Like individuals, nations struggle first and foremost against themselves; the origin of their tragedies has less to do with what they suffer than with what they provoke; and courage, in an existence as in History, is not to overcome one’s vices once, they never disappear, but to combat them over the course of their repetition.
Some Germans are fighting against the unfortunately democratic rise of the AfD, a neo-Nazi party. These convulsions of life versus death are all the more striking in a country responsible for the Second World War and a barbarity without equal in Europe. How can we explain the resurgence of an ideology from which Germany was certainly guilty, but also bloodless? To understand him, we must turn to his memory.
READ ALSO In Germany, the AfD is giving “Silicon Saxony” a cold sweat Harald Jähner publishes a book of astonishing intelligence: The Age of Wolves, Germany and the Germans (1945-1955) published by Actes Sud. A brief history of his country, from 1945 to 1955, where he is less interested in the decisions of the victors (France, Great Britain, United States, USSR) and the vanquished than in the reaction of the population.
Unimaginable barbarity
Occupied by the Allies, destroyed, depopulated of its men and boys (dead, prisoners, returning from the front), excluded from the civilized nations to which it was certain to belong, Germany plunged into a state of unimaginable barbarism. The black market dominated the economy to such an extent that it surpassed the power of the State and, moreover, this State was only in name.
In the same column
Survival was the rule, theft the norm, including in bourgeois families where children were trained to loot the displays and empty the coal from the train carriages. Legality, order, discipline, obedience, stiffness, dignity, Germany’s reputation for a century and a half, were no longer valid on a daily basis. Poverty had smoothed social gaps so extravagantly that the right to property itself was no longer considered sacred; there were, so to speak, no longer, or almost, poor people or rich people.
READ ALSO “The Nazis outside”: massive mobilization in Germany against the far rightNo one escaped destitution, not even politicians to the extent that public power was held by the Allies. Berlin realized, in 1945 and despite itself, the dream of Moscow: exemplary egalitarianism, minus prosperity and security. Even though they were aware that they were suffering a paltry punishment compared to the deluge of fire they had inflicted on the world, some Germans were jealous of the camp survivors, who were naturally entitled to more housing, more food and more money. than them.
The Holocaust does not exist in the memory of Germans of the time
The Holocaust was virtually non-existent in individual and collective memory. Harald Jähner writes it everywhere: “The Shoah played such a minor role in the consciousness of most post-war Germans that one might be shocked. […] very few people spoke of it publicly, like the philosopher Karl Jaspers. Jews were not even explicitly mentioned in the confessions of guilt of the Protestant and Catholic Churches, which were the subject of long discussions. »
Germany admitted its fate while refusing its cause: it wanted to pay for the war, not for the murder of six million Jews. The human mind is so made that it believes in the performative power of discretion: keeping silent about a crime leads one to believe that it will eventually disappear. This Hitler, alas and whatever may be said, did not arrive at the chancellery through the operation of the Holy Spirit, nor even through a coup d’état. The Allies had not forgotten him.
Neither the murder of millions of Jews nor the crimes of the Wehrmacht had attenuated, for the majority, the feeling that order and correction were at home, in Germany.Harald Jähner
Even more remarkable, let’s not say delusional, the Germans were convinced they had discovered savagery. The explosion of crime occupied the press and obsessed the newspapers. How could Kant’s country sink into immorality? The question is in itself an insolence, as Harald Jähner very intelligently points out:
“The Germans, with their war crimes and genocide, had long since become criminals. […] Neither the murder of millions of Jews nor the crimes of the Wehrmacht had attenuated, for the majority, the feeling that order and correction were at home, in Germany. They therefore watched with all the more fear as crime became a norm in these times of distress. »
Stability does not exist
This “black market” generation would transform, in the 1950s, into an exemplary people of civility, whose “petty bourgeois spirit” would be mocked for a long time. Failing to have carried out a convincing denazification, Germany will rush into the European project, will become the symbol of a new world by tearing down the Wall, will build an exemplary social and liberal democracy, will offer Berlin to European youth so that she comes to love herself, to dance, in freedom.
READ ALSO Germany: the AfD’s response to criticism from Marine Le PenNature is such that stability does not exist: regression or progression are the only movements of humanity. Democracy, too, must constantly demonstrate its right to exist. History does not save anyone on principle. Not even Germany, once again challenged.
Born in 1990, Arthur Chevallier is a historian and editor at Passés Composites. He was curator of the exhibition “Napoléon” (2021), produced by the Grand Palais and La Villette. He has written several books devoted to the political and cultural posterity of Napoleon Bonaparte and the First Empire, “Napoleon told by those who knew him” (Grasset, 2014), “Napoleon without Bonaparte” (Cerf, 2018), “Napoleon and Bonapartism” (Que sais-je?, 2021), or even “Les Femmes de Napoléon” (Grasset, 2022).
2024-02-13 18:11:20
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