“Excess of Forgetting and Excess of Memory” in Polish, German and Austrian Narratives on World War II

Abstract

In his extraordinary book titled Memory, History, Forgetting, Paul Ricoeur writes thus: “I am deeply troubled by the disturbing spectacle of the excess of memory in some places and the excess of forgetting elsewhere”. The events of World War IIaffected the Polish and the German nations in completely different ways. As perpetrators of the tragedy, the Germans were to some extent confronted with war crimes (the Nuremberg Trials, the Frankfurt Trial, the Düsseldorf Trial). But have the war crimes and the mechanisms of functioning of the Third Reich become common knowledge?
Was Ralph Giordano right to call forgetting the second German guilt?
In their Communist-dominated country, Poles were faced with a uniform and preordained ritualization of war memories and the commemoration of its victims. For many years, a reckoning of German crimes and the post-war trauma was played out politically. The memory of the war owes its lasting vividness to the fact that almost every Polish family had lost loved ones at the time. After 1989, however, the narrative on war crimes has changed markedly. The Soviet occupation and its crimes finally became a subject of public discussion. For the first time, commemorations of World War IIanniversaries were held jointly by Poles and Germans.
Relying on statistical data, the author analyzes the present-day memory of World War IIand the state of knowledge about this period in history among various age groups. She also poses the question to what extent the memory of this tragedy has been ritualized both in Germany and Poland.