Last German veteran of World War One passes away...
Spiegel Online has just reported that the last German veteran of World War One has died, Dr. Erich Kästner, who was Germany's second oldest man at 107. It went almost unnoticed and would have been totally overlooked if someone had not by chance noticed the obituary and updated the Wikipedia article, unleashing some discussions on internet forums for military buffs.
The story by Hans Michael Kloth aptly contrasts memorial culture in Germany, where the First World War is a side show at best and something like this can be overlooked, with France, where, when the second-to-last veteran died a few days ago at 110 and it made front page news. For Germany, everything is overshadowed by the monolithic presense of the Second World War and the Holocaust.
This gives pause to consider - again - the relevance of veterans and oral history for the history of war. There is very little chance that Dr. Kästner took anything of great relevance to his grave that he was on the verge of telling us. The days of oral history uncovering new and interesting information for World War Two are essentially over, and World War One is that much further gone. For historians, the world wars are both book and film and archive and memory wars. Eye witnesses have very little left to tell. But biological survival of such events is always important in terms of the impression that veterans and their stories can make on the next generations, something one might call the "grandpa told me" factor. The emotive impact of one more war has now slipped away. Given the simple biological and psychological limits of human beings, and in this concrete case going on how little he actually told his family about the war (the time he was in a parade for the Kaiser seems to have been his main story), it seems clear that these events die their biological death years, if not decades, before the last veteran goes to his grave. Thus, I cannot really agree with the final words of the Spiegel article, that we have "missed a chance, forever" to possibly learn something. He had decades to say whatever it was he was going to say.
The story by Hans Michael Kloth aptly contrasts memorial culture in Germany, where the First World War is a side show at best and something like this can be overlooked, with France, where, when the second-to-last veteran died a few days ago at 110 and it made front page news. For Germany, everything is overshadowed by the monolithic presense of the Second World War and the Holocaust.
This gives pause to consider - again - the relevance of veterans and oral history for the history of war. There is very little chance that Dr. Kästner took anything of great relevance to his grave that he was on the verge of telling us. The days of oral history uncovering new and interesting information for World War Two are essentially over, and World War One is that much further gone. For historians, the world wars are both book and film and archive and memory wars. Eye witnesses have very little left to tell. But biological survival of such events is always important in terms of the impression that veterans and their stories can make on the next generations, something one might call the "grandpa told me" factor. The emotive impact of one more war has now slipped away. Given the simple biological and psychological limits of human beings, and in this concrete case going on how little he actually told his family about the war (the time he was in a parade for the Kaiser seems to have been his main story), it seems clear that these events die their biological death years, if not decades, before the last veteran goes to his grave. Thus, I cannot really agree with the final words of the Spiegel article, that we have "missed a chance, forever" to possibly learn something. He had decades to say whatever it was he was going to say.
mhatlie - Thu Jan 24, 16:39 Topic: German memorial culture
eye-witnesses
As someone who has listened to the recollections of those who, as children, watched the Bavarian royal family ride through Munich in a stately horse-drawn carriage or interviewed an elderly Berlin woman who had seen the Kaiser, Hindenburg, and Hitler, heard a speech by Goebbels live and once, as a teen, had slipped into a preformance by Josephine Baker, I can testify to a feeling of privilege at having had the chance to speak to these people before they passed away. Though the memories of a single individual may or may not be significant in themeselves, if we believe that every death is like a library of experience gone up in flames, then we cannot help but regret what has been lost.
Lastly, I doubt that the so-called "seminal catastrophe of the 20th century," as the First World War has been called, has entirely lost its emotional impact on living generations. If that were true, then movies (such as the recent "Merry Christmas") or books (like the award-winning WW1 trilogy by Pat Barker) would not have been made. The echoes of that war continue to reverberate and its role in shaping both our political and our memory cultures remains important, long after the last soldier is gone.