History
Angolus Novus, Walter Benjamin. Committed suicide apparently in Spain, because he thought he failed to reach Spain when escaping Nazis.
”A Klee paining named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread- This is how people view the angel of history- His face is turned towards thje past- Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.”
This interpretation deals with the position of the historian as a moving target. In the epoche of those who experience history, the contemporary experience, experience changes constantly. History changes because our position changes.
History is not any longer only political history, but is also many other layers, history has diversified.
Depending on what kind of history one focuses on, the caesurae of history change, the points one views as revolutionary or changing. And so on, the caesurae make up what kind of history we are telling.
One can take the perspective of academic history, but also that of the ”politics of memory”, as is quite common today.
This is not completely severed from academic history, but it follows a different logic. It provides answers according to different needs. It is using history in certain ways.
The politics of memory as a current issue:
12 feb 2025 might be looked at like an insanely important day, it seems to be the death of the Americo-European federation. Many contemporary historians believe so at least.
In the quote by Trump, Trump invokes the history of WWII as a place in which both Russia and the USA fought together against the same threat and made losses of a similar kind.
Trump invokes a kind of nostalgia for when things were clearly outlined politically, there was a good and bad guy, and the two world leaders arranged the world as they attempted to see fit.
It seems dubitable to say that it is generally correct that the history between the west and east front were collaborationistic.
In recent years, the commemoration became the central politico-historical doing of the Putin government.
It seems that Trump invokes the idea that the victory of WWII involed Russia, rather than the Soviet Union. Russia matters, Ukraine does not matter.
Italy’s rightist party had similar problems with the current Swedish alt-right party. It comes out of the same fundaments of a fascist party, yet it is cleaning up that image.
Still today, bombs are found from both WWI and WWII all over past frontlines.
The last one to be convicted of being a concentration camp worker, a german lady in her 90s, was recently convicted. Is this just? Probably.
When analysing history, mention what is not mentioned but what could have been expected to be mentioned.
In western Europe, there are very few monuments commemorating WWII, but many commemorating WW1, in eastern Europe the opposite is true.
The endurance of 8 may 1945 as an important caeasura. This one is specifically all about who won WWII.
The narrative of who won WWII however never include those others who played a part in ending the war, it remains to be about Russia or the US.
Today it might even be split like:
Russia vs West
Russia vs Ukraine etc.
Russia vs Poland
This also points towards the differences between National socialism and Socialist Union.
Both are scientifically different systems, yet writing a history without looking at the negative aspects of soviet occupation would provide a distorted picture.
NordStream 2, the pipeline between Germany and Russia, allowed for an invasion of Ukraine without any further trade reprecussions, as the prior gas pipelines from Russia to Germany went through Ukraine. I wonder who would gain from the blowing up of such a pipelines.
23rd August 1989, human chain on the borders between the baltic states and Russia, which commemorated the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. A non-aggression pact which divided large parts of Europe between Germany and the Soviets. This is a trauma, in a sense.
Fascism is the use of the small burghers by the burghers as a mass movement, to remove or damage worker associations.
In order to understand why these developments after WWII are so much more present in eastern Europe, we need to understand the character of the war in the east.
No part of WWII experienced the same thing. Every part played a different role and suffered differently.
Characteristics of the war in the east:
In the east, the wehrmacht was confronted with a population that was ”inferior”, they should be decimated, and the elite had to be erased. So when the wehrmacht invaded Poland, they would have einsatzgruppen, who would have a list of around 1000 names, with everyone who had important jobs, and these people were either brought to concentration camps or shot immediately for being the Elite (inferior populations could not survive without the elite according to German theory).
So already in Poland there was clearly a warfare with the point of annihilation. The establishment of generalgouvernment, ghettos and death camps were here first established, with industrial murder, as well as forced labour.
This leads to an extreme loss of life on the eastern front. These are partially territories which before occupied by the soviet union. Belarus and Ukraine were destroyed after WWII.
”Kommissarbefehl.”: in the soviet union you had both a military and a political officer, the kommissar. Komissars were shot on the spot, they were meant to be the ideological backbone of the Soviet regime.
From wars today, both sides have a very different logic when looking at the number of people damaged. In the case of WWII, it sometimes made sense to stress the number of casualties one has on one’s own side, and others at the amount that one has killed. At home it didn’t seem wise to stress the number of casualties, so this information would have been obscured on any side.
Hitler’s view as to why WWII was lost was because Ukraine was lost, in that this led to the impossibility of feeding the German population.
The idea was that the crucial problem to maintain was that the German population should not realise that the country was at war. By plundering other countries, the MEFO plunder system, the country could be kept together. This in turn led to civillian casualties being much higher in WWII than perhaps could have been expected of earlier wars.
Today in Flanders, streets are still renamed due to being named after famous collaborators, people who acted together with the German government.
Conclusion: The second world war is still present.
There are a multitude of ways in which WWII lives on in today’s memory.
We need to understand both dynamics of histroy, both that of academic history and that of the commemoration.
Politics of memory as a new phenomenon
It always happened top down.
Definition: ”Politics of memory refers to the organised and often institutionalised historical remembrance, particularly with a view to violence and dictatorial regimes and often with the imperative to learn lessons for the future”.
”Postwar europe was reestablished by forgetting the past” Judt.
Still culturally defined by rememering the past, but a different past, WWII.
Judt argued that this is established by forming the myth of resistance, everyone occupied was part of the resistance, even many Germans in nazi germany were like that. Europe was culturally defined as being against the Nazis. In European countries after WWII, there was little critical interaction with its past. This hasn’t happened historically before, and these nations slowly, embraced the critical aspects of their past in mourning all those bad things done, even the colonial past.
This is interesting in talking of how it is new.
Zygmunt Baumann: Our time is an Epoch of memory, the retrotopia. The life only in relation to the utopia coming from the past. Depending on what political strand one looks at, it all seems to aim back.
Against this background we have to understand the politics of memory. We wish to distinguish it as something inherently institutionalised and top down. This conflicts with the statement of Baumann.
There seem to be tensions with learning from the past and self-ascertainment through an idealised past, as well as the top down society vs the bottom up politic of memory.
The idealised retrotopia is challenged in many ways by historians. Russia, as Tanner notes, would not look as it does without the kind of culture that existed before (?).
The government in Poland tried to influence museums and so forth in order to rewrite their history in a way so as to show it as heroic and so on.
”Vergangenheitsbewältigung”, ”The slow confrontation of Germans with their past”.
In the 50s, the German population was asked ”who were the main victims”, and they would have said those who lost their houses in Allied bombing terror in eg. Dresden.
What is striking is that Germans at the time would not talk about Jews, this was not yet relevant.
In May 45, the war was over and the German population realised their faults, rather, engaging with the past was a slow process that took a very long time.
It is really only in the 60s in the Auschwitz trials, as well as the student movement of 68, that there is a significant change in society in regards to this.
There are many critical events often mentioned here, like the ”Kniefall von Warschau”, the first SPD kanzler of Germany, Willy Brandt, kneeled in Warsaw in order to commemorate the many victims.
Kohl-Mitterand, in Verdun, one of the main battleplaces of WWI, was seen as an anti-picture of the commemoration of D-day in which Germany was not included.
It furthermore seemed to suggest Franco-German normalisation of relations.
Weizsäcker-speech, president of West-Germany in the 80s, defended his father in Nuremberg, but renamed the 8 may as the day of liberation. This was against most partypoliticans whom saw it as a defeat still.
There are however some agreements that need to be adresed since WWII, like Greece, Italy, and furthermore Israel, which for Germany is a Wiedergutmachung, a making good due to the bad which has happened. There are also still collaboration payments paid to eg. Flemish people.
The song by Barbara plays on the tension between those things that are instantly being forgotten but which must simultaneously be remembered.
How can we concretely imagine these tensions that we have found in the world to still be present the day.
External and internal:
Countries taking official measures to rewrite history, there is a trend, but each example must be remembered to be entirely its own. In Russia for example there are certain kinds of reserach which one can no longer do. Or the US rewriting history as no longer containing slavery and colonialism as vital parts of its history, it rather needs to be countered with a more classical narrative, in which the slavery aspect is just one small aspect of US history. It is very different from Russia, but certain dynamics are still comparable and are definitely censorship.
In Belgium, CegeSOMA, an instititution which is kept small due to lack of funding, has began questioning the Flemish Canon; the Flemish history that has to be taught at school, there is an initiative even here to change the kind of history that is being taught, from the top.
So then what is the legal treatment of those caused war, in Nuremburg, many Nazi politicians and soldiers were tried and faced legal consequences for their participation.
It was the first time that crimes against humanity were tried in this way.
Genocide becomes one of the most central terms of the day. If wars are decided to be genocide, much like in Nuremberg, the same kind of retribution would be necessary against those who participated in that.
In certain countries you can in a similar way also not use communist iconography due to the crimes committed by the Soviet union.
Historical museums become an important factor through which people engage with modern museums. These are almost always state-sponsored, and always relay certain messages about the roles played in, especially WWII, by different countries.
eg. The Museum in Gdansk was taken over by the government, and changed in order to change the sort of messages relayed there, such as Poland not collaborating with the German.
The European house of History in Brussels has similar problems, since it is one place that affirms one narrative, rather than being critical.
Another example of this tension is monuments.
Eg. the holocaust monument in Berlin. Should the monument of Jews killed take so much space in relation to all the other people hurt during the war?
These monuments which are meant to ”set something in stone”, this is how we want to commemorate some happening in our society, yet they miss a lot of what is really important. They do not work the same way any longer as when they were built.
Should we remember German victims themselves? Should we remember the victims of colonialism? YES.
These monuments of course do not solve an issue, but they can perhaps open up debates aboute eg. representation and about what we think is important to remember as a society.
In Dresden 13 Februrary, a long ring was formed in Dresden against a far right party wanting to claim the Dresden memorial.
Tension between logic of scholarship and logic of politics of memory.
It seems they have a different flight-height, they have an entirely different way to deal with the concept of history itself.
They are using an entirely different kind of language.
The tension between who collaborated and who resisted, and the realisation that most often, some people collaborated a bit, and resisted a bit. Nothing special in that regard, in other forms than that the Germans offered different sums to different populations.
Bloodlands, Snyder, about a region between Warsaw and Minsk wherein the largest part of the Jewish population lived, wherein whole villages and towns were exterminated, of which each part destroyed has a living history now too.