"Germany waged genocidal war under the shadow of ww2"proverbial statement
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under adolf hitler germany waged genocidal war
It's wrong to say Germans ignore WWI. While they may not remember the details of their own family history, the larger geopolitical history is burned into their collective memories, and so is the guilt, writes Jennifer Macey.
My great-grandfather died on the Western Front in WWI.
But I don't march on Anzac Day. I don't have any of his old medals. I don't visit his war grave.
He fought on the wrong side of the war. He was German.
A rough poll of my German mothers group drew a similar response.
Few are able to name a relative who fought in WWI. Yet they shamefully list family who fought in WWII as pilots, radio operators, and the SS.
Sibylle Seidler says Germans are taught not to be proud of war: "There's nothing to celebrate."
Anna Steinhaus says at school they spent two weeks learning about WWI history and nine years on WWII and the Holocaust.
My friend, Lars Nieradzik, who works for the CSIRO in Canberra says, "Many of the personal stories of WWI have been forgotten because everything that came afterwards was so much worse."
The British tabloids have attacked Germany for this perceived lack of interest in the WWI centenary.
"Germany shuns 1914 centenary," and, "Germany's cut price First World War Tribute," berates the Daily Mail. Even Reuters and the BBC got in on the criticism: "As others mark World War One centenary, Germans prefer to forget."
But a spokesman from the German Foreign Ministry says, "To suggest Germans have forgotten the First World War is absurd."
On July 3, the German Bundestag held a special session of parliament to remember the centenary. There were two ceremonies in Berlin in June (and one in Sarajevo) to mark the 100th anniversary of the assassination of Austrian Crown Prince Franz Ferdinand, which triggered the war.
On that day, Chancellor Angela Merkel attended an EU commemorative event in Belgium and German president Joachim Gauck has a list of events still on his calendar for August when fighting broke out 100 years ago.
And more than 200 new history books have been rushed out for the centenary. Newspapers have devoted specials to WWI. There are countless documentaries on television and exhibitions held in museums and galleries around the country.
WWI historian, Professor Gerd Krumeich, from Düsseldorf University says the German government initially dragged its feet over the centenary but has now caught up with huge popular interest. He says WWI "conferences and exhibitions are packed".
It is true that Germany's anniversary events are typically academic and analytical, self-reflective rather than showy. There was no one big event planned for August 3.
But I'm not entirely sure what sort of ceremony would be deemed appropriate for the instigators and losers of the Great War.
Imagine a parade of soldiers marching down the avenues of Berlin in a country that once hosted the Nuremberg rallies? It's inconceivable to Germans.
Professor Krumeich says there's never been a tradition of remembering the Great War dead.
The Nazis took up the issue and commemorated a lot, (using the First World War for propaganda) and this was abandoned after 1945.
Klaus Wiegrefe wrote in the weekly magazine Der Spiegel that while the British government is funding school trips to the Western Front battlefields, "a response of this nature would be unthinkable in pacifist Germany."
About 17 million people died in WWI. "That's one of the reasons," president Gauck told Der Spiegel, that he would consider "a German commemoration as merely being a sign of respect for the suffering of those we were fighting at the time."
Perhaps also why on August 3 Gauck is joining other heads of state at former WWI battlefields in France and Belgium, rather than hosting a ceremony on German soil, where no fighting occurred within Germany's current borders.
The German Foreign Ministry says the focus is on "remembering and honouring the victims and those who suffered in the Great War and to learn lessons for the future."
Far from