The more rational reasons behind the demonstration – that there should be a distinction between the civilian victims of the firestorm and those people who were legitimate targets for the bombs – are also much more interesting. Shouldsuch a distinction be made, or should we avoid distinctions, in the same way that the bombs did? Since it is Christian doctrine to pray for allsinners, are churchgoers right to mourn the soldiers, arms manufacturers and Nazi Party members along with the housewives and children who were killed? And, further, is it possible to go so far as forgiveness, even for those who went enthusiastically to war in 1939? Or would this merely lend legitimacy to the atrocities the Nazis committed?
To consider these questions, the first thing we must do is to draw a distinction between public and private mourning. This is important because they are two very different acts. A private act of mourning is exactly that – something personal, unique to the individual who suffers through loss. A public act of mourning is a statement to the world, declaring openly the values that collectively we hold dear. The same person, commemorating the same event, can profess very different sentiments, perhaps even conflicting ones, depending on whether he is acting in a private or a public capacity.
Privately, of course, any individual has a right to mourn whomsoever they choose. A mother will naturally mourn her son even if he turned out to be a murderer. A husband might forgive his wife things in death that he could never forgive her while she was alive. Love, as Nietzsche wrote, is beyond good and evil; mourning for a loved one, therefore, takes no account of whether they were worthy of that mourning or not.
The same is true of Christian love for one’s neighbour, whoever that neighbour might be – a civilian, a soldier, or even a Nazi. A storm trooper in the firestorm was no less human than a Hamburg housewife, and also deserves some empathy – if not for the factof his death then at least for the mannerof it. A Nazi prison guard might have committed countless crimes during his lifetime, and might even have intended to commit more, but at the point of death he was merely a human being undergoing a form of hell, and for this he, too, can be pitied. From a Christian point of view it is every individual’s dutyto try to forgive others, even those who have committed the most heinous crimes.
In a public ceremony, however, this duty dissolves into the background. The whole point of a public commemoration is, first, to remember what happened, second, to explain why it happened, and third, to show the world what you have lost. When commemorating an event as huge as the Hamburg firestorm, the ceremony is as much about the loss of ideals as it is about the loss of human life. In the years since the war, the firestorm has come to be symbolic of an even greater tragedy: the fact that civilians, not only in Hamburg but all over Europe, should involuntarily have found themselves caught up in the fury of aerial bombardment. The loss that is being commemorated, therefore, is not simply human life, but innocenthuman life.
During a ceremony like the one that took place at the Michaeliskirche in 1993, the Church authorities have to walk a fine line: on the one hand they need to provide a venue in which people feel able to express their private grief at what happened; but on the other they have an obligation to present the tragedy of the firestorm in terms of the public symbol it has become. If the firestorm is to be seen as a tragedy for the innocent, they cannot also include the guilty in their prayers. In short, a distinction must be made.
Furthermore, it is the duty of the Church to direct the moral values of the community it leads. In an atmosphere where there is already a widespread fear of a resurgence of neo-Nazi activity, any public forgiveness of the sins committed by the Nazis during the Second World War is unthinkable. Indeed, anything that goes even a tiny way towards an implied acceptance of Nazi crimes must be vigorously shunned. These things are important not only for those Hamburgers who happened to be present at the commemoration, but for the whole city, and indeed the whole of German society. Such ceremonies are a template for the way the German people think about themselves, and for the way they remember both what they did during the war and what they suffered.
For these reasons, I believe the protesters at the Michaeliskirche were right to demand a distinction between those who should be publicly mourned and those who should not (although I am less sympathetic to the methods they used to get their point across). One would never consider having a ceremony devoted onlyto those militant Nazis who died in the firestorm – so why include them in a ceremony that should have been devoted to the innocents? I have argued that the Allies should have drawn a line between combatants and non-combatants, even if it was an arbitrary one; likewise it is fitting for the Germans to draw a line between those who should be mourned, and those who should not.
However, wherethat line should be drawn is extremely problematic. Some people believe that all the genuinely innocent victims of the firestorm should be painstakingly named, in the same way that Berlin’s Jews were listed for the Holocaust Museum, so that any future commemoration will be for them and them only. They argue very passionately that this is the only way to avoid the cloudy thinking that mixes the guilty with the innocent, and thereby devalues any commemoration of Hamburg’s tragedy. 23
I do not believe this is the answer. If such a register were ever created, it would necessarily have to include many people who do not fit with the spirit of the idea. For example, there were countless men and women in Hamburg who supported Hitler, who believed in ‘final victory’ and who hated Jews, but who were never required to do anything active for the Nazi Party. It would make me very uncomfortable if such people were included among the innocent victims of the firestorm, but how could they possibly be excluded? Freedom of speech and freedom of political association are two of the cornerstones of democratic society – by this token even the most ardent supporter of Nazism must be deemed innocent if they have not committed any actual crime.
Equally, some people for whom such a register seems designed might easily find themselves left off. Many soldiers privately hated the war, and despised Nazi policies yet still took up arms for their country. Hans Scholl is a perfect example. As the founder of the White Rose movement, he was executed for printing anti-Nazi leaflets – yet he had also served as a soldier in the German Army. Most Germans would say that Scholl was a victim of the Nazi regime rather than one of its perpetrators. But if he had been killed by a bomb before he had had the chance to print his leaflets, or while he was still in the army, would he have ended up on the other side of the dividing line?
The problem with listing the innocent is that everyone not listed then becomes guilty by default. The distress that this would cause countless families in Hamburg is surely too high a price to pay. In any case, I doubt that a register of the innocent would remove all ambiguity: disputes would inevitably arise, causing yet more distress, and in the absence of absolute proof it would be impossible to make a decision one way or the other. Guilt and innocence are rarely clear-cut concepts, no matter how much we would like them to be, and we must be prepared to allow for a rather broad grey area between the two.
If a line must be drawn, it should therefore be a broad conceptual one. Those people who both supported the Nazi Party and actively involved themselves in furthering its goals cannot, mustnot, be mourned publicly. Those who resisted the Nazis both in thought and deed should be remembered in our prayers. Everyone else should be left to God, in the faith that He will know His own.
* * *
I have written here about blame, about guilt, about morality, but in the end this book is not about any of those things. My main intention has never been to judge the events of the past, only to offer a reminder that they happened. One can always argue about who should be commemorated, and how, but in the end the most important thing is that a commemoration takes place at alclass="underline" otherwise these terrible events will be forgotten. The world is already beginning to forget. Once the generation that lived through them has gone, there will be nobody left to tell the story first hand. That is perhaps the most dangerous thing of all. When the power of their direct experience is lost there will be little to prevent us stumbling into exactly the same mistakes all over again.