January 17, 2014 1:51 pm
Best-seller list reveals German desire to reassess Great War
By Jeevan Vasagar in Berlin
via mozu
The first world war, a conflict long overshadowed in Germany by the crimes of the Third Reich, is being reassessed by a German public eager to regard the Kaiser’s empire as a great power like any other.
Given the nature of the bestsellers, it is little surprise that a survey this month found that just 19 per cent of Germans believed their country bore “chief responsibility” for the outbreak of war. A total of 58 per cent said that every participating nation was to blame, while 9 per cent blamed other combatant nations.
Germans had believed their country fought to escape encirclement by France and Russia.
you see that there was aggression, paranoia and a reckless game of brinkmanship on all sides, not just in Berlin.”
The German state has adopted a low-profile approach to this year's events. Chancellor Angela Merkel’s spokesman declared recently that Germany did not have an “official policy on history”.
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Mr Röhl feared the consequence would be a widening gap between the British and German views of the origins of the war. "Some kind of return to the 1920s and 1930s, where in Britain there's one interpretation and in Germany there's another," he said.
The commemorative events of this year are likely to bear the imprint of this divergence.
Annika Mombauer, senior lecturer in modern European history at the Open University, said the question of the origins of the war no longer hit a raw nerve in Germany and had lost relevance in the wake of the second world war. In Britain, by contrast, the debate is dominated by the Great War’s “alleged futility”, she said.
“In Britain, historians and the general public are concerned with how best to remember the war, how to commemorate it. In France, commemoration of the centenary is planned on a huge scale. In Germany, the topic is swept under the carpet.”
第一次世界大戦について。
これについて、私は無知だ。
開戦の原因、責任ついて、敗戦国が全面的に負う、というのが政治だろうが、しかし、歴史的、また、事実上は、様々で複雑な要因がからみあっているわけであろう。
敗戦国が、包囲されてて、他にしようがなかった、というのも嘘だろうが、戦勝国がまったく挑発もしなかったし、開戦に寄与しなかったというのも嘘だろう。
戦勝国のナラティブというのは戦勝国の宣伝であって、現状の秩序の正当化根拠になっているから、固執するのだろうが、しかし、それは公平ではなかろう。
敗戦国に責任を持たせる理由になった基準を否定する必要はないが、その基準は戦勝国にも適用してはじめて公平といえようし、そうすることで、将来の戦争への危険をみなが協力して回避できる、というもの。
戦勝国のナラティブから脱却できない敗戦国の国民は卑屈だし、脱却できない戦勝国の国民は卑怯だ。