The War Dead Germany Struggles to Remember

[Ghazala]

Harry Mount in The Sunday Times today.....

Lying cold and alone: the war dead Germany struggles to remember

While Britain is preparing four years of events to mark the centenary of the First World War, there is near-silence in Germany. Why has the conflict faded from popular memory?

Recently Michael Morpurgo, the author of War Horse, said British schoolchildren should see the graves of Germans killed in the First World War. I thoroughly agree but if they do they wont find many German children, or their parents or grandparents, visiting those graves.

In the Neuer Garnisionsfriedhof cemetery in Berlin there lie 7,200 German soldiers killed in the First World War. The cemetery is well maintained the grass is neatly mown and the gravestones are clean but no one comes. Not a single flower is laid on any of the ranks of monuments.

For the hour I was there last week I had the place to myself as I read the briefest of epitaphs for some very brief lives: H Heussen *24.2.1897 +11.12.1916. A 19-year-old boy, wounded at the front, brought home to a Berlin hospital to die.

The First World War is Germanys forgotten war. While we embark on a four-year-long commemoration of the conflict that shaped the modern world, in Germany there is near-silence. There are a few official tributes planned but the sums being spent are minimal less than £4m in Germany against £50m each in Britain and France.

More striking than the financial difference, though, is the lack of German popular interest in the war. While our papers are crammed with information about the centenary, German newspapers rarely mention it. When I discussed the Neuer Garnisionsfriedhof cemetery with German friends in Berlin, they hadnt even heard of the place even though it takes up a vast area only 10 minutes bike ride from the city centre.

Its not that Germans are ashamed or embarrassed by the war; more that it has been wiped from popular memory by the all-encompassing shame of the conflict that followed. The Second World War changed anything that occurred before. Hitler obliterates everything; hes the cork in the bottle that seals off the past, says Thomas Kielinger, the London correspondent for German newspaper Die Welt for 16 years. Everything else pales in comparison.

In Britain, theres a seamless thread back to the past, which keeps the past alive. There is an unbroken tradition the Cenotaph ceremony and Remembrance Sunday are big events in Britain. In Germany, November 11 kicks off the carnival season. That shows how great the divergence is between the two countries.

Its striking too that the only public holiday shared by the whole nation (the others are determined by individualfederal states) is German Unity Day on October 3. The reunification of West and East Germany is a rare good-news story in a country with its fair share of bad-news stories.

The First World War also meant the end of the German monarchy. Military defeat brought the abdication of Wilhelm II, the Prussian king and German emperor. But there is no curiosity about the end of 400 years of Hohenzollern rule over Prussia either.

For much of the post-1945 period Germany wasnt really a proper country to be patriotic about. Reunification took place in 1990 and it wasnt until 1991 that Britain, France, America and Russia renounced the rights they had held over Germany since the end of the war. With little shared identity and a deeply divided history its hard to institute a collective commemoration of the First World War.

Theres another reason why the First World War has been amputated from German memory. Not only was it eclipsed by the Second World War; its thought that the first was the cause of the second. Hitler is often referred to as a Betriebsunfall an accident waiting to happen where hes seen as the inevitable result of a failed political system created by the First World War.

Its an explanation, not a justification for Hitler, says Peter Littger, a columnist for Der Spiegel magazine. I wouldnt say that Hitler was a Betriebsunfall . . . But there is a continuity we cannot overlook: elements of Hitlerism were deeply rooted in the mindset of German society before the First World War. Armageddon was already in the machine.

This attitude has produced an aversion to the past among many Germans. The aversion even extended to old buildings. After the Second World War the West German state granted money to householders to remove the ornate old plasterwork covering many homes. This facade-stripping called Verödung can still be seen in Berlin. Pre-war houses that survived the allied bombing are utterly plain on the outside; peep through their windows and you see the intricate plastered interiors that escaped the Verödung.

The idea in both Germanys after the Second World War was that you mustnt look back to build a future because the past did not have a future, says Littger, who has just co-edited a book, Common Destiny v Marriage of Convenience What Do Britons and Germans Want from Europe?.

Ever since 1945 the Germans have carried a double burden of guilt for both wars. The standard, widely shared view on the First World War was laid down by the German war historian Fritz Fischer. The Fischer thesis, in his 1961 book, Germanys Aims in the First World War, is that Germany was at fault for the war, having deliberately started it to become a world power.

Fischers thesis was pretty widely accepted then and now, says Professor Norman Stone, author of World War One: A Short History. It was pretty clear that the Germans did cause the First World War and wanted to set up a German Europe. The most the opposition to Fischer can say is that everyones to blame and theres an element of truth in it. But there was a particular element of lunacy in the German desire to take over Europe. The Germans are good at many things but theyre not very good at building empires.

Only now are there glimpses of an acceptable alternative view to the Fischer thesis. One of the few recent popular books about the First World War in Germany has been The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 by Cambridge professor Christopher Clark.

While not exonerating Germany, it argues that the Germans were not alone in their frantic, insecure imperialism. Across Europe, military and political leaders created a dense web of treaties and ultimatums that led inexorably to mobilisations and declarations of war.

For lots of people Clarks book was a great relief, says Littger. Theres still nothing more important than admitting and dealing with German responsibility for both wars. But now they could say, Thank God, Germany wasnt the only baddie.

That remains a fringe opinion, though. And as long as Germany is considered the double baddie of the 20th century, not many Germans will make their way to the Neuer Garnisionsfriedhof cemetery.

[trajan]

I can remember coming back on the train from Germany in the 1980's - a field trip with students - and leaving Koblenz, and the trip leader (slightly inebriated) giving generously when a collection box appeared at the door of our compartment, and he not quite understanding why he was given a small red plastic cross to place in his buttonhole... And so I explained... To say he was flumoxed at first is an understatement, having been bombed in Hull in WWI, but he did eventually calm down! We DO need to spread a greater awareness that whoever's 'fault' WWI (or WWII) may have been it did involve a hell of a lot of slaughter on both sides... And as far as I am aware Germany was affected so much more in terms of men who died as a proportion of the population... I can recall learning with some sense of shock in the 1970's from a then (German) girlfriend's mother how after 1918 there was only one male left on both the paternal and maternal side of the family - and none left on either side at all after 1945...

[Mark Hone]

While I agreed with much of what Michael Morpurgo is reported as saying at the conference, his claim that British schoolchildren don't visit German war graves is simply nonsense; Langemark Cemetery is part of the standard school trip 'circuit' of the Ypres Salient. There are also, of course, many German war graves in CWGC cemeteries.

It would be interesting to know what proportion of visitors to the Langemark site in a year are British schoolchildren. I suspect it would be pretty high.

[slick63]

It`s a thought provoking article and if I was being flippant I`d just think of the current German population as 'poor losers', but that would be too simple. The first half of the 20th century wasn`t very good for them, they lost two wars and some might say 'not very honourably'. It could also be said that they confuse militarism with patriotism, so by remembering those who took part they themselves are supportive of militarism which is of course nonsense.

Alternatively, Britain has been quite heavily involved militarily around the world in the last twenty years. The current UK military has been in the public eye and are generally held in high esteem. If Britain hadn`t had that involvement then very few people in the UK would give the military a second thought. Rudyard Kiplings 'Tommy' springs to mind.

Would the current level of interest in the centenary exist from both the UK media and government, if we were transported back to say the 1970's ?