The importance of understanding - and remembering -history.

'I am the granddaughter of a German member of the Nazi party and of a French gendarme who served under the Vichy regime, which collaborated with the Nazis. My German grandfather was not an ideological National Socialist – he joined out of opportunism and for convenience. He took advantage of Nazi “Aryanisation” policies to buy a Jewish family business at a low price. My grandmother was not a card-carrying Nazi, but was fascinated by the Führer. Between them, they were typical of the Mitläufer (followers): those masses of people who, through blinkered vision and small acts of cowardice, helped create the conditions for the Third Reich to perpetrate its crimes.

After 1945, Germany’s trickiest task was not setting up new institutions or prosecuting high-profile criminals – it was transforming the mindset of an entire population whose moral standing had been reversed by Nazism in ways that made crime appear not only legal but heroic. My grandparents never acknowledged their responsibilities as Mitläufer. But their son, my father, became part of a generation that confronted its parents and forced Germans to ask themselves: what did I do? What could I have done? How do I act now?

One of the greatest achievements of the memorial work Germany has undertaken since the 1960s has been to infuse many of its citizens with a historical conscience and a sense of duty towards democracy, as well as a critical attitude towards populism and extremism both left and right. In France, the taboo long attached to how people behaved under Vichy made such teachings more difficult. In Italy, Austria and eastern Europe, efforts to reckon with their past as allies of the Nazis were even weaker. It is no coincidence that these are countries where patterns of extremism we’d thought long gone have returned.

But now, Germany in turn is affected. Last September, 12.6% of voters cast a ballot for the AfD, allowing a far-right party to secure a strong position in parliament for the first time since the second world war. The arrival of more than a million refugees seems to have broken down the safeguards. In former East Germany – where no true reckoning of the past was possible under communism because state propaganda held West Germans solely responsible for Nazism – the AfD’s popularity was twice as high as in western parts of the country.

What worries me most is that younger generations in Germany and elsewhere feel less and less concerned with the history of fascism, and hence risk becoming indifferent to the new threats. That’s precisely what the AfD strives for when it says it wants a “180-degree turn” from the tradition of atoning for Nazism, and suggests the Holocaust memorial in Berlin should be closed down, and Wehrmacht soldiers rehabilitated.'

[theguardian.com]