Reminding

Events to May 8th, 1945 on May 9th, 2005 at Munich University, Germany sponsored by the War Childhood “kindheit.eu”

We were all struck by a real high tide of reminding prior to May 8th, 2005. Special to this time was the fact that German victims of war, flight and expulsion lay for the first time at the centre of public attention and media reports. As a result, the frightening question immediately arose: Do we stand at the beginning of an epoch in which the sorrow of the Germans will be set off against the crimes which they have caused others'

This question preoccupies me as one who is himself, in his professional work as head of the research project “Kriegskindheit.eu” (warchildhood.net), contributing to steering attention onto this group of individuals. By this new approach, do we promote, I wonder, a chauvinistic culture of reminding that pushes forward only to steal away from historical responsibility? In dealing with that question, it is my hypothesis that reminding ourselves of the trauma of the German people is a necessary step on the way to a memory culture that more and more accepts the complexity and folding of the different facets of the National Socialism catastrophe.

The Holocaust came to the forefront gradually in the public discourse in the 1980s. The frightening facts related to it started to dig into consciousness and resulted in an increasing recognition of historical guilt, particularly in connection with the murder of Jews and members of other minority groups. But this process of becoming conscious concerns only one side of a very complex past.

The one-sided attention for the victims of National Socialism on the part of most Germans laid the basis for a self-understanding that has polarized perpetrators and victims. It has resulted in one inevitably finding oneself, as a German, on the side of the perpetrators. Although long-withheld sympathy was now being finally and publicly shown for the victims, the sorrow suffered by the perpetrators and fol