Has your country committed a gross historical wrong, the type of wrong so horrific that justice can never truly be done, so egregious that so long as you exist as an ethnic nation your people will never be free from guilt? How, you may be asking yourself, can my government begin making things right? The answer is as simple for a nation as it is for a kindergartner: Apologize.
Ok, maybe it’s not a kindergarten apology. This one has to be real, like, really real. You don’t just have to mean it, you have to keep meaning it, forever, and your national actions must be, if not governed by, at least ever-mindful of your national guilt, pursuing an agenda of “Never Again” committing the same crime against any group, and additionally taking special care to protect from further harm, in any form, the specific group your nation has already victimized.
The quiet centerpiece of modern Germany, the process of Aufarbeitung was a multi-decade effort following the denazification of Germany and the creation of a new German state
The perfect template for what a national apology can do is post-Holocaust Germany. Six million people coldly exterminated by the machinery of the state because of their ethnic lineage. The day when the Germans cease to live in the shame of this act is unforeseeable. But what’s exemplary in Germany is the complete acceptance of that shame, that guilt. Living in the knowledge of the guilt of one’s nation, and accepting that guilt not as a burden but as a responsibility, this is a phenomenon unprecedented elsewhere, and it was caused by a process called Aufarbeitung.
The quiet centerpiece of modern Germany, the process of Aufarbeitung was a multi-decade effort following the denazification of Germany and the creation of a new German state. It involved public discussion of the role of everyday Germans, as well as non-Nazi-affiliated institutions such as churches and even literary and academic figures, in the Holocaust and in the rise and continuance of the Nazi regime. It turned into, through the next generation known as the 68ers, a full political and social review of national privilege and of personal, familial, and national narratives.
Germany has worked through and critically reflected on their Nazi past and created a whole new world
Today it continues, with, among other things, brass cobblestones laid in the ground in front of the houses where victims of the holocaust lived upon which are inscribed their names, year of birth and year and location of death, more massive Holocaust memorials in most cities, and the Holocaust and the horrors of Nazism being taught in-depth in history, politics, religion and even literature classes in all schools from fifth grade on. This is, of course, in addition to and not instead of a massive program of reparations to survivors and victims’ families.
It’s not the fact that the perpetrators are dead and gone that releases Germany from their Nazi history. It’s the fact that, unlike Poland or Croatia or Romania or even France or the Netherlands, Germany has worked through and critically reflected on their Nazi past and created a whole new world founded on never ever doing anything like that again (foolish, Versaille-esque austerity policies in Greece notwithstanding), and trying to make amends for what happened. However, the overthrow of a regime and refounding of the state is not necessary to properly apologize and begin the process of Aufarbeitung.
If done properly the apology becomes the civil religion
A proper apology should wholly restructure a society at every level, from legislative to judicial to political to law enforcement to media to education. Constitutionally to culturally, a real national apology means a series of reforms so intensive as to qualify as a total cultural overhaul. The apology becomes so much more than words. This is the reason that I, as a Jew, have never felt so safe and so comfortable in any country, not in America, not in Israel, certainly not in Serbia or Ukraine or Britain, as I do in Germany. Because Germany is the only country that has ever gotten the national apology right. If done properly the apology becomes the civil religion, and as a Jew a state religion based on guilt is something I feel right at home with.
The lack of any meaningful, restructuring apologies from Spain, Portugal, or the Vatican, for the genocide of the indigenous peoples of South America has resulted in an unhindered continuance of the same colonial relationship between the Global North and South America. This past July, Pope Francis made the first step towards making this right, but it is too soon to tell whether his words will be backed up by actions. Looking at a slightly different context, when Serbia’s Prime Minister Aleksandar Vučić visited Bosnia on the 20th anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre, Bosnian mourners pelted him and his entourage with rocks. This may seem undiplomatic of the Bosnians since the Serbian President has officially apologized for the state’s role in Srebrenica, but that’s before we consider that Vučić had pushed forward a movement of “Safe Houses for Ratko Mladic”, the general responsible for the massacre. Serbia as a state has apologized, but these have been mere words, while the policies and attitudes of the state’s leadership have changed little.
Aufarbeitung took decades to change German society
When housemates in Poland learned that I was Jewish they offered, at least partly jokingly, to replace the sugar with Zyklon-B for my coffee. In Hungary and Croatia, antisemitism was rampant, ingratiating itself so far into society as to take large roles in democratic government. In Serbia, I was mistaken for a Mexican and told of a litany of horrible Jewish crimes, modern and historical, “but of course you already knew that, they [the mythical cabal of Jewish financiers in America] have f***ed your people worst of all!” Throughout my years in Eastern Europe, swastikas were a regular part of urban scenery. My ancestors who failed to flee Poland are featured in Berlin’s Museum to the Murdered Jews of Europe. Germany has dealt with and internalized the guilt of that slaughter, while Poland and the rest of Eastern Europe continue to take the lazy route and lay their burden on German shoulders. Aufarbeitung took decades to change German society, but such a process has never even begun outside of Germany itself, despite the historical record showing the disturbing passion with which the peoples of Croatia, Ukraine and Poland, among many others, undertook the annihilation of the Jewish people, during Nazi rule, sure, but also long before and still for a time thereafter.
Perhaps more significant than an apology is its absence. The lack of an official, heartfelt, culture-changing apology signifies an utter disinterest in making things right for past crimes, for example the century-old genocide of the Armenians by the Ottoman Turks, but also an equal disinterest in preventing similar crimes in the future, such as the modern-day ethnic cleansing of Turkey’s Kurds. Turkey’s unapologetic approach as Ottoman successor state to its institutionally violent history symbolizes its interest in legitimizing such acts as acceptable. This is no less the case for an unapologetic United States of America as it is for an unapologetic Turkey or an unapologetic Serbia.
The proper apologies from White America, and the structural overhaul that would accompany them, are 150-300 years overdue
#BlackLivesMatters and Antiracism as Religion, these pop up in America because the national apology has, once again, been simple words, at times backed up by weak legislation but in general a system of white supremacy has remained woven into the national fabric and no care is taken to protect those effected by the national sin of slavery. 12.5 million people were kidnapped from their homelands and shipped in horrific conditions into a new life of brutal bondage, into which generations of their progeny would be born. 1.8 million of these Africans died in transit, a number that dwarfs the Armenian, Bosnian, Kurdish or Rwandan Genocides. Now, only 6% of those transported were directly linked to what is now the United States of America, but given the slave trade’s duration of more than two centuries, and that by the end of the slave trade there were nearly 4 million slaves in America, one must assume at least an equal number spent their entire lives from birth to death as slaves, making American slavery at least as significant a crime as the Nazi Holocaust.
In the end, promises of “Forty Acres and a Mule” made to freed slaves were left unfulfilled and they were left to fend for themselves against Jim Crow and other horrific forms of post-slavery racism. Of course even less has been done for the Native Americans, whose genocide was far more thorough than the European annihilation of the Jews. And this is why it is not just reasonable but important that antiracism become the American religion as anti-antisemitism has for Germany, because the proper apologies from White America, and the structural overhaul that would accompany them, are 150-300 years overdue, and in those centuries the crimes that should have been prevented and rectified have instead been repackaged, compounded and continued.
It is this now-uncritical devotion to antiracism that has made even PEGIDA seem like liberals compared to the anti-refugee, anti-Islamic, antisemitic attitudes of citizens and politicians elsewhere
Progressive organizers have called #BlackLivesMatter a failed movement due to its lack of policy goals toward ending systemic white supremacy, while others diminish it to little more than branding. And perhaps they’re correct, but only in the same way that the post-Holocaust use of the phrase “Never Forget” was branding. It wasn’t about policy, it was about ensuring that attention was paid to atrocity, and as a movement it worked. The same charge of #BlackLivesMatters’ lack of policy initiatives is levelled against antiracism, with some critiquing its uncritical, near-religious nature. “Real people are having real problems,” they say, “and educated white America has been taught that what we need from them is willfully incurious, self-flagellating piety, of a kind that has helped no group in human history.” I would disagree with this statement: after a process of education about the atrocities of the past, this is exactly what Germany provides to Jews and other minorities. Yes, there is still racism and xenophobia in Germany, especially East Germany where the process of Aufarbeitung began only in the 1990s after reunification, and yes, it is still ugly, but it is this now-uncritical devotion to antiracism and acceptance of historical guilt, following of course a necessary national open presentation of past crimes, that has made even Germany’s extreme-right xenophobes PEGIDA seem like liberals when compared to the anti-refugee, anti-Islamic, antisemitic attitudes of mainstream citizens and politicians in the US, UK, France, Holland or the bulk of the globe.
I pray someday that Poland feels obliged to do more than simply blame the Nazis for their own role in the pogroms and genocide against the Jews. I pray for the same in Croatia, in Romania, in Ukraine, in France. I pray for the same from the Russians and Belarusians who blame the slaughter of my ancestors and the obliteration of our ancestral hometown on the Tsars or the Nazis or the Soviets or Stalin. I pray that all these lands will have their cultural overhaul and my people will be able to finally forgive them as I have forgiven Germany. And I pray that someday my home country, America, will do the same for the victims of its historical crimes.
The author is a former board member of the American Jewish Congress (MD chapter) now living in Germany, and is a lecturer on Jewish Concepts of a Peaceful Coexistence in Berlin.
The Art Of The National Apology by Zachary Gallant is licensed under aCreative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
