“Reparations without reparations”
Max Czollek
Source: pa/dpa/Gerald Matzka
Recently, the contributions to the German culture of remembrance have accumulated. There seems to be a shift in commemoration – just what kind? Max Czollek refuses to speak of a “miracle of reconciliation” like Steinmeier. He calls for a radical break.
Ahen the first German feature film was released in cinemas in 1946 after Nazi rule and World War I, the obvious was already mentioned in the title: “The murderers are among us”. Today, not only are most of the murderers of that time dead, but so are those who managed to escape them. The memory of the crime and its victims is changing, also because contemporary witnesses are disappearing and society is changing.
The contributions to what is called the German culture of remembrance have increased in the recent past. It is a clear sign that there is a change in commemoration. Just what kind is unclear. Is everything forgiven and forgotten now? Can one speak of a “miracle of reconciliation”, as Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier did in 2021 when he received the Leo Baeck Medal in New York? Max Czollek is one who emphatically disagrees.
Czollek, born in East Berlin in 1987, is the grandson of a Jewish and communist resistance fighter who worked as a publishing manager in the GDR. Czollek argues that one cannot and should not speak of reconciliation with the past and the Jews today. For him, that is “Reconciliation Theater”, the title of his new book. After “Disintegrate!” and “Coping with the Present”, it is already his third.
Symbolic politics without consequences
For Czollek, this is initially a logical thing: millions have been disenfranchised and murdered, how can one be reconciled? It happened and cannot be undone. The past is unavailable, suffering cannot be healed. The task of the living to shape the present in such a way that Auschwitz does not repeat itself and nothing similar happens, as Theodor W. Adorno put it.
But it’s also a political thing – and here Czollek goes back to the “Murderers Among Us”. Were the perpetrators held accountable? Like Achim Doerfer in “Somebody Had to Punish the Perpetrators,” Czollek states that silence and amnesty were more the norm than coming to terms with the situation and punishment – with a few exceptions. But the opposite was asserted, the work-up was described as complete where it had not even begun. Reality and self-image diverged, as Czollek writes.
For Czollek, this first phase of the Federal Republic’s culture of remembrance is followed by two more: with Willy Brandt’s kneeling in Warsaw and Richard von Weizsäcker’s famous speech, lively symbolic politics were pursued, but without major consequences. This symbolic relief prepared the way for the political normalization of the past, which has now arrived in the “theater of reconciliation”. It was the “trick of making amends without making amends,” according to Czollek.
The duty to prosecute
Czollek uses individual examples to illustrate his criticism. He shows why Stauffenberg, Anne Frank and Sophie Scholl are so popular in Germany, but other resistance is not mentioned. Or how the Holocaust memorial and the Berlin City Palace are connected – and what that has to do with the “turn of the era”. It is not always the path of least resistance in terms of political remembrance, but also the one with the greatest possible profit for the project of reconciliation with one’s own past.
Although the polemics are rarely cranked up to the max, Czollek’s book is a polemic. Where does one place “theater of reconciliation” in the already somewhat confusing field of debate? It is skeptical about thoughtless commemoration routines like Per Leo’s “Tränen ohne Glück”, but clearly more socially critical. It pleads for a broadening of the perspective like Michael Rothberg’s “Multidirectional Memory”, but does not question the unprecedentedness of the murder of the Jews committed by the Germans.
From the shrill post-colonial criticism of A. Dirk Moses, who in “The Catechism of the Germans” declared the commemoration of the Holocaust as an attempt to suppress other minorities and so-called criticism of Israel, Czollek is not only a long way away in rhetoric. His reluctance to proclaim reconciliation brings him close to Natan Sznaider, who wrote one of the smartest books on the Holocaust and colonialism, Vanishing Points of Remembrance.
Czollek, that is clearly recognizable, does not want to clear away the memory of the murder of the Jews in the name of other groups of victims. He demonstrates that this remembrance only makes sense if it is not just an empty protestation, but a serious break with what has favored and protected the “murderers among us”. In the film, the protagonist decides against vigilantism at the end. “But we have a duty to bring charges,” it says. It would also fit as a motto for Czollek’s book.