Take a look at the photo below. It was taken at 6.00 on the morning of Sunday 11th November 2018. The pipers in the photo are celebrating the signing of the armistice by playing, "When the Battle is over." Where do you think this photo was taken - Scotland, Ireland, Canada or even London? Well, it was taken in a small town near Frankfurt, Germany. This was not an isolated event - far from it. In order to remember the dead of WW1 thousands of pipers around the world were asked by the College of Piping in Glasgow to take part. From left to right, the pipers pictured are: Thomas Rehm, Hanns Martin-Bartels and Andrea Bartels from the Onion Pipers and Drums in Griesheim.
As far as I am aware, there were no nationwide WW1 memorial events in Germany that matched what was going on in the UK and other countries. It seems the Germans are very selective when it comes to remembrance. As far as I am aware, until last year, the German government did not organize any memorial events at all. They only accepted invitations for events outside the country. Perhaps the reason is that 1918 marked not only the end of WW1 but also the beginning of a catastrophic disaster for Germany. The end of WWI ushered in revolution, the collapse of monarchy, the short-lived Weimar republic and, ultimately, the rise of Adolf Hitler and his Nazi regime.
Nonetheless, if people on an individual level are not allowed to deal publicly with their grief, what on earth do they do with it? Near Tempelhof airfield in Berlin, you can find the graves of 7,200 soldiers who returned from the front injured and who then died in hospital. Dr Ingolf Wernicke, who tends the graves at Tempelhof, is reported by the BBC to have said, "Nobody knows about these graves. Forgotten. Nobody is interested. They are not our heroes because Germany lost. And everything that happened in the First World War was taken in by what happened in the Second World War."
And here, perhaps, lies the reason for the lack of national WW1 memorial events in Germany. Guilt from WW2 overshadows the calamity of WW1. Writer Bernhard Schlink (The Reader) remarked that growing up in post-war Germany was ''a weird experience.'' It was, Schlink said, as if the past's poisonous secrets were locked away, hidden from children, ''and only the mother has the key.''
Bernhard Schlink makes the interesting observation that Germans should have taken the opportunity to rid themselves of all traces of the Nazi regime in 1945 - but they didn't. By not expelling the perpetrators, he says, by accepting them as post-war judges, administrators, professors and politicians, all Germans share the guilt for their crimes. In fact, Schlink does not stop there. He suggests that the problem for the second generation Germans is that they cannot expel their parents and this means that the children are also within the limits of collective guilt.
Perhaps things are about to change. The pipers above may be piping in a change of attitude towards the past that allows Germans to remember the dead from both world wars. And with changing times come opportunities for the writer. Alfred Doeblin wrote about Weimar Berlin in Berlin Alexanderplatz . Erich Kaestner dealt with Nazi Berlin in Going to the Dogs. Bernhard Schlink deals with collective post-war guilt in The Reader and Guenther Grass writes about how different generations of Germans view their past in Crabwalk. Perhaps it is time for a writer to write about how Germans left their guilt behind.
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