Germany’s far right continues to instrumentalize the memory of Dresden.

In 2005 I wrote an op-ed in the Globe and Mail about the 60th anniversary of the Dresden firebombing on February 13-15, 1945. I was critical of the neo-Nazi National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD). Its members had recently boycotted the official German day of remembrance marking the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. They claimed that Germans were locked in what one legislator called “servitude guilt”: the suffering of Germans during World War II - symbolized most potently by the thousands killed in two days of bombing in Dresden - was being downplayed in favour of memorializing the Holocaust.

The attempts by the NPD to ignore history and the crimes of the Third Reich were rightly and roundly criticized. But as we now mark the 75th anniversaries of Auschwitz’s liberation and Dresden’s burning, it is distressing to see how little has changed.

The NPD has been largely marginalized as a political force, not because their views have been rejected, but because those views have found new respectability with the emergence of the Alternative for Germany (AfD). A right-wing populist party that is now the third largest faction in the federal German parliament, the AfD avoids the anti-Semitic and fascist language of neo-Nazis. But make no mistake, their aims are essentially the same.

The AfD’s “Manifesto for Germany” echoes the populist ideas circulating throughout the continent. It rejects a united Europe in favour of a Europe of nation states, justifying this stance with the astoundingly ignorant claim that Europe’s history is a legacy of “peaceful co-existence of sovereign nation states.” It states bluntly that “Islam does not belong to Germany” and plays on fears of Islamization. It promotes German as the predominant culture (Leitkultur), leaving immigrants with the obligation “to adapt to [their] new host country, not the other way around.” The manifesto’s silence on the place of Jewish culture in Germany is deafening.

The party laments the “narrowing of the German culture of remembrance to the time of National Socialism,” calling instead for “a broader understanding of history, which also encompasses the positive, identity-establishing aspects of German history.” On the surface, that doesn’t sound so bad. Let Germany take pride in its poets, its composers, its cultural life before the horrors of the Third Reich. Other nations are allowed to celebrate their pasts, the reasoning goes - why can’t Germany enjoy the same privilege?

The fact is that Germany is able to celebrate its culture. My op-ed piece fifteen years ago warned that the far right’s promotion of German victimhood was an attempt to abdicate any responsibility to remember and atone for the crimes of the Third Reich. Some people were offended; the “Skidmore-Debatte” raged briefly in the German-Canadian press, with most columnists and letter writers arguing that I was belittling Germans and their suffering during the war.

Nothing could be further from the truth. The critics were unable to see that I was - and am - advocating that if Germans are going to take pride in anything, it should be in the way the country approaches and learns from history. One of German society’s greatest contributions to world culture since the Second World War is its deep and thoughtful - and yes, sometimes imperfect - reckoning with its past.

People outside of Germany benefit as well. Susan Neiman, in her recent book Learning from the Germans, makes the case that German Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung (reappraisal of the past) would be a welcome tonic in the American south where the memories of the racist Confederacy continue to be nurtured. As Canadians work to understand the inhumane treatment of indigenous peoples, we’d also do well to study the German example.

The German far right would have us believe that it is time to grieve for Dresden and ignore Auschwitz. That would be a mistake. Acknowledging wartime German pain is legitimate and proper, but only if it is doesn’t sidetrack the ongoing public remembrance of the country’s crimes. We can never forget that the victims of the Third Reich suffered precisely because it was the policy of the Third Reich to inflict such suffering.

Other Posts about Germany