

In mid-November I traveled from Kosovo to Göttingen, Germany. I had not visited Germany in 21 years. I was invited to Göttingen to give a talk for the Society for Threatened Peoples (Gesellschaft für bedrohte Völker). The Society, several decades old, is an admirable human rights institution, and it stood up for the preservation of Bosnia-Herzegovina, against atrocities, when the going was very rough. It still does so. So I was honored to be invited - and the flight from Prishtina to Frankfurt was quite convenient.



Göttingen is a charming university town. Around a thousand years old, it has an impressive history as a center of intellectual achievement, especially in science and philosophy. Max Planck, Heinrich Heine, Max Weber, and Arthur Schopenhauer all lived there; so did the Brothers Grimm.



Göttingen scene

Coming from southeastern Europe, you can't help but be struck by the clean streets, the orderliness, and the atmosphere of comfort reminiscent of an affluent suburb. In a posting on Facebook, I remarked that:

--The trains are as clean as people's living rooms.

--There are street signs bearing the name of each street.

--There is toilet paper available in every restroom.

--Old things are well-preserved.



I was given a tour of this most pleasant town by Jasna and Laure, friendly and helpful staff of the Society for Threatened Peoples. Buildings made of stone, and others with exposed-beam construction, along with a Gothic church or two, lined a circular pattern of roads on the inner part of the old town. I was shown into a public hall built in 1270, adorned on the inside with murals of peasants with scythes and dancing gentry. In the center of this neighborhood stood a fountain with a statue of a girl, the "Gänseliesel" holding a pet goose and a basket of flowers. Postgraduate students, upon finishing their doctorates, traditionally come to the square and kiss the Gänseliesel. This supposedly makes her the most kisséd girl in the world (because there are so many PhDs in Göttingen, I suppose).



The Gänseliesel

Göttingen's history goes back to feudal times when rulers like Otto the Child, Otto the Mild, and Otto the Evil, took turns with the likes of Albert II the Fat and Otto the One-Eyed to build fortifications around the town and to do battle with other cities for regional power.



During World War II Göttingen suffered much less damage from bombing than many German cities; apparently the Allies and Germany had an informal understanding that the Allies would not bomb Heidelberg and Göttingen, in return for German bombers steering clear of Cambridge and Oxford.



Jasna and Laure guided me to the home of the Society for Threatened Peoples, where they showed me around the two-story building and its numerous area offices. I met an Iraqi Kurd who was working with a Kosovar Albanian in the Middle East section, a room stacked with books and magazines. The hallway walls were lined with artwork and photos from situations worldwide where human rights campaigns are ongoing. One wall displayed several dozen issues of the Society's periodical, "Pogrom." I also met several staff and friends who were, like Jasna, from Bosnia. I rested up and prepared for my talk the next day.



Display of Pogrom magazine covers at the offices of Society for Threatened Peoples

The talk went well. Around forty people showed up, and I'd guess that half of them were from the former Yugoslavia. Most were former refugees from Bosnia now long since settled in Germany - some living there twenty years already. There were also Roma and Bosniaks from Kosovo, Bosniaks from the Sandžak, and a Torbeš from Debar, Macedonia.



Having just spent a couple of months in Bosnia, that's what I discussed the most, and the content of my talk was similar to that of my recent series of reports. After an overview of the political situation (describing the Dayton straitjacket) and a description of the economic situation, I talked about the domestic politicians and the role of the international community. RS President Dodik says "Bosnia-Herzegovina makes me sick." The "anti-nationalist," "social-democrat," and above all autocrat Zlatko Lagumdžija makes historic deals with reactionaries, profiteers, and separatists. And the international officials have pretty much - effectively, if not rhetorically - turned their backs on Bosnia for a half-dozen years. Meanwhile, large foreign companies are moving in and plundering the country.



I discussed the activist movement, touching on five or six local organizations with whom I had met and which I felt were positive actors on the scene. Asked by the organizers to address routes for change, I advocated some obvious things: simplify the Bosnian government; remove corrupt officials; ban war criminals in politics; ban hate speech; pressure the Bosnian government to cooperate with the international community; and promote a change of the Dayton constitution.



What's less obvious is how to bring about these desired changes. For my taste part of the answer, as always, lies in support of the grassroots movement for change in Bosnia. In my recent reports I introduced a number of organizations and described their campaigns and struggles. Even in the period since I was in Bosnia, and even though it is winter, these campaigns have picked up. I have more recently mentioned the March 1st Coalition (for example, in my tenth report), and I was glad to be able to talk about this campaign with people in Germany, as a concrete campaign in which they could participate. And among other things, I noted that the entire catalogue of changes needed has to be considered a long-term struggle, with no easy fixes on the horizon.



My presentation was being translated into German, but as much as anything else, I was talking to what I felt was a representative group from the Bosnian diaspora in Germany. These are the people who activists from Prijedor, for example, reach out to, who could offer critical assistance in making change happen in Bosnia. My impression is that people want to help, that they care with all their soul; indeed many people in the diaspora have already been helping and participating in crucial ways. I hope that the time is coming when they can make an even greater difference.



Afterwards we had an informal gathering and I met some of the local Bosnians. There was a family from near Banja Luka with their daughter, 18, who was born in Germany. She spoke better English than Bosnian, and told me that once, when she entered into a math class, she encountered a teacher who had been in the army in Prizren, Kosovo. He said to her, "You have no business being here. Why don't you and your family go back home and solve your own problems, instead of coming here and taking our jobs and our money?" Later, when he saw that she was an excellent student, he changed his mind about her.



The gathering lasted congenially into the late evening; at one point some of us even sang some Bosnian sevdalinke.



*



Backing up a bit, here's something that happened when I arrived in Göttingen. Landing at the train station from Frankfurt, I was met by Jasna and Laure, and they immediately took me to a pleasant restaurant by a lake in the countryside. There we had a fish dinner, together Tilman Zülch, general secretary of the Society for Threatened Peoples.



In the late 1960s Tilman, a human rights activist, founded an advocacy group to call attention to the genocide taking place in Biafra at that time. In 1970 he founded the Society for Threatened Peoples. Since then, the Society has focused on the defense of minority and indigenous rights. It holds consultative status at the UN Economic and Social Council, as well as participatory status in the Council of Europe.



In the 1990s the Society devoted much attention to Bosnia and later to Kosovo. Other concerns of the Society are the Kurds and the Roma - it sent Paul Polansky (whom I quoted in my last posting) to Kosovo to research and advocate for that country's Roma population. The Society has offices in Germany, one in the Kurdish area of Iraq, one in Bosnia, and several in other parts of Europe.



As we were talking about Bosnia and various other human rights problems, Tilman used the word "Vergangenheitsbewältigung," and checked to see if I knew what it meant. I didn't, and I asked Jasna to write down the eight-syllable word so that I could study and comprehend it.



Vergangenheitsbewältigung means "coming to terms with (bewältigung) the past (Vergangenheit)." I hadn't known the word, but to a significant extent, the meaning is something that I have been focusing on in Bosnia and in my reports, especially in this recent visit. That is why it was "love at first sight" for me when I learned the word.



When I talk about "memory" - in the context of Bosnia, the US, or anywhere else - I see the process of coming to terms with the past as an integral part of justice. Protecting and calling upon memory in the service of justice involves satisfaction of the following needs: to acknowledge war crimes and crimes against humanity that have been committed; to apprehend and legally process the perpetrators; to establish restitution for the crimes; and, one hopes, to hear a sincere apology from the perpetrators.



These are some components of justice. Add to that, in the case of Bosnia, the need for detailed descriptions of the crimes to the extent of the location of mass graves, leading to the discovery and identification of the missing. And just as important in the Bosnian struggle for justice is the ongoing struggle to refute the war atrocity deniers, as well as the freedom, in Bosnia, to remember those crimes at the places they were committed.



There's more to Vergangenheitsbewältigung. For the Germans it has meant coming to terms with the past collectively. That collective response to the past implies recognition of a nation's participation in the past. Germany has done much work in this regard.



During my stay in Bosnia, Hikmet Karčić called my attention to the writings of Karl Jaspers, the prominent 20th-century German psychiatrist and philosopher. Shortly after World War II, in his book The Question of German Guilt, Jaspers addressed the responsibility of Germany as a nation for the war crimes and atrocities that had been committed. In examining the question of guilt, he identified "criminal guilt" as distinguished from "political guilt," the latter being the more widespread phenomenon, in which people are implicated by virtue of being citizens. Jaspers considered that all citizens of a state are in some way involved in the political conduct of that state, and given that, all citizens somehow experience the consequences of that state's policies.



In principle, the response to the commission of a crime is punishment. But that axiom does not work in the case of collective political responsibility for massive crimes, because collective punishment is not only wrong; it is another crime.



But once the crimes have been committed, and to the extent that there has been collective involvement in the crimes, then that population has the moral obligation to own up to its participation in the crimes and to participate in rectification of the damage done. As Americans we all have this responsibility after the genocide of the Native Americans and after slavery, just to name two items from the long list of US-sponsored crimes against humanity.



In this vein, an American friend commented to me that the Germans have done better with these things than the Americans, at least to the extent that you see anti-racism posters mounted prominently in some parts of Germany. People who go around in the US wearing t-shirts with anti-racist messages tend to be looked on as oddballs.



Anti-racism poster in Göttingen

This discussion came about after I posted on Facebook a photo I had taken of such an anti-racist poster in Göttingen. This posting prompted quite a correspondence, starting with a clarification of the meaning of "Vergangenheitsbewältigung." I had interpreted it as "confronting the past," a direct translation of the corresponding Bosnian phrase (suočavanje s prošlošću). I was quickly corrected by several people who made it clear to me that in the German expression, it's a matter of "dealing with the past," "coming to terms with the past," or "coping with the past." That's a more accurate translation, but I'm still partial to the Bosnian phrase, because of the connotation of the process as nothing less than a struggle.



This is a struggle that people in all the former republics of Yugoslavia must go through to the extent that any of them were responsible for war crimes; and it's clear that that's a large extent.



Here's an excerpt from the Facebook discussion of "Vergangenheitsbewältigung."



--Holger: "'Coping with the past' or 'process of coming to terms with the past' are two more possible translations. There is a lot of past to cope with in Germany, so a special word is required to describe it."



--Jeff: ".even though (or perhaps because) the Germans have a more spectacular recent past in that regard than we do, in many ways they are much more actively engaged in an open discussion calling Neo-Nazi exactly what they are and are trying to figure out how to raise their kids so that it is addressed on a societal level. We seem to have resigned ourselves to enduring these nonsensical terms that equate the exact same thing with patriotism and then have to hear about 'post-racial society' which we clearly aren't."



PL: "In Germany, there's been a real confrontation with the past (ok, somehow that phrase still feels right)...and we haven't had that in the US. We learn about the genocide of the Native Americans even in elementary school, and about the slavery too - but we haven't really confronted it. No apology, no reparations, no real self-examination on a national scale. Only the occasional Clintonesque apology (Guatemala, Japanese internment). If that confrontation were to happen, I bet it would bring a halt to our ongoing exportation of mass murder, our addiction to violence, our militarism."



Holger: "The real confrontation with the past happened in West-Germany in the late 60s, when the generation born in the 40s really wanted to know what their parents involvement was with the Nazi system. Why didn't they act against it? Why couldn't they? Or could they? This was a painful process happening in many families. It has led to a situation where nothing that happened in the past is glorified anymore in Germany. The crimes of the Nazis have just overshadowed everything.Patriotism has become a negative word in the German language. A politician publicly announcing to be proud to be German would have to resign (as has happened). Yes, Germans are very sensitive about this.



."And here is an example of what Germans mean when they talk about 'Vergangenheitsbewältigung'. There used to be a myth that the regular German army, the Wehrmacht, was fighting a clean war like any other army and that the war crimes were only committed by the SS and other Nazi special forces. This was a very convenient excuse for the generation of ex-Wehrmacht soldiers. This myth was destroyed by the exhibition Crimes of the German Wehrmacht: Dimensions of a War of Annihilation, 1941-1944. The introductory text says it all."



Hessie, whom I quoted in an earlier report, touched on the relationship between war trauma and examining the past: "Wherever it has happened, all those traumas will not just disappear, neither in the consequences for those persons themselves nor will they disappear with their death; they will affect the next generation and even more generations. And in a perverse way this will lead some to switch from being victims to persecutors, as [trauma] nourishes revenge, as long as the role of victims is not changed by themselves actively taking control of the consequences of what happened to them.



"I mention that we managed to function; that doesn't mean to live really, as part of our energy is bound up on keeping those traumas from disturbing our functioning. The effects of those more-or-less hidden traumas on our health are visible on many levels as well, through psychosomatic influences, not to mention through the widespread, so-called illnesses of civilization.



"For me dealing with the past is not the same as facing it or confronting it. First you develop some way that you are no longer disturbed by it. Facing it is the next step, if you can manage to do so. You cannot force someone to do it, as there is a risk of a total destruction. I remember the effect on one person of my generation who couldn't cope with life when she was forced to face the fact that her father had been an architect of the concentration camps. She committed suicide. Confronting the past is the next step, wherein you make changes to actively do something about the consequences of past history."

