A kinder gentler Nazi Germany?

In the 1990s, I traveled on three separate occasions to Halle Germany, which is in the German state of Saxony-Anhalt in the former East Germany. My MD/PhD student at the time spent two months in a research lab in Halle. At that time, Halle was experiencing the flush of new money that flooded in after reunification. There were cranes all over the city, signifying new buildings. People were replacing their Trabants with BMWs (although I photographed over a dozen Trabbies around town during a three-week visit. But now the picture in Saxony-Anhalt looks different.

“The man leading the charge to make Germany proud again won’t say he wants his fellow Germans to “forget” the Nazi past, but that is where his ideas invariably lead.

 

“Hans-Thomas Tillschneider, a 48-year-old lawmaker for the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt, was until recently little known beyond his largely rural constituency. But he may soon be in a position to help realize one of the greatest ambitions of the party’s most extreme faction: remaking his country’s postwar identity and steering Germans toward leaving behind the Nazi past.”

 

They remind me of the Confederate apologists in the American South who I grew up with.

“Party leaders say they don’t intend to eradicate memorials to Nazi crimes but will fund and restore those that “honor the sacrifices of soldiers” in both world wars. “This support should benefit all monuments equally, without petty political judgments,” the program reads. “Fallen soldiers gave their lives to defend their country. Recognizing and honoring this great sacrifice is a first sign of a patriotic turnaround.”

 

Never mind that the “sacrifice’ of the Nazi soldiers was on behalf of the slaughter of Jews, gypsies, slavs and the infirm. Just like the “sacrifice” of the Confederate soldiers was on behalf of the suffering of Black slaves.

He denied the goal was to make Germans forget the Nazi past. Yet he went on to describe a process that seemed to amount to just that.

 

“The goal, he said, was for this history to “no longer be so urgent, no longer so intrusive, no longer so present.”

 

“He added: “Just because something is no longer present doesn’t mean it will be forgotten.”

 

This is disgraceful backsliding. It is unworthy of modern Germany.

 

https://www.politico.eu/article/hans-thomas-tillschneider-saxony-anhalt-election-erinnerungskultur-alternative-for-germany/

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