Germans must learn from Hitler to escape him

Classics never die. Seventy years after Germany last allowed it to appear in print, Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf has become a bestseller again. A new edition of the rambling, nationalist, anti-Semitic screed has sold 85,000 copies and is on its sixth print run.

Mein Gott! What on earth has got into the Germans? Actually, nothing very shocking. They’re buying a heavily annotated edition that, including critical commentary, runs to 2,000 pages. I don’t believe the book is being bought by frothing neo-Nazi extremists. More likely, it’s being stocked by schools, universities, libraries and ordinary Germans trying to educate themselves about an important historical document that they have hitherto been unable to buy in print.

It’s unsurprising that Hitler still draws in the crowds and not just in Germany. Most western nations harbour a Nazi obsession. Britain has long played Hitler for laughs, or to showcase heroism. The US deploys the swastika for dramatic effect, the sigil of the ultimate Hollywood baddy. Germany, wracked by guilt, has only recently tried laughing at Hitler.

A successful 2015 film based on a satirical novel, Look Who’s Back, was Germany’s first major attempt. It imagines that Hitler has been resurrected in modern Berlin and given a television show by oblivious media executives who think he is a talented impersonator. At one point, Hitler gives flirting advice to a hapless companion, who retorts that Adolf should go and write a dating book called Mein Kampf With My Wife. But in the end, the movie goes for sinister moral impact, not humour.

The Germans might try to laugh at Adolf, but it still doesn’t come easily. Nor should it. Reverence towards past horrors is worth preserving — and hard to revive when it fades. I saw this in France during a school trip to Alsace. We visited Le Struthof, the only concentration camp ever built on French soil. My group, about half of us Jewish, toured the camp in silence. Not so for some of the French schoolchildren. I remember watching, with total shock, as one laughing French teen photographed another poised as if lying on a metal stretcher that slid into an old furnace. I can’t imagine a German schoolteacher tolerating that kind of jape.

Reverence, though, can be taken too far. Promoting Nazism is prohibited in German law, as you might expect. But there are scholars and campaigners who take it further, suggesting it’s immoral even to compare Nazism and the Holocaust with any other political movements or crimes. The Nazi Holocaust, they say, is above comparison. Unfortunately, the Holocaust is one of many genocides and massacres throughout history. And Mein Kampf can teach us not just about Hitler, but about the seductive appeal of scapegoating, violence, racism, paranoid victimhood and national nostalgia.

Historic parallels, drawn in good faith, should not be sacrilegious. On the other side are the activists who extrapolate too much from the 1930s. The Holocaust, they’ll argue — pettily, inaccurately, appallingly — is just like what Israel is doing in Gaza. These people are, to put it mildly, not interested in learning from history. And now, after the political upheavals of 2016, there’s the boilerplate political debate heard at pubs and dinner parties around Britain. The rise of Trump? Just like the Thirties. Brexit? Ooh, don’t mention the war. Le Pen? She’s just Hitler in heels.

The West is obsessed with the Nazis, appeasement, nationalism. In a flash, the West’s intelligentsia has swung from believing that history has ended to the idea that it’s stuck on repeat. Nowhere are people more afraid of history repeating itself than in Germany, where atonement is one of the driving forces of politics. Germany’s pitiful contribution to Nato, its shaky intelligence services, its acceptance of more than one million refugees, its commitment to open borders, even the entire euro project: All of them are meant to contain, neutralise and atone. Whereas in Britain and Poland, the nation state is seen as a defender of freedom against conquest, in Germany, the nation-state and its organs are viewed as instruments of fascist terror.

To German Chancellor Angela Merkel and her peers, the greater the threat to liberalism, the more inflexibly and dogmatically it must be defended. Defending liberalism now cannot expunge crimes committed long ago, though. Europe should have fought against Hitler’s rise to power. Does that really mean that now, today, in modern Europe, the European Union and its leaders must hold on tight to integrationist dogma and refuse to evolve or reform?

Back in the 1930s, Germany created millions of refugees. Does that mean that taking in refugees now is so noble an act it can be subject to no practical limits or planning? Of course not. 
It’s welcome that Germans are so keen to study Mein Kampf, but guilt is no sound basis for a society and atonement cannot be an unlimited policy objective. Learning from the past is one thing. Being blinded by it is quite another.

— The Telegraph Group Limited, London, 2017

source : gulfnews