Copyright (c) 1997 - Ingrid A. Rimland
". . . I can very well understand people crying "enough, enough", when confronted with yet another piece on the Munich Wehrmacht exhibit, which has just closed its doors here. I was trying for weeks to escape from the orbit of this topic here in Munich - no chance!
Whenever one opened a newspaper or switched on the radio, one was pretty sure to come across at least one report on the Wehrmacht thing. Several newspapers, such as the "Passauer Neue Presse" (March 6) and the "Fraenkische Landeszeitung" (March 11) actually went so far as to complain about the enormous amount of readers' responses and asked them not to send in any more letters.
It is very difficult to convey to people residing outside Bavaria an idea of the storm of controversy that was going on here.
To give you an impression: A few weeks ago I really had enough from all that war stuff and left Munich in order to do some hill-walking in the Alpine Mountains . . . I took a rest in a beer garden near Mittenwald and was just about to enjoy the peaceful setting surrounding me, when my wandering eyes hit the headline of a paper that was lying around:
"Wehrmacht exhibition: a one-sided falsification of history", by (parish priest) Konrad Schreiegg.
It was the "Kreisbote. Wochenzeitung fuer das Werdenfelser Land" (March 12), one of those typical freesheets that contain, apart from thousands of ads, only one or two editorial pages: circulation 41,815: distributed to all households in that area . . .
When I took the train back to Munich, there was an elderly couple sitting in my carriage; the man read aloud to his wife from a local paper - guess what!
On arrival home I was welcomed by newspapers carrying headlines about the Wehrmacht exhibit. Then a friend called me to tell me that she had received a personal letter from Dr. Peter Gauweiler, the leading spokesman of the CSU's right wing . . . Gauweiler had sent letters to 300,000 Munich citizens, in which letters he complained about censorship measures on the part of the "Sueddeutsche Zeitung".
There was indeed censorship enacted: The Wehrmacht exhibition had been demolished in Erfurt by a right-wing extremist; Christoph Boekel, a documentary film director, was sacked by the CSU-controlled Bavarian Broadcasting Corporation, after he had dared to produce a report on the Wehrmacht's victims; and, finally, Sven Thanheiser, one of the four town-councillors among the Munich CSU, who had dared to oppose Gauweiler in public, was taken from his area of competence.
Somehow fed up with the Wehrmacht news I fled into the catacombs of the library in order to find shelter - no chance!
While I was busy with distributing the incoming new periodicals onto the shelves, I came across a journal published by the veterans of the German mountain troops called "Die Gebirgstruppe". I had to open it due to bibliographical reasons and was not really surprised to see a photo of the Wehrmacht exhibit.
However, while I was quickly glancing at the accompanying editorial text labeled "Ein Anschlag auf die Wahrheit" (A plot against truth). . ."
Here I am skipping a bit of the tongue-in-cheek parody referring to Germans
fighting the Romans. The post then continues as follows and might have referred
to our focused labors here at the Zundelsite, we are vain enough to think:
". . . There is a special kind of "Hoehere Mathematik" [higher mathematics], that has been practiced at least since the end of WW I: the idea of setting German war crimes off against misdeeds committed by foreign powers past and present, whether perpetrated against Germans or anybody else . . .
(I)nstead of adding up the various horrors to the dark side of world history, the revisionist version of algebra, i.e. "Aufrechnung", works not by summing up things, but by subtraction - and thus somehow manages to brighten this side of the national historical horizon.
Invoking all the various horrors of world history, the historians of the extreme (New) Right and their adherents balance them . . . in order to let the Holocaust in general, or the Wehrmacht's crimes in particular, appear less unique and "outstanding".
The result of this kind of mathematical operation is designed to be the relativization of the Holocaust and, as sum total, the international "normalization" of German history of the 1933-45 period; the cross sum being the rehabilitation and eventual viability of extreme nationalism in Germany.
While this kind of mimetic machinery had been rather idle for a few decades, it was reactivated with much success only a few years ago, after the fall of the Berlin wall. It was already very active during the Goldhagen debate, but has reached its peak only now.
While going through all those (published!) hysterical readers' responses concerning the Wehrmacht exhibit, which have been sent in to Bavarian regional newspapers as well as to national right-wing papers such as the "Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung" or "Die Welt", one encounters an enormous mass of metaphorical representations of the Wehrmacht's misdeeds that refer to other armies' horrors.
But it is not only Gauweiler's favorite argument - i.e. the war crimes of the Soviet army - that people have employed here in their attempts to match the Wehrmacht's atrocities; it is not merely the bombing of Dresden, the fate of German refugees, and other such contextual moralistic juxtapositions, which seem to have already hit the textbook-level (cp. the "Kleine deutsche Geschichte" by Hagen Schulze, recently published in the renowned C.H. Beck publishing house, that equates - without any further qualification - the war crimes committed by the Wehrmacht with those of the other powers involved in WW II . . .)
It seemed to me - just as one reader of the "Augsburger Allgemeine" (Feb. 28, p. 2) had promised - as if the whole course of world history were passing by before my eyes, while I was reading all those letters:
There were atrocities committed by all armies - by the Spaniards, the British, the Americans, the Russians, etc. . . Readers' responses saw the Wehrmacht's ethical equivalents fighting in the battlefields of former Yugoslavia, in the paddy-fields of Vietnam, in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, etc., etc., etc. - as if a ghost army of Wehrmacht soldiers were still marching, a haunted battalion, that in a desperate - but fruitless - effort to find a suitable match for their own atrocities were engaged in a metaphorical conquest of the world. . . "
Read that again: ". . . as if the ghost army of Wehrmacht soldiers
were still marching. . . "
They are. That's what it's all about.
The rousing and patriotic Horst Wessel Lied, the second national anthem
of the Hitler era, often sung by the soldiers of the Wehrmacht, is now banned
as a "Nazi song" on pain of 2 to 5 years imprisonment - not to
be played, sung or even whistled!
This song contains this stanza:
"Kam'raden, die Rot Front
und Reaktion erschossen,
Marschier'n im Geist
In unsren Reihen mit."
It loses a bit in translation because it loses the awesome power of understatement
coupled with beat, but what it means is this: "Our comrades, executed
by the Reds and the Reactionaries, are marching with us still in our ranks
- in spirit."
Ingrid
Thought for the Day:
"If there ever was a war breeder, it is the Europe of today. Russia is just like the French Republic of 1870. Germany is out. The Czechs hate everyone. The French are communistic. The British fools. And we, God knows."
(American WWII General Patton, in "Letter to Beatrice", August 6, 1945)