Helmut Walser Smith writes:

On 8 May 1985, West Germany’s president Richard von Weizsäcker delivered something akin to the Gettysburg Address – not for a nation in the midst of war, as was the case for the United States’ president Abraham Lincoln in 1863, but for a country working through the memory and the meaning of a lost war 40 years after its end. There were, of course, vast differences in the two speeches. Given on a grey day on Cemetery Hill in the Pennsylvanian town for which the address is named, Lincoln’s speech to union soldiers lasted all of two minutes. Weizsäcker’s, by contrast, went on for three quarters of an hour, the German president weighing each syllable of each word and delivering them in measured tones to smartly dressed representatives of parliament in the then capital city of Bonn. The two speeches also contrasted in the way they invoked the past. Marking a battle that had transpired four months earlier, Lincoln did not utter the word ‘slavery’. Instead, he evocatively recalled a time – ‘fourscore and seven years ago’ – when ‘our fathers brought forth, on this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.’ Weizsäcker, somewhat in contrast, faced the Nazi past without flinching. He pleaded that 8 May 1945, the day of defeat, not be separated from 30 January 1933, the day Hitler had seized power.

Weizsäcker’s speech took place against the scandal caused by the US president Ronald Reagan’s visit, on the German chancellor Helmut Kohl’s behest, to Bitburg cemetery just days before. The cemetery contained the graves of US and German soldiers, and the visit was meant to be a symbolic act of reconciliation between two erstwhile enemies that had, in the course of four decades, become close allies and friends. But it was soon revealed that soldiers from the SS, the Nazi elite corps, were also buried in the cemetery, and the international public reacted swiftly. Elie Wiesel, a Holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace-prizewinning author of the memoir Night (1960), told Reagan: ‘That place, Mr President, is not your place. Your place is with the victims of the SS.’

Reagan and Kohl wanted to heal the wounds of the Second World War by drawing a Schlussstrich (a conclusion) to the seemingly endless discussion of the conflagration. Weizsäcker struck a more honest tone. He named the names of the groups who suffered. We remember and mourn all the dead of war and dictatorship, Weizsäcker intoned. He underscored especially the ‘6 million Jews’ killed in concentration camps, and singled out the citizens of the Soviet Union and Poland. Then, as he read through a scroll of agony, Weizsäcker mourned a third group, ‘our countrymen’, including the German soldiers who lost their lives, civilians who died in aerial attacks, and the many millions of expellees forced from their homes in eastern Europe after the war. Less expected, Weizsäcker also evoked the memory of the murdered Sinti and Roma people, the homosexuals killed, the mentally disabled whose lives the Nazis extinguished, and those they eradicated because of their religious or political conviction. [Continue reading…]