“Symbol of a brighter future”? Three views on Germany’s memorial to Polish victims of WWII

By Kate Martyr

When the Bundestag, Germany’s federal parliament, recently approved a plan to create a memorial in Berlin honouring the Polish victims of German Nazi occupation during World War Two, it revived discussion over the delicate issue of commemoration of past trauma shared by the two neighbours.

The decision also came amid heightened tensions between the two countries. Earlier this year, Warsaw delayed the appointment of the new German ambassador for months, arguing that it was “historically insensitive” for Berlin to have nominated the son of a Wehrmacht officer who served in Hitler’s bunker.

The Polish government’s recent threats to block the EU budget have also seen history invoked. The proposed rule-of-law mechanism is part of a plan for “Germany to colonise Poland”, said a deputy minister. “We should remember how the German diktat ended for Poland.”

The new memorial is intended by its designers to be not only a “place of remembrance”, but also one for “meetings and discussion”. Notes from Poland asked three academic and political commentators for their views on the project.

“Risk of creating a hierarchy of victims”

Aleida Assmann, retired professor at the University of Konstanz and memory scholar

“We [Germans] are forgetting Poland,” stresses Aleida Assmann, who has supported the proposed monument “since the beginning” and emphasises that the issue is one close to her heart.

There is currently “no public consciousness in Germany at all” of its occupation of Poland. Knowledge and remembrance of this is needed for Germany to move forward, she argues.

Assmann cites poor popular history as part of the problem: the Crimes of the Wehrmacht exhibition in 1995 explored German aggression in Russia during the Second World War, while overlooking Poland.

In 2013, a three-part mini-series about the war entitled Unsere Mütter, Unsere Väter (known as Generation War in English) was aired in which Poland and Poles were negatively portrayed. They were, for example, made out to be the main perpetrators of antisemitism, while German antisemitism was marginalised.

Another issue is that Germany commemorates the Holocaust “extremely well”, meaning there is little space left to commemorate anything else, says Assmann.

“A previous German president, who visited Poland in 1994, was unaware of the fact that there was not only the uprising in the Jewish ghetto, but also the Polish one in Warsaw a year later,” Assmann said, referring to Roman Herzog’s embarrassing mix-up to illustrate how the Polish war experience can be subsumed by the Jewish one in German remembrance practices.

The same situation occurred last year, when Germany’s foreign minister, Heiko Maas, visited Poland to participate in the commemoration ceremony of the Warsaw uprising in 2019. A German newspaper then reported that it was the Jewish Ghetto uprising.

While official, diplomatic visits are important, they remain “moments that disappear,” says Assmann. Hence the need for a permanent physical space of remembrance.

Yet she also has doubts about the individual national focus on Polish victims. “Some groups have a powerful lobby and others don’t,” she says, and there is a risk of creating a “hierarchy of victims”.

Assmann hopes that an inclusive, transnational memorial centre could be built in Berlin to present all groups who were impacted during the war. “Europe is a frame to connect national memories and bring them into a relationship of mutual awareness,” she argues.

“It can prove that nationality still matters”

Andrzej Nowak, professor of history and member of President Andrzej Duda’s National Development Council

“Nation was the reason for the Second World War,” notes Andrzej Nowak. However, Germany is “in danger” of interpreting and commemorating World War Two history through today’s lens of identity politics such as gender, while eroding remembrance of nationality.

This is even more troublesome as Germany positions itself at the centre of Europe in both its politics and its definition of what it means to be European, argues Nowak.

He hopes that, by reframing remembrance in terms of nationality, the planned memorial could help challenge Germany’s commemoration culture and prove that nationality still matters. It would also become a gesture to one of the largest groups of victims of the Nazis.

“Germany is presented as a model of remembrance,” says Nowak. Its commemoration culture is viewed as “the best and most moral” within Europe, and one that other Europeans, particularly Central and Eastern Europeans, should learn from.

For Nowak, however, this dynamic is dangerous as it mirrors the power-imbalance between nations during World War II. He rejects the idea that Poland needs what he termed as “therapy,” or lessons from Germany when it comes to commemorating the war.

However, Nowak is also hopeful that the memorial could help Germany and Poland “deal with their shared history” in a way that can “improve relations” between them. While not a solution in itself, the memorial could be a starting point for a new dialogue between the countries, he suggests.

“Tragic” if memorial is hijacked by PiS

Adam Traczyk, political scientist, associate fellow at the German Council on Foreign Relations and co-founder of Warsaw-based think tank Global.lab

“Reconciliation is never a straight line,” says Adam Traczyk. While Germans are now “pretty good” at remembering and commemorating the Holocaust, they began this process in the 1960s, rather than immediately after the war.

By contrast, they are “pretty bad at remembering” Poland, stresses Traczyk. Even today, “the field of research in Germany about its occupation of Poland is very small”.

Germany also had its own national agenda: it wanted to commemorate its own Vertriebene, ethnic Germans who fled or were expelled from territories which became part of Poland after the war, and who became an important political group in postwar Germany.

The Cold War also meant the Polish border became a challenging space: Poland was on a different side of the Iron Curtain to West Germany, making reconciliation much harder.

Nevertheless, Traczyk notes that German leaders have repeatedly recognised the occupation of Poland – most famously in 1970, with Chancellor Willy Brandt’s genuflection in Warsaw, and also in 1994, when President Roman Herzog declared that he “bowed down before all Polish victims of the war” and “asked for forgiveness for what has been done to you by Germans”.

Further financial reparations for the war – which the German government has ruled out – are “a different story”, however. While there is talk on the Polish side about reparations, this is mostly “a political circus for PiS’s domestic audience,” added Traczyk.

Traczyk believes that there is “not a huge risk” of the planned memorial being hijacked by Polish national conservatives. It would have been “tragic” to see the memorial as a gift for Law and Justice (PiS), the Polish ruling party.

Although he doesn’t see the memorial as a panacea for German-Polish relations, it can become a “symbolic issue” for how Germany and Poland deal with the past. “It could help” and be part of a “brighter future” between the two neighbours.

Main image credit: Adam Guz/Krystian Maj/KPRM (under public domain)

Kate Martyr

Kate Martyr is a German-based British freelance journalist contributing mainly to Deutsche Welle, covering social issues and breaking news.