8 May as "Liberation Day" in Germany and the limits of self-righteous antifascist hypermorality
On this day 79 years ago, the Allied powers accepted Germany’s unconditional surrender, bringing an official end to World War II in Europe. My American and British friends celebrate 8 May as Victory in Europe Day, while for our erstwhile occupied neighbours like France, Czechia and Slovakia, it is Liberation Day. I wish all of you a cheerful holiday.
For what might seem obvious reasons, today has never been a holiday in the Federal Republic of Germany, although in 1950 the German Democratic Republic declared 8 May (in typically longwinded fashion) to be the Day of the Liberation of the German People from Hitler-Fascism.
The divergence reflects an important ideological difference between liberalism and communism that I have pounded time and again on this blog: Liberalism tends to implicate the people in the actions of their states, making a holiday celebrating “liberation” from National Socialist rule in the post-1949 Republic at first inconceivable. Communism, however, constructs those subject to non-communist regimes as the victims of capitalist or fascist repression, and at a formal ideological level is less eager to implicate ordinary people. In practice, of course, communist regimes are anything but forgiving. During the Cold War, the Federal Republic’s refusal to recognise a holiday on 8 May also became a way of quietly rebuking the brutalities visited upon Germans in the Soviet occupied zone and their ongoing illiberal repression. This – so the quiet implication – was nothing to celebrate.
That was all a very long time ago; our politics have gotten much stupider in the generations since. Last year, Alternative für Deutschland co-chair Alice Weidel refused to attend an 8 May celebration at the Russian embassy. In an interview months later, she gave this explanation:
I decided for myself – it was a personal decision – not to attend for political reasons. You know, celebrating the defeat of your own country with a former occupying power is something I personally decided not to take part in – also because of my father’s refugee history.
The freakout was immediate. Our Green Family Minister Lisa Paus led the charge, complaining on Twitter that “Weidel is characterising the liberation of Nazi Germany by the Allies as a defeat.” She quoted Bertold Brecht (“Der Schoß ist fruchtbar noch, aus dem das kroch”) and threw up a fierce girl-power hashtag: “Fascism: never again.” The leftist Bundestag representative Susanne Ferschl likewise lined up to denounce this terrifying resurgence of National Socialism, complaining of Weidel’s “historical distortion that the liberation of Germany from the Nazis was a defeat.” Article after article after article after article appeared in the press to denounce Weidel’s alleged historical revisionism and latent fascist tendencies. It was yet another prototypically German orgy of moral incontinence and performative outrage against a defunct political ideology that no longer commands any real support.
It was also really stupid. As a matter of historical fact, Germany was not liberated on 8 May 1945; rather, we were occupied by the Allied powers. This is generally understood to be the direct opposite of liberation. But beneath that there lies a much more significant ideological problem: Either Germans (as in the reigning liberal orthodoxy) bear real, tangible historical responsibility for National Socialist crimes, in which case they were defeated on 8 May; or Germans were themselves victims of an occupying fascist regime, in which case they were liberated on 8 May. You cannot have it both ways. This brings us back to the paradox I explored in my long post on the Germans and the Jews: The “culture of remembrance” that our rulers have cultivated since World War II rejects the National Socialist past only by binding us ever more tightly to it. For our historical guilt to remain active in the present, there must endure some identification (however negative) between ethnic Germanness and the Nazi regime. National Socialism cannot really be something from which we were freed – at least not without a long list of very careful qualifications.
As amazing as it is to type, schoolmarm dimwits like Paus have simply never thought this through. So eager was this sad woman to diagnose fascism in Alice Weidel, that she ended up denouncing her opponent’s circumspection as some kind of neo-Nazi sentiment. The truth is very nearly the opposite: Weidel’s was the standard party line of our centre-right Union parties for more than a generation. Chancellor Ludwig Erhard in 1965 explicitly rejected the idea that 8 May might be a holiday of liberation for West Germans, characterising the moment instead as the “day of German capitulation.” Erhard said that one would have been justified in calling the occasion a “liberation” only “if injustice and tyranny had been eradicated from the entire world with the defeat of Hitler’s Germany.” (It had not been, because communism.) Even in that case, this “liberation” would not be specifically German, but would pertain to all of humanity.
After various Twitter users explained all of this to their mentally infirm Family Minister, Paus did not observe the simple rule of holes and stop digging. Rather, she pleaded that she was not actually stupid, because our Federal President Richard von Weizsäcker ushered the notion of a German “day of liberation” into the orthodox menagerie in a famous speech all the way back in 1985. Checkmate fascists! Except, with this reference, Paus actually checkmated herself, revealing that in all likelihood she’s never read von Weizsäcker’s words at all. While he did indeed say that “8 May was a day of liberation” when we were all freed “from the inhuman system of National Socialist tyranny,” he also said that “8 May is not an occasion for us Germans to celebrate” and that “we certainly have no reason to take part in victory celebrations on this day.” Unlike Paus, von Weizsäcker was all too aware of the tensions inherent in the notion of German “liberation.”
It is all well and good to hate Nazis in the Federal Republic, and it is even better to tell everybody that you are not a Nazi if you can still find anyone who cares to listen. You cannot, however, draw the distinction between yourself and the Nazis too sharply, or cast in your lot with our liberated neighbours too unreservedly. However right and just and antifascist this may feel, it brings you very close to the line of political transgression – certainly much closer than joining Alice Weidel in her decision to leave 8 May celebrations to the victors. Orthodoxy is a subtle and complicated thing. As many an ancient theologian discovered, if you practise it too vigorously, you may find yourself a heretic.
For most ordinary Germans who lived through it, May 8, 1945 was a horrible time, especially if they happened to be in the Soviet Zone of Occupation. The collapse of Nazi Germany kicked off an orgy of rape, murder, destruction and looting unprecedented in history. Why would Germans want to celebrate that?
Germany is a relatively new country, at most 200 years old, so it is still trying to define its identity. It's been emasculated enough to not be a dangerous country any more. So these debates are more academic with little consequence.