The other September 11th...
The first time I heard the term, "The other September 11th" was in the context of the 35th anniversary of the 1970 coup against Salvador Allende in Chile. While that event was unhappy and did result in a political throwback and, over time, in many deaths, it didn't quite seem appropriate. If Chileans see it differently, I will gladly concede that point, however. When I recently visited the forest cemetery in Darmstadt and saw the mass grave for the 12,000 men, women and children killed in the British bombing raid on the city on the night of September 11th, 1944, I thought, "Perhaps this was the other September 11th".
While the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz brought the usual series of speeches and wreath-layings, none of it seemed original or noteworthy enough to move to me to make an entry here. But visiting Darmstadt and seeing the mass grave and the ruins of the bombed out church impressed me. It was my solemn intention when starting this project that I would not participate in memorial culture as much as observe and document it. But I find again and again that the line between the two is blurred. Some sites have an unavoidable impact. The impact here was not only the size and multi-layered nature of the memorial (the dead from the allied bombing, combat deaths in World War Two and then World War One are buried there in ascending, concentric circles), but also the American connection. While British bombers had done this, Americans were involved in other such attacks in Germany and, especially, Japan. The only relative of my family who fought in Europe, as far as I am aware, was a tailgunner on a heavy bomber (and was killed in action).
Whenever Germans talk in public about the allied terror bombing of their cities and mass deaths of civilians that resulted, they are always careful to put it in the context of the Nazi war of aggression. The Darmstadt mayor's speech at the 61st anniversary of the bombing can serve as an example. (You can read the speech in the original German at this link.) First, he recounted the horror of that night: 234 British planes dropped 230 high explosive bombs and 280,000 incindiaries on the city within a 30-minute period, killing 12,000 people and rendering 70,000 more homeless. But then he went on, saying, "And yet, let me make one thing clear: WE MAY NOT CONFUSE CAUSE AND EFFECT. It was Hitler's war of aggression that came first, the crimes of Naziism and the Holocaust of European Jews. Churchill didn't start the war, but the Germans". He then went on comment on how the recent discussion in Germany about the allied bombings had taken a wrong turn in that it often implied that the Germans had been the primary victims of the war. He refused to see the horror of his city's September 11th - and he called it that - without the wider context of Germany's war on mankind, especially Germany's early and widespread use of terror bombing in Poland.
Now, we never get that kind of self-deprication from American politicians (nor do I recall one ever making an informed statement on a current historical controversy). That kind of self-deprication may not even be appropriate considering the circumstances of the war. There are too many factors to easily concede guilt for the slaughter of civilians, but also too many factors to avoid the uneasy feeling that something had gone wrong: While we teach our kids that two wrongs don't make a right and often chide them for bickering over "who started it", that is the kind of argumentation we use to justify our strategy of area-bombing enemy cities. On the other hand, the death rate of western-allied soldiers was rising as the war went on; it is only with hindsight that we can see that the war was decided in 1944 and that such bombings might not have been necessary; we cannot recreate and truly apprepreciate the fear and the hatred of that time - but we get a sense of it seeing how our generation has also let itself be led to excesses by fear and loss.
Nonetheless, I have the feeling that something has been missing from our national memory in this context. Then, the day before yesterday, in an article in the Süddeutsche Zeitung by Michael Frank, I think I saw it (21 February, 2006 issue).
Frank was writing about the trial of David Irving, British pseudo-historian who was on trial (he has since been sentenced) in Austria for denying the Holocaust. Commenting on Austrian public discussion of the trial, the author noted, "How shallowly the sadness over Nazi crimes has taken hold in the disposition of the nation...." ("Wie wenig tief die Trauer über die NS-Verbrechen ins Gemüt der Nation vorgedrungen ist, lässt sich an dieser Debatte ablesen.") I think he is saying that Austria can still not bring itself to mourn the Holocaust. It had admitted no small degree of guilt, but it did not mourn for the victims.
Isn't that what is missing when we Americans look back on our misdeeds, be they understandable, commited in the heat of a hateful war we did not start such as 1941-1945, be they clearly wrong, such as the genocidal policy against the Amerindians or slavery or whatever the case may be? We can take on a note of solemnity, we can regret, we can consider reparations - but we do not collectively mourn.
It has been said of Germany that it never even mourned its own losses in the Second World War and certainly never mourned the Holocaust. The humble proportions of World War Two memorials compared to those from World War One lend some credence to that claim (See this comparison from Stuttgart for a stark contrast). Austria has tried to portray itself as a victim and still does not mourn. While I think Germany has gone to extraordinary lengths and made astounding strides in its culture of memory, the assessment that it still does not mourn is probably accurate. Buried in guilt, for several decades they focused on reconstruction and now, too much time has elapsed.
If the descendents of the men who slaughtered millions cannot mourn, perhaps it is asking too much to ask that Americans and British mourn for the thousands of men, women and children of Darmstadt and Osaka and Dresden and Hamburg and Nagasaki. It is probably an anthropological constant that prevents people from truly mourning the losses of their enemies or distant peoples.
I am forced to recall the 1995 controversy surrounding the exhibition of the Enola Gay at the Smithsonian. It showed that we too are quite capable of fighting over just this very history. One side wanted to see the anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima celebrated as a technological wonder, pretty much devoid of context, and it won out, but not without a fight. While that fight was not directly about collective mourning, the result did serve to further delay or prevent it.
Postscript
I recently heard a paper given by Dr. Gary Anderson of Zeppelin University on American remembrance of the Second World War. He noted how, over the past 20 years especially, American politicians and popular culture have tried to recapture the World War Two era to some extent. The wave of new movies since Saving Private Ryan is one example. Other examples extend from small things like President Bush's dog (looks just like FDR's) to important political symbolism like the new World War Two Memorial in Washington.
The visit in Darmstadt has made me wonder whether the connection doesn't extend further. By recreating the mood of that time, the so-called "Good War", perhaps we allow ourselves to tap into the "Bad War" as well. We don't gloat over the destruction of Fallujah; our public expression of our excesses has certainly changed. But war is war and I don't think it is going too far to point out the possible reprecussions of such politcal attempts to conjur up that past - the illusion of national unity (one of the expressed purposes of the new National World War Two memorial in Washington, the optimism of victory, the moral clarity of fighting an evil foe for the good of all mankind. Moral clarity can be a blank check; it implies the assumption that whatever we do is right - even if it is wrong.
mhatlie - Wed Feb 22, 23:52 Topic: German memorial culture
