*stares at the Neonazi party in parliament* We're not out of the woodworks yet.
But to go back to the post war years, because given in SW, the victorious return of the fascists happens within twenty years or so, actually because of the East and West divide we have two different models. The GDR didn't use so many (ex?)Nazis in the judiciary, administration etc., they tried for a genuine new start in the branches of government, but otoh they also severely downplayed antisemitism from the get go (an later, once Israel was founded and became a key US ally, doubled down on the downplaying) and the widespread support of fascism within the populatation in favour of a narrative where basically all the fascists remained in the West and those twelve years were all about Communist Resistance vs Industrialist Who Supported Hitler And Their Flunkies, with them, of course, being the inheritors of the Communist Resistance. Xenophobia could not exist in a glorious socialist republic, so it was never dealt with and faced; I befriended a GDR guy whose mother was Bulgarian in 1989 who said he and his siblings and their other faced a lot of daily discrimination but he didn't try to ask for help from the teachers more than once because this was a phenomenon that could not exist in a socialist republic. And I do think that has a lot to do with why the support for the AFD (= Neonazi party back in parliament to eternal shame) is strongest in the former East Germany.
Otoh, in the West, with a very few exceptions there was massive under the carpet sweeping in the 1950s and non facing and happily jumping on the anti Communist bandwagon (I mean, the guy put in charge of the first West German secret service was an unrepentant Nazi had seen which way the wind was blowing in 1944, had collected all the intel he could get his hands on re: Communism and did a deal with the Americans in 1945), with the confrontation of the past really starting in the later 1960s, not so coincidentally when the next generation had grown up to ask "what did you do in the war, Dad?" with a very different undertone than in the Anglosphere and the 1968 youth rebellions exploded, and it's not a coincidence, either, that in the 1980s, when this generation was the one in political power, we got the confrontation with the past from the ground upwards, i.e. for someone like me who was a teenager in the 1980s, being taught in great detail about the Third Reich and the Holocaust in school (where now many teachers were the former protesters from the 1960s) was standard, but for my parents (born in 1945 and in 1947, respectively), it hadn't yet been - their teachers were to a man/woman of That Generation, of course.
What I'm getting at is that confronting the past intensely was and is a decades long work in progress, not a singular short lived event, and so it's hard to point to a fork in the road not taken. However, what happened in neither the East or the West twenty years after the war: reestablishing of a fascist dictatorship as the result of a long term conspiracy. Now, one big reason for that is something that can't apply to the SW scenario - both West and East Germany were very tightly bound to a superpower with troops on their territory as a vassal/satellite state. But I also think if you look at our revolting (ex?) Nazis who were everywhere in the 1950s and 1960s, they simply weren't interested in reconquering territory or starting the next war or what not. They want to get rich, enjoy their ill gained goods and not answer questions by their pesky kids. But the only SW movie who tried to use financial greed as a motivator for the villains was The Last Jedi. Among the tv shows, Andor used it, too, but in both cases as part of an already established fascist Empire. It's not very movie plot friendly but ultimately most disturbing to me that you can be part of a genocidal regime and then spend the rest of your life in a democracy acting not much differently than if your twelve years of active support of a genocidal regime had not happened.
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branchandroot
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Date: 2023-08-28 07:37 am (UTC)But to go back to the post war years, because given in SW, the victorious return of the fascists happens within twenty years or so, actually because of the East and West divide we have two different models. The GDR didn't use so many (ex?)Nazis in the judiciary, administration etc., they tried for a genuine new start in the branches of government, but otoh they also severely downplayed antisemitism from the get go (an later, once Israel was founded and became a key US ally, doubled down on the downplaying) and the widespread support of fascism within the populatation in favour of a narrative where basically all the fascists remained in the West and those twelve years were all about Communist Resistance vs Industrialist Who Supported Hitler And Their Flunkies, with them, of course, being the inheritors of the Communist Resistance. Xenophobia could not exist in a glorious socialist republic, so it was never dealt with and faced; I befriended a GDR guy whose mother was Bulgarian in 1989 who said he and his siblings and their other faced a lot of daily discrimination but he didn't try to ask for help from the teachers more than once because this was a phenomenon that could not exist in a socialist republic. And I do think that has a lot to do with why the support for the AFD (= Neonazi party back in parliament to eternal shame) is strongest in the former East Germany.
Otoh, in the West, with a very few exceptions there was massive under the carpet sweeping in the 1950s and non facing and happily jumping on the anti Communist bandwagon (I mean, the guy put in charge of the first West German secret service was an unrepentant Nazi had seen which way the wind was blowing in 1944, had collected all the intel he could get his hands on re: Communism and did a deal with the Americans in 1945), with the confrontation of the past really starting in the later 1960s, not so coincidentally when the next generation had grown up to ask "what did you do in the war, Dad?" with a very different undertone than in the Anglosphere and the 1968 youth rebellions exploded, and it's not a coincidence, either, that in the 1980s, when this generation was the one in political power, we got the confrontation with the past from the ground upwards, i.e. for someone like me who was a teenager in the 1980s, being taught in great detail about the Third Reich and the Holocaust in school (where now many teachers were the former protesters from the 1960s) was standard, but for my parents (born in 1945 and in 1947, respectively), it hadn't yet been - their teachers were to a man/woman of That Generation, of course.
What I'm getting at is that confronting the past intensely was and is a decades long work in progress, not a singular short lived event, and so it's hard to point to a fork in the road not taken. However, what happened in neither the East or the West twenty years after the war: reestablishing of a fascist dictatorship as the result of a long term conspiracy. Now, one big reason for that is something that can't apply to the SW scenario - both West and East Germany were very tightly bound to a superpower with troops on their territory as a vassal/satellite state. But I also think if you look at our revolting (ex?) Nazis who were everywhere in the 1950s and 1960s, they simply weren't interested in reconquering territory or starting the next war or what not. They want to get rich, enjoy their ill gained goods and not answer questions by their pesky kids. But the only SW movie who tried to use financial greed as a motivator for the villains was The Last Jedi. Among the tv shows, Andor used it, too, but in both cases as part of an already established fascist Empire. It's not very movie plot friendly but ultimately most disturbing to me that you can be part of a genocidal regime and then spend the rest of your life in a democracy acting not much differently than if your twelve years of active support of a genocidal regime had not happened.