Berlin. There is probably only one country in Europe that has no concept of “national pride”: Germany. Even a completely unexcited sense of national consciousness is taboo there; national German interests play no role in political discourse. Indeed, is there even such a thing as a specifically German culture, apart from the language? And what does it mean when politicians repeatedly implore society to “stick together”? Stick together for what? Against what? What still binds “those living in Germany”, as the phrase now goes in order to avoid the term “German people”?
And who seriously believes that the “new arrivals”, now numbering in the millions, could be expected to assume Germany’s historical guilt – especially migrants from cultures hostile to Jews?
The twelve years of National Socialism sever Germans from their earlier history. From the German Empire, for instance – a period marked by innovation, engineering achievement and economic success. Those years are now reduced to little more than one of the “precursors” of Germany’s later catastrophe: the Holocaust.
Pride in guilt
In one of his many speeches in search of meaning, German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier spoke of the “monstrosity of an unprecedented crime against humanity”. As monstrous as the mass murder of the Jews was, this well-intentioned superlative carries an uncomfortable – and in some quarters welcome – side effect: the millions of deaths under Stalin (an estimated 20 million) and Mao (an estimated 45 million) can be quietly set aside. In Germany, even raising such comparisons, despite the clear historical facts, immediately invites suspicion of attempting to relativise the uniqueness of German criminality.
The GDR, incidentally, had an existential interest in maintaining silence about atrocities committed elsewhere. Socialism and communism were not to be tarnished by the historical truth of mass murder committed in the course of creating the “new man”.
It also appears to have become a political habit to load Germany with responsibility for the crimes of others and then to expiate that guilt through financial and other forms of compensation. Worse still, Germans take pride in demonstrating how much guilt they bear and how admirably they make amends. This “pride in guilt” is no more appropriate than a triumphant acquittal of historical wrongdoing.
Colonial guilt without a colony?
“Pride in guilt” is perhaps the most fitting description of the bizarre appearance of the then Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock during a joint visit with the then Minister of State for Culture Claudia Roth of the Green Party on 20 December 2022 in Abuja, the capital of Nigeria, where they handed over 20 historical objects – the so-called “Benin Bronzes”, previously held in German museums – in order to address Germany’s “own colonial past”. Germany’s “own” colonial past?
Nigeria was never a German colony, but a British one. Nor did the returned artworks form part of the cultural identity of the “Nigerian people”, a state comprising more than three different ethnic groups. Their former owner was the royal house of Benin, once a brutal slave state, where the returned bronzes were immediately privatised by descendants rather than being made available to the “Nigerian people”. One cannot help but ask: who is advising our politicians?
Genocide in the German genes?
The thesis that there is a more or less direct line from the German “genocide of the Herero” to the mass murder of the Jews is likewise frequently applauded in Germany. It was the then German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas of the SPD who, in May 2021, bypassed the Bundestag and negotiated an agreement with the state of Namibia. “We”, that is to say the Germans, had committed “genocide” there during the brief colonial period and were now, through Mr Maas, “asking Namibia and the descendants of the victims for forgiveness”.
Namibia, however, has existed only since 1990; it comprises 16 ethnic groups, and 30 languages and dialects are spoken there. The punitive expedition of the German colonial army against the Herero took place as early as 1904 and was preceded by the murder of 130 German farmers in the same region.
The 1,400 men of the German Schutztruppe deployed at the time did not emerge victorious from the scattered engagements. The Herero knew the terrain of their former homeland far better than the Germans, who were weakened by disease and hunger, and made their way of their own accord into British-controlled Botswana.
The German director of Namibia’s national archives, Brigitte Lau, criticised the “Eurocentric” mindset underlying Maas’s genocide thesis: “To claim that the German colonists successfully almost exterminated the Herero people and ‘enslaved’ the survivors is to stylise them as superior and cold-blooded killing machines, […] as superhumans of Roman proportions.” It also reduces the Herero to helpless victims. Here, too, one encounters misplaced pride in guilt.
When military and civilian are declared one
One often gains the impression that the German national self-image has long followed the narratives of British propaganda dating back to before the First World War. Was not the much-cited “Prussian militarism” regarded as the root cause of Germany’s downfall? In other words, the thesis of a symbiosis between the people and the military in pursuit of the hegemonic claim “Germany, Germany above all”?
According to this historical understanding of “the Germans”, Germany at that time was represented not merely by its army but as a whole – so, at least, the British interpretation could be read, drawing on reflections by the military writer Carl von Clausewitz. This was total war, a people’s war, in which the distinction between combatants and civilians was erased, and in which the civilian population was therefore liable to reprisals.
In the Prussian self-understanding, however, war was waged for reasons of self-preservation, not for the acquisition of power. Unlike the colonial powers of the time, there was no question of Prussian “imperialism”. The British civil servant Baron Arthur Ponsonby described the distortions of British propaganda as early as 1928 in his book “Falsehood in Wartime”, referring to the First World War. He concluded that the German invasion of neutral Belgium was by no means the cause of the war with Germany, but rather Britain’s commitment to France. Germany could not, therefore, be held solely responsible, and the Treaty of Versailles was driven by a desire for revenge.
No sympathy for the co-responsible
In Germany, however, it is frowned upon to question sole German guilt – as though war were ever the work of only one party. When the then Federal President Joachim Gauck visited the French-maintained memorial at Hartmannswillerkopf in Alsace in 2014, where nearly 30,000 German and French soldiers died, he emphasised his respect for the “suffering of those who were fought by us”. Did “our” soldiers, then, deserve no respect?
On 13 February 1945, exactly 81 years ago, British and American bombers began their air raid on Dresden, dropping 400,000 incendiary bombs and 4,500 high-explosive bombs and reducing the “Florence of the Elbe” to rubble and ashes in a firestorm that reached temperatures of several hundred degrees in places. Not only many of Dresden’s 630,000 inhabitants, but also large numbers of defenceless refugees from Silesia perished during the two-day bombardment – possibly far more than the 25,000 deaths cited today.
Grotesquely, Germany has argued for years over the number of dead, which is revised downwards year after year, as though the point were to minimise the British campaign under Bomber Command chief Arthur Harris. A historians’ commission declared in 2008, with disarming brevity, that Dresden had been destroyed “as a consequence of a war initiated by Germany” – as though the mass killing of a country’s civilian population could be derived from its war guilt.
Year after year, Dresden wrestles with the “correct” interpretation of what happened. From the left, there have been calls to abolish the traditional commemoration of mourning, on the grounds that it has always served the purpose of “blotting out Dresden’s history as a site of National Socialist crimes, mass forced labour and pervasive persecution”. The city authorities have likewise repeatedly sought to shift attention away from the dead of Dresden and towards the victims of the Nazis. A group supported by trade unionists and politicians from the SPD and the Left has explicitly declared its intention to rid Dresdeners of their “myth of victimhood”.
So were there, in truth, no German victims because the Germans somehow had it coming? That is profoundly disturbing. British incendiary and high-explosive bombs destroyed almost every German city with more than 50,000 inhabitants. Even in the final months of the war, between January and May 1945, when Germany’s defeat was already certain, more than 1,000 civilians were killed each day on average – among them women, children and the elderly.
Did Churchill not declare as early as 1940 that Germany would be turned into a desert by an “absolutely devastating, exterminating attack … upon the Nazi homeland”? Not upon the war machine, but upon the civilian population, whose morale was to be broken? From the summer of 1944 onwards, the bombing raids no longer served the military defeat of Germany – air superiority had long been secured. Now the aim was punishment and intimidation of the German population with a view to the post-war order. Operation “Thunderclap” was intended to produce a prolonged collective shock, as a lesson of lasting value.
Self-imposed penance to this day
The ongoing debate in Germany over the destruction of Dresden is still marked by a striking lack of compassion for German civilian victims, as though the mass killing of a country’s civilian population could be justified by its war guilt. Try advancing such an argument today in relation to the war in Gaza. Across the political spectrum, it is insisted that the more or less civilian population must not be held responsible for its terrorist Hamas leadership and must be spared the collateral damage of war.
In Germany, however, a lack of sympathy for German victims is commonplace – after all, they were all somehow Nazis.
And it has worked: even today, many Germans regard the Allied campaign of destruction as a just punishment and refrain from gestures of mourning. It is, to be sure, welcome that Germany does not parade national pride, unlike other countries where the darker chapters of history are glossed over. Yet this pride in guilt – this attachment to the role of scapegoat – invites distrust. Does the country despise itself and its inhabitants? And if so, into what, exactly, does it seek to integrate those who come to us from other cultures?