Springs of war — on memory, repetition and resistance
A reflection about the remilitarisation of Europe, memory and transgenerational wounds — and the faint hope that we will do better this time
Guest post by Maike Gosch, originally published in the German magazine NachDenkSeiten.
We the peoples of the United Nations determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind […] and for these ends, to practice tolerance and live together in peace with one another as good neighbours, and to unite our strength to maintain international peace and security […] have resolved to combine our efforts to accomplish these aims.
Preamble to the UN Charter
I found this article a little difficult to write. Perhaps because it’s the most personal one I’ve written for NachDenkSeiten so far. But I feel I have to. They are two short stories from my life, almost just highlights. But I’ve been thinking about them more often in recent weeks — actually, since spring 2022. They’re about German history and the Second World War, which I fortunately never experienced. But I still feel its traces today, like most (all?) people in Germany and in Europe. The traumas live on; the pain, the anger, the fear echo through the decades to us.
But we’re currently hearing far too little from the people who are still acutely aware of the horrors of that time. Are they the silent majority, or rather the majority who aren’t speaking out? The people who have learned the lessons of the past that are now being shouted over and overwritten again?
The first story is about my uncle, whom I never met. I only knew his grave, in the cemetery with the beautiful village church in the small town in Schleswig-Holstein where my grandparents lived and where my father had grown up as one of many siblings. That’s where he was buried. His name was Hans Dieter. And I knew a photo of a boy with dark-blond hair in a very neat side parting, wearing a white shirt and a sweater. He looked like my father. As a child, I stood in front of the gravestone and calculated how old he was. He died shortly before his 17th birthday. As a child, that fascinated me. Graves were actually for older people.
He was the eldest son in the family, the older brother of my father and his younger siblings. His father wasn’t there when he was taken away; he was already a prisoner of war at the time. Years before, he had said goodbye to my grandmother: “Take good care of my boy”. And my grandmother had tried to do that. But they took him away, one day in the spring of 1945, almost exactly 80 years ago now, from the yard of a relative’s farm. They dragged him with force; he clung to my grandmother, crying. My aunt, who was only 8, still remembers how amazed she was that he was crying — such a big boy. But of course, there was no mercy; they took him away. My aunt and father stood just a metre behind their mother and saw everything. My father was 6 years old.
Whenever I see the short videos of the forced conscription in Ukraine, I think of that scene. I also think of it during discussions about lowering the recruitment age in Ukraine (28, no 26, no 24, no 20, no 18). I don’t see numbers in front of me, I see young men. Even when I see the pictures of the countless war graves with the yellow and blue flags waving above them, I see young men, I see the boy, my uncle, and my grandmother trying to hold him. And I think of the grave, lying there in the quiet, overgrown cemetery, and the silence in my father’s family that always surrounded him and his story afterwards.
Of course, I wasn’t there in the courtyard in the spring of 1945, but I feel as if I had been there. A few weeks later, in mid-April 1945, he was dead. Shot on the “Eastern Front” by the Russians. Shortly after this senseless sacrifice, the war ended. But for him, it was too late. My grandfather returned from captivity months later and only then learned what had happened. He would never be able to talk about it. The pain ran through the family, including my father, and shaped his life. And in doing so, it reached me and the next generation.
Our family is just one of millions in Germany who have experienced something like this or something similar. It’s nothing special, but that’s precisely why it’s important.
The second story, the second highlight, I experienced myself. It was in the fall of 1991, I was 18 years old and visiting the Soviet Union and Russia for the first time as part of my high school graduation trip. Our unconventional and adventurous history and geography teacher had decided that this year we Hamburg high school students should not only have the choice between Greece and Rome, as had been customary at our humanistic high school, but that we should also be given a trip behind the recently fallen Iron Curtain.
I found this exciting, of course; just a few months earlier there had been the attempted coup, with tanks on Red Square, the power struggle between Gorbachev and Yeltsin, the Russian republic’s efforts for independence, and finally the election victory of the often drunken president Yeltsin. The penultimate stop on our trip was the beautiful town of Sochi on the Black Sea. We had already spent a week and a half traveling through the vast country, traveling around the Soviet Union, visiting Moscow, Mineralny Vody (the birthplace of the poet Lermontov, whom none of us had previously known, which horrified the Russian literature students we met), and then hiking in the Caucasus. We had experienced many exciting things, drunk a lot of vodka, dealt with some culture shock and overcome prejudices.
Sochi, too, amazed me; it was so southern — whenever I thought of the Soviet Union, I’d always only pictured a snowy Red Square and fur hats — full of palm trees, exotic plants and lush flowerbeds. That evening we ate at a restaurant; it was a very mild evening. We sat outside in the garden; the scent of the many flowers hung in the air, the crickets chirped. Our group of students sat at several long tables; we’d already eaten, smoked cigarettes and drank. We talked about music and thought perhaps of love stories, flirtations, intrigues and drinking contests, and how we could later secretly go to an open-air rap concert that was to take place near the hotel on the beach. Then the owner of the restaurant came to our table: a small, elderly man with deep wrinkles on his face, kind brown eyes and a white beard. He sat down next to us and placed a bottle of clear liquor and a tray of small glasses on the table. Then he began to talk to us, with pauses for the translator.
After a few questions about where exactly we were from and what we’d seen on our trip, he told me about the Great War — how he himself had been a soldier and how his father, his uncle and his two brothers had fallen fighting against the Germans. I was dismayed; it was already late and maybe I was a little drunk. I thought of my uncle, and tears streamed down my cheeks. I said to him, “I’m so sorry”. He was completely dismayed and put his arm around me. “No, please don’t cry. They were poor people, your fathers and grandfathers — just like my relatives. They had to fight; it wasn’t their fault”. He filled the glasses and distributed them around the table. “That’s not why I came. When I heard you were German, I wanted to toast with you. To friendship. To the fact that there should never be war between our peoples again”. And so we did. It may sound pathetic, but to this day I feel bound by it like an oath.
That, too, was almost 35 years ago. And now spring has arrived, the air smells of blossoms, of damp earth. The leaves of the cherry and magnolia trees lie like confetti in the grass. Life is awakening again — it is such a hopeful, sunny, fresh time. And yet: in all the media, in politicians’ speeches, in the coalition agreement of the new government, the country is being made ready for war again — everything is being prepared, both practically and ideologically, for a new war, against Russia. As I clinked glasses with the friendly old man in the beautiful restaurant garden on that warm autumn evening, I could never have imagined the developments that are now taking place again.
It feels like a time warp, like something inevitable. As if we were under a spell, compelled to repeat ourselves. Who wants war? Who, especially in Germany, wants war again? I listen to the politicians, the “experts” on the talk shows, and I don’t understand them. And I ask myself: what did their families experience in the war? What did their fathers and mothers, their grandparents, uncles and aunts tell them? How did they deal with the pain, the loss, the dying, the murder? How did they talk about it, how did they process it, what conclusions did they draw from it?
And of course, none of them would say they’re “for war”. They just think it’s inevitable. And so it becomes inevitable. We’ve been through all this before — twice in the 20th century. I know from my work that it’s not about finding arguments against war — of course, no one is for war, except the arms industry and the deep state. It’s about finding arguments against the necessity of war. That’s why I’ve spent a lot of time studying war propaganda, writing about it and working on it. But right now, it feels like bracing oneself against a great tidal wave — powerless and weak in the face of almost all-encompassing propaganda.
But fortunately, there are many old and new initiatives and campaigns for peace; many people and organisations are now taking action and making their voices heard. Hopefully, the Easter peace marches will be huge this year. We must and can still turn the wheel around.
It can’t go on like this forever.
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Thomas Fazi
Website: thomasfazi.net
Twitter: @battleforeurope
Latest book: The Covid Consensus: The Global Assault on Democracy and the Poor—A Critique from the Left (co-authored with Toby Green)
Very, very moving. Thank you.
I am in France (not French) but none of the younger people I talk to want to go to war. All of them have had elderly relatives who were lost and ruined by war.
My own Grandfather went through 2 World Wars after which he became an ardent Socialist. He loathed and detested Churchill for not stopping when he could have done.