Politics of the past: the use and abuse of history - Socialists ...

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history and memory. In such a situation, history must have the last word when we accept that the past can be known and that historians apply rules validated by the intergenerational, supraconfessional and international community of historians – logically connected to rules applied in natural science. This is one of the principal reasons why a parliament cannot legislate the past, the other being the respect for the freedom of opinion. This question was recently debated in France because of the so called lois mémorielles (memory laws) which forbid the negation of crimes against humanity such as the extermination of Jews by the Nazis, the genocide of Armenians in Turkey, the enslavement of Africans and the transatlantic slave trade. I would like to mention here the special committee of the National Assembly under the chairmanship of its president, Mr Bernard Accoyer, which auditioned several historians and produced a report on the subject. Its cautious conclusions seem to give the best definition of the relations to be established between politicians and historians or between politics and history. But if historians can pacify a memory war at the cognitive level, they cannot do the same as far as emotions and identities are concerned. At this point artists, writers and educators, and among the latter politicians, enter the stage. What can they do in order to replace negative emotions by neutral ones, replace mutual hatred by mutual understanding, and modify identities in such a way that a non confrontational coexistence of incompatible memories is made possible? There is no single recipe but they must have this goal in mind when they decide about what to commemorate and how to celebrate memorable events or figures; when they take measures to preserve monuments and generally things that belong to the national, European or world heritage; and when they select the language to describe yesterday’s enemies who are today’s friends. Politicians do not have to struggle against the past nor should they promote historical amnesia. They must try to frame the assessment of past events so as to make it acceptable for all concerned. Mitterrand and Kohl did not forget WWI and its slaughter. But when, in 1984, they stood with hands joined at Verdun, they modified the meaning of what happened between 1914 and 1918. They showed it as a tragedy of both peoples, the Germans and the French. 83 Krzysztof Pomian
Such an approach certainly has its limits. The case of WWII is different. Its end is too recent. In Eastern Europe, it actually ended only in the 1990s when Soviet troops left the Baltic States, East Germany and Poland. So its memory is still very much alive. But WWII is also different from WWI because of its very nature. It was not a war of comparable nationalisms. It was the war of democracy against the Nazi totalitarianism. And the specific character of the Nazi ideology, based as it was on anti-Semitism and racism, caused the unprecedented horror of this war, which we must qualify as ultimate evil – there is no another word for it. Nevertheless, we must somehow try to pacify the memory wars originating from this period. In order to attain this objective, we have to look at it from a point of view that makes it possible not to carry past conflicts to the present and the future. We must, on the contrary, replace it by a common remembrance of past horrors meant as a step towards an intellectual and moral reconciliation. This is the point of view of the victims of war. We must also try to change national identities by reducing or even eliminating the traditional picture of the enemy, often still an important element. Every European nation has incorporated in its identity an image of the hereditary enemy. This can change in the course of time – for the French, the British were replaced by the Germans – but it plays an important role in the image that a nation has of itself. We must learn to think of WWII not in national, but in ideological terms. We must learn to see it as a war of democracy against Nazi totalitarianism. When we do this a major difficulty appears, because the ally of democracies like the US and the UK was the Soviet Union. The nature of the political regime of the USSR becomes therefore crucially important to our vision of WWII. Let me, however, restate very briefly my position: I maintain that Lenin’s and Stalin’s Soviet Union was indeed a totalitarian country and that it may rightly be compared to fascist Italy or to Nazi Germany. But this does not imply that those who chose the side of the Nazis against the Soviets were politically and morally entitled to do that. It does not mean that those who chose the Soviets against the Nazis made the right choice. The only correct choice was democracy. For many, if not for most inhabitants of Eastern Europe, this option was in reality not possible. We have to understand the tragedy of people who were 84
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Twenty years after the end of the C
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Dedicated to Bronisław Geremek Bro
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Table of contents Preface: Never Ag
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Preface Never again 7 Martin Schulz
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Preface The Past Does Not Go Away A
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Introduction by the Editors In 2008
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about the tense and ambivalent rela
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another debate formulated by Richar
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theoretical and practical impossibi
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History and national identity Histo
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the subject of much controversy, th
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everything on Stalin and communism:
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Prague Spring: “In the mid-1950s,
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Literature Arendt, Hannah (1951) Th
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Common Memory and European Identity
Page 34 and 35: cried the Ossies as the Berlin Wall
Page 36 and 37: the first phase of negotiations aft
Page 38 and 39: eference to a common destiny, and t
Page 40 and 41: The ‘enlargement fatigue’ obser
Page 42 and 43: on each other. The only way of chan
Page 44 and 45: “The Word Concentration Camp mean
Page 46 and 47: I think history is essential to thi
Page 48 and 49: denying it is like saying evil does
Page 50 and 51: Soviet camp, not because he had don
Page 52 and 53: Q: In Germany there is a strong fee
Page 54 and 55: the 17 th century so that the South
Page 56 and 57: forests near Minsk. I was taken the
Page 58 and 59: harmonious and prosperous, with the
Page 60: were doing and why they were doing
Page 63 and 64: an explanation. I told him that I e
Page 65 and 66: This movement once had a big meetin
Page 67 and 68: guests of Imre Pozsgay, minister of
Page 70: HISTORICAL DILEMMAS
Page 73 and 74: National myths Every society has a
Page 75 and 76: confessions. The culmination of thi
Page 77 and 78: First, few countries undertake a th
Page 79 and 80: Finally, confronted with the experi
Page 81 and 82: no better placed than governments t
Page 83: compartments, and that one must som
Page 88 and 89: History and Politics: Recommendatio
Page 90 and 91: The tension between academic histor
Page 92 and 93: oth a collective and individual exo
Page 94 and 95: Europe’s responsibilities It is c
Page 96: egimes provides a deeper understand
Page 99 and 100: and accounts for professionals deal
Page 101 and 102: This shift later inspired the devel
Page 103 and 104: In Germany, public historical cultu
Page 106 and 107: Historical Bias in Poland: Lustrati
Page 108 and 109: The Polish United Workers’ Party
Page 110 and 111: The right’s criticism of the meth
Page 112 and 113: epresents one more step in the broa
Page 114 and 115: European Social Democracy and 20 th
Page 116 and 117: the KPD - even now - is not about p
Page 118 and 119: esisted them in many cases. The ove
Page 120 and 121: turned some of them against the SPD
Page 122 and 123: The Interpretation of the Soviet Un
Page 124 and 125: the result of a war of liberation a
Page 126 and 127: Molotov-Ribbentrop protocol? How di
Page 128: pen in Lithuania. The idea was adva
Page 131 and 132: and politician Giovanni Amendola to
Page 133 and 134: The most influential analytical mod
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2. A single mass party consisting o
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their differences. Most comparative
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communism are legal heirs of the En
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the world war and to exculpate the
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They also criticized “revisionist
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seen above, after careful scrutiny
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The Real Problem Latvians Have with
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not see it as something important e
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structures Latvian domestic politic
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the language of instruction in scho
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Diversity in Historical Education:
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and sometimes in adjustment and ada
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For the Record: PSE MEPs react 159
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F. especially the Nazi- and the Sta
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having always been victims, trying
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SPECIAL REPORT: SLOVAKS AND HUNGARI
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Much has happened in the last two y
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The conference concentrated, as the
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aristocratic, Estates-based ‘nati
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A person’s identification with a
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ians to evaluate the extent to whic
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more intensive part in forming the
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A Common Past, a Divided History 18
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nearly seven hundred kilometres of
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It is extremely important to note,
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historical public opinion and self-
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thousands of Hungarian and Slovak c
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enewed historiography will also be
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we shall turn our attention to two
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In response to these questions, two
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While more than 80% of the oldest a
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Table 2 Opinions of respondents of
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6,0 5,5 5,0 4,5 4,0 3,5 3,0 2,5 ▼
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we consider the trends suggested be
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Resistance and Exile Miguel Angel M
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it was necessary to formulate socia
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degree of generosity, activism and
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the ICFTU. There my work focused on
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After Stalin’s death, most of the
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Moscow versus Prague 219 Boris Orlo
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Of all the problems that my country
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Social Democracy and the Prague Spr
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comprehend the overwhelming contrad
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Renaissance of Socialism Observatio
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My Personal Encounters with History
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Over a decade later, political chan
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monument, its location and particul
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Minister, Dimitri Rupel, I founded
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people exactly know what actually w
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tablished democracies. What was the
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Memory is a Loaded Gun An Epilogue
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Post office, Gdansk
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Solidarność Memorial
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Krzysztof Pomian, a well known Poli
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effective and positive factor in gi
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Martin Schulz, leader of the PSE Gr
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