Nothing could be more unlike the Russo-Ukrainian war in the Donbas than Munich’s remarkably well-ordered condition. The desperate desire of Germans to look away from the death and destruction beyond their eastern border makes sense: War is too disruptive of their near-perfect orderliness to be thinkable, least of all real. Unfortunately for them, Germany has no choice but to play the role of Europe’s “well-meaning hegemon.” The European Union needs leadership, and, as distasteful as seizing the initiative may be to most Germans, who associate hegemony with the disaster of Nazism and World War II, only Germany has the geopolitical resources to be a consistent leader.
The lessons of Germany’s catastrophic embrace of Nazism have been underscored in all the media these last few weeks, as Europe sans Russia and Russia sans Europe commemorated the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II. And rightly so, as long as Vladimir Putin’s Russia continues to ignore the criminality of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the division of Poland, the incorporation of the Baltics, and the USSR’s support of the Nazi killing machine. Unfortunately, all too many German policymakers and commentators still refer to the war as having been fought against Russland and insist that the Russen suffered immense casualties. The continued German blindness to the existence of the nations in between—Poland, Ukraine, and Belarus—and to their far greater population losses (not to mention the full-scale destruction of their cities, towns, and villages) is obscene. Poland at least exists in the German popular consciousness; Belarus and Ukraine are empty signifiers—terms that evoke no associations and, hence, little sympathy.
Paradoxically, part of the problem may lie in the fact that Germans are, appropriately, fixated on the Holocaust and their role in it. As a result, academic research, policy commentary, and media discussions of the German responsibility for Nazism and the Holocaust are extremely detailed and nuanced. In contrast, German attitudes toward the East are shaped by the categories of the Holocaust. The wartime experience of Poles, Belarusians, and Ukrainians matters only when Poles, Belarusians, and Ukrainians contributed to the persecution of Jews. Otherwise, they—and their narratives—take a back seat. Take a walk through Munich’s newly opened Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism and you’ll be hard-pressed to notice that the war actually affected the nations in between.
In fact, observing Adolf Hitler’s rise to power cannot but evoke thoughts of Putin and Russia. A currently playing German docu-drama, Elser, focuses on the young Georg Elser’s failed attempt to assassinate Hitler in late 1939. The film is especially good in depicting how the otherwise normal people of Elser’s hometown acquiesce in or increasingly support the growing Nazi presence. Their faces glow at the mention of the Führer, their right arms rise in salute, their voices hail victory in the coming war. I doubt that most Germans will see the parallel, but I couldn’t help but think of the millions of Russians who view Putin as their messiah and who, no less blindly and no less fanatically than the Germans, are welcoming their country’s drive toward war. Swetlana Alexijewitsch, a Belarusian writer living in Moscow, writes in the May 13th edition of Die Zeit that “Russia has become a different country in the last one and a half years…. We are people of war, because we know nothing else…. A cult of war rules over us.” A statue of Putin in St. Petersburg depicts him as a Roman emperor. A Russian scientist I met in Regensburg, Germany, says that he no longer recognizes his mother, still living in St. Petersburg. Meanwhile, former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, who would never say that we should “understand” Hitler, continues to call on the West to understand Putin.
Munich’s Literaturhaus, a cultural center, is currently showing an exhibit dedicated to the excellent Viennese Jewish writer Stefan Zweig, who left Salzburg for London in 1934 and, depressed by Hitler’s aggression and persecution of Jews, committed suicide with his wife in Brazil in 1942. The poster highlights a citation from Zweig: “Wir brauchen einen ganz anderen Mut!” (We need a completely different courage!) The quote is profoundly misleading, suggesting that Zweig, who actually refrained from criticizing the Nazi regime publicly in the hope of having his books published in Germany again, was a heroic figure. He was not: He was tragic. The actual text also lacks the exclamation point, which suggests that Zweig’s statement was meant as a call to arms. In fact, Zweig wrote the following to his friend Paul Zech on June 5, 1941: “My dear, it would be stupid and dishonest to want to say to you: be of good courage, we will win, all will be better. We need a completely different courage, not that of an artificial optimism, but a courage of ‘even so’ and ‘nevertheless.’”
In Munich, where Putin’s immediate threat to world peace appears more abstract than the Nazi book-burning on Königsplatz in 1933, Zweig’s words ring especially true.
