"Despite all the turbulence I see no danger of the system breaking down"
Nowadays, anyone following the news is regularly confronted with reports on xenophobia, racism and antisemitism. 73 years after the end of the World War II, it is still important that people should take a (self-)critical look at German history. Kathrin Nolte spoke to Thomas Großbölting, Professor of Modern History at the Department of History at Münster University and a member the "Religion and Politics" Cluster of Excellence, about current public and political discussions, the culture of remembrance since 1945, and the importance for history studies of people who witnessed and experienced the Nazi regime.
Whether it is the recent long trial of members of the far right NSU group, the populist AfD party’s election campaign in Bavaria or the hostility aimed at footballer Mesut Özil after he posed for a photo with President Erdogan of Turkey: xenophobia, racism and antisemitism play a significant role in current discussions. What is your assessment of these developments?
Any assessment of current events varies, depending on which phase of history you choose to look at. In my view we can distinguish two opposing tendencies. Our current Berlin Republic is not the Weimar Republic of the interwar years – to repeat, in a slightly changed form, a prominent observation made in the 1950s in order to underline the stability of the Federal Republic. Any comparison with those interwar years shows clearly that democracy and political culture in Germany today rest on much stronger foundations, so I see no danger of the system breaking down here – despite all the turbulence in domestic politics as well as in foreign affairs. A majority of the population still values and upholds the foundations of our democracy. However – and this is the opposing assessment, which makes a comparison especially with the Bonn Republic – voices are becoming louder which either lament the inability of the political system to function properly or even – in the view of a very small but nonetheless voluble minority – use this as a reason to call on others to “drop out”. One of the reasons the Weimar Republic failed was that so few people in the middle ground defended it. It would be foolish if the parties and representatives of public life allowed themselves to be influenced by those at the extremes to tinker with our political system. In my view, this holds true for both Germany and Europe.
There is a growing call to end remembrance in our society. How has the culture of remembrance changed over the past decades?
Public discourse on the Nazis and an emphatic remembrance of the victims of the Holocaust and of persecution are now firmly established in the political culture of the Federal Republic. In the early years of the Federal Republic, this was not at all the case. And this strong orientation of remembrance towards the Nazis and, in particular, towards the persecution and extermination of Jews in Europe will not change – in spite of all the polemical attacks on this position. However, anyone today who works on the upkeep of memorials or is engaged in any work of a political/historical nature and, like me, teaches Nazi history, will have to be careful that they don’t revert to strongly generational stereotypes when talking about and explaining the past. Among students in particular, but also among schoolchildren, I often experience a very marked, considered awareness of how to handle this history in a productive, forward-looking way without immediately lapsing into compartmentalized ways of thinking, or using clichés or reverting to pathos. This makes the older generation – including myself – a bit smarter!
How important is the question of guilt?
Guilt is a difficult category which needs firstly to be dealt with in a legal sense, then metaphysically and perhaps theologically. Nonetheless, guilt plays a major role in the popular as well as the political approach to dealing with the past. The ideal case is that victims are indemnified, and perpetrators punished, in order for justice to be restored. This noble aim will always have to contend with the fact that both are only possible in an imperfect way. The question of guilt then erects barriers to any understanding of the past, especially when it is morally charged, thus enabling only a clichéd appropriation of the past to be made.
More and more survivors and witnesses from the Nazi period are no longer with us. What does this mean for history studies?
It is perhaps less dramatic for historians than it is for public remembrance. Many experts – for example the social psychologist Harald Welzer – fear that remembrance may cool off as more and more witnesses die. I’m not so sceptical. Contact with people who can talk about their experiences, for example of Nazi terror, certainly makes a deep impression – but there are still many other possibilities to come closer to, and deal with, the events of that time. In history studies themselves, there have been many attempts to keep records of memories, and thus conserve them, in order to be able to undertake work on them in the future too.