Germany, International Justice and the Twentieth Century

Abstract

Germany, International Justice and the Twentieth Century Paul Betts (bio) The turning of the millennium has predictably spurred fresh interest in reinterpreting the twentieth century as a whole. Recent years have witnessed a bountiful crop of academic surveys, mass-market picture books and television programs devoted to recalling the deeds and misdeeds of the last one hundred years. It then comes as no surprise that Germany often figures prominently in these new accounts. If nothing else, its responsibility for World War I, World War II and the Holocaust assures its villainous presence in most every retrospective on offer. That Germany alone experienced all of the modern forms of government in one compressed century—from constitutional monarchy, democratic socialism, fascism, Western liberalism to Soviet-style communism—has also made it a favorite object lesson about the so-called Age of Extremes. Moreover, the enduring international influence of Weimar culture, feminism and the women's movement, social democracy, post-1945 economic recovery, West German liberalism, environmental politics and most recently pacifism have also occasioned serious reconsideration of the contemporary relevance of the twentieth-century German past. Little wonder that several commentators have gone so far as to christen the "short twentieth century" between 1914 and 1989 as really the "German century," to the extent that German history is commonly held as emblematic of Europe's twentieth century more generally.1 Acknowledging Germany's central role in twentieth-century life has hardly made things easy for historians, however. In large measure the challenge has been to devise clear and compelling storylines to explain [End Page 45] the country's dramatically changing political fortunes, its transformation from warfare to welfare state, as well as its complex historical legacy in remaking German identities, European politics and even global history. A good amount of the tension stems from the difficulty of conjoining the first half of the century with the second. For it is one thing to say that Germany rests at the center of a ravaged century, having unleashed imperial wars of aggression, untold suffering and history's worst crimes against humanity. But it is quite another to say that all of this was merely the bloody prehistory to a fundamentally different and comparatively benign story of post-Nazi development. What then is the relationship between the violence and will to power fueling Germany's first half of the century with the experience of peace and (relative) plenty after? Is it simply an international relations morality tale of (again, relative) good conquering evil? Particularly unsettling for many is the prospect that one would be hard-pressed not to write twentieth-century German history with a happy ending. Even if few would subscribe to a Whiggish interpretation of German history, scholars are beginning to focus less on how Germany found its way into Nazism and World War II and more on how Germans got themselves out of them.2 To what extent each fledgling republic learned to become peaceful powers at the heart of a divided Europe is a growing research field for historians of late. Not that the apparently felicitous resolution of the once-nettlesome German Question is always easy to countenance: Niall Ferguson's rather alarmist view of a Reunified Germany that despite having lost two world wars has still managed to return as Europe's dominant force (whereas Britain, having been on the winning side of both wars, has been unable to arrest political decline and waning international influence) is one recent instance pointing up the anxieties associated with suddenly releasing the German past from its long-familiar Cold War confines.3 All the same, some might counter that putting Germany at the center of the larger twentieth century is misleading and unjustified. On the one hand, the United States and the Soviet Union were clearly more influential overall both in terms of geopolitical reach and ideological appeal. On the other, war, revolution and mass death—what Lenin rightly predicted would earmark the century—were hardly the privileged monopoly of Germans, or even Europeans for that matter. Viewed from a broader global perspective, Germany may not even be all that pivotal to what has [End Page 46] recently been called the "moral history...