A number of European leaders met for several days and completed a geographical division of the lands of Africa. They also agreed on some form of “globalization” between their colonies (social networking sites)
Germany carries on its back huge burdens from the last century: two world wars and two human genocides. As well as a notorious colonial legacy in southern Africa, and a harsh version of dictatorship on the eastern bank of the country.
Germany's problematic history extends beyond the twentieth century. In the second half of the nineteenth century, in the wake of the British-French conflict over the colonies and under the pressure of the German industrial machine and its need for more raw materials, German Chancellor Bismarck called, in 1884 AD, for the Berlin Conference on Africa.
A number of European leaders met for several days and accomplished a geographical division of the territories of Africa, and agreed on some form of "globalization" between their colonies, including the free flow of raw materials and white people. There is not a single reference to the peoples of Africa in the conference papers.
These lands seemed as if they had no people. After his success in uniting the German-speaking peoples under one roof, Bismarck was able to look around and look at the world as his European neighbors did.
After nearly three decades of German colonial practice in Africa, its military formations, under the leadership of General von Trotta, carried out the first human extermination operation in the region that is now known as Namibia. The massacre of 60-70,000 Herero and Nama tribes between 1904-1908 was the last rehearsal before massacres of the same kind followed.
Throughout the country, monuments were built to remind the Germans of their bad history, and national symbols and icons receded from the forefront, as if the German no longer had the right to express himself. Cinema, literature, education, and all types and mediums of the arts worked to remind the Germans of their notorious work.
The colonial race between the European powers developed into the First World War, which Germany lost.
France, the victor in the war, deployed its military formations in West Germany, and African and Moroccan soldiers represented the backbone of those formations. The German, both the individual and the elite, felt a severe insult to their noble race, or the country of philosophers and poets.
The term “black shame” emerged into the open, a mixture of both political and racial appeal. The black man, the lowest, was brought to insult Germany's pride and rape its women.
In the 1920s, Nazism found in the Black Question a rare mobilization tool against everything from the Weimar government to French colonialism. As a material means of propaganda, the Nazis distributed sculptures in the form of African sexual organs, covered with French military hats, and crucified German girls. Within that speech, and under the sign of black shame, the Germans were called to think about what France was doing to them, about the humiliation that went beyond the limits of imagination.
In the 1920s, Nazism was still a young movement in the cities of the South, but the story of black men raping German women day and night took its toll and put the Weimar Republic in a dilemma. In addition to the black perpetrators, the Jewish race was present as another perpetrator, and was presented as a secret gang controlling the German government in Weimar, and pushing it to turn a blind eye to the humiliation to which German society is exposed.
When the Nazis came to power, after 1933, they counted the children born to white mothers and black men, and found that they did not exceed a few thousand, so they castrated them all. Until you put an end to black shame, and come at it at its roots.
This was a second genocide that was rarely talked about. The same thing happened with the Jews. Nazism wanted to “purify” Germany of everything inferior. Germany became for the Germans, and all types of sports, as well as music, were forbidden to anyone who was not Aryan by blood.
The Berlin Olympics, August 1936, represented a sudden shock to the idea of Aryan superiority, which Nazism had used to turn into a social doctrine. 18 African-American athletes participated in the sports tournament and won 12 medals, including 8 gold medals.
The Americans wanted to provoke the Nazis at home, and that is what happened. The Germans watched black runner Jess Owens win four gold medals alone and defeat his white rivals, including the Aryans, or Übermensch. The man's ingenuity prompted them to clap and cheer, ignoring everything the Nazis told them about their racial superiority. Swallowing defeat, Hitler left the stands, refusing to shake hands with any of the black winners, and his newspapers neglected to mention those “black” sporting victories.
America succeeded in its tactic by placing Nazism in a moral dilemma within an international event that was the most important at the time. After the arrival of the American delegation to his country, the White House invited only white athletes to meet with President Roosevelt, who knew very well that hosting black men in the White House would put him in trouble with the political elites in the southern states.
As for Jess Owens, whom the American press talked about at length while he was still in Berlin, as the hero whom Hitler refused to shake hands with; Because of his color, he started saying at a popular party in America: “The one who insulted me is Roosevelt.” The First World War left every reason for a second war, and that is what happened. Nazi Germany also lost the second war, and then returned once again to fragmentation into states and colonies. All these shadows fell on post-World War II Germany. The Germans returned to themselves; To understand what happened to them, and how it happened. Preoccupied with studying and remembering the past, branches of knowledge and academics specializing in the culture of memory (Erinnerungskultur) arose.
Throughout the country, monuments were built to remind Germans of their bad history, and national symbols and icons receded from the forefront, as if the German no longer had the right to express himself. Cinema, literature, education, and all types and mediums of the arts served to remind the Germans of their notorious deed.
The harsh self-flagellation created a growing rejection and an urgent desire to return to a normal state, to a life without “moral clubs” that haunt and surround the country’s people. Martin Walser, the most famous German writer, used the expression moral cudgel in a speech he gave on the occasion of receiving the Peace Prize in Frankfurt 1998. He expressed his desire for Germany to be freed from its moral prison and live its natural state. To stop at the limits of her acknowledgment of her past and not go too far into self-flagellation.
Walser's speech resonated throughout the country, and within a short time 1,200 prominent German figures from the worlds of culture, politics and economics had signed a petition in support of what was stated in his speech.
At that time, the German arena witnessed an open debate that is difficult to imagine happening these days. Pops, head of the Supreme Council of German Jews, responded to Walser by calling him an arsonist. German intellectuals who sided with Walser against the "German Jew" Pops became involved in the dispute, and the debate witnessed a heavy presence of anti-Semitic rhetoric to a greater or lesser degree. This was the first notable attempt to express the Germans' boredom with the abnormal situation to which they found themselves hostages.
Two years earlier, in 1997, the Hamburg Institute for Social Research held an exhibition entitled: “War Crimes, Actions of the German Army 1941-1945.” The exhibition sparked a wave of popular discontent that reached Parliament and entered public debate. It was said that the German soldier was not a criminal, he was just an employee carrying out orders, and that it was time for the Germans to stop insulting themselves and the reputation of the German soldier.
In parallel, the German regime continued its work to deepen the culture of memory under a broad heading called: (Vergangenheitsbewältigung) or confronting the past.
German recognition of the past centered exclusively around the Jewish question. Germany did not recognize the human genocide committed by its army in Africa until 2021, and refused to include the issue of reparations within that recognition process.
When German Interior Minister Nancy Wasser stood before journalists in Tel Aviv at the beginning of this year, she was unable to provide a convincing explanation for the data that said: Only 34% of all Germans see their country as committed to supporting Israel. To avoid embarrassment, she said: Her country would work harder within the school education system; So that the children know that - as she said - we killed the Jews in the streets of our country
Instead, then-Foreign Minister Heiko Maas asked forgiveness from the descendants of the victims. Germany was so emotionally exhausted by the Jewish question that it was all in the past. In his article on Al Jazeera Net, on March 22 of this year, the Russian writer Ontikov referred to the Russian-Israeli controversy over the Nazi Holocaust.
According to Ontikov, Israel, which accuses the Russians of belittling the Holocaust, does not itself acknowledge the Holocaust that happened to the Russians in the war itself. The German self-purification machine operates under the slogan: “Never again,” which has become a fatalistic cult, a slogan that revolves around the crime against the Jews.
In recent weeks, pro-Palestine demonstrators in Berlin carried signs reading, “Never again with all the people.” The slogan, which was intended to be an introduction to peace and a summary of the historical lesson, returned to the forefront with the Gaza war to say the opposite of its meaning, and to support human genocide taking place on air.
The mnemonic culture has fallen into two real dilemmas: The first: its total absorption in the Jewish issue, and the second: a popular desire to be freed from guilt, perhaps as a reaction against indulgence in self-flagellation. The details of the first dilemma are observed in the suicidal support that Germany provides to the perpetrators of the Holocaust in Gaza, which means that it has not learned much from the past.
The second dilemma appears in many forms within the structures of the state and society. When Gauland stood before the youth of his party in Thuringia in 2017 - at the time the head of the Radical Alternative Party - he enthusiastically told them: Germany is a country with a thousand-year history, and Nazism is nothing but “flying dung” on that glorious history. That statement roused politicians from the most prominent parties to accuse the man of despising the Nazi crime, and some of them demanded that his party be removed from Parliament.
The Alternative Party represents the second political force in the country, and 80% of its voters believe that Israel represents a foreign entity to them, according to a poll conducted by Forsa last December. The culture of remembrance, with all its material and rhetorical presence, is going through a real crisis.
I wanted it to mean only the German sin against Judaism, but then it turned into daily grief and humiliation that did not fit with what the German believed about himself and his history. New data suggest that mnemonic culture may lead to its opposite.
When German Interior Minister Nancy Wasser stood before journalists in Tel Aviv at the beginning of this year, she was unable to provide a convincing explanation for the data that said: Only 34% of all Germans see their country as committed to supporting Israel. To avoid embarrassment, she said: Her country would work harder within the school education system; So that the children know that - as she said - we killed the Jews in the streets of our country.
It is not unlikely that new attempts will go in vain. The average German wants to look at the past and see his historical self in a natural context. He became satiated with the image of his father in his military uniform tracking down the Jews in the basements of his country. Because of their religion. That moral cudgel, which Martin Walser talked about, is Germany's chronic fatigue.
Because the culture of remembrance has focused entirely on the Jewish issue, and not on the entire past, it is likely that the level of historical lesson will be less than hoped for. The politicians who are currently leading Germany, and pushing it into wars and holocausts, have graduated from this school of memory, and have learned nothing.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Al Jazeera.