Urban Renewal and the Graveyard of History

                                              URBAN RENEWAL AND THE GRAVEYARD OF HISTORY     

                                                                              HE SAYS:

Our river boat glides down the Main River as we watch the quiet, green shore line with its overgrown vegetation, occasionally littered with tourist rec vehicles in camp sites. There is a gentle mist falling which will become a downpour. Now, today, the river is, literally, quiet as a grave yard. And the metaphor is all too appropriate as I think about what I have seen.

Some random retrospective and prospective thoughts….

O The Jewish community in Cologne, which we visited two days ago,  was reputed to be the oldest in Europe with a population of about 30, 000 in 1933; at the war’s end the population was only 3, 000. Today, with the influx of Eastern European immigrants, it has a population of 8, 000 and boasts a new (Conservative) synagogue.

O As we left the boat to board our buses for our tour of Koblenz there was a tall, guff gentleman behind me who growled, “Why are we visiting Koblenz?  I thought we bombed it flat.” There is an unarticulated, but real low-key tension between the nominally apolitical tourist experience of most, and the cloud of memory of others, and the historical amnesia of the locals.

O We leave for our tour this morning to Wurzburg, a colorful, small-large town with a mixed economy; however, it is best known for being a university town. The local Franconia white wine was nice, but the town is otherwise non-descript, being a mixture of old timbered houses and post-war modern archtecture. One of our German tour guides says that the town was spared saturation bombing until the end of WW II when it was fire bombed. The woman next to me whispers, “What are they complaining about?  They got free urban renewal.” This tension is glossed over with a benign smile.

O We visited Miltenberg, in Bavaria, yesterday. Our guide, Bridgette, was superlative – knowledgeable, bright and enthusiastic. She knew her local history and had a feel for small town (10, 000 pop) life and politics. She bragged that the mayors in Bavaria, who evidently have a good deal of political power, in the 1930s rejected the lured of National Socialism (Nazis). But even she, who is strongly anti-Nazi, didn’t know that it was the Bavarian Peasants’ Party that threw their electoral support to Hitler so that he could be elected.

After the formal tour she also took us, at our request, to the local Jewish cemetery. Interestingly, it was desanctified in 1904 (yup) after the entire Jewish community left for some reason; it was never used again. We contemplated this experience over a beer in Germany’s oldest beer hall.

At the beer hall another person who knew the local scene told us a blood curdling story. A few years ago her then teenaged daughter found out that there was a group of students and townspeople getting together for a meeting, but she wasn’t invited because she was of a mixed marriage, and wasn’t considered to be fully German. As it turns out, this group of students, adult townspeople and grandchildren of local Nazis had dug up Nazi paraphernalia that had been buried after the war and were now having Nazi marching drills in a cellar. As well, there had been a large and unchallenged neo-Nazi demo in this town only a few years ago.

This is the ugly underbelly of the new Germany. Notwithstanding denazification, and saccharine platitudes, Germany still suffers from historical amnesia, as do the Austrians and the Japanese. The recent historiography on German fascism has emphasised how the Nazi movement took root  in small towns and tries to answer the questions: Why did people support the Nazis? and, why did people follow orders? The most cogent study in this genre is Ordinary People by Browning.  And what this study shows, simply, is that ordinary people did unspeakable things in the name of security, employment, community, and ideology. But historical amnesia leads to the graveyard, both for victims and victors.

My lengthy op-ed piece in The Ottawa Citizen (Aug 28, 2011) demonstrates that genocide is an old as human history, and that no one group, religion or ethnic group has a monopoly on misery or being victims; we should honour all of the victims of genocide throughout history. Promo Levy, the famous Italian writer and holocaust survivor, wrote a New Yorker Magazine piece a few years ago trying to explain the dynamics of racism, and said that “Everyone wants their Jew. Now the Israelis have the Palestinians.”

We all make a mistake if we think that it can’t happen again, or that the most overt symbols such as torchlight parades or black jack boots are necessary to announce the arrival of fascism. And we should understand that fascism doesn’t have to be racialist. It was Mussolini who once said that, “We are not anti-Semites, we are fascists.” In short, fascism has many faces.