Don't mention the war

Why can't we British just forget about the war (you know, that war, with the Holocaust and all)?The Germans have managed it, after all. All water under the bridge, eh?

A couple of items in today's Sunday Times (£) caught my eye....

From an article by Stephen Armstrong on German comedian Michael Mittermeier (their answer, apparently, to Michael McIntyre - well, their names are similar anyway):

Mittermeier doesn’t quite get the whole “two world wars and one World Cup” thing. For a start, his generation seems comfortable that their history is what it is. They’ve moved on, but without forgetting. He will happily discuss Hitler without shame, but without enthusiasm.  Modern Germans rarely get the credit they deserve for dealing with a dark past practically, honestly and with a sense of humour, something their British counterparts still struggle to begin to do when faced with the full litany of our own bloodstained history.

Well that's nice: without shame but without enthusiasm. If only we could muster the same philosophical approach to our history of exterminating European Jewry in death camps just a couple of generations ago. 

It takes some effort to turn our part in Hitler's defeat into something to be embarrassed about with respect to the Germans, but let's give credit for the continuing effort. 

And Max Hastings, reviewing a book on the expulsion of Germans from Eastern Europe after the war. Oh yes, they suffered too, you know:

For three years, the new regimes in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Yugoslavia shipped millions of people westwards in conditions entirely comparable with recent Jewish experience at Nazi hands, save that the victims were not gassed. 

I love that: "entirely comparable....save that the victims were not gassed". 

Yes yes, I know....unfair. No doubt this Michael Mittermeier is a delightful man, and yes, the ethnic post-war cleansing of Germans was a shameful business that should be better known, but - to state the obvious - the Holocaust is not something that should be forgotten or forgiven, or be casually compared to other political crimes.

Comments

[tolkein]

I must have missed the part in the history of the British Empire about starting two European wars, one involving deliberate murder of around 6 million Jews as well as millions of others. Oh wait. I haven't, because it never happened, nor anything on that scale. This is not to say that the British Empire was just a bunch of happy campers singing kumbaya.

And what's this bit about discussing Hitler without a sense of shame? I still feel ashamed about British participation in the slave-trade.

Lastly, I think the ethnic cleansing of the Germans of eastern Europe was a moral crime. The Czech lands and Poland would be better off with restitution, including return of property, to those who were expelled. This should apply to the Jews expelled in the Middle East as well as the Palestinians who fled the creation of Israel. And yes, I'm a staunch supporter of Israel and the Jewish people.

[brian]

That football phrase "two world wars and one world cup" is vulgar and asinine. That much the German dude is right about. If he said that, I can't read the articles.

[sackcloth and ashes]

If the Nazis hadn't seized power (let's say there had been some better marksmanship on the part of the Munich police in 1923) there wouldn't have been an eventual ethnic cleansing of Germans from Poland or what is now the Czech Republic, and the Kaliningrad enclave wouldn't exist. Untold thousands of women and girls in East Germany wouldn't have been gangraped, and there would have been no Stasi and no Wall.

At the same time there also wouldn't have been the consequences of the Holocaust and also Barbarossa (which included the mass exodus of Poles from what is now Belarus and Ukraine after 1945).