All 2 entries tagged History

Euro–history – ahead of Poland–Russia

Irish historian Norman Davies, after XVI Century's Polish poet Jan Kochanowski, defined Poland as ‘God’s Playground’. I dislike his romantic approach to history, but indeed the playground of Euro 2012 football matches having been the main playground of European XX Century’s history, it’s no surprise that every day brings new history politics issues. Let see some of them, because rather than ‘don’t mention the war’, here the point is it to mention it right.

German history (1)

Only two weeks ago Obama caused a major diplomatic scandal when, while delivering the Presidential medal of Honour to the memory of Jan Karski, the Pole who in 1942 brought the news of the extermination camps to a West unwilling to hear, to see and to act, pronounced the words ‘ Polish extermination camps’. Nothing is more offensive to Polish ears: it is just like saying ‘American terrorist attacks’ for 9/11, just because it happened in America. The Polish authorities, usually very flattering towards the Americans, asked for a public apology, Obama obliged immediately, but the damage is done. Last week, the German, Italian and Dutch team, and a few English players, visited Auschwitz-Birkenau, and the pictures show them with the guided tour headset. The first thing the guides say in Auschwitz, is that in 1942-45 there was no Poland: Auschwitz was in Nazi Germany. Let’s hope they will remember what Obama has not remember from his tour two years ago (when he mixed up Auschwitz with Buchenwald).

German history (2)

One who needs a bit of history lessons is the second coach of Germany, Hansi Flick. He invited the team to a ‘Stahlhelmen auf’. In Gdansk. He apologised more convincingly than Obama, probably because the Germans at home care about history more than Americans do.

German history (3)

The Czech Republic and Germany might meet in the quarterfinals, although this is unlikely given the Czech bad start. In any case, President Gauck, while leading the hardliners towards the Ukrainian government on the Tymoshenko case, just made a historic step towards better Czech-German relations with an excellent letter of unconditional condemnation of the Nazi massacre of Lidice in 1942, which significantly avoids mentioning the Benesz decrees (as if they retrospectively justified German crimes) and express admiration for the Czech resistance (which can no longer be considered moraly responsible for the massacres, for having assassinated Reichsprotektor Heydrich). Well done. Czech Republic and Germany may meet in the quarter-finals.

Polish history (1)

In Warsaw the impressive Museum to the 1944 Insurrection (not to be confused with the Ghetto insurrection of 1943!) has become a pilgrimage point for Polish fans before each match. And he is crowded with western fans too, and are conquered by the dramatic, if one-side, history of Warsaw’s sufferance. Everybody hopes that Russian fans will visit too: the museum blames them as much as the Germans (but does not blame the mistakes of the Polish underground leaders). Some Russian fans have left flowers at the Insurrection monument.

Polish history (2)

The tramways to Gdanks new stadium run along Gdansk shipyards, now largely dismissed, where the army massacred strikers in 1970, Solidarnosc was born in 1980, and communism started to end in 1988. Yesterday, Italian President Napolitano left his flowers under the monument to the victims of 1970, which was appreciated by locals even if they could not avoid to notice that back in 1970 Napolitano was a communist himself (although as moderate as a communist can be). Now my Polish friends define the impressive shipyards as the monument to the collapse of communism, and indeed there is a ‘Museum of Freedom’ here since 2005, when I came for the 25^th years of Solidarnosc celebrations. But I can’t avoid to notice that the dismissed parts look to me rather like a monument to the collapse of capitalism. Moreover, in the part that still is active, just meters away from the ‘Museum of Freedom’, a few years ago it was discovered that North Korean welders, posted from their government, were working for no salary…. Selective freedom indeed.

Russian history (1)

In 1920, the Soviet Army arrived to Warsaw gates. Germany and Hungary being then in a revolutionary state, a Soviet advance would have changed Europe’s history – who knows if for the better or for the worse. Pilsudski guided the freshly created Polish army to the ‘Miracle on the Vistula’ and condemned socialism to be ‘in one only country’. Tomorrow, for the Poles, it is re-enactment of that battle, and they hope in a new miracle. All Russia (or USSR)-Poland games are politically charged: in 1957, during the Polish Spring of 1956-58, when Poland beat the USSR in Chorzów, hundreds of thousands sang the national anthem, in tense awareness of what had just happened in Budapest; in 1982, Poland stopped the USSR 0-0 in Barcelona, qualifying for the semi-finals, and the Soviet TV could not broadcast the match live because of the big Solidarnosc banners behind one of the goals (old times: now anything vaguely political cannot enter the stadium).

Russian history (2)

But for the Russians tomorrow, the 12^th of June, is national day: the announcement of Russia’s exit from the USSR in 1990, following Eltsin’s election victory. Russian fans asked the permission to organise a match through Warsaw ahead of the match, which was initially banned but eventually allowed on a very short tract. The end of the USSR is something Poles should be happy to see celebrated. But the Polish Right is inflamed: Russians marching in Warsaw! Dressed in red! The Russian fans are nationalist, their leader being active in Zyrinovski’s party, and add to the provocation by announcing they will carry communist symbols (banned by a law on the same ground as swastikas in Poland, which however the Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional but the Constitutional Court). One has to hope right-wing Polish football hooligans will not react. Some of them have left flowers at the liberating Red Army monument, though.

Polish Fanta-history

As Spanish novelist Cercas writes in his Anatomia de un instante, according to some survey (?) a quarter of British people believe Churchill was a fiction hero. What is sure is that a quarter of Polish people believe that the 2010 Smolensk disaster, when the Polish president and the highest political, military and economic authorities died in a plane crash when heading to Katyn’s remembrance day, was a Russian attack. On the 10^th of each month, the Right demonstrates in memory of Lech Kaczynski in front of the presidential palace – which is just besides the Bristol Hotel, where the Russian team is based. Fortunately no problem at all occurred during yesterday’s demonstration, and the Russian team made the nice gesture to leave flowers at the Smolensk victims monument. Still, some nutters (under the banner ‘Solidarni 2010’) still cry that Kaczynski was murdered by Russians. They were kindly invited to get out of the stadium area last Friday, will they try again tomorrow?

Ukrainian history

There are two Ukraines, one hates the Russians, the other hates the Germans, neither trusts the Poles, who on their side would like to bring Ukraine under their influence and away from the Russian ones. During the Orange revolution of 2004, Poles were wearing more orange flowers than the Ukrainians themselves. The horrible crimes between Ukrainians and Poles at the end of WW2 are less and less mentioned. Signs of hope?

On a lighter note

For once, I wasn’t ashamed of being Italian yesterday in Gdansk. For Polish speakers, the two best Polish comments on the events of the last few days:

“Tyton ratuje zycie”

“Yakunovich siedzi na trybunie. Tymoszenko tez siedzi”

(untranslatable, sorry)

Guglielmo Meardi : 11 Jun 2012 16:34 |  Tags: Football History Poland |  Comments (1) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

"Forced labour", "Hitler & the Germans": controversial exhibitions in Berlin

Berlin , an ever-evolving history exhibition in itself, is hosting two historically significant history exhibitions: “Zwangsarbeit” (Forced labour) in the Jewish Musuem, and “Hitler und die Deutschen – Volksgemeinschaft und Verbrechen” (vaguely translatable as Hitler & the Germans – national community and crime – but the English never had a Volksgemeinschaft, thanksfully) in the German Historical Musuem. Significant, if not for other reasons, because they are the first exhibitions on forced labour and on Hitler in Germany ever – however strange this may sound at first.

The Jewish Musuem is a difficult place to host an exhibition in. Built in 1998 in Kreuzberg by Daniel Libeskind, it is such an astonishing building – with its broken geometry and its “voids” - that it attracted more visitors in the first three years, when it was empty, than since 2001, when the Museum was inaugurated – and still many say the museum was better when there was no museum. Temporary exhibitions, however, are in the old building so at least they don’t have the empty corridors as hard (impossible) act to follow. “Forced labour” in Nazi Germany has been, until now, overshadowed by the bigger and unique crime of the Shoah. In the after-war processes, it was not treated as a crime against humanity in itself – only individual (and hard to proof) cases of inhumane treatment were persecuted. It had, however, a huge importance: it involved millions of victims and was an inherent part of the Nazi economic and military machine. It is therefore significant that this exhibition comes from the Jewish Museum, certainly the last institution wanting to downplay the Shoah. Not only: this exhibition is not Jewish specific, and it pays equal space, from the beginning, to non-Jewish victims, from German opponents, to Gypsies, to Poles, and eventually the inhabitants of all occupied countries and 600,000 Italian soldiers after Italy's surrender (by the way, my grandfather escaped forced labour by pretending to be German – this family story explains why I started to learn languages very early).

The exhibition contains telling documents and images of conditions in labour camps. For instance, official inspection reports checking prisoners’ conditions and concluding “the food is insufficient to survive – no action required”. I found most telling the letters from forced labourers in agriculture, mostly Poles. Forced labourers constituted half the wartime agricultural workforce of the Third Reich (in other words, half of Germans’ food came from slaves' work), but within Germany they were mostly kept separated: one per farm. They therefore suffered from extreme isolation and although some were treated humanly, the letters show how inhumane the farmer could be. And if each German farmer had a forced labourer, how does the story that the German population didn’t know hold?

What however lacks in the exhibition – and again I speak from a professionally distorted point of view – is the context and nature of forced labour. Unpaid labour was essential for the German economy (already since 1933) – but how essential? Occasional employers are named or portrayed, but which large companies used forced labour most? And, crucially, how? Which forms of constraint could guarantee a decent productivity? What were the relations, if any, between forced and "normal" labourers? And which survival (literally) strategies could workers use? Sorry if these questions sound cynical, but I don’t think we can grasp the phenomenon without answering them. In the exhibition there is a striking lack of data, figures, company names, and work schedules. It is still worth seeing, but is not enough. All the more that – something which is never mentioned – slavery has not disappeared and there are millions of forced labourers around the world.

The German History Museum is in amazing building too. The Zeughaus is the best baroque building in Berlin, on Unter den Linden, besides the Dom. And it has not been elegantly enlarged by I. M. Pei, in Louvre’s style (Kohl ‘s timid answer to Mitterrand). But in this case, the crowd comes for the exhibition: for Hitler? No Nazi in the long, at least half-foreign queue, of course, but it is still quite shocking. In post-war Germany – where a Nazi salute still lands you in jail, unlike in Italy – nobody had dared devoting an exhibition to Hitler before. This first attempt has very clearly avoided any celebratory style. There are no “relics” (which are anyway kept safe in Moscow) apart from a couple of autographic sketches and notes, and no monumental portrayal. Moreover, all propaganda material is directly counterbalanced by critical comment and images on the criminal dimension behind it – footage from the 1937 Hitler–Mussolini summit being followed by Chaplin's caricature of the same meeting, for instance). And the exhibition is not on Hitler. It is on Hitler and the Germans. Germans, the curators say, have tended in both East and West to unload all guilt on Hitler and not thought enough about what relations they had had with him. Movies such as "The Downfall" have gone in the same direction of isolating the individual from the context.

This is the proclaimed reason for this exhibition: Hitler’s problem is still open, and each generation has to find its own answers. This is an understatement: of course the Hitler problem is not closed. A book is coming out ("Das Amt und die Vergangenheit”, by E. Conze, N. Frei, P. Hayes, M. Zimmermann), as a result of a historians’ commission called by then Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, on the role of the German Foreign Office in the Thirld Reich. And it found that, against the received myth of their non-co-operation and even conspiracy, German diplomats actively participated in Nazi crimes. Believed innocent, they mostly remained in their posts after the war, but it now emerges that, when in the Fifties they all looked good Europeans, they were also secretly assisting Nazi criminals in foreign hiding. So sure, the story is not over and there are new questions to be asked all the time.

But does this exhibition ask the questions? The understandable concern with “the context” made the curators fall into the opposite mistake than those of the one on forced labour. The context is overwhelming, and the visit turns into an intensive crush course on the history of the Third Reich. Some details do indeed shed some light on the relation between Hitler and its Volk. Some Nazi posters and the huge variety of little souvenirs are impressive (and one poster was a reminder that the issue is not closed: a racist graph showing what will happen to Germany if “low-quality” people make have more children than “high-quality” people; it looks, apart from the racist pictures, as taken directly from the bestselling book by Sarrazin that is dividing Germany right now, and on which I will comment in another blog). Some information is interesting, for instance employers’ reports, on one side grateful to the regime for keeping wages so low, but on the other side moaning about all symbolic practices they had to introduce to pretend they were comrades with the workers. I found most interesting the number of letters and cards sent to Hitler on his 43^rd birthday, by adoring men, women and children, with poems, prayers and drawings. I would have made an exhibition just out of that material – although obviously counterbalanced by epistolary materials from Hitler’s victims. Instead, the curators overburdened the ten rooms with all sort of historical material about all that happened in Hitler’s political life. People’s perception of Hitler, and Hitler’s manipulation of it, which should have been the focus, is therefore lost under a mountain of contextual and unoriginal information, which might have been better visually separated. If you want to know about resistance, for instance, you need to wait for a multimedia computer at the end. Tourists seemed to enjoy the exhibit, but I doubt the new German generations will find their answers, or even their questions, in it.

More answers are provided by the film retrospective associated to the exhibition. Besides a few fiction movies, the highlights were Leni Riesenthal’s films (Der Sieg des Glaubens; Tag der Freiheit: Unsere Wehrmacht; Triumph des Willens). This again is significant because these films, which were seen (willingly or not) by one third of the Reich's population, can only be shown in today’s Germany within a cultural event and with an expert’s introduction and guidance, so they are hardly known directly, a strange fate for what are considered by some as the most important works in cinema’s history. When queuing with H for the screening of Der Sieg des Glaubens we even felt a moment of uneasiness, as if doing something not so licit. The historian Jeanpaul Goergen did his best to make sure the spirit of the German constitution was respected with his very erudite but also quite boring 45min introduction, that would have screened away any non culturally-motivated spectator – but there was no need for it (an interesting bit of information, though, was that it is the Riesenthal’s fake re-enactment propaganda images, not the historic ones, which are still unawarily used in history books, and even on the website of the German parliament, to illustrate the 30^th of January 1933). It’s especially the second of the Nüremberg movies that portrays a symbolic “marriage” between a marching Volk and a Führer arriving from the sky, who find each other in a symphony of images and unite at night. The effect of such images in the 1930s is hard to underestimate, although it can't have been the only factor.

The significance of these two controversial exhibition is apparent in the contrast with a third, uncontroversial one. One floor above the crowded Hitler’s exhibition there is another one, included in the same ticket. It is devoted to Reunification. It was near-empty, and so was the cinema during its own film retrospective (at one screening we were three in total: they kept the museum open for us). As I had written in my previous blog, that topic has become so boring in just 20 years. Other topics have not, after 70 years.

Guglielmo Meardi : 25 Oct 2010 08:11 |  Tags: Berlin Germany History Movie |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem