Bright future haunted by Nazi past

GERMANY - Two months ago, the people of Germany waved their national flag with a fervour unseen since World War II.

It was the 2006 Football World Cup, where millions of Germans were inspired by their team's success and delighted in a sporting spectacle where peace and fun were the official themes.

To many observers, the waving of the red-black-and-gold emblem of the Federal Republic was a sign that Germany had turned the corner on its Nazi past.

Long accepted in the community of nations as an established democracy and beacon of tolerance, Germany was now also at ease with its history. Germans, it was theorised, were now looking forward, not back.

Alas, with such a troubled past there is no easy escape. Two fresh controversies have shown that even as the generation of World War II heads to their grave, they bequeath a legacy tinged with mistrust and taboo.

Among the most painful experiences has been the admission by the country's most acclaimed intellectual, the Nobel-winning novelist Gunter Grass, that he served in the Waffen SS, a unit which carried out atrocities throughout Nazi-occupied Europe.

Grass, 78, who made his confession in a new memoir Peeling the Onion, said he had volunteered for the Third Reich's navy in 1944 but was turned down, instead being conscripted to a tank unit in Dresden. He said he never fired a shot.

The big shock is not so much that he was in the Waffen SS - in the final months of the war, the unit mostly comprised young conscripts rather than Nazi fanatics - but the fact that he had covered it up.

From the 1960s onwards, Grass had played the role of Germany's moral compass, telling the country that it had to face its Nazi past with honesty and transparency. For the immediate postwar generation, Grass was a hero who turned a cold, courageous light on their mothers and fathers, the men and women who supported and fought for Hitler.

Leading German historian Joachim Fest said he was dumbfounded that Grass had played a "double role" for decades. "He is seriously damaged," Fest said.

On the heels of Grass' shock confession has erupted another polemic: an exhibition in Berlin that portrays the plight of the millions of Europeans who were expelled from their homes in the 20th century, in forced migrations that redrew the continent's ethnic map.

The exhibition, Forced Paths, at the Kronprinzenpalais in Berlin, highlights nine cases of mass expulsion from Armenia in 1915-16 to the "ethnic cleansing" of Yugoslavia in the 1990s.

It includes the fate of the millions of ethnic Germans who at the end of the World War II were kicked out of Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and other parts of Eastern Europe. The forced migrants often arrived in the haven of Germany with little more than a cardboard suitcase and a pocketful of money to their name.

The exhibition has been praised for its fairness, scholastic depth and also for its boldness in exposing one of latter-day Europe's dirty secrets. But the exposure has also laid bare a raw wound.

In Poland, conservative politicians have fiercely attacked the exhibition, saying it portrays the Germans as victims of World War II rather than its perpetrators and overlooks the role of the Nazi regime.

Polish Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski blasted the exhibition as a "very bad, worrying and sad event" that "relativised the history of World War II".

Wilfried Rogasch, the curator of the exhibition, told the Herald he was astonished and dismayed by this response, not least because the show also places a spotlight on expelled Poles.

"It is the most pro-Polish exhibition one could imagine," he said. For Rogasch, the storm over his exhibition and Gunter Grass show that, for the two generations that have grown since the end of the war, the intellectual blinkers often remain firmly in place.

"In Germany, many on the left are not used to the fact that Germans have been victims as well."

Those Germans who were at ease with themselves were the young, he contended. "The ones waving the flags at the World Cup are boys and girls who are 20 years old. They are a different group of people."