Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History (16 page)

The more complicated the past, the more difficult the commemoration. West Germany, as it then was, could not decide how to celebrate the two hundredth anniversary of the death of Frederick
the Great. Were they remembering the scholar or the soldier? Was he a figure of the Enlightenment or a forerunner of Hitler? Almost everyone in France agreed that 1989, the two-hundredth anniversary of the French Revolution, ought to be commemorated. But what did the Revolution mean? Was it to be celebrated for liberty, equality, fraternity, or deplored for the Terror? The members of the commission supposedly responsible for the commemorations quarreled among themselves and with the government. In the end, the national celebrations were taken in hand by an impresario who staged a marvelous and eccentric parade—the Festival of the Planet’s Tribes—through Paris. With the funky chicken, African drums, Russian soldiers marching in fake snow, Chinese students towing a huge drum, and a marching band from Florida, should the new slogan for France be,
Newsweek
wondered, “Liberty, Frivolity, Irony”?

If the significance of the French Revolution is difficult for the French to agree on, so, too, is much else in France’s history. What about Napoleon? Is he a great national hero or, as a French historian recently charged, a racist dictator? Should the major anniversaries such as his great victory at Austerlitz be commemorated as the British commemorated the bicentennial of the Battle of Trafalgar, or should they be passed over in silence? How should French schools present the history of French colonialism in Algeria? For many years, the savage war between the Algerian nationalists on the one hand and the French settlers and the French army on the other was officially downplayed as “the events.” The pervasive and sanctioned use of torture against the Algerians became a matter of public discussion only when General Paul Aussaresses, who was a high-ranking intelligence officer during the Algerian war, publicly defended the use of torture in 2000. (After September 11, he recommended using his methods on Al Qaeda.) In 2005, the government passed a law stipulating
that textbooks should recognize “the positive role of the French presence in its overseas colonies, especially in North Africa.” At first a few historians protested against this attempt at an official history, but when the nation was shaken that autumn by rioting adolescents of North African descent, the issue hit the headlines and the National Assembly.

The right-wing, collaborationist Vichy regime, which ruled over what was left of France by the Germans during World War II, has been particularly difficult for the French to deal with. For a long time after 1945, they told themselves a comforting story that ignored the degree of support Vichy had among the population as well as its often enthusiastic collaboration with the Nazis. When he arrived in triumph in Paris in 1944, General Charles de Gaulle, the leader of the Free French, announced that Vichy was “a non-event and without consequence.” The true France was represented by his own forces and the Resistance. The few French who had collaborated were to be punished, and the French would get on with rebuilding their great country. The myth, for that is what it was, allowed the French to forget about the French policemen who willingly rounded up the Jews to be deported to the death camps; to forget the relatively small number who joined the Resistance and the many officials of the old regime who had collaborated and yet were allowed to continue in their positions after 1945. The government made little attempt to catch and try some of France’s more prominent war criminals such as Klaus Barbie, the “Butcher of Lyon” Indeed, some received protection from the Church or from highly placed politicians. No one questioned, or not until the 1990s, the claim of François Mitterrand, president from 1981 to 1995, that he had worked for the Vichy government for only a short period before joining the Resistance. In fact, as an enterprising journalist discovered, he had worked there for much longer than he had admitted and had won a decoration.

The process by which France has come to terms with its Vichy past has been a painful one. Initially it was only foreign historians who chose to examine the period carefully. When the filmmaker Marcel Ophüls made his classic documentary
The Sorrow and the Pity
, which gave a truer picture of Vichy and shattered the myth of widespread resistance, French television refused to broadcast it. When it was released in 1971, it was attacked from the Right and the Left. Jean-Paul Sartre found it “inaccurate.” A conservative commentator in
Le Monde
scolded the Jews who had been interviewed in the film for their ingratitude in criticizing Vichy’s president, Marshal Pétain, who, he claimed, had saved them. In the 1970s and 1980s, there was increasing public discussion, with more films and books appearing, but it was not until the end of the century, after Mitterrand and much of his generation had passed from the scene, that the new French president, Jacques Chirac, was able to admit that France had aided in the Holocaust.

In Russia, where the transition from one form of government to another was much more abrupt, post-Soviet governments have been grappling, with limited success, to make a new identity for Russia by using history. “These days,” the Russians say, “we live in a country with an unpredictable past.” While the new order clearly does not want to celebrate the November 7 anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, it does not want to alienate the citizenry by getting rid of what has been a two-day holiday. When Boris Yeltsin was in power, he kept the holiday but renamed it the Day of Accord and Reconciliation. The public remained largely in ignorance of the change. In 2005, Putin moved the holiday a couple of days forward, to November 4, and christened it the Day of National Unity. The change in date is to commemorate Russian success in driving out Polish invaders in 1612. The public, apart from the radical nationalists, still has no idea of what the holiday is supposed to be celebrating.

What present-day Russia has shown little interest in remembering, at least so far, is the horrors of the Stalinist period. There are few official museums or sites to mark the Gulag or the thousands upon thousands who died in Stalin’s prisons, and few memorials to those brave individuals, like Andrei Sakharov, who opposed the Soviet state.

Russia is not alone in wanting to turn its eyes firmly away from the painful parts of the past. In the decade after the Vietnam War ended, the United States, unlike the case in all previous wars, did not undertake to create an official war memorial to the dead. It was only when private citizens created their own foundation that the government was shamed into providing a piece of land on the Mall in Washington.

In Spain, when democracy gradually took root after General Franco’s death in 1975, there was an unspoken agreement—the
“pacto del olvido”
—to forget the trauma of the civil war and the years of repression that followed. In recent decades, though, writers, historians, and filmmakers began to explore the horrors of the war, and in November 2007 the government enacted the Law of Historical Memory. There is to be a national effort to locate the mass graves and identify the bones of those who were shot by Franco’s winning side. Franco’s regime itself has been formally repudiated, and it will be erased, as much as possible, from public commemoration. Franco’s statues will disappear, and the names of streets and squares will be changed. It is unlikely that the law will bring agreement on Spain’s history. If anything, it is opening up old divisions and creating new ones. “What do we gain?” asks Manuel Fraga, a senator and former minister under Franco who took part in the transition to democracy. “Look at the British: Cromwell decapitated a king, but his statue still stands outside parliament. You cannot change the past.”

West Germany and Japan were both pushed to remember the
recent past by the victors in World War II but also, to be fair, by their own citizens. Immediately after the war, the Germans, like other Europeans, were preoccupied with survival and rebuilding and had little inclination or energy to spend on thinking about the past. Perhaps, too, because their defeat had been so complete and the Nazi past was so hideous (and their own complicity with Hitler so profound), they took refuge in forgetting and in silence. In the 1950s, few ordinary Germans wanted to discuss Nazism or remind one another of their involvement with the regime. With the one exception of
The Diary of a Young Girl
by Anne Frank, which sold very well, the dozens of memoirs by concentration camp survivors and the few essays on German guilt did not attract much attention. The silence about the past was never complete, though; there were always writers and thinkers prepared to ask the awkward questions, and Germans could not entirely escape the consequences of following Hitler when their country was first occupied and then divided into two independent states. Moreover, West Germany, on Chancellor Konrad Adenauer’s initiative, paid reparations to Israel. (Only 11 percent of Germans at the time thought the decision was a good one.)

It was at the end of the 1950s that West Germans started to examine their own past in depth. In 1961, the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem exposed the elaborate bureaucracy with which the Nazi state had carried out the extermination of the Jews. Other trials followed in West Germany, and a younger, more radical generation began to demand and get the truth about the past. When the American television series
Holocaust
was shown on German television in 1979, over half the adult population watched it. Today, a reunited Germany stands out as a society that deals with its past, often in very visible ways. More concentration camp museums have been opened, and schoolchildren are taken to see them as a matter of course. In Berlin,
the National Memorial for the Victims of War and Tyranny, the bombed-out ruins of the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, and the Holocaust memorial all act as a national remembrance, while all over Germany towns and cities have their own memorials and museums.

During the Cold War, while West Germans were confronting their Nazi past, East Germans were avoiding it. The Communist state of East Germany managed to detach itself from all connection to or responsibility for the Nazi period. Hitler and the Nazis were said to represent the final stage of capitalism. It was they who had started the war and they who had killed millions of Jews and other Europeans. East Germany was socialist and progressive and had always stood side by side with the Soviet Union against Fascism. Indeed, a significant number of East Germans grew up thinking their country had fought on the Soviet side in World War II. Although the East German regime made memorials of three of the concentration camps, the only deaths remembered were those of Communists; Jews and Gypsies were not mentioned.

Austria’s amnesia was even more striking. In the decades after World War II, it managed, very successfully, to portray itself as the first victim of Nazism. In a 1945 ceremony in Vienna for a memorial to fallen Soviet soldiers, Leopold Figl, who was shortly to become the country’s chancellor, mourned that “the people of Austria have spent seven years languishing under Hitler’s barbarity.” Austrians comforted themselves for the next decades with such assurances. They were a happy, gentle people who had never wanted to be joined with the likes of Nazi Germany; Hitler had forced the
Anschluss
on them. They had never wanted war, and if their soldiers had fought, it was only to defend their homeland. And they had suffered hugely, it must be said, at the hands of the Allies. Who, after all, had destroyed the magnificent opera
house in Vienna? The fact that many of the most fervent Nazis, including Hitler himself, were Austrian; the wildly enthusiastic crowds that greeted his triumphal march to Vienna in 1938; and the willing collaboration of many Austrians in the persecution and destruction of the Jews—all that was simply brushed under the carpet. The few brave liberals who tried to both celebrate the small Austrian resistance to Nazism and memorialize the destruction of the Jews found themselves isolated and accused of being Communists. It was only in the 1960s, with new generations appearing on the scene and Germany’s own examination of its Nazi past, that questions about Austria’s role began to surface.

The Japanese are often compared unfavorably to the West Germans, especially by the Chinese. Japan has not, it is charged, admitted its culpability in the invasion of China in the 1930s, its role in the start of the Pacific war, and the savage treatment of those it conquered, from the rape of Nanjing to its inhumane medical experiments in Manchuria. There is enough truth in this to make the accusations stick. Japan, like Austria, portrayed itself as a victim in the years after the war. It used the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in part as a way of deflecting attention from its own crimes. It was slow to offer compensation, for example, to the Korean women it forced to serve as prostitutes for its soldiers. Successive prime ministers have paid their respects to the Yasukuni Shrine, which honors Japan’s war dead, including leaders who were convicted of war crimes.

On the other hand, there has been a long-lasting public debate over how to deal with the difficult parts of the past. Even in the 1950s, a trickle of books and articles came out, many of them by eyewitnesses and participants, which confirmed that Japanese soldiers had indeed committed atrocities. Meanwhile, a handful of historians wrote texts in which they insisted on dealing with all aspects of the war. While the nationalists have attacked such
writings, they have not been able to prevent them from appearing. Nor is it true, as the Chinese like to claim, that Japanese students have been kept ignorant of what went on in the war. (The attack also comes strangely from a country where whole pieces of the past, such as the Cultural Revolution, cannot be examined at all.) By the 1970s, for example, Japanese school texts were mentioning the Nanjing massacre and giving figures for those who were killed. For many Japanese, that decade marked a moment when their nation moved from being a victim to being a victimizer. In the 1980s, when nationalists tried to downplay Japanese aggression and the wartime atrocities, their attempt set off a furious reaction from liberals and a full-scale public debate. Scholars began to broaden their research into lesser-known episodes and aspects of the war. In December 1997, on the anniversary of the Nanjing massacre, a citizens’ parade, which included visiting Chinese and German scholars, walked through Tokyo behind a special lantern bearing the Chinese characters for “to commemorate.”