Over the past week two events have brought the question of guilt and shame arising from the actions of a nation to the surface once again. The death of Günter Grass — whose entire literary body of work was centred around the idea of coming to terms not only with his nation’s but his own complicity in Nazism — and a statement by Haruki Murakami, that Japan must go on apologising and making amends for its actions during the second world war until its former enemies decide that this is no longer necessary. Both have given us pause for thought.
There are forces in both of those countries and beyond (one thinks of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s description of the concentration camps as a “mere detail of the second world war”) who would dearly love the memory of the crimes of fascism to be expunged from the record. But they should stand as an indelible warning to other nations and individuals who all too easily slip into the denigration of whole groups of peoples, races and religions who apparently deserve to be exterminated because of who or what they are.
The problem comes, of course, when those who continue to maintain that there is a need to remember these things come up against the perhaps understandable desire to move on and to leave the crimes behind. We get a small taste of this here whenever anyone in the United Kingdom (such as Frankie Boyle yesterday) attempts to point to the crimes of the British Empire, an institution that is still largely venerated in this country — indeed we give each other medals with its name — and yet in whose name many crimes were committed.
There do appear to be differences between Japan and Germany, though, in their approaches to coming to terms with the past. In Germany a culture of contrition has arisen that no schoolchild could possibly miss during their education. Many claim that the constant reminders about the dangers of fascism can be counterproductive. However, anti-fascism in East Germany before 1989 was a one-sided ideology meant only to give the Communist party legitimacy. Those who grew up and were socialised in East Germany were confronted with an anti-fascism that concentrated almost exclusively on the crimes against the Communists and the political left. The antisemitism and homophobia of the Nazis was not fully acknowledged.
Despite this, voices such as Murakami’s continue to bemoan the lack of a German-style culture of contrition within the Japanese education system. Many complain that the period from 1931 to 1945 is skated over within the school system and that as a result many Japanese people do not really comprehend why it is that its south-east Asian neighbours are so hostile. Territorial conflicts with China are regularly underpinned, at least in Chinese rhetoric, with references to Manchuria and the massacres of Chinese nationals and forced prostitution that took place there.
This is equally pertinent in the context of the recent demand by the Greek government for €279bn to compensate for the Nazi occupation of that country during the second world war. Alexis Tsipras’s first action after being elected prime minister was to lay a wreath on the memorial to the victims of the Nazi occupation of Greece. Yet a trial of members of the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn has been stopped because of intimidation of witnesses by fascist thugs; fascism continues to seep into today’s political events and consciousness in a way that means that it is absolutely necessary to continue to remember the crimes that were committed in its name. If fascism ever achieved anything it was to stand as a warning against itself.
And that is the point. People like Grass and Murakami are attacked as being obsessives and yet they are performing a vital public service in preventing all of us from thinking that we, as a nation and people, are somehow better than others and that we therefore have some inalienable right to rule.
Around the world the social conditions that gave rise to fascism in its German and Japanese forms in the 1930s have perhaps never been so propitious for its resurgence since that decade. Fascism had its heyday between 1931 and 1945, but it pre- and postdates that period. As they said in Germany in the 1920s already: Wehret den Anfängen! Or: stop it before it starts! — © Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2015
