When victory does not mean liberation

Shared memories of World War-II are fading as the generation for which the war was a personal experience passes away. As a result, the conviction that the war was part of the European past, but not Europe’s future is fading too. In May last year an opinion poll conducted by the European Council for Foreign Relations in a number of EU member states revealed that Europeans aged between 18-24 are likely to believe that a war between European nations is possible in the next 10-20 years. This stance signals an end to the post-WW-II world even before the coronavirus arrived.

“Perhaps the reason we never learn from history,” wrote the American poet Charles Simic, “is that we are incapable of picturing the reality of war and its aftermath, for fear that if we did, we would stop believing both in God and in our fellow human beings.”

Seventy-five years after the end of WW-II, there will be no major celebrations of the war’s end in any European capital because of COVID-19. But it is not only the coronavirus, it is also the virus of historical revisionism that has hit Europe. What we witness in Russia and some Eastern European countries is a weaponisation of the memories of the war. Rejecting a government’s narrative is deemed a crime. It is well known that truth is the first casualty of war. In the case of memory wars, the first casualty is complexity. The propaganda war over WW-II makes neither Russia, nor some of the Eastern European governments, look good. In the Kremlin’s official narrative anyone opposing the Soviet occupation in Eastern Europe after 1945 is a fascist, and any criticism of Stalin’s policies is a deliberate attempt to diminish the crucial role of the Red Army in defeating Adolf Hitler.

There is an abundance of Eastern European narratives that mirror the Russian one — everybody who fought against the Soviets, including those allying themselves with the Nazis, are praised as heroes.

But history is more complex. As the Buchenwald-Foundation Director Volkhard Knigge told American philosopher Susan Neiman, author of Learning from the Germans, in order for this black and white narrative to be true, “you’d have to have a concentration camp without communists and a Soviet camp without Nazis.” But Buchenwald, which was a concentration camp during the Third Reich and a Soviet camp after the war, is the best illustration that such politically correct camps are nothing but fiction.

But recognising complexity does not mean that those on both sides of Europe’s history wars are equally wrong. The Kremlin can insist that the sacrifice of Soviet people should be recognised. But the accent is here on “Soviet,” as opposed to the “Russian” people. There were millions of Ukrainians, Georgians, Central Asians who died fighting Hitler. In Belarus every third person did not survive the war.

Wars are usually fought over territories. Memory wars are fought about the meaning of words. And the current Russian-Ukrainian, Russian-Polish or Russian-Czech memory wars are over the meaning of the word “liberation.” In 1985, German President Richard von Weizsacker made history by calling May 8 Germany’s Day of Liberation. He told his compatriots that while it is true that Germans also suffered greatly during the war and that injustice had been done to Germans after the war, Germans do not have the right to call themselves victims, because they were responsible for the suffering of others and for the Holocaust. But while Germans do not have the moral right to call themselves victims, they have the right to call the end of the war “liberation” — because Germany lost the war, and as a result of it gained its liberty. And what matters is not victory, but liberty.