Germany not part of event plans for WWI centenary
BERLIN >> German Chancellor Angela Merkel will mark the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I on French soil, and German President FrankWalter Steinmeier will be in London for a ceremony in Westminster Abbey with Queen Elizabeth II.
But while Germany’s leaders visit the capitals of its wartime enemies, at home there are no national commemorations planned for the centenary of the Nov. 11 armistice that ended the four-year war that left 17 million dead, including more than 2 million German troops.
Next week, the German parliament will hold a combined commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the declaration of the first German republic, the 80th anniversary of the brutal Naziera pogrom against Jews known as Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass) and the 29th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Almost as an afterthought, parliament notes there’s also an art exhibit in the lobby called “1914/1918 — Not Then, Not Now, Not Ever.”
More than just being on the losing side of World War I, it’s what came next that is behind Germany’s lack of commemorative events.
For Germany, the Nov. 11 armistice did not mean peace like it did in France and Britain. The war’s end gave rise to revolution and street fighting between farleft and far-right factions.
It also brought an end to the monarchy, years of hyperinflation, widespread poverty and hunger, and helped create the conditions that brought the Nazis to power in 1933.
The horrific legacy of the Holocaust and the mass destruction of World War II overshadows everything else in Germany, said Daniel Schoenpflug, a historian at Berlin’s Free University’s Friedrich-Meinecke-Institute.
His new book, “A World on Edge,” explores the immediate aftermath of the war through individual perspectives.
“One can’t reduce it to the simple fact that one country won the war and the other lost,” Schoenpflug said. “Germany is a country that draws practically its entire national narrative out of the defeat of 1945” — and not the defeat of 1918.