 opposing the proposed Center. ‘What sort of remembrance! Did they suffer that much? Because they lost their houses? Of course it is sad when you are being forced to leave your house and abandon your land. But the Jews lost their houses
and
all of their relatives. Expulsions are about suffering, but there is so much suffering in this world. Sick people suffer, and nobody builds monuments to honour them’ (
Tygodnik Powszechny
, August 17th 2003).

Edelman’s reaction is a timely reminder of the risks we run by indulging to excess the cult of commemoration—and of displacing perpetrators with victims as the focus of attention. On the one hand there is no limit in principle to the memories and experiences worthy of recall. On the other hand, to memorialize the past in edifices and museums is also a way to contain and even neglect it—leaving the responsibility of memory to others. So long as there were men and women around who really did remember, from personal experience, this did not perhaps matter. But now, as the 81-year-old Jorge Semprún reminded his fellow survivors at the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of Buchenwald on April 10th 2005, ‘the cycle of active memory is closing’.

Even if Europe
could
somehow cling indefinitely to a living memory of past crimes—which is what the memorials and museums are designed, however inadequately, to achieve—there would be little point. Memory is inherently contentious and partisan: one man’s acknowledgement is another’s omission. And it is a poor guide to the past. The first post-war Europe was built upon deliberate
mis
-memory—upon forgetting as a way of life. Since 1989, Europe has been constructed instead upon a compensatory surplus of memory: institutionalised public remembering as the very foundation of collective identity. The first could not endure—but nor will the second. Some measure of neglect and even forgetting is the necessary condition for civic health.

To say this is not to advocate amnesia. A nation has first to have remembered something before it can begin to forget it. Until the French understood Vichy as it was—and not as they had chosen to misremember it—they could not put it aside and move on. The same is true of Poles in their convoluted recollection of the Jews who once lived in their midst. The same will be true of Spain, too, which for twenty years following its transition to democracy drew a tacit veil across the painful memory of the civil war. Public discussion of that war and its outcome is only now getting under way.
⁴²⁰
Only after Germans had appreciated and digested the enormity of their Nazi past—a sixty-year cycle of denial, education, debate and consensus—could they begin to live with it: i.e. put it behind them.

The instrument of recall in all such cases was not memory itself. It was
history
, in both its meanings: as the passage of time and as the professional study of the past—the latter above all. Evil, above all evil on the scale practiced by Nazi Germany, can never be satisfactorily remembered. The very enormity of the crime renders all memorialisation incomplete.
⁴²¹
Its inherent implausibility—the sheer difficulty of conceiving of it in calm retrospect—opens the door to diminution and even denial. Impossible to remember as it truly was, it is inherently vulnerable to being remembered as it wasn’t. Against
this
challenge memory itself is helpless: ‘Only the historian, with the austere passion for fact, proof, evidence, which are central to his vocation, can effectively stand guard’.
⁴²²

Unlike memory, which confirms and reinforces itself, history contributes to the disenchantment of the world. Most of what it has to offer is discomforting, even disruptive—which is why it is not always politically prudent to wield the past as a moral cudgel with which to beat and berate a people for its past sins. But history does need to be learned—and periodically re-learned. In a popular Soviet-era joke, a listener calls up ‘Armenian Radio’ with a question: ‘Is it possible’, he asks, ‘to foretell the future?’ Answer: ‘Yes, no problem. We know exactly what the future will be. Our problem is with the past: that keeps changing’.

So it does—and not only in totalitarian societies. All the same, the rigorous investigation and interrogation of Europe’s competing pasts—and the place occupied by those pasts in Europeans’ collective sense of themselves—has been one of the unsung achievements and sources of European unity in recent decades. It is, however, an achievement that will surely lapse unless ceaselessly renewed. Europe’s barbarous recent history, the dark ‘other’ against which post-war Europe was laboriously constructed, is already beyond recall for young Europeans. Within a generation the memorials and museums will be gathering dust—visited, like the battlefields of the Western Front today, only by aficionados and relatives.

If in years to come we are to remember why it seemed so important to build a certain sort of Europe out of the crematoria of Auschwitz, only history can help us. The new Europe, bound together by the signs and symbols of its terrible past, is a remarkable accomplishment; but it remains forever mortgaged to that past. If Europeans are to maintain this vital link—if Europe’s past is to continue to furnish Europe’s present with admonitory meaning and moral purpose—then it will have to be
taught
afresh with each passing generation. ‘European Union’ may be a response to history, but it can never be a substitute.

Photo Credits

Part One Insert

Page 1, top (Bergen-Belsen corpses): George Rodger/
Time Life
/Getty Images; bottom (Soviet retribution, 1946): AKG Images.

Page 2, top (Mihailović trial, 1946): John Phillips/
Time Life
/Getty Images; bottom (French retribution, 1944): Bettmann/Corbis.

Page 3, top (coal shortage, London, 1947): Harry Todd/Fox Photos/Getty Images; bottom (welfare booth, London, 1946): Topical Press Agency/Getty Images.

Page 4, top (Marshall Aid sugar arriving): Edward Miller/Keystone/Getty Images; middle (Marshall Aid, Greece): Bettmann/Corbis; bottom (cartoon, USSR refusing Marshall Aid): Alain Gesgon/CIRIP.

Page 5, top (Czech coup, 1948): Bettmann/Corbis; middle (Yugoslavia’s Tito, 1948): Walter Sanders/
Time Life
/Getty Images; bottom (Berlin Blockade, 1948): AKG Images.

Page 6, top (Schuman, Bevin and Acheson): Keystone/Getty Images; bottom (Stalin with child): Wostok Press.

Page 7, top (Berlin uprising, 1953): AKG Images; middle (Rajk Trial, 1949): Bettmann/Corbis; bottom (Gulag laborers, 1949-53): Wostok Press.

Page 8, top (Sartre in Leningrad, 1954): AFP/Getty Images; bottom (Aron at RFE, 1952): Archives familiales, Raymond Aron, Radio Free Europe.