Being the youngest of three brothers, quite a few of the family legends involve me doing something comically stupid. In this tradition, when I was three or four I apparently jumped into a hedge when a plane flew past, because I was worried it was a ‘German bomber’.
We were still immersed in the Second World War during the 1970s. It wasn’t just the stories told by people who were involved. It was all over. Sundays meant a war film and World At War documentary if you were lucky, you’d read Victor or Warlord comic (which never seemed to include stories of friendly fire, the effects of bombing cities or running away).
If you were lucky you’d get a little foam aeroplane too, always secretly hoping it was a Spitfire or a Hurricane rather than a Messerschmitt 109. There were even sitcoms about the war.
It was partly the inevitable nostalgia for an event that was as recent to people in the 1970s as, say, the birth of house music or glasnost is to us now.
But for British people it was more. It defined our moral universe and gave us ideas of good and bad, us versus them. Language too: I think I can possibly say ‘for you Fritz the War is over’ in German which thankfully I haven’t so far.
I’m writing this in a Berlin* apartment; yesterday we hired bicycles at the holocaust memorial. People were clambering on the sculptures, posing unselfconsciously for snaps, draping themselves over them in fact, despite clear and one would think unnecessary instructions not to.
The story of how political unrest led to blame and on to discrimination and harassment, ending up with death camps and the final solution is a obviously big part of European history, as it should be. If you deny the holocaust in Austria, Germany, Hungary, or Romania, it’s an offence.
People should know about it; because there are plenty of holocaust deniers about.
The holocaust deniers I’ve met were not like I expected. They weren’t full of hate at all. I’ve never met the people on the far right who start the rumours that the concentration camps didn’t exist or that the millions of unaccounted for Jews are made up by a kabal of powerful Zionists or the people who know them not to be true but have their own agenda. The people who tried to play down the Holocaust were the kind of people who have heard this from someone else; uneducated people, who are simply ignorant of the facts. The story they have been told benefits the people who control them.
It was simple ignorance, people with a poor education accessing information from the wrong bits of the Internet.
The same branch of getting the facts wrong which leads some people to still believe that maybe Nelson Mandela actually did bomb some children [as was being circulated recently on Facebook]. It’s not true, it’s a story put out by racists who haven’t moved on from the stories they were told about black people. It’s a plausible story (why else was he in prison?) and the people who believe it are often not racist themselves. Just not so good at filtering facts in an age when there’s a lot of data to filter.
In this sense they could be seen as victims of circumstance, like the East Germans who believed in the Glorious Socialist State. Not the cynical, card-carrying leaders who had the best flats and the official cars, but the simple footsoldiers, the regular Joes who were told that the West was the enemy and believed it.
It’s hard to escape the myths and stories of your own and realize you are being fed propaganda, because obviously it doesn’t feel like it at the time. The people who tell you stories are usually not bad themselves either, it’s older people, family members and teachers, people you trust from whom you get your values.
And stories usually benefit people somehow; like plucky Britain, how we stood up to the Germans (with a little bit of help from triggerhappy but ultimately benign Yanks and heart-in-the-right place but rough around the edges Russians, according to my comics) presumably made us feel good about ourselves as we lost our Empire and stopped manufacturing things.
Presumably if you deny the holocaust it makes it much easier to hate Jews or Americans. There is a purpose to stories and why we choose to believe in them.
The thing is we do have a duty to learn the truth of a situation, or both sides of the stories, myths and legends we are familiar with, however unsettling to our belief system it may be. Because people rarely go to war or commit acts of atrocity based on the way things are, rather the way they appear, the way things have been explained to them. And unlike those poor buggers who were unlucky enough to live under a totalitarian communist state, information is freely available – so the challenge is filtering out that which is sketchy.
When I came to realize the second world [sic] war was actually over, I also realized the extent to which propaganda wasn’t just something that happened to other countries with less effective systems or whose citizens were gullible or oppressed. It was happening here, too.
Take Winston Churchill; I had bit of an obsession with Winston as a teenager. [I was never cool]. He was clearly a great wartime leader for Britain, but complex too. He got depressed. Interesting. Then as I read more I realized he was a racist himself.
I don’t mean ‘he used the odd word that political correctness has deemed inappropriate like a benign old aunt whose language hasn’t moved with the times’.
No. He boasted about ‘shooting savages’ in Sudan; he believed ‘the Aryan stock is bound to triumph’, and he famously once said that ‘he was strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes.’
For him the war was about preserving an Empire, which didn’t really exist in my lifetime, nor would I want it to. For lots of people across the world, the British were never the plucky underdogs, we were the invaders.
This was deeply unsettling at first; I wanted to put my fingers in my ears. Churchill was part of my life story. The wartime orator who stood up to fascism and Hitler and saved Europe – If he isn’t the good guy, who is?
Yes he was a product of his times bla bla bla, but he wasn’t the dude he was made out to be. ‘Churchill’ is effectively a construct as much of any of the soviet-approved historical figures whose statues still dot some parts of East Berlin.
We should naturally remember the brave acts on all sides; the levels of sacrifice experienced by many in wartime Europe is pretty hard for subsequent generations to fully understand.
It would seem our obvious moral duty to keep the memory of the holocaust alive – as well as its geopolitical aftermath.
But one of the stories we should be telling each other about ‘the war’, and every violent conflict, is that as soon as people start killing each other it’s not so simple any more. People take revenge and collaborate. People divert resources in order to make things to kill people with. People on your side do bad things.
Women and children suffer, as does the truth. It’s never over by Christmas. Wave your flags all you want but nobody comes back the same and some don’t come back at all. You probably know most of that anyway, but tell Michael Gove maybe?
Anyway come to Berlin. I can confirm that the situation on the ground is currently peaceful, and involves coffee with lots of cream and whisky in it, or at least it did for me.
Photo by Rupert
* am back now