70 Years On

Living in England there was a lot of coverage of this the 70th anniversary of the Invasion of Normandy.  Additionally I have just come back from a visit to a small village near Le Havre where the celebrations were also in full swing.

This year was especially poignant given that many of the survivors of the D-Day landings are no longer alive and with their passing the "living memory" of the event moves from life to history.

As I also watch German television to try and get a more balanced view of events I was struck by the lack of coverage for D-Day in the German media. I asked a friend who edits an investigative journalism program for one of the mainline (public) television channels in Germany as to why.

His blunt answer was "It's not really discussed and no one asks our opinion anyway".

This got me to thinking as to just how deep does Germany's historical retrospection regarding the Third Reich go and as to whether the blanket of collective guilt smothered the fact that there was a German resistance-it just manifested itself very differently from the resistance in occupied countries.

So first: collective guilt.  This is a two-edged sword.  On the one side it sweeps everyone up and holds them responsible regardless of where they were on the "guilty-scale".  It also allows everyone on a very different level to shrug their shoulders as if to say we were all involved and therefore the responsibility is to the nation-not to the individual. 

Secondly is the question of resistance: What about those Germans who were against Hitler?  Those that were either demoted or fired because they wouldn't join the party.  Those that were banned from writing, painting, teaching or acting because their politics were wrong.  Those that physically escaped persecution by emigrating, not to mention those that were imprisoned and/or executed.

For on June 6th, 1944, they breathed a sigh of relief.  They saw what they hoped would be the end of the war, of the dictatorship, of the nightmare.

And yet there is still a whiff of not being patriotic in voicing those thoughts, of maybe even being a traitor. 

As far as Germany has come in trying to come to terms with its National Socialist demons I think there is still work to be done.