1.1 - Diner, Dan - European Counterimages. Problems of Periodization and Historical Memory (en)

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European Counterimages: Problems Of Periodization and HistoricalMemory

European Counterimages: Problems Of Periodization and Historical Memory

by Dan Diner

Source:

PRAXIS International (PRAXIS International), issue: 1+2 / 1990, pages: 14-23, on www.ceeol.com.
http://www.ceeol.com/http://www.ceeol.com/http://www.dibido.eu/bookdetails.aspx?bookID=9e4d6499-94a7-47c0-b6d3-48244233281fhttp://www.ceeol.com/


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EUROPEAN COUNTERIMAGES:PROBLEMS OF PE ATIONHISTORICAL MEMORYDan Diner

The events we are watching unfold in the heart ofEurope over the last few months,weeks and days - a chain of events evolving within ever smaller spans of time- invite the interested contemporary observer, fascinated and at the same timefilled with a sense of apprehension, to conclude that he or she is witnessing aprofound historical change. And there is no doubt that something has indeed cometo an end: though you can certainly debate just what that something is.Attempts to grasp this dynamism of change are beset by an additional andcomplicating factor: namely that such a diagnostic enterprise tries to place eventsin a historical framework in order to explore the locus of the present against thebackdrop of the past. The diagnosis of the current moment dons a historiographicalcostume, so to speak. It is thus no surprise when the outcroppings of such "views"include presumptuous notions claiming that the "end of history" is upon us,accompanied by a triumphant gesture alleging the victory of one form of societyand polity over another.Last summer, in a widely discussed article, the American Francis Fukuyamaproclaimed the final victory ofwestern liberalism over its totalitarian alternativesin this century: namely fascism and communism. The open society, it seems, hasfinally defeated its enemies - history appears to be approaching fulfillment.As true as this apodictic, utterly certain realization of victory ofwestern valuesover their totalitarian alternatives may appear - the associated and higWy questionable formula about the supposed "end of history" should give us pause for thought.Paradoxically, that notion reminds us of previous totalitarian temptations in history,since the proclamation of history's end is accompanied by a further claim: thatan end has come to history's interpretation as a conditioning factor for furtherhistorical movement. Thus, this formula of the "end of history" prompts thesuspicion that a status quo is being turned here into something fixed and eternal- a historical static state.However, any such premonition and announcement of eternity is just as millenialin mood as those other programmatic interpretations of history that were orientedtoward' 'diesseitige Jenseitigkeiten" , secular and highly imperfect realizations ofan ideal world beyond, and whose collapse is now taking place before our veryeyes. Proclamation of history's imminent end is, I would argue, just as teleologicaland susceptible to the lure of totalistic thinking as those programmatic interpretationsin the past that viewed their present as the ' 'highest" or "fina l stage" in humanprehistory, accompanied by the myth of the "ultimate battle." What separatesthese views, pitching one against the other, is only their underlying degree ofPraxis International 10:1/2 April & July 1990 0260-8448 $2.00


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Praxis International 15material saturation and affluence - a historiosophy of the haves, or that of thehave-nots.

In these past weeks and days of the "Volkerfriihling" in what is Central Europe(culturally) and in Eastern Europe (politically) - days in which that old continent'scenter has been swept by stormy changes and aspires to reemerge as the focusand pacemaker ofworld events - other voices have also been raised. Giinter Gaus,an intellectual political thinker and journalist, one who perceived sooner than mostthe possible reemergence of the German question in Europe, has been talkingsimultaneously with Fukuyama, but in antithetical contrast, about the phoenixlike return ofhistory. In Gaus' s view, history had been buried for 40 years, andinitially in a somewhat hesitant fashion, then more and more agitated - that historyhas burst forth to rush once again into its old river bed in Europe. Surprisingly,both Fukuyama and Gaus are looking at precisely the same events, the samephenomena. However, they arrive at diametrically opposed interpretations. Forthe one, history has outlived itself, is over - for the other, it has just returned.What Fukuyama (the American) and Gaus (the German and European) havepresented here are opposed interpretations of history based on the medley andjumbled character of the events which prompts two central questions: namely, theproblem of the subject of history and secondly, the recurrent issue in historiography

of the periodization of the past. It is unnecessary to point out that these two aspectsare interlocked. Both the historical-philosophical presumption about the end ofhistory as well as a somewhat less pretentious notion of postulating a "secular"break (a "secular" break in the original meaning of the word) in history andemploying a metaphor of the "end of the century" are part and parcel of thiscomplex nexus.As I see it, what is involved here is an attempt to systematize our century alongtwo interlocking axes of interpretation: the axis of the confrontation of values,expressed by the metaphor of universal civil war (Weltburgerkrieg), and the axis

of hegemonial confrontation, continental in scope, mostly between nation-states.The nature of the subject of and in history - is easily answered by both Gausand Fukuyama. Their writings do not require any deep-hermeneutic analysis toyield up full meaning - their concepts are evident and available. For the American,standing firmly within the Anglo-Saxon tradition of civilization, those are quiteclearly societal values, whose most triumphant song is once more being chantedin a world where everything has seemingly turned western: freedom and democracy,pluralism, property and market economy. And the victorious truth of that cloyingprosperity cannot, in its dazzling insistence, be denied. Giinter Gaus, who is byno means at odds with those values, is of course concerned about another subjectof history: the reappearance on the stage of actors long forgotten - Volk, Nationand Minoritiit, as he put it.A fundamental difference surfaces here: for America, which Hegel alreadycharacterized as a "bourgeois society without a state" , all poli tical struggle wasbasically a struggle over values. Its nature in extreme was that of civil war. Inmarked contrast, something else underlay the concept of nation in the Europeansense - no matter how different its manifestation may be: namely the totality ofethnos. For America, every war it has fought to date has been a war for the sake

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16 Praxis Internationalthis century in Europe in order "to make the world safe for democracy" and embarkupon a "crusade for freedom". Firmly anchored in this tradition, Fukuyamaunderstandably can happily proclaim the end of the universal civil war in the wakeof the collapse of the value-adversary - of liberty over equality.The secular metaphor of the universal civil war is not new. It was given a literaryembodiment by Emst Junger in his story "On the Marble Cliffs" (1939). CarlSchmitt, in trying to discern the emerging profile of our century, raised the notionto the basis of a new world order back in 1945 at the very beginning of the newera, polarized along a scale of values after the supposed end of the territoriallybased system of European nation-states. Today, after even the common publicis reclaiming Minerva's owl, supposedly finally aloft in history's gloaming, onecan rightfully diagnose his analysis as accurate in its essentials.The universal civil war of the 20th century, whose apparent end the historianmight now rat ify, was undoubtedly the dominant feature of our time. Proceedingfrom the October Revolution, whose universal promise of genuine equality standsdegenerated today before the [mal tribunal of history in the form ofpublished opinionand a world public, that civil war was extended, elongated on the internationalstage into the contrast between bolshevism and antibolshevism of differing andeven historically opposed types: namely liberalism and fascism. It then continued onafter 1945 in the form of the ColdWar, whose armamental apotheosis materialized

in the nuclear logic of deterrence.For more than a generation, this Manichean logic shaped the thinking and feelingof contemporaries. Virtually all conflicts were subsumed under this logic, evenif they were in essence of a quite different nature. The bipolar, nuclear oppositionbecame something like amechanism to reduce the complexityofa highly complicatedplural-state world system based on the principle of national self-determination.East and West kept down the multiplicity of conflicts and the principal actors toa low number, putting a historical brake on that key triad: Volk, nation, minority.If I am not completely mistaken, their time has come again - a hint that aperiodization of this century now drawing to a close is not fully subsumed underthe terms of the conflict of values. There are other and older conflicts in this century- in particular, the struggle for hegemony on the continent, that second axis alongwhich history can be interpreted. Their catastrophic intermingling can be foundin the central event of the century, the Second WarId War. Proceeding out from

Europe's frontier country (Grenzland in the political-cultural sense) of this century,from Germany, it spread to engulf theworld, and came to an end again on Germansoil. Germany - conceptualized as the Grenzland of the conflict of the century,in that the civil war was waged there domestically during Weimar by proxy forall of Europe, and after the victory of reactionism and fascism there, reached itshighpoint in the war against the Soviet Union.In order to join forces as Allies, both the liberal West and the bolshevik Easthad to reach and accept a self-limitation on their respective ideological load. Longbefore that point, the world-revolutionary impetus of the bolsheviks had come toa standstill, as had the antibolshevik interventionism of the west. Yet in the face

ofNazi German expansionism from its self-proclaimed "center" - antiliberal andhegemonial toward the west, anticommunist and racist toward the east - East andWest returned to traditions of pure power politics based on military logic and situated


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Praxis International 17beyond the perimeter of value and society. Liberty and equality joined hands againstthe Nazi myth of the biological inequality of mankind, which rejected both socialequality and social freedom - united now as Anglo-Saxons and Russians againstthe traditional (as perceived) Prussian-German enemy. And although this traditionalperspective of the Old Europe of the great powers - as though in a return to thetraditional constellation of the First World War - was not in keeping with theracial nature of the National Socialism, it nonetheless prepared the way for itsmilitary defeat.

Thus, this war was two things simultaneously: a European war for hegemony,whose axis was strung along the lines of confrontation between old contrasts anddifferences, and a universal civil war over values. In that struggle, the liberal Westand the bolshevik East momentarily set aside their antagonism in values in orderto confront the presumptuous challenge of a non-societal, biological world order,led by the Prussian-German nation-state. The fact that the old conflict over valuesbetween liberty and equality renewed itself once again after 1945 in terms ofblock power politics and then extended its stage to encompass the entire globein correspondingly variant metamorphoses, points once again to its secular durability. This process extended all the way to the creation of two German states,interpretable as the concentrated territorialization of that civil war which, ascommunisnl against anticommunism, had originated in Weimar on German soil.With the sudden decay and collapse of the contrast in terms of a universal civilwar between bolshevism and antibolshevism, the ColdWar and nuclear bipolarity,the universal, value-oriented interpretational variant of the history of the 20th centuryalso appears to have come to an end with the now-touted metaphor of the "endof history" . From the forgotten depths,.voices nlany thought had long since beenforgotten can be heard once again: Volk, Nation, Minoritiit.Perhaps the most suitable example illustrative of the choreography of the currenttidal change, the supplanting of an antagonism of values by the national interpretation of history anl0ng the peoples that have risen to a new political self-consciousnessin political eastern Europe and cultural central Europe, is a renewed debate thathas been forcibly reopened: namely the debate on the impact and historicalsignificance of the Hitler-Stalin pact of August 1939. That pact appears to havethe meaning of a kind of negative birth certificate for the consciousness of a newera to be marked by a German bonus and a Soviet/Russian malus.It was noted intelligently that Polish historians present at a recent internationalconference in Berlin to mark the outbreak of the Second World War had shownfar more interest in August 23, 1939 than in the following September 1st. It nlaybe a conlffionplace for the historian that he or she is more intrigued by what ishidden than what is open and evident - the content and nleaning of the supplementarysecret protocol being of greater interest than the attack by the Wehrmacht againstPoland and the military beginning of the war itself. It may also be that the stirring,indeed churning events in July and August of this year in Poland and the Balticstates contributed their share to making the past relevant to current events - yes,even as a political instrument.

Yet behind the enhanced significance in 1989 of August 23, 1939, greater thanthat September 1st, what becolnes evident in the collective consciousness of


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18 Praxis Internationalinterpretation based on conflict of value systems to an axis bound up with nationalinterpretation and identity.It is not actual history which relevant, but rather the significance of the historicalmetaphor for the past's future. While the complex of associations linked withSeptember 1st has a direct connection with Hitler's war in eastern Europe, the

23rd of August for Poles (and not just for Poles) is associated almost exclusivelywith Stalin and the Soviet Union. Most certainly: The imperialist partnership ofthese two dictatorships in the carving out of spheres of interest in "Middle Europe"(' 'Zwischeneuropa' '), a term being banded about once again today, providedmaterial for a great deal of comparative historical theory-building in the past. Yetits relevant associative meaning today does not lie in the making of analogies withtotalitarianism .. Rather, the current relevance of the Hitler-Stalin pact functionsto enhance and underscore that shift on the double-axis of historical interpretationin our century: from a confrontation over values to one of traditional national rivalry.In so doing, National Socialism is drained of its core - racialism and genocidalLebensraum ideology - and reduced to a mere variant of continental nationalisthegemonism.The traditional national Russian-Polish antagonism, masked by now as a conflictover values (communism vs. liberalism), emerges more openly into evidence and,paradoxically, determines Polish consciousness far more than the National Socialist,

biologically motivated policy of annihilation. To put it succinctly: in the collectivePolish consciousness, Katyn is increasingly looming more significant, more salientthan Auschwitz.Thus, the constant reference made to the Hitler-Stalin pact as a kind of negativebirth certificate, a historical frame of reference for a new "Mittel-" and "Zwischeneuropa, " extends far beyond its immediate significance. Rather, it acts as a kind ofintroduction ushering in an era of historical reinterpretation in Europe - away fromvalue conflicts to those between national collectives. The fact that the Russian-Polishantagonism lends itself as such an introduction to this new epoch is compelling:here more than elsewhere, the national element interlocks with social and worldrevolutionary dimensions, running like a red thread through historical reality'sinterlinkages.The dualism of the motives in conflict-national and/or societal terms are deeplyrooted: Was, for instance, the incursion by Pilsudski into the Ukraine during the1919-1920 war and his march all the way to Kiev the expression of Polish expansionism in Jagellonian colors - or a manifestation of western interventionism in

the Russian civil war? Was the counteroffensive by Tuchachevski and his marchonWarsaw part of a world-revolutionary strategy in a continental framework, aimedat least at Getmany and Berlin - or the fITst Great Russian mobilization, the defenseof holy Mother Russia, which inspired Czarist officers to take up arms, an anticipatory prelude to the Great Patriotic War? And this quite aside from the internalSoviet struggle between the primacy of the civil war - the fight against Wrangelthat Budjonnyj and Stalin had to wage in the south, and the march ofTuchachevski,more externally oriented, which led to his conflict with Stalin as political commissaron the southern front?You can take that perspective of interpretation of the Hitler-Stalin pact in termsof national history even further in looking at the more distant past: German-Russian


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Praxis International 19cooperation in the 1920s, directed against Versailles, but especially against Poland- Rapallo 1922, the 1926 Berlin treaty, extending all the way down to August23, 1939.

This joining together of the double axes of the 20th century has further ramifications specifically in regard to the Polish dimension. Leaving aside September 17,1939, the day when Polish territories were lost to the Soviet Union by militaryoccupation of the eastern mixed ethnic area, the confrontation continues along theline of the traditional, the national axis: the decision of the Polish Home Armyin August 1944 to take up arms against the German occupation forces was directedmilitarily against the Nazis; politically, however, it was aimed at Poland's traditionaladversary - Russia (and thus the Soviet Union).Stalin's Machiavellian reserve in the form of the wait-and-see stand adoptedby the Soviet forces in connection with the suppression of the Polish uprising inWarsaw in 1944 by the Nazis reveals that uprising in a new light: namely as acontinuation of the Polish-Russian antagonism, an antagonism likewise markedin Polish national historical consciousness by the date August 1920. The civil-warlike struggle in Poland at the end of the war between communist authorities andremnants of the Polish Home Army, which lasted down to the late 1940s, wasan extension of this confrontation. This period witnessed a continuation not onlyof the mutual aversion between Poles a n ~ Russians, but also experienced the impactof a historically significant amalgam running through the national and civil-war-likeantagonism: namely, elements of that traditional Central European antisemitismwhich identified Jews, almost in an organic way, with bolshevism. This wascomplicated and enforced in early postwar Poland by the perpetuation from theprewar period of the pesky problem of minorities.These components blended together then into the most fateful of all postwarPolish pogroms, the 1946 Kielce pogrom, an event of key importance for the laterestablishment of Israel - a polity which, though not in Europe, is of Europe.

Let us continue to explore a bit further the central leitmotif here: namely theattempt to interpret the history of European consciousness, utilizing the juxtapositionof the significance in 1989 of August 23 vs. September 1, 1939, in terms of theaxes of traditional confrontation for hegemonial control on the one hand, anduniversal or European civil war in connection with the mass extermination onthe other.The memory filters operative in the current collective consciousness of the peoplesof Zwischeneuropa tend, in significant fashion, to interpret their fate - shapedby Soviet domination and communist oppression - exclusively in national terms.In their consciousness, a bridge is built, shortcircuiting historical time and extendingfrom the Hitler-Stalin pact, or May 1940 across to the consequences of the SecondWorld War. One of those consequences was, of course, the return once again ofRussian dominance: though now for other reasons, as indicated by the Hitler-Stalinpact, but as a result of the antibolshevik war of Lebensraum expansionism thathad been waged by Nazi Germany against the Soviet Union. In contrast, theHitler-Stalin pact (and particularly its secret supplementary protocol) could - atface value - be seen as part of the tendency of revision of the existing politicaland territorial order in Europe between the wars, no matter what motives the Soviet


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20 Praxis Internationalsupplementary protocol, the Soviet Union joined the ranks of the two powers bent onterritorial revision in between the two World Wars: namely Germany and Hungary.The perspective of territorial revisionism changed abruptly with the Germanattack on the Soviet Union in June 1941. The constellation of hegemonial andnational revision characterizing the prewar period, and ultimately also harboringthe explosive compound that acted to ignite and trigger the Second World Warwas suddenly supplanted by an antibolshevik, racial-ideological war of annihilation. The focus on the 23rd ofAugust, 1939 and the Hitler-Stalin pact jibes wellwith an emphasis on a hegemonial, nationalistic struggle for power. A focus onSeptember 1st, in contrast, anticipates the dimension pointing beyond any mererepetition of the First World War, to include the elements of universal civil warand mass extermination. Yet that focus must necessarily elude a consciousnessfocused exclusively on the national reconstruction of collective memory - as isthe case today in (political) eastern Europe.Not every adversary of the Soviet Union in the Second World War fall backon that constellation which was so unique in the case of Finland. In a manner quiteseparate from the framework of the broader world war - and initially even withassistance from the western powers England and France- Finland was able towage its own and distinctive defensive war against the Soviet Union, a war thatactually belonged in terms of orientation to the prewar constellation of territorialrevision. And this even when Finland had difficulty in distinguishing and separatingits own forays against the Soviet Union from those of the Nazi forces within theframework of its "continuing war" in 1941.However, the difference contrasted with the German axis partners Hungary andRumania is striking. Since the Finnish effort is framed in national terms, it hasnone of the authoritarian-fascist and antibolshevik impetus characteristic of Rumaniaand Hungary in their struggle against the Soviet Union. The Finnish war efforthas its proper place in another system of coordinates, as difficult as this distinctionmay be in temporal and spatial terms, both politically and - what is probably farmore important for constituting historical memory - that Finnish war effort hasanother system of coordinates in terms of consciousness.Poland, in contrast, does not experience a combination of all those elementswhich, if not characterizing the war as a whole, do characterize the events between1939 and 1945: a hegemonial war with nationalist coloring, an antibolshevikEuropean civil war and a project of extermination completely beyond the immediatedimension of combat and motivated by racial ideology. However, Poland sufferedthe abrogation of its own national existence as a supposed "bastard ofVersailles" .It is - on the one hand - thus part of the total revision of the interwar territorialpolitical order and - on the other hand - becomes as well the first victim, trulythe first, of a selective genocidal policy paving the way for future Nazi dominationin eastern Europe based on biological criteria. What is lacking here from amongthe triad of elements characterizing the special nature of events in the SecondWorldWar as a whole is the motif of the antibolshevik civil war. That element couldonly be implemented in action against the Soviet Union as a communist regime.Antibolshevism, national enmity toward Russia and deep resentment against - asclaimed: Jewish-colored communism as a manifestation of traditional antisemitism,


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Praxis International 21The mass extermination, so it appears, that third dimension in the elementaltriad of the events during World War 11 along with hegemonial hybris and theantibolshevik crusade, has not been given the place it ought to have been accordedin Polish consciousness. This is because it has been inserted more into the nationalmartyrdom of the Polish nation, and is therefore less manifested in the racialWeltanschauung of the Nazi regime, In universal terms, the mass exterminationis not a part of those two historical axes along which the century interprets itself.That event appears to stand like outside history, because it was not a component

of the war effort in a national, hegemonial or even antibolshevik sense. It thusremained outside the scope of warfare itself. No interpretations related to thecategory of nation are available for application here. Similarly, the ideologicalinterpretation and the definition of fascism derived from class antagonism remaininadequate as well. Mass extermination, the "Final Solution", and the eugenictheory and practice which paved its way, take on a special status - a status againstwhich the historian, geared to uncovering strands of continuity, feels a need to rebel.He rebels by attempting to subsume the event under one of the elements ofcontinuity running through the 20th century: either by including it as a component

of an extreme nationalism that slaughters its victims in xenophobic fury, orassociating it with the value-antagonism of the century - bolshevismlantibolshevism.Both interpretations can claim a connection with the double axis of the century,both can insist on continuity.Attempts to integrate the "Final Solution" - from the victims perspective into a nexus of national continuity appear to come relatively easy. Collective memoryis, in any case, selective in accordance with the demands of the respective nationalmyth. But the proof, that the "Final Solution" springs like a full-blown conceptionfrom antisemitism must necessarily raise numerous doubts.More challenging are those more frequent attempts in recent years to place theextermination of the Jews in the context of the above mentioned metaphor of civilwar as an axis of the 20th century history. Both Ernst Nolte and Arno Mayer,

each in his own manner and with opposed objectives, have tried to utilize oneof the central axes of the periodization of this century - the conflict betweencommunism and anticommunism - as an interpretative framework for explainingthe "Final Solution". For both historians, the problem of periodization is of centralimportance, as well as the open or secret identifying of the Jews with bolshevism- for the one positive, the other negative.Arno Mayer, who attempts to establish a causal connection between the conductof the war and the extermination of the Jews, constructs a periodization of thehistory of the 20th century revolving around the motif of total war, with theideological antagonism as its core. The phenomena of war of annihilation, totalwar and the fascist, antibolshevik crusade are conflated and rolled into one, bothconceptually and factually. Pursuing this kind of periodization, Mayer comes upwith the rather forced notion of a "Thirty-Years-War" from 1914-1945. In sopostulating, he fails to consider the fact that the totality characterizing the conductof the war at the front during the First World War had not sprung from theideological struggle between antagonistic parties on a European or universal level.Rather, this totality derived from the phenomena of the yet unknown effect ofmassarmies and the automatization and mechanization of killing.


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22 Praxis InternationalThe fact that during the course of the war itself, images of the enemy developed

that were increasingly ideological, framed in terms of ' 'civilizational contrasts",such as Werner Sombart's dichotomous pair "Handler und Helden" (tradesmenvs. heroes) to categorize Anglo-saxons and Germans, is another matter: it mustbe viewed as a consequence of the totality of the war, not its precondition. Focusedon the ideological metaphor of civil war - communism against anticommunismas a conditioning factor for the "Final Solution", Mayer remains blind to a farmore total facet on National Socialism - namely its racial ideology. The liquidationof the Polish intelligentsia beginning in the autumn and winter of 1939-40 wasin no way related to that ideological antibolshevism which, at least in the initialphase, was utilized by the Einsatzgruppen in the Soviet Union as the basis forthe beginning stages of the extermination of Jews, acting in accordance with anexpanded Kommissarbefehl.In his attempt at periodization, Arno Mayer undoubtedly wants to achievesomething more comprehensive than simply to offer a new explanatory frameworkfor explaining the ' 'Final Solution". He is principally concerned with developinga critique of western anticommunism, especially its American variant, during theCold War. Given his political stance and the logic of periodization, Mayer triesto press this into a mold including the preconditions for the "Final Solution".Nolte, in contrast, attempts to characterize the key watersheds in his periodizationof the "European civil war" 1917/1945 in terms of the immediate antagonismbolshevism vs. antibolshevism. In his analysis as well, the identification of Jewswith bolshevism plays a central role, even though he places the beginning of thedeportation of Jewish victims in the context of the national and hegemonial confrontation in Europe, and portrays the Jews simply as traditional adversaries in war.Be that as it may: no matter how false the constant identification of Jews and com

munismmay be in the consciousness of those peoples in Europe now awakening to arenewed flowering ofnational identity, that identification continues to have an impact,down into the present. The swan song of communism, carried up and into Germanyas a consequence of that hegemonial and universal civil war unleashed by GermanNational Socialism, harbors a disconcerting potential: namely the tendency to successively reduce and finally obliterate the meaning and importance o f the "FinalSolution' 'from the memory ofEurope's peoples. And this not justbecause the40 yearsofSoviet rule have left a negative legacy that is being transfonned in historicalmemoryinto a bonus for Germany in Europe - Germany inMitteleuropa. An easily repressedabstract event such as the mass extermination, which in any case is difficult to retainin memory, will, along with an identification ofcommunist antifascism and the Sovietvictory over Hitler's Germany, be submerged in an ever deepening amnesia.The interpretation of 20th century history in terms of national dimensions, thereturn of Yolk, nation and minority as key factors in Europe, undoubtedly alsoopens itself up to the Jews as Jews. The renewed interest in the history of thevery people of Central Europe is evident. Yet the salient formative element oftheir historical fate there, the "Final Solution", in its intertwined linkage withGermany, is relegated to the limbo of forgotten history. Where regime and nationwere so disastrously coupled and insolubly linked like in the Nazi German state,the reemergence of the one (Le., the nation) necessarily means the forgetting ofthe other (the regime and its deeds).


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Praxis International 23Thus, with the decline of Soviet-brand socialism, forced upon the peoples ofeastern and central Europe by the Red Army, the symbolism of the intertwinedanti-fascist crusade, formerly an insoluble part of memory is also being buried

away. Yet it cannot be forgotten that this memory also bore another element:namely the victory over Nazi Germany and the liberation of the survivors.Translated by Bill Templer

1.1 - Diner, Dan - European Counterimages. Problems of Periodization and Historical Memory (en)

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