were buried?????
one of many sites
http://www.gaple.com/articles/BitburgReagan visit controversy
On April 11, 1985, it was announced that then-U.S. President Ronald Reagan would visit the Kolmeshohe Cemetery near Bitburg, at the suggestion of Chancellor Helmut Kohl of West Germany, to pay respects to the soldiers interred there. The White House staff was under the impression that those interred included both American and German soldiers. The visit was intended to be symbolic of the goodwill between the two countries, but unbeknownst to Reagan and deputy chief of staff Michael Deaver, 49 of the graves contained the remains of men who had served in the Waffen-SS. The cemetery also contained remains of about 2000 other German soldiers who had died in both World Wars, but no Americans. On top of this, Reagan had no plans to visit a concentration camp during his tour of Western Europe in connection with the commemoration of the 40th anniversary of the end of war.
This planned visit caused a great deal of moral anger, mainly on the part of Jews and former World War II soldiers. Many prominent government officials, U.S. Army officers, and celebrities, protested the planned visit. Concentration camp survivor and author Elie Wiesel spoke out on the topic at an unrelated White House ceremony, saying, "I ... implore you to do something else, to find another way, another site. That place, Mr. President, is not your place." 53 senators (including 11 Republicans), signed a letter asking the president to cancel, and 257 representatives (including 84 Republicans) signed a letter urging Chancellor Kohl to withdraw the invitation. The Ramones recorded the song "My Brain Is Hanging Upside Down (Bonzo Goes To Bitburg)," which alludes to Bedtime for Bonzo and Bonzo Goes to College, two movies from Reagan's film career that co-starred a chimpanzee, and Frank Zappa recorded "Reagan At Bitburg".
Chancellor Kohl responded that he and the West Germans would be insulted if Reagan didn't go ahead with the visit, and it was shown in a poll that more than half of West Germans were in favor of the visit. Reagan defended himself by saying that "I think that there's nothing wrong with visiting that cemetery where those young men are victims of Nazism also, even though they were fighting in the German uniform, drafted into service to carry out the hateful wishes of the Nazis. They were victims, just as surely as the victims in the concentration camps." Reagan was criticized for this statement by opponents of the visit, though the first part of his assertion was factually correct.
more....
********
This was also related to German domestic politics and the 80s 'quarrel of the historians,' the attempt of conservative historians and others to swing the public political dialogue to the right.
See this discussion, which uses the German controversy to illuminate controversies about American history, especially slavery---
http://www.cas.northwestern.edu/philosophy/people/political_theory.htm....
...But in the 1980s, after the Christian Democrats returned to power under Helmut Kohl, conservative intellectuals were encouraged to take advantage of the new political climate to reclaim political-cultural dominance from the left opposition. This was the setting for the well-known Historikerstreit, or historians’ debate, of the mid-1980s, which I shall be considering here.<6>
Ernst Nolte, Michael Stürmer, Andreas Hillgruber, and other professional historians undertook to reinterpret the events of the Nazi period in ways that reduced their singularity and enormity -- for instance, by comparing the Final Solution to other mass atrocities of the twentieth century, from the massacres of the Armenians by the Turks to the Stalinist purges of the 1930s. Indeed, the Bolshevik Revolution and its aftermath also served as the major explanatory factor in their account of the recent German past: Hitler and Nazism were a response to the threat of Bolshevism from the East. In addition to “normalizing” and “historicizing” the Holocaust in these ways, historical work from this quarter also promoted a shift in perspective from solidarity with the victims of Nazism to solidarity with the valiant German troops fighting on the Eastern front and with ordinary Germans suffering through the war’s grim end. There was, of course, a political-cultural point to all of this: it was time for Germany to leave behind its Nazi past, turn toward the future, and assume its rightful place among the leading nations of the world. It was worse than an intellectual error to view a proud German history solely through the distorting lens of a twelve-year aberration; it was a political failing as well, for it impeded formation of the strong national identity and confident national purpose needed for effective action in rapidly changing European and global settings. By that time, most of the country’s inhabitants had been born after the War or had been too young during the Nazi period to bear any individual responsibility for it. Dwelling on a past that was not theirs served no better purpose than public self-flagellation and blocked the normal development of patriotic identification with the fortunes of the nation.
With such arguments, and in concert with their political allies, the conservative historians were putting revisionist history to public use in the interests of reshaping public memory -- and thus German self-understanding -- and of relieving public conscience so as to revitalize German patriotism. And it was precisely to this political-cultural challenge that Jürgen Habermas, Hans Mommson, and other German left-liberal intellectuals responded in the Historikerstreit.<7> I want now to consider briefly their responses concerning the public use of history, and to do so from the interested standpoint of our own difficulties in coming to terms with the past.
The overriding political-cultural issue behind the historians dispute might be put as follows: what should be the attitude of present-day Germans toward a Nazi past in which most of them were not directly implicated? Often enough the collective past is a burden on the present, and the stronger the memories of it the greater the burden....
more....
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
