Working through the past

In a few weeks it will be 70 years since World War II on the European continent came to an end, yet the complex questions of culpability, victimhood, shame and guilt associated with the enormous crimes of Nazi Germany continue to rise painfully and regularly to the surface.

We are confronted by them as one of the last surviving Auschwitz guards goes on trial; as we read the obituaries of Guenter Grass, the writer who struggled to come to terms with his nation’s crimes; and with his own complicity; as we follow the furor in Poland over a U.S. official’s suggestion that Poles were accomplices in Nazi crimes; and as we read with disgust Jean-Marie Le Pen’s dismissal of the Holocaust as a mere “detail” of history.

No doubt there are many who long to be done with an increasingly distant past, who question the value of “working through the past,” in the words of the German social critic Theodor Adorno. One reason, of course, is because of unsettled questions over legal culpability for the Holocaust.

The many aged survivors who traveled from the U.S., Canada and elsewhere for Oskar Groening’s trial in the north German city of Lueneburg were there not to seek revenge against a 93-year-old guard who has long acknowledged what he did, but to witness the long-overdue acknowledgment in German legal thought that complicity, and not only direct participation, is a crime.

As Hedy Bohm, a Holocaust survivor and one of the plaintiffs, said, the hope is that the trial will prevent those who were complicit in such crimes from claiming, as Groening did, that they are just “a small cog in the gears.”

Grass, who died on April 13 at 87, was held up for most of his life as the moral conscience of Germany in demanding that it confront the Nazi past. Yet he may be best remembered for revealing, less than a decade before his death, that as a teenager he had been a member of the Waffen-SS.

Given how raw these wounds remain, it is not surprising that Poland would react with anger over comments by FBI Director James Comey, depicting Poles as accomplices of Germany. Poland was brutally occupied by Nazi Germany from 1939 to 1945 and views itself as a victim of wartime crimes. The State Department spokeswoman said that Comey certainly did not intend to “suggest that Poland was somehow responsible for the Holocaust.”

Ultimately, the only way to work through the past is to examine evil and its causes. Germany has been admirable in its commitment to master its past, to which both Grass’ belated admission and the Lueneburg trial bear testimony.

But it stands out against far-right parties on the prowl in Europe, the aggressive nationalism of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan, Le Pen’s effort to minimize the Holocaust and the reluctance of President Vladimir Putin of Russia to investigate Stalinist atrocities, all of which demonstrate the continuing need to confront what happened seven decades ago.

Serge Schmemann is an editorial writer for the New York Times.