Tag der Befreiung

A scene from Berlin, May 1945

Today, the eighth of May, is not celebrated in all of Germany. However, as a one-time public holiday (Feiertag), it was commemorated today in Berlin. It has been celebrated as a day of remembrance (Gedenktag) in the states of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern since 2002, and in Brandenburg since 2015. It seems that the former constituent states of what once was East Germany are continuing to insist on holding the Tag der Befreiung, the Day of Liberation, that had been a public holiday there during the Deutsche Demokratische Republik between 1950 and 1990. This is as only good and right and proper, but on this day there needs to be a common consensus on what gets celebrated and how.

It strikes me that the East German states like Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Brandenburg and Berlin are at least starting to retell some of the appropriate stories about their past. They have had longer to come to grips with it, for one thing: despite the political failures of the DDR particularly after 1953, one upside was that Walter Ulbricht demanded as early as 1950 that East Germans come to terms with what was done during and after the war, and public remembrance of the victims of the Holocaust became something acceptable. This process would not begin in earnest until 1970 in the West, with Willy Brandt and his famous and touching visit to Warsaw. In general, the attitude of the East German states toward their position in Europe between Russia and the West, and in particular their œconomic position, seems a lot more honest and realistic than the attitude in the West – though of course the West does not see it that way. But there seems to be an improper emphasis from the top nowadays, on a selective storytelling that politicises the results of the war and recreates in part the same political, class and even racial divisions that undergirded the rise of the National Socialists to power in the first place.

For historical events like these, all possible ideological perspectives – including, I should note, the leftist one – are draped in multiple layers of irony. The military defeat of the fascist war machine in Europe is something that deserves to be remembered and celebrated, surely. It strikes me as on a certain basic level inhuman to deny the descendants and loved ones of the people who fell fighting against the Nazis an opportunity to express both grief and gratitude in a public way. The vast majority of that sacrifice fell on the shoulders of Soviet soldiers: 34.5 million who fought, and 8.6 million who died. In the West, that particular insight is rapidly going down the Orwellian memory hole (particularly ironic given the attitude of Orwell toward the Soviets!), while modern Russians are mocked or ridiculed in the Western press for expressing this memory in any organised public way, or while the coronavirus outbreak becomes an opportunity for Western Schadenfreude. If there were any justice in our historical remembrance, this would be a time for finding common ground rather than playing up differences for political gain.

All that having been said, we should never pretend that this victory came without a cost, or that the ground gained was somehow final. In one sense, the costs of the war were visited heavily upon the German people themselves, something which unfortunately does not register much in the traditional telling of the war’s aftermath, whether in Russia or in the Western countries. To be sure, many of these ‘good Germans’ were not in fact entirely innocent (occupying land and homes that had once belonged to Jews or Slavs or Roma), but that does not entirely justify how they were treated by the occupying armies. On the other hand, in the broader perspective the temptations of fascism are never as far away as we would like them to be, even in countries that consider themselves ‘allies’. And even putatively pro-Allied sentiment in the West can unfortunately still be a cover for various forms of selective storytelling and bigotry.

If Victory Day in Europe is truly to be a Tag der Befreiung, what must be commemorated first and foremost must be, not an ideological abstraction like liberty or human rights or even the brotherhood of nations, but instead the historical truth, in all its messy complexity. Anything less than that is no real liberation at all.