This year marks 90 years since the Nazis came to power in Germany. On January 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of the Reich. In this context, “K” today begins a series of tributes in sequels that will follow on the following pages throughout the year, covering a wide range of issues from a fundamental cultural point of view.

Today begins with a conversation with historians Anna Maria Drubukis and Kostis Kornetis on the controversial issue of the trauma of Germans as victims and victims of Hitlerism (and Allied bombing). Anna Maria Drubouki is a historian specializing in the post-war reconstruction of Greek Jewish communities in Greece and Europe. She is a research fellow at the University of Munich. Her book “Monuments of oblivion. Traces of World War II in Greece and Europe” will be re-released in expanded format in 2023 (Purple Squirrel editions). Kostis Kornetis is a historian whose main research interest is the transition from dictatorship to democracy in the European South. He teaches modern history at the Autonomous University of Madrid. His book “Children of Dictatorship” is published by Polis Publishing House. The first idea and most of the information material for organizing the discussion belongs to Irini Sotiropul. I am very grateful to her.

In 2011, the then Christian Democratic Liberal government made an attempt to establish a day of remembrance for those expelled from Germany!

Anna Maria Drubukis (AMD): Even if it is a distorted memorial landscape! It wasn’t taboo at all! The monument is 15 km away. south of Göttingen, in Friedland, on the borders of the former zones of occupation, American, British and Soviet. Adenauer himself, as soon as he became chancellor, announced in 1950 the construction of a monument to 9 million German refugees there, in a country where until now there was not a single monument to the Holocaust. It wasn’t easy. It was immediately smashed, some wrote “Dachau” and “Liditz” on it. Obviously, in the 1950s it is still too early to remember the German trauma, the German refugees. Today there is a very powerful organization – the Federation of Exiled Germans. Since then, he has been active, claiming the construction of monuments to groups of German victims, so to speak, “lost homelands.” The president of this federation, Erica Steinbach (born 1943), is a very controversial person. He was a member of the CDU and recently joined the far-right AfD. In Germany, there are many memorials to the victims of the so-called “mass exodus” of 1944-1946. There are six of them in Stuttgart alone for uprooted Germans! In 2011, the then Liberal Christian Democrat government attempted to establish a memorial day for those expelled from Germany! Obviously it didn’t work. The issue remains under discussion. However, Steinbach’s efforts were ultimately successful, as in 2016 a museum was founded in the city of Berlin, the so-called Center for Documentation of Flights, Movements and Reconciliation. On the first floor, mass immigration to Europe and around the world is represented, on the second floor, we only have German refugees. It’s something terribly problematic, we debate it in the historical community to this day. So it probably wasn’t taboo. Perhaps in West Germany, where oblivion was essentially the regime, there was too early perpetuation of the memory of specific groups, a rather irrelevant discussion of the German trauma. While the 70s had to come for the Holocaust to be included in the public debate.

KK: New political generations are coming to the fore. The generation of ’68 feels liberated from the past. On the level of political activism, he defended the victims, so he frees himself in terms of the past itself, at least as far as the intersection of left and right is concerned. There is left-wing rhetoric that speaks clearly about his past and his crimes, but does not attach a “national label”. According to them, this is not a “German affair”, it is more connected with a political omen. On the other hand, there is a more right-wing, conservative approach, which, on the contrary, speaks of the national past, but without the load of crimes. It is important to talk about the intersection between them. The generation of 68 took the position of the victim. We are the victims of our parents, they said, so we have the right to talk about Auschwitz in connection with modern politics, in relation to us, i.e. under the slogan “Vietnam is America’s Auschwitz”. There is a very problematic confusion at the symbolic level here. And now another, new generation, which feels liberated in relation to the past as a whole. It’s twofold: I identify with the victims, so I can talk much more comfortably about the past, the German victimization. Sounds a bit contradictory, but I believe it exists today. When, for example, in the mid-1990s, Goldhagen’s book The Volunteer Executioners was published, this view of history was very popular, especially among young Germans: it is the new generation that accepts the crimes of the past, but not in a political sense. terms like the ’68 generation, but culturally. So he stands with a critical distance to them, without the emotional intensity of 68 years.

KK: There are indications – two of my German colleagues twenty years apart assured me of this – that Haarer is highly respected by German psychoanalysts to this day! This code of conduct, which is completely devoid of emotion, is considered a feature of the German way of learning, which is very difficult for non-Germans to accept.

A.M.D.: In the last two years, Germany has done a lot of work with its colonial past. Antiques, etc. are returning. The Humboldt forum recently had a wonderful exhibition on this subject. Possible reparations for the victims of colonialism at the beginning of the century are discussed. As a person who lives here and sees them, I believe that the chapter of “Nazism” is closed. Maybe I’m getting ahead of myself, but that’s my impression.