There is no state that has been and continues to be as haunted by the spectres of a criminal past as is Germany. Jeffrey Olick’s The Sins of the Fathers: Germany, Memory, Method examines, with an impressive wealth of documentation and meticulous attention to detail, the process by which the Federal Republic of Germany (1949–1990) confronted the burden of the Nazi crimes and dealt with its political costs, from the immediate post-war period to German unification.
What happens when State leaders cannot tell a positive story about the nation’s past? What history and politics unfold in the context of a damaged national identity? Such a problem is, of course, not unique to Germany – even less so in a ‘guilty age’ dominated by the Politics of Regret, to which Jeffrey Olick has devoted his previous book. For German leaders, however, the task at hand was, and continues to be, the mastering of a past that has become the symbol of ultimate evil.
The book’s fundamental contribution is a methodological one. The well-established but still amorphous field of memory studies exists disjointedly in disciplinary silos that too often engage in solipsistic and heuristically sterile undertakings. In this academic scenario, Jeffrey Olick’s ‘historical sociology of mnemonic practices’ (or, more simply, the historical study of commemorations and images of the past) has for some time now provided conceptual clarity and very helpful analytical tools for examining the elusive workings of collective memory. To that end, Olick has also revisited theoretical traditions in a very fruitful fashion and The sins of the fathers is possibly the most refined outcome in this line of scholarship.
This is a book about state-sponsored or official memories of the Nazi past. It examines what national leaders have said about Nazism, and how those statements, which conveyed specific images of this past and its present implications, showed significant differences synchronically and throughout the period analysed. Drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin and the notion of dialogue and on Bourdieu’s field theory, Olick departs from reified conceptions of collective memory and places the emphasis on practices and processes. Official representations of the past are not mere emanations of structural factors – or epiphenomena. While official memories are influenced or constrained by broader social trends and governmental agendas, they are also structuring, i.e. affecting what the state does and conditioning ensuing discursive constellations, implying both speech and actions. The productive notion of ‘memory of memory’ illustrates the dialogical approach. Earlier images of the past shape later ones, singular commemorative events being ‘always but moments in continually unfolding stories’ (p. 4). The author also adopts a commendable Bourdieusian epistemological vigilance in the use of concepts that too often fall prey to deterministic approaches in social memory research. ‘Generations’ is one of them. While differences in generational experience undoubtedly have a bearing on the ways German leaders have referred to and situated themselves with regard to the crimes of the Nazism and the Second World War, the study highlights that ‘generations’ are not only analytical prisms but also categorisations internal to the field of study – emic or indigenous categories in ethnographic terms – and claims made for particular purposes by the political actors involved. For instance, the liability-deflecting ‘grace of late birth’, a statement by chancellor Helmut Kohl at the Israeli Parliament in 1984, is both an empirical fact and a powerful element of discourse.
Germany has gained international reputation and now appears in popular imagination as the country that has openly acknowledged, atoned for and expiated the atrocities in question. Olick offers a thorough empirical qualification to such broad-brush strokes and argues that Germany’s leaders have actually deployed a myriad of defence mechanisms in their remembrance of the Nazi past. ‘Much of the state-sponsored memory in the Federal Republic of Germany’, he claims, ‘has been organized as an effort to deny collective guilt’ (p. 29). The book is structured around the presentation of three succeeding ‘legitimation profiles’ – each confronting the problem of collective guilt in singular ways. The first one, the ‘reliable nation’, centred on institutional reform, rather than symbolic gesture, and aimed to prove that the newfound German state was a trustworthy and responsible member of the international community. During this time, the country’s leaders draw a clear line separating the criminal Nazi leadership from the general German population. The Nazis had committed crimes ‘in the name of the German people’, as chancellor Adenauer put it in the 1950s.
The ‘moral nation’ emerges in the mid-1960s with the coming of age of a second generation that was not burdened directly by the Nazi period and who could more easily pose questions regarding individual culpability and collective responsibility of their elders. This was a progressive era across the West. In Germany, the political culture of the New Left embraced anti-Fascism (in contrast to previous anti-totalitarianism theory), and German leaders of the time claimed that the separation line between the new German democracy and the Nazi past was rather porous. The duty of remembrance was stressed now and this meant properly confronting the looming legacies of that past in the present, a past repressed and not yet ‘worked through’.
In the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s, the pendulum swung back towards conservatism, and German leaders sought to become a ‘normal nation’, the third legitimation profile. Such normalisation implied recovering national identity and traditional values. Leaders were invested in altering the image of the nation’s past, where Nazism appeared to be spoiling the nation’s identity for perpetuity. Normalisation meant reframing and relativising: (a) other nations also had trouble with their pasts and (b) there was more to German history than the crimes of Hitler. While each epoch has a dominant legitimation profile, Olick stresses that these are not watertight compartments and there are elements of the three legitimation profiles in all three epochs.
From the analysis that follows, Olick asserts that when the acknowledgment of guilt comes to the foreground of German history politics it is, necessarily, at the expense of national identity. The progressives, argues Olick, seek guilt without identity, while the conservatives claim an identity without guilt (p. 32). This leaves the reader with the stirring question behind this study: a criminal past, when acknowledged, poses a legitimation dilemma and thus Germany embodies the quintessential collective memory problem. The overall political lesson to be learned from this case is that Germany managed to keep the past alive – even if such efforts were permanently entangled with attempts to avoid, to reframe, to silence or to relativise it. This is, we learn in the conclusions, a valuable humanist German legacy to the world.
The epilogue makes a necessary incursion into the post-unification memory debates. Still, the reader remains somewhat unapprised of how the developments in the last 25 years in Germany fit within the overall analytical framework. Have new legitimation profiles emerged? Is the irreducible tension between guilt and identity still pertinent in the unified Berlin Republic? Here engagement with the work of German scholars who sustain alternative hypotheses on the memory–national identity nexus would have been welcome. I thus permit myself to bring some of these arguments to the discussion now. The chronic weakness of identity of the Germans, to the extent that their past cannot be integrated into a stable and positive self-image (a recurrent trope from the Historians’ debate in the 1980s), has given way to rather new formulations. Sociologist Darious Zifonun (2004) argued that the Holocaust has shifted from a burden to an opportunity, paradoxically, for a redefined national identity. The thorn in the side of German identity has not festered in the wound, but rather nurtured and strengthened the national body. German memory discourses, practices and fertile memorial landscape (the colossal Memorial to the murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin being its most conspicuous expression) function like a mirror for the German citizen, and a theatrical stage for the non-German spectator, who witnesses Germans confronting their past and verifies their transformation and national renewal.
This newfound national identity is, however, unescapably exclusionary. The language around the Berlin Memorial is a case in point. Journalist Leah Rosh, one of the primary forces lobbying for this project, envisioned that the monument would fulfil a ‘collectivity building’ (Gemeinschaftsstiftend) role. But which is the collectivity whose identity is being built through remembrance? Germans here can only be those who identify as descendants of a perpetrator generation and accept, as Zifonun argues, the guilt of Germans as representatives of the collectivity. These are necessarily ethnic Germans. One could also provocatively phrase this as follows: the Nazis saw themselves as a collectivity (the Germans) that defined themselves against the (non-German) Jews to be exterminated, whereas contemporary German identity is defined vis-à-vis the dead Jews of the Holocaust in a national identity-building space such as the Berlin monument. Several historians have also pointed to this unfortunate irony. Hanno Loewy (1999) contended that the Berlin monument embodies the founding act of the Berlin Republic, of German unity, which is to be realised in the collective penance for the act, i.e. the genocide of the Jews. Similarly, Holger Kirsch (2003) considers that the Jews are the ‘great other’, and at the same time fulfil the role as a symbolic centre of German identity.
Summarising, the critical interpretation of these more recent memory discourses and objects poses questions regarding the linkage between remembrance (of atrocious misdeeds) and identity, which Jeffrey Olick sees as an irreconcilable legitimation problem. One could argue that this is still a legitimation profile, one that rhetorically embraces guilt and repentance. But in contrast to the ‘social liberal-guilt’ of the 1960s and 1970s, this discourse is not deepening a cleavage with conservative mainstream forces in society but functions transversely as a productive source of national identity. In this respect, we might think also of other lessons, or rather warnings, that Germany’s memory problem can teach to the world. I am referring here to the limitations and drawbacks of state-sponsored (national) remembrance of an ethnic crime (as any genocide is) in a society where citizenship is no longer defined in ethnic or national terms. How do such mnemonic practices concern those in Germany (immigrants, refugees, and also descendants of the persecuted) whose ‘fathers’ were not part of the Holocaust?
I would not like to finish this review by pointing to what could have been discussed but rather I applaud the book’s significant contributions. The Sins of the Fathers: Germany, Memory, Method skillfully combines empirical exploration, historical and political erudition, and theoretical insight. For scholars and students in memory studies, this book is an excellent illustration of what rigorous and creative social memory research can look like.