Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History Read online

  The right-wing, collaborationist Vichy regime, which ruled over what was left of France by the Germans during World War II, has been particularly difficult for the French to deal with. For a long time after 1945, they told themselves a comforting story that ignored the degree of support Vichy had among the population as well as its often enthusiastic collaboration with the Nazis. When he arrived in triumph in Paris in 1944, General Charles de Gaulle, the leader of the Free French, announced that Vichy was “a non-event and without consequence.” The true France was represented by his own forces and the Resistance. The few French who had collaborated were to be punished, and the French would get on with rebuilding their great country. The myth, for that is what it was, allowed the French to forget about the French policemen who willingly rounded up the Jews to be deported to the death camps; to forget the relatively small number who joined the Resistance and the many officials of the old regime who had collaborated and yet were allowed to continue in their positions after 1945. The government made little attempt to catch and try some of France’s more prominent war criminals such as Klaus Barbie, the “Butcher of Lyon” Indeed, some received protection from the Church or from highly placed politicians. No one questioned, or not until the 1990s, the claim of François Mitterrand, president from 1981 to 1995, that he had worked for the Vichy government for only a short period before joining the Resistance. In fact, as an enterprising journalist discovered, he had worked there for much longer than he had admitted and had won a decoration.

  The process by which France has come to terms with its Vichy past has been a painful one. Initially it was only foreign historians who chose to examine the period carefully. When the filmmaker Marcel Ophüls made his classic documentary The Sorrow and the Pity, which gave a truer picture of Vichy and shattered the myth of widespread resistance, French television refused to broadcast it. When it was released in 1971, it was attacked from the Right and the Left. Jean-Paul Sartre found it “inaccurate.” A conservative commentator in Le Monde scolded the Jews who had been interviewed in the film for their ingratitude in criticizing Vichy’s president, Marshal Pétain, who, he claimed, had saved them. In the 1970s and 1980s, there was increasing public discussion, with more films and books appearing, but it was not until the end of the century, after Mitterrand and much of his generation had passed from the scene, that the new French president, Jacques Chirac, was able to admit that France had aided in the Holocaust.

  In Russia, where the transition from one form of government to another was much more abrupt, post-Soviet governments have been grappling, with limited success, to make a new identity for Russia by using history. “These days,” the Russians say, “we live in a country with an unpredictable past.” While the new order clearly does not want to celebrate the November 7 anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, it does not want to alienate the citizenry by getting rid of what has been a two-day holiday. When Boris Yeltsin was in power, he kept the holiday but renamed it the Day of Accord and Reconciliation. The public remained largely in ignorance of the change. In 2005, Putin moved the holiday a couple of days forward, to November 4, and christened it the Day of National Unity. The change in date is to commemorate Russian success in driving out Polish invaders in 1612. The public, apart from the radical nationalists, still has no idea of what the holiday is supposed to be celebrating.

  What present-day Russia has shown little interest in remembering, at least so far, is the horrors of the Stalinist period. There are few official museums or sites to mark the Gulag or the thousands upon thousands who died in Stalin’s prisons, and few memorials to those brave individuals, like Andrei Sakharov, who opposed the Soviet state.

  Russia is not alone in wanting to turn its eyes firmly away from the painful parts of the past. In the decade after the Vietnam War ended, the United States, unlike the case in all previous wars, did not undertake to create an official war memorial to the dead. It was only when private citizens created their own foundation that the government was shamed into providing a piece of land on the Mall in Washington.

  In Spain, when democracy gradually took root after General Franco’s death in 1975, there was an unspoken agreement—the “pacto del olvido”—to forget the trauma of the civil war and the years of repression that followed. In recent decades, though, writers, historians, and filmmakers began to explore the horrors of the war, and in November 2007 the government enacted the Law of Historical Memory. There is to be a national effort to locate the mass graves and identify the bones of those who were shot by Franco’s winning side. Franco’s regime itself has been formally repudiated, and it will be erased, as much as possible, from public commemoration. Franco’s statues will disappear, and the names of streets and squares will be changed. It is unlikely that the law will bring agreement on Spain’s history. If anything, it is opening up old divisions and creating new ones. “What do we gain?” asks Manuel Fraga, a senator and former minister under Franco who took part in the transition to democracy. “Look at the British: Cromwell decapitated a king, but his statue still stands outside parliament. You cannot change the past.”

  West Germany and Japan were both pushed to remember the recent past by the victors in World War II but also, to be fair, by their own citizens. Immediately after the war, the Germans, like other Europeans, were preoccupied with survival and rebuilding and had little inclination or energy to spend on thinking about the past. Perhaps, too, because their defeat had been so complete and the Nazi past was so hideous (and their own complicity with Hitler so profound), they took refuge in forgetting and in silence. In the 1950s, few ordinary Germans wanted to discuss Nazism or remind one another of their involvement with the regime. With the one exception of The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank, which sold very well, the dozens of memoirs by concentration camp survivors and the few essays on German guilt did not attract much attention. The silence about the past was never complete, though; there were always writers and thinkers prepared to ask the awkward questions, and Germans could not entirely escape the consequences of following Hitler when their country was first occupied and then divided into two independent states. Moreover, West Germany, on Chancellor Konrad Adenauer’s initiative, paid reparations to Israel. (Only 11 percent of Germans at the time thought the decision was a good one.)

  It was at the end of the 1950s that West Germans started to examine their own past in depth. In 1961, the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem exposed the elaborate bureaucracy with which the Nazi state had carried out the extermination of the Jews. Other trials followed in West Germany, and a younger, more radical generation began to demand and get the truth about the past. When the American television series Holocaust was shown on German television in 1979, over half the adult population watched it. Today, a reunited Germany stands out as a society that deals with its past, often in very visible ways. More concentration camp museums have been opened, and schoolchildren are taken to see them as a matter of course. In Berlin, the National Memorial for the Victims of War and Tyranny, the bombed-out ruins of the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, and the Holocaust memorial all act as a national remembrance, while all over Germany towns and cities have their own memorials and museums.

  During the Cold War, while West Germans were confronting their Nazi past, East Germans were avoiding it. The Communist state of East Germany managed to detach itself from all connection to or responsibility for the Nazi period. Hitler and the Nazis were said to represent the final stage of capitalism. It was they who had started the war and they who had killed millions of Jews and other Europeans. East Germany was socialist and progressive and had always stood side by side with the Soviet Union against Fascism. Indeed, a significant number of East Germans grew up thinking their country had fought on the Soviet side in World War II. Although the East German regime made memorials of three of the concentration camps, the only deaths remembered were those of Communists; Jews and Gypsies were not mentioned.

  Austria’s amnesia was even more striking. In the decades after Wor
ld War II, it managed, very successfully, to portray itself as the first victim of Nazism. In a 1945 ceremony in Vienna for a memorial to fallen Soviet soldiers, Leopold Figl, who was shortly to become the country’s chancellor, mourned that “the people of Austria have spent seven years languishing under Hitler’s barbarity.” Austrians comforted themselves for the next decades with such assurances. They were a happy, gentle people who had never wanted to be joined with the likes of Nazi Germany; Hitler had forced the Anschluss on them. They had never wanted war, and if their soldiers had fought, it was only to defend their homeland. And they had suffered hugely, it must be said, at the hands of the Allies. Who, after all, had destroyed the magnificent opera house in Vienna? The fact that many of the most fervent Nazis, including Hitler himself, were Austrian; the wildly enthusiastic crowds that greeted his triumphal march to Vienna in 1938; and the willing collaboration of many Austrians in the persecution and destruction of the Jews—all that was simply brushed under the carpet. The few brave liberals who tried to both celebrate the small Austrian resistance to Nazism and memorialize the destruction of the Jews found themselves isolated and accused of being Communists. It was only in the 1960s, with new generations appearing on the scene and Germany’s own examination of its Nazi past, that questions about Austria’s role began to surface.

  The Japanese are often compared unfavorably to the West Germans, especially by the Chinese. Japan has not, it is charged, admitted its culpability in the invasion of China in the 1930s, its role in the start of the Pacific war, and the savage treatment of those it conquered, from the rape of Nanjing to its inhumane medical experiments in Manchuria. There is enough truth in this to make the accusations stick. Japan, like Austria, portrayed itself as a victim in the years after the war. It used the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in part as a way of deflecting attention from its own crimes. It was slow to offer compensation, for example, to the Korean women it forced to serve as prostitutes for its soldiers. Successive prime ministers have paid their respects to the Yasukuni Shrine, which honors Japan’s war dead, including leaders who were convicted of war crimes.

  On the other hand, there has been a long-lasting public debate over how to deal with the difficult parts of the past. Even in the 1950s, a trickle of books and articles came out, many of them by eyewitnesses and participants, which confirmed that Japanese soldiers had indeed committed atrocities. Meanwhile, a handful of historians wrote texts in which they insisted on dealing with all aspects of the war. While the nationalists have attacked such writings, they have not been able to prevent them from appearing. Nor is it true, as the Chinese like to claim, that Japanese students have been kept ignorant of what went on in the war. (The attack also comes strangely from a country where whole pieces of the past, such as the Cultural Revolution, cannot be examined at all.) By the 1970s, for example, Japanese school texts were mentioning the Nanjing massacre and giving figures for those who were killed. For many Japanese, that decade marked a moment when their nation moved from being a victim to being a victimizer. In the 1980s, when nationalists tried to downplay Japanese aggression and the wartime atrocities, their attempt set off a furious reaction from liberals and a full-scale public debate. Scholars began to broaden their research into lesser-known episodes and aspects of the war. In December 1997, on the anniversary of the Nanjing massacre, a citizens’ parade, which included visiting Chinese and German scholars, walked through Tokyo behind a special lantern bearing the Chinese characters for “to commemorate.”

  History has so often produced conflicts, but it can also help in bringing about reconciliation. The purpose of the truth and reconciliation commissions in South Africa and Chile was to expose the past in all its seaminess and to move on. That does not mean dwelling on past sufferings or past misdeeds to the exclusion of all else, but accepting that they have occurred and trying to assess their meaning. When John Howard was trying to promote a national history curriculum in Australia, the principal of a girls’ high school in Sydney described how she dealt with the contested story of the arrival of the first whites. “We canvass all the terms for white settlement: colonialism, invasion and genocide.” Examining the past honestly, whether that is painful for some people or not, is the only way for societies to become mature and to build bridges to others.

  In 2006, those old enemies France and Germany brought out a joint history textbook, which students in both countries will use. Although it only deals with the period after World War II, the longer-term plan is to produce texts dealing with the more difficult subject of the period before 1945. In the Middle East, Sami Adwan, a Palestinian professor at Bethlehem University, has been working with an Israeli psychologist, Dan Bar-On, to design a text that both Israeli and Palestinian high school students can use. Their goals are more modest than the French and German ones; they hope merely to include the two different national histories side by side, as well as instances of cooperation and peace between Israelis and Palestinians to offset the prevailing stories of perpetual conflict. This, they hope, will help build a mutual understanding that will have a wider significance in the longer run. “In order for Palestinian and Israeli children to understand themselves,” Professor Adwan told an interviewer, “they must understand the other. It is only after they understand the story of the other that they will discover to what extent they are truly prepared to understand the other side, and thus prepared to make changes to their own stories.” So far, sadly, only a handful of teachers on both sides of the divide have shown an interest in using the text.

  Public acts where the past is admitted can also help to heal wounds between countries. Chancellor Willy Brandt, on the first visit of a West German leader to Poland, made a huge impact when he fell to his knees before the memorial to the Warsaw Ghetto. In 1984, Mitterrand and Helmut Kohl, the German chancellor, met at Verdun, site of the most prolonged and deadly battle between their two countries in World War I, to celebrate the future of an integrated Europe. The two countries have also built a shared war museum at Péronne, which was once the German headquarters for the Battle of the Somme. The museum was designed to show the war as a European phenomenon and to stress the need for integration in present-day Europe.

  Sometimes, of course, like a strong medicine, admitting past crimes can kill. The Soviet Union did not survive Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost, of opening up discussion of the Stalinist past. The revelations of the extent of the Gulag and the number of Stalin’s victims served to undermine public faith in the whole system that could have produced such crimes. And the Soviet Union’s admission in the 1980s, after years of denial, that it had indeed agreed secretly with Hitler to divide up the countries that lay between them and that its armies had murdered Polish soldiers after they had surrendered in 1939 only destroyed still further the hold that the Soviets had over Eastern Europe. (Today, the Russian media are backing away from that admission and returning to the old, false charge that the murders were done by the Nazis.) Then, one can ask, should such a regime and such an empire have survived?

  History, as we have seen, is much used, but is it much use? On that, opinion has been divided ever since the fifth century B.C. when Thucydides declared the past was an aid in the interpretation of the future. Edward Gibbon regarded it rather as “the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.” A. J. P. Taylor, contrarian in this as in so much else, believed that history was an enjoyable exercise which had no use whatsoever beyond helping us to understand the past. “Of course,” he said dismissively “you can learn certain commonplaces, such as that all men die or that one day, the deterrent, whatever it may be, will fail to deter.” Perhaps it is best to ask if we would be worse off in the present if we did not know any history at all. I think the answer would probably be yes.

  To begin with, history helps us to understand: first, those with whom we have to deal, and, second, and this is equally important, ourselves. As the American historian John Lewis Gaddis put it, it is like looking in a rearview mirror: if you only l
ook back, you will land in the ditch, but it helps to know where you have come from and who else is on the road. One of the factors that made the Cold War so dangerous to both sides is that they simply did not understand each other. The Americans took the Soviets’ rhetoric at face value and took for granted that their leadership really was out for world domination. The Communists, whether Soviet or Chinese, assumed that capitalist countries such as the United States and Britain would inevitably come to blows in their increasingly ruthless struggle for profits.

  Michael Howard, the British military historian, despaired of the attitude that prevailed in Washington for much of the Cold War. “The Soviet Union was seen in the USA as a force of cosmic evil whose policy and intentions could be divined simply by multiplying Marxist dogma by Soviet military capacity.” Many of the Soviet goals were, in fact, traditional Russian ones, dictated by geography and history. Russia has few natural borders and has suffered repeated invasions; its governments have always sought buffer zones to protect the Russian heartland. When Stalin took the opportunity to move into Eastern Europe at the end of World War II, he was motivated as much by a desire for security as by ideology and national pride, Russian national pride, for all that he came from Georgia. During the war he created new military honors named after not Marx or Lenin but great czarist generals and admirals. One evening at the end of the war, after a dinner with his intimates, Stalin spread a map out on a table and happily pointed to all the old czarist territory he had regained.