Eighty years on, the Second World War is losing its moral primacy as global memory shifts, challenged by postcolonial critiques, geopolitical upheaval, and ideological appropriation, reshape how Europe and the world confront the legacies of totalitarianism and liberal democracy.
By Georgi Verbeeck
This article is the fifth in our series commemorating the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II.
Is it possible that 80 years after the end of the Second World War (at least on the European continent) we are once again facing a turning point on our perceptions about this conflict? Of course, a consensus never existed on this topic. The geopolitical shifts, changes in historiography and the ways the conflict have been commemorated greatly influenced this debate. Most notably, the end of state socialism in Central and Eastern Europe in 1989-1991 had an enormous impact and significantly changed the perception and understanding of the history of totalitarian rule. There have also been many new trends in the perception of the various victim groups of the Second World War, some of which have only recently been recognized. A similar process of reassessment applies to the periodization of the mass violence associated with the Second World War. The period between 1939 and 1945 is not an equally significant point of reference for every country. This applies to countries that remained outside the conflict or experienced a different cycle of violence, and it certainly also applies to regions of the world that were only marginally affected by the European war theatre.
Several attempts have been made to canonize the memory of the Second World War. In this process, the European Union played an increasing role, mainly because its political elites believe political and moral lessons can be learned from this conflict. Yet, this was not an easy task. Competing memories continue to hinder a unified memory landscape. At the same time, efforts have always been made to reach a minimum consensus, and the Holocaust serves as an excellent example of this. British-American historian Tony Judt once famously described Holocaust recognition as ‘our contemporary European entry ticket’. The unreserved acknowledgment of the ‘crime of crimes’ committed by the Nazi regime was a precondition for achieving the status of ‘truly European citizens’ (Judt 803). Different countries have dealt with the Shoah in their own ways at different stages of their development after 1945, but ultimately the systematic murder of 6 million Jews became a moral benchmark for Europe. Judt wrote this book Postwar in 2005, at a time when the world could still confidently enjoy the waning days of the post-Cold War era.
Various factors have gradually undermined this widely supported consensus about the Second World War and the Holocaust.
Some have to do with changing perspectives in academic historical research, others are related to broader geopolitical changes and to wider cultural and ideological shifts. The first is the rise of the postcolonial perspective, which is increasingly claiming its place in various branches of social and cultural analysis. At a time when scholars from a wide range of disciplines are searching for global contexts and entanglements and are also explicitly calling for more attention to the perspective of the Global South, the Eurocentric view of the history of the Second World War is increasingly under pressure. The same applies to the history of fascism, which can no longer be described as an exclusively European historical pathology in which both perpetrators and victims are mainly portrayed as white Europeans.
The historical canon of the Western world, in which the Holocaust occupies a prominent place, is thus losing its long-cherished self-evidence. T
his is demonstrated, for instance, by the Historikerstreit 2.0, in allusion to the first German ‘historians’ debate’ in the late 1980’s, in which the so-called ‘German catechism’ was discussed. In the ‘catechism’ debate, Holocaust exceptionalism was once again the target of controversy, not such much as an historical event in itself, but rather as subject of collective commemoration. Criticism was primarily directed against the ‘model character’ of Germany’s handling of its wartime past. While the self-reflective awareness of guilt anchored in the official political culture of the Federal Republic was long hailed as a guiding principle for other countries, more attention is now being paid to how a certain kind of moral navel-gazing might have served to level out the violence and crimes of colonialism and neo-colonialism.
Frank Trentmann has aptly described this reconfiguration of German memory culture in his book Out of Darkness: Germany’s collective solipsism, which focused almost exclusively on the crimes of the Nazi regime, is gradually reaching its limits (Trentmann). This became painfully clear in the controversy surrounding South African philosopher Achille Mbembe and, more recently, in the growing resentment over Germany’s stance on the war in Gaza. Germany’s cultural memory is, in the words of Michael Rothberg, not ‘multidirectional’ enough, but remains too exclusive and essentially self-centered (Rothberg). Focusing too much on traumas within the confines of Germany’s national history alone obscures the fate and historical experiences of others. The intellectual Left, which has made post-colonialism its methodological passe-partout, will find it difficult to recognize that a right-wing conservative like Ernst Nolte was, ironically, posthumously right, at least to a certain extent. Since 1945, the Federal Republic has existed longer than the German Second Empire, the Weimar Republic, and the Third Reich combined. Germany’s fateful Sonderweg (special path) has thus become something from the distant past, a controversial history that no longer has any particular significance for today’s liberal democracy. A certain normalization has taken place, but this also means recognizing responsibility, not only for one’s own moral relief, but also for the perspectives and sensitivities of others.
As Ferenc Laczó argues elsewhere in this issue, we should be aware of where the parody of antifascism can lead to, not least since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Putin’s regime has perverted the memory of the Second World War in an unprecedented way, using it as a template not only to legitimize its imperialist war of aggression, but also to disguise the semi-fascist nature of its own regime. The Russian politics of history is, of course, an extreme example of how the instrumentalization of the historical role of victim does not break the cycle of war and violence but rather perpetuates it. Timothy Snyder has described this as the ‘politics of eternity’, in which history is not used to hold open the possibility of a freer and better future, but in which the past is a collection of frozen heroic deeds (Snyder, 8).
80 years after the end of the Second World War, we are witnessing an even greater ideological paradigm shift. Putin’s imaginary ‘denazification campaign’ is mainly supported by right-wing populist politicians in East and West. This shows the extent to which the political-ideological landscape is currently in flux, and how much ideas about the meaning and legacy of the Second World War are changing. While antifascism was primarily an instrument of the Left to disqualify its political opponents, the radical and populist Right has been pursuing a similar discursive strategy since the mid-2010s. The advocates of an anti-liberal agenda now see themselves as the true opponents of the ‘new totalitarianism’, to which they like to compare themselves with the victims of the regimes of Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin. A common ‘Socialist’ ideology, so the argument runs, is what these totalitarian dictators shared. The next step in the argument is that today’s political leaders remain indebted to their twentieth century predecessors. The claim is that the West is being controlled by a ‘globalist elite’ and has surrendered to an all-pervasive welfare state. The legacy of ‘antifascism’ is no longer claimed only by leftists and liberals, but also by those who position themselves as radically anti-left and anti-liberal.
The global rise of right-wing radicalism, and of the authoritarian movements associated with it, therefore, has far reaching consequences, not only for the local and geopolitical balance of power, but also for the struggles for remembrance of the legacies of Europe’s Dark Century.
To conclude, the international world order that has characterized Europe and the globe since the end of the Second World War is being subjected to an unprecedented stress test 80 years after the defeat of Nazi Germany. The consequences of the shocks that the world is currently experiencing are still difficult to assess. Yet, it is to be expected that in the future, the Second World War and the millions of victims of the Axis powers will occupy a less prominent place in our collective memory. It may also be inevitable that they will slowly lose their old role as moral standards in our review of history. They have played this role for many decades and helped to shape the modern liberal political order based on human rights and the rule of law. Historical memories are always closely linked to political, social, and cultural power relations. The shift in the historical image of the end of the Second World War is no exception.
Georgi Verbeeck is a Professor of German history at the KU Leuven and Associate Professor of Modern History and Political Culture at Maastricht University.
References:
Judt, Tony. Postwar: A History of Europa Since 1945. Penguin Press, 2005.
Rothberg, Michael. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Stanford University Press, 2009.
Snyder, Timothy. The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe and America. Penguin Random House, 2019.
Trentmann, Frank. Out of the Darkness: The Germans, 1942-2022. Knopf, 2024.
