Germany’s anti-Russian amnesia

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May is a key month in Germany’s anti-fascist calendar: the first of the month marks Labor Day, also known as International Workers’ Day, followed by Liberation Day, which commemorates the unconditional surrender of the German Wehrmacht on May 8, 1945, marking the end of the Second World War in Europe. As the signing of the capitulation document took place at night in Berlin when it was already May 9 in Moscow, Russia observes what it calls Victory Day a day later.

Yet, in 2023, as the Ukraine war grinds on thanks to the material and moral support of the West and Germany leading the way in continental Europe in terms of supplying arms to Kiev, my country’s failure to observe Liberation Day in a manner that is befitting of its significance indicates an onset of historical amnesia, which wholly contradicts Germany’s fealty to “Vergangenheitsbewältigung”, a term used to describe the self-imposed imperative of coming to terms with its Nazi past.

Berlin’s newly elected conservative Governing Mayor seemed to have trouble remembering who actually liberated Germans from the fascism of their own doing. After attending a ceremony on May 8 at Neue Wache, a historic building located on the city’s iconic Unter den Linden boulevard, which houses the Central Memorial to the Victims of War and Tyranny, Kai Wegner proudly declared that he was “deeply honored to have commemorated the victims of the Second World War, together with the ambassador of Ukraine to Germany, Oleksii Makeiev.”

Not the Russian ambassador, mind you, the Ukrainian one. This carefully choreographed insult to the Russian Federation as the legal successor of the Soviet Union, which shouldered the heaviest burden among all Allied Forces in Europe in their quest to liberate Germans from self-made Nazism, would have been unthinkable before the Ukraine war (Germans like to forget that Nazis weren’t some alien life form that descended upon them and tricked the unsuspecting masses into fascism: Hitler’s NSDAP party won the November 6, 1932 elections which heralded the end of the Weimar Republic, the first parliamentary democracy in German history, with 33.1 % of the popular vote).

It behooves to point out that Wegner misused a momentous occasion to proclaim his unsolicited pro-Ukrainian partisanship: “Ukraine must win this war” and “Berlin stands steadfast on the side of Ukraine!” proclaimed Wegner, naturally making no mention of Ukraine’s Nazi problem, one that even US mainstream news magazine Newsweek, arguably no friend of Russia, called out in 2022, deeming it a “dangerous oversight to deny Ukraine’s antisemitic history and collaboration with Hitler’s Nazis, as well as the latter-day embrace of neo-Nazi factions in some quarters.”

Complementing Wegner’s anti-Russian amnesia and underlining how the German state influences memory-making by force was a last-minute ruling by Berlin’s appellate Higher Administrative Court, which banned the displays of Russian and USSR flags at memorial events on May 8 and 9. In what can only be seen as an ideological decision by an institution that is supposed to be politically neutral, the court’s reasoning was that these symbols could be viewed as condoning violence and those displaying these symbols might have the potential to commit violent acts. Thoughtcrime, anyone?

It comes as no surprise that it was Berlin’s notorious police force that was behind the ban, using the same Orwellian tactics routinely employed to suppress pro-Palestinian rallies (as they did this May by outlawing Nakba protests altogether). In a show of force, 1500 uniformed foot soldiers, far more than there were visitors, occupied key remembrance sites on May 8 and 9, such as the Soviet War Memorial on the Western continuation of Unter den Linden and the much larger war memorial at Berlin’s Treptower Park, which also functions as a military cemetery for Red Army soldiers.

Anti-Russian ideology, which is steadily replacing historical fact in Germany, could be witnessed at another memorial site in the once divided city: speaking at the German-Russian museum in Berlin- Karlshorst, State Minister for Culture and Green party icon Claudia Roth announced that the site’s permanent exhibition would be revised in order to “include the latest research findings and current developments” and that the museum’s scientific advisory board would be staffed with new people.

Let this sink in: here is a person publicly proclaiming intentions to tamper with history in order to fit the present ideological mood of the country. At least Israelis - no stranger to falsifying history - have the “decency” to remove historic documents proving the Nakba from their archives in secret.

Another German whose historical amnesia was on full display (yet again!) on May 9 was European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen: she demonstratively spent Victory Day in Kiev with her best bud, Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky, who she has visited five times in fourteen months. “Good to be back in Kyiv,” the conflict tourist von der Leyen tweeted upon her arrival.

Under the guise of marking Europe Day, which also falls on May 9 and commemorates the 1950 Schuman Declaration, which first proposed the European Coal and Steel Community, the earliest predecessor of the EU, she also seemed to have forgotten the larger significance of the day and the debt her native Germany owes to the Russian people: while in the Ukrainian capital, she presented her host with a prospective 11th package of anti-Russian sanctions since the start of the war.

Taking into account her infamous Nakba denial video from not even three weeks before in which she completely edited out the ethnic cleansing campaigns against native Palestinians that accompanied "Israel’s" founding in 1948, it seems that von der Leyen’s memory loss might be at a more advanced stage of cognitive decline.

Sadly, among the minority that did manage to mark Victory Day in an appropriate fashion was the right-wing AfD party, which vehemently opposes Germany’s involvement in the Ukraine war (it says a lot about the topsy-turvy state of political affairs in my country where xenophobic populists have become pacifists and the governing Social Democrats and Green party unapologetic war hawks): Alexander Gauland and Tino Chrupalla, two AfD heavyweights, attended a reception at the Russian embassy in Berlin which was - quelle surprise - boycotted by Western diplomats.

Ambassador Sergey Nechaev reminded those in attendance, among them former chancellor Gerhard Schröder who is routinely attacked in the national press for his refusal to be swept up by the tidal wave of socially accepted Russophobia currently inundating Germany, of the “machinery of death” that cost 27 million Soviet citizens their lives.

Instead of antagonizing their liberators, ungrateful amnesiacs like Wegner, Roth, and von der Leyen with their self-induced, politicized memory loss need to be reminded of who they should be thanking for the freedom, peace, and democracy Germans have been enjoying for the last 78 years.