Andrew I. Port

In his recent book, Dan Stone characterised the Holocaust as ‘unfinished history’, even in Germany, ‘the consummate country of contrition’. Does facing up to the past actually contest dangerous ideas in the present? Andrew Port’s new book focuses attention away from sentimental repentance and vacuous memorialisation to the matter of ‘real world’ German responses to postwar genocide.

In 1995, as news of the mass killings of Muslim men and boys by Bosnian Serb forces after the fall of Srebrenica reverberated across the international community, Joschka Fischer of the pacifist German Green Party summoned the spectre of genocide: ‘German history still counts as a weighty political argument for me in the present.’ Did Germans, as Fischer implied, have a special obligation not just to remember, but to act? In German, Vergangenheitsbewältigung means confronting the past, Vergangenheitsbewältigung der tat means doing so in deed. Port shows that many Germans responded to persecution ‘der tat’.

The wording employed in the Genocide Convention (1948) is notoriously cryptic, but it imposes a duty on states that have acceded to the Convention to ‘prevent and punish’ the international crime of genocide. For any acceding state, these duties are fraught with legalistic roadblocks – most notably, state sovereignty. For Germans, both before and after unification, the legal dilemmas of genocide became entangled with contradictory ethical and political currents. Did recognition of the Holocaust, a genocide perpetrated by Germans, as a shameful symbol of all genocides obligate Germans to shoulder a unique responsibility to act? But if action meant armed intervention, did this historic ‘mortgage’ clash with a concomitant revulsion for war making? Might recognition of genocides in Asia, Africa and southwest Europe diminish the supposedly unique status of the Holocaust? What genocide is not unique? Conversely, did a national preoccupation with the historical crimes of the Third Reich blunt the horrors perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge, Bosnian Serb militias and Hutu Interahamwe?

Read the rest of the review at HistoryToday.com.

Christopher Hale is the author of Deception: How the Nazis Tricked the Last Jews of Europe (The History Press, 2018).… (más)