In 1994, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington started to plan an exhibit to commemorate the end of World War II. One of its holdings was the B-29 bomber that had dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. The Enola Gay, named by its pilot after his mother, became the centre of a huge controversy when the curators suggested that visitors might want to think about the morality of using the world’s newest and most destructive weapon. Part of the exhibit was to be broken objects retrieved from the rubble at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Although the museum had consulted with veterans’ associations and historians, this did not spare it the storm that followed. The American Air Force Association charged that the exhibit claimed there was moral equivalency between the United States and Japan. Almost worse, perhaps, from the association’s viewpoint, it was a “strident attack” on the value of airpower. Members of Congress, newspapers, and right-wing radio talk shows jumped in enthusiastically to charge that the Smithsonian was besmirching the honour of the United States and its war heroes. The Smithsonian retreated step by step, first agreeing to redo the exhibit and then cancelling it altogether in January 1995. Four months later, the director of the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum resigned.
Canada has just gone through a similar dispute and yet again it is over the way a museum chose to commemorate World War II. When our new War Museum opened in Ottawa in 2005, it was widely hailed as a stunning building with detailed and well-planned exhibits showing Canada at war from its earliest days to its twenty-first-century campaign in Afghanistan. Nevertheless, the museum almost immediately ran into trouble over the part of its exhibit devoted to the bombing campaign against Germany between 1939 and 1945. As I mentioned earlier, the plaque entitled “An Enduring Controversy” gave particular offence to veterans and their supporters. It called attention to the continuing debate over both the efficacy and the morality of the strategy of the Royal Air Force’s Bomber Command (and its head, Sir Arthur “Bomber” Harris), which sought to destroy Germany’s capacity to fight on by massive bombing of German industrial and civilian targets. The veterans were also upset by photographs that showed dead Germans lying amid shattered buildings after bombing attacks.
The issue was almost bound to cause trouble with the veterans because so many Canadians—about twenty thousand—had flown with the RAF’s Bomber Command and nearly ten thousand had died. Furthermore, the veterans had already fought a similar battle a decade previously when they had taken on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation over a television series it ran in 1992 on Canadian participation in World War II. One segment of The Valour and the Horror suggested that Canadian airmen, brave as they were, had been led into carrying out a morally dubious bombing campaign by their unscrupulous leaders. The veterans organized petitions and letter-writing campaigns against the series and the CBC. Conservative Members of Parliament asked hostile questions in the House of Commons and the hitherto obscure Senate Subcommittee on Veterans’ Affairs started a portentous series of hearings. By the summer of 1993, a group of air force veterans were suing the makers of the documentaries for a huge amount in damages. It was, said the lawyer for the veterans, quite simply “about right and wrong; good and evil; white and black; truth and falsehood.” The suit made its way to the Supreme Court, which finally ruled it out of order. The CBC made a commitment to the veterans not to rebroadcast the series.
Since the veterans and their supporters had won that battle to their satisfaction, they were more than ready to take on the bombing exhibit. Legion Magazine, in an article entitled “At War with the Museum,” said “the war museum has proceeded in such an insensitive and hurtful way that many air veterans feel they and their fallen comrades are being fingered as immoral—even criminal—by an institution of the very government that sent them on those harrowing missions.” The letters started to come in, accusing the museum of labelling Canadian pilots as war criminals. Yet again, those who took part in history were said to have a better view of what had happened than those who studied it later. Official Ottawa, which has tended to have an exaggerated sense of the veterans’ power, was more than ready to try to find a compromise before things got out of hand again. Hoping to defuse the criticisms, the museum’s director called in four outside historians (of which, as I have mentioned, I was one) to give their opinions on the exhibit. Unfortunately, they split. Two tried to uphold the standards of their profession by saying that, yes, there was indeed a controversy over the bombing but that the presentation was “unbalanced.” And was it really necessary, asked one, to refer visitors to a controversy that was quite a complicated one, best carried on among experts? “If we even need to ask the question,” he concluded, “then the answer is no.” The other two historians took the view that museums must be places of learning and that, when there are controversies, museums ought to say so. “History,” I concluded, “should not be written to make the present generation feel good but to remind us that human affairs are complicated.”
The Senate Subcommittee on Veterans Affairs roused itself from its customary torpor and held a series of hearings in the spring of 2007 in which the veterans featured prominently. Its report recommended to the War Museum that it take steps to sort out the dispute with the veterans. The museum, it said, ought to “consider alternative ways of presenting an equally historically accurate version of its material, in a manner which eliminates the sense of insult felt by aircrew veterans and removes potential for further misinterpretation by the public.” What that meant soon became apparent. The War Museum’s director left in circumstances that are still not clear, and soon after the museum announced that it was going to work on revised wording for the exhibit in consultation with the veterans. Cliff Chadderton, chairman of the National Council of Veterans Associations in Canada, was ungracious in victory. “We don’t know what took them so long, because it’s patently wrong, the text of the panel.” He promised more trouble if he and his veterans did not like the revised wording.
Like many other countries, Canada has also had its disputes over public holidays. Many objected when Dominion Day, a celebration that dated back to the formation of Canada as a self-governing dominion within the British Empire, was renamed Canada Day in 1982. Others argued that since Canada had just cut its last legal tie to the United Kingdom, the new name was a mark of full nationhood. Almost everyone in France agreed that 1989, the two-hundredth anniversary of the French Revolution, ought to be commemorated. But what did the revolution mean? Was it to be celebrated for Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, or deplored for the Terror? The commission supposedly responsible for the commemorations quarrelled among itself and with the government. In the end, the national celebrations were taken in hand by an impresario who staged a marvellous and eccentric parade—the Festival of the Planet’s Tribes—through Paris. With the Funky Chicken, African drums, Russian soldiers marching in fake snow, Chinese students towing a huge drum, and a marching band from Florida, should the new slogan for France be, Newsweek wondered, Liberty, Frivolity, Irony?
If the significance of the French Revolution is difficult for the French to agree upon, so too is much else in France’s history. What about Napoleon? Is he a great national hero or, as a French historian recently charged, a racist dictator? Should his great victory at Austerlitz be commemorated as the British commemorate the Battle of Trafalgar or should it be passed over in silence? How should French schools present the history of French colonialism in Algeria? For many years, the savage war between the Algerian nationalists on the one hand and the French settlers and the French army on the other was officially downplayed as “the events.” The pervasive and sanctioned use of torture against the Algerians only became a matter of public discussion when General Paul Aussauresses, who was a high-ranking intelligence officer during the Algerian war, publicly defended the use of torture in 2000. (After September 11, he recommended using his methods on al-Qaeda.) In 2005, the government passed a law stipulating that textbooks should recognize “the positive role of the French presence in its overseas col
onies, especially in North Africa.” At first a few historians protested against this attempt at an official history, but when the nation was shaken that autumn by rioting adolescents of North African descent, the issue hit the headlines and the National Assembly.
The right-wing, collaborationist Vichy regime, which ruled over what was left of France by the Germans during World War II, has been particularly difficult for the French to deal with. For a long time after 1945, they told themselves a comforting story that ignored the degree of support Vichy had among the population as well as its often enthusiastic collaboration with the Nazis. When he arrived in triumph in Paris in 1944, General Charles de Gaulle, the leader of the Free French, announced that Vichy was “a non-event and without consequence.” The true France was represented by his own forces and the Resistance. The few French who had collaborated were to be punished and the French would get on with rebuilding their great country. The myth, for that is what it was, allowed the French to forget about the French policemen who willingly rounded up the Jews to be deported to the death camps; to forget the relatively small number who joined the Resistance and the many officials of the old regime who had collaborated and yet who were allowed to continue in their positions after 1945. The government made little attempt to round up and try some of France’s more prominent war criminals such as Klaus Barbie, the “Butcher of Lyons.” Indeed, some received protection from the Church or from highly placed politicians. No one questioned, or not until the 1990s, the claim of François Mitterrand, president from 1981 to 1995, that he had worked for the Vichy government for only a short period before joining the Resistance. In fact, as an enterprising journalist discovered, he had worked there for much longer than he had admitted and had won a decoration.
The process by which France has come to terms with its Vichy past has been a painful one. Initially, it was only foreign historians who chose to examine the period carefully. When the filmmaker Marcel Ophüls made his classic documentary The Sorrow and the Pity, which gave a truer picture of Vichy and shattered the myth of widespread resistance, French television refused to broadcast it. When it was released in 1971, it was attacked from the right and the left. Jean-Paul Sartre found it “inaccurate.” A conservative commentator in Le Monde scolded the Jews who had been interviewed in the film for their ingratitude in criticizing Vichy’s president Marshal Pétain, who, he claimed, had saved them. In the 1970s and 1980s, there was increasing public discussion with more films and books appearing, but it was not until the end of the century, after Mitterrand and much of his generation had passed from the scene, that the new French president Jacques Chirac was able to admit that France had aided in the Holocaust.
In Russia, where the transition from one form of government to another was much more abrupt, post-Soviet governments have been grappling, with limited success, to make a new identity for Russia by using history. “These days,” the Russians say, “we live in a country with an unpredictable past.” While the new order clearly does not want to celebrate the November 7 anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, it does not want to alienate the citizenry by getting rid of what has been a two-day holiday. When Boris Yeltsin was in power, he kept the holiday but renamed it the Day of Accord and Reconciliation. The public remained largely in ignorance of the change. In 2005, Putin moved the holiday a couple of days forward, to November 4, and christened it the Day of National Unity. The change in date is to commemorate Russian success in driving out Polish invaders in 1612. The public, apart from the radical nationalists, still has no idea of what the holiday is supposed to be celebrating.
What present-day Russia has shown little interest in remembering, at least so far, is the horrors of the Stalinist period. There are few official museums or sites to mark the Gulag or the thousands upon thousands who died in Stalin’s prisons, and few memorials to those brave individuals, like Andrei Sakharov, who opposed the Soviet state.
Russia is not alone in wanting to turn its eyes firmly away from the painful parts of the past. In the decade after the Vietnam War ended, the United States, unlike the case in all previous wars, did not undertake to create an official war memorial to the dead. It was only when private citizens created their own foundation that the government was shamed into providing a piece of land on the Mall in Washington.
In Spain, when democracy gradually took root after General Franco’s death in 1975, there was an unspoken agreement—the pacto del olvido—to forget the trauma of the Civil War and the years of repression that followed. In recent decades, though, writers, historians, and filmmakers began to explore the horrors of the war and, in November 2007, the government enacted the Law of Historic Memory. There is to be a national effort to locate the mass graves and identify the bones of those who were shot by Franco’s winning side. Franco’s regime itself has been formally repudiated and it will be erased, as much as possible, from public commemoration. Franco’s statues will disappear and the names of streets and squares will be changed. It is unlikely that the law will bring agreement on Spain’s history. If anything, it is opening up old divisions and creating new ones. “What do we gain?” asks Manuel Fraga, a senator and former minister under Franco who took part in the transition to democracy. “Look at the British: Cromwell decapitated a king, but his statue still stands outside parliament. You cannot change the past.”
West Germany and Japan have both been pushed to remember the recent past by the victors in World War II but, also, to be fair, by their own citizens. Immediately after the war, the Germans, like other Europeans, were preoccupied with survival and rebuilding, and had little inclination or energy to spend on thinking about the past. Perhaps too, because their defeat had been so complete and the Nazi past was so hideous (and their own complicity with Hitler so profound), they took refuge in forgetting and in silence. In the 1950s, few ordinary Germans wanted to discuss Nazism or remind each other of their involvement with the regime. With the one exception of The Diary of Anne Frank, which sold very well, the dozens of memoirs by concentration camp survivors and the few essays on German guilt did not attract much attention. The silence about the past was never complete though; there were always writers and thinkers prepared to ask the awkward questions and Germans could not entirely escape the consequences of following Hitler, when their country was first occupied and then divided into two independent states. Moreover, West Germany, on its Chancellor Konrad Adenauer’s initiative, paid reparations to Israel. (Only eleven percent of Germans at the time thought the decision was a good one.)
It was at the end of the 1950s that West Germans started to examine their own past in depth. In 1961, the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem exposed the elaborate bureaucracy with which the Nazi state had carried out the extermination of the Jews. Other trials followed in West Germany and a younger, more radical generation began to demand and get the truth about the past. When the American television series Holocaust was shown on German television in 1979, over half the adult population watched it. Today, a reunited Germany stands out as a society that deals with its past, often in very visible ways. More concentration camp museums have been opened and schoolchildren are taken to see them as a matter of course. In Berlin, the National Memorial to the Victims of War and Tyranny, the bombed-out ruins of the Kaiser Wilhelm church, and the Holocaust memorial all act as a national remembrance, while all over Germany towns and cities have their own memorials and museums.
During the Cold War, while West Germans were confronting their Nazi past, East Germans were avoiding it. The Communist state of East Germany managed to detach itself from all connection to or responsibility for the Nazi period. Hitler and the Nazis were said to represent the final stage of capitalism. It was they who had started the war and they who had killed millions of Jews and other Europeans. East Germany was socialist and progressive and had always stood side by side with the Soviet Union against fascism. Indeed, a significant number of East Germans grew up thinking their country had fought on the Soviet side in World War II. Although the Eas
t German regime made memorials of three of the concentration camps, the only deaths remembered were those of Communists; Jews and Gypsies were not mentioned.
Austria’s amnesia was even more striking. In the decades after World War II, it managed, very successfully, to portray itself as the first victim of Nazism. In a 1945 ceremony in Vienna for a memorial to fallen Soviet soldiers, Leopold Figl, who was shortly to become the country’s chancellor, mourned that “the people of Austria have spent seven years languishing under Hitler’s barbarity.” Austrians comforted themselves for the next decades with such assurances. They were a happy, gentle people who had never wanted to be joined with the likes of Nazi Germany; Hitler had forced the Anschluss on them. They had never wanted war and if their soldiers had fought, it was only to defend their homeland. And they had suffered hugely, it must be said, at the hands of the Allies. Who, after all, had destroyed the magnificent Opera House in Vienna? The fact that many of the most fervent Nazis, including Hitler himself, were Austrian; the wildly enthusiastic crowds who greeted his triumphal march to Vienna in 1938; and the willing collaboration of many Austrians in the persecution and destruction of the Jews—all that was simply brushed under the carpet. The few brave liberals who tried to celebrate both the small Austrian resistance to Nazism and memorialize the destruction of the Jews found themselves isolated and accused of being Communists. It was only in the 1960s, with new generations appearing on the scene and Germany’s own examination of its Nazi past, that questions about Austria’s role began to surface.
The Japanese are often compared unfavourably to the West Germans, especially by the Chinese. Japan has not, it is charged, admitted its culpability in the invasion of China in the 1930s, its role in the start of the Pacific War and the savage treatment of those it conquered, from the Rape of Nanjing to its inhumane medical experiments in Manchuria. There is enough truth in this to make the accusations stick. Japan, like Austria, portrayed itself as a victim in the years after the war. It used the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in part as ways of deflecting attention from its own crimes. It was slow to offer compensation, for example, to the Korean women it forced to serve as prostitutes for its soldiers. Successive prime ministers have paid their respects to the Yasakuni Shrine, which honours Japan’s war dead, including leaders who were convicted of war crimes.
The Uses and Abuses of History Page 10