To the Person Mathias Bothor Geraldine Black , born in 1974 in Strasbourg, is the daughter of a French mother and a German father. She has worked as a correspondent for the AFP news Agency in Paris and now lives in Berlin. Black works as a writer and documentary filmmaker, and describes himself “as a child of Europe”. For her book “The Memory” was awarded it with the European book prize; he is 5. December, awarded in the EU Parliament.
MIRROR ONLINE: woman in Black, in your book, you have to reconstruct the war and the postwar period on the basis of their German-French family history. Why is it so important to you to negotiate debt individually?
Black: I think that you can’t separate history and memory. The “little story”, the way a single man in the third Reich and after the war, the “great story” to better understand, and Vice versa. Because one can identify with, especially if this person was a follower, like my German grandfather, and not a large number – not Goering, not Mengele. With whom can identify with no one. But to be out of conformism, or opportunism in the NSDAP came to have a little bit enriched, to have a company planarized so as to be gradually accomplice of a criminal state – you can think of. Also that such behavior in another context today, could repeat.
MIRROR ONLINE: they Were shocked about how her grandfather was found dead a Jewish company?
Black: My approach is not to condemn my grandparents, but their attitude in the broad context of their time. You can’t assume that my grandfather knew that his monkey see, monkey do was a necessary precondition for the organization of a crime on an enormous scale. But he should have after the war, to acknowledge, to push instead of how the majority of Germans, in the role of victim. The question I ask myself is: Where individual responsibility begins and where it ends in a dictatorship?
MIRROR ONLINE: The recognition of individual responsibility is not a matter of course in the culture of remembrance.
read the reappraisal in the NS-time, “A mockery of the victims”
Black: no, in France, efforts have been made, to remind of the crimes of the Vichy leadership, but it is less interested in the attitude of the Individual. In Austria and Italy, the work of memory has begun much too late. In the GDR, was the myth that the East Germans were never Nazis, but have always been Communists. So there was no reason to assume a historical responsibility for the atrocities of the third Reich. In Eastern Europe, the Narrative was that the population was always on the side of the Soviet Union, although during the war many of the countries with Nazi-Germany were allies. That was a dictation of the Soviet Union, the peoples were forced to remember the Soviet soldiers. This schizophrenia explains in part why, after the fall of the wall a part of these people reminded of Protest is exactly the opposite: fascism. In Hungary, the Baltic States, Croatia fascist “heroes to be rehabilitated”.
family in the year 1955: “at some point, you can not only deal with negative memories”
MIRROR ONLINE: Hungary has to wait until 2015 for complicity in the Shoah.
Black: Yes, many countries in Eastern Europe have apologised and Holocaust monuments built. But also because the EU expected of them. If Recall is enforced, it has little impact on the society. There is no formula for a successful Recall. What I can say, however: The German memory model is admired abroad.
MIRROR ONLINE: What is the special about it?
Black: Germany has been recognized gradually, and that large parts of the society have a responsibility in the crimes of the third Reich, either as perpetrators, as bystanders, or as apathetic individuals viewers. You have dealt intensively with the question of how socio-psychological mechanisms, moving so many people to support a criminal state. Such values were widespread, a sense of individual responsibility and critical Thinking is promoted and democracy is to be attached. Germany Safirbet has maintained also a work of memory based on the Negative, and on this Basis, something Positive is constructed, which has made no country before. On the contrary, the glorified and most of the time the past. But in order to learn from, one must recognize, of course, the error not only of governance, but also of the citizens.
DISPLAY Géraldine Black:
memory free
memories of a European woman
from the French by Christian Ruzicska
Secession, the publishing house for literature; 445 pages; 28 Euro
link to Amazon. In the case of Thalia order.
MIRROR ONLINE: Nevertheless, right-wing thinking is gaining ground in this country.
Black: The work of memory must be constantly nourished. We are experiencing a change of Perspective, due to the generation change. We are now in the Era of the Post-anti-fascism. The anti-fascism that characterizes Europe since the post-war period, is not a matter of course. For the younger generations of the war and the Holocaust back further and further in the distance. You can’t imagine that it could repeat itself, and so the vigilance. But if there is no memory, it creates a vacuum that can be filled with any of the myths. Without a reminder, the democracy is at risk.
MIRROR ONLINE: we Need to reform the reminder?
Black: at some point, you can not only deal with negative memories. We should look not only on the Shoah and the war, but the post-war period to expand on the construction of a democratic Germany, what the Germans can be proud of. And we should promote the European identity and the way we remember what connects us and this is positive: The defeat of two totalitarian regimes.
MIRROR ONLINE: there Can be “Too much” of past reprocessing?
Black: It is not “the more the better”. Rather, it is the question, what can be the consequences for today’s learning. For example: What are the mechanisms uses a party, a Regime, to people, to blend and manipulate? Because these mechanisms are repeated. A part of the AfD leadership followed an old method: to incite Fears to set against scapegoats, to convey the flattering feeling, a special “people’s community” to belong to and to the separation between the True and the Untrue.
MIRROR ONLINE: , And rejects the work of memory.
Black: Exactly. Because memory work encourages critical Thinking and the sense to take individual responsibility. And not for the benefit of the right-wing populists, because they play with irrationality and simple answers. But there are no easy answers in a globalized world. As a citizen in a democracy one has the responsibility to be vigilant and to reflect critically. But it is a long process, especially for those who have long lived in a dictatorship, such as in the GDR. There, the individual responsibility was not promoted, the impression is that the state is everything for a rules. If that doesn’t work, because we live in a democracy in which you have to help reject some of the System in a lump sum.
MIRROR ONLINE: to describe the feeling of “Suspended”.
Black: Yes. Where civil society was very weak, it is a long process. To learn democracy, it will take longer than a new economic system.
