‘Reconciliation across the Graves’? The German War Cemetery at Ysselsteyn as a Place of Remembrance between Local and (Inter)national Areas of Conflict 1945–2000

Abstract

On 10 May 1940 German troops crossed the Dutch border. Four days later — as Willem Frijhoff extensively recounts in Chapter 2 of this volume — the centre of Rotterdam was almost completely destroyed by a massive German bombardment. The Netherlands surrendered and faced five years of occupation with a dreadful result: more than 250,000 Dutch died or were murdered, over 102,000 of them Jews; the accrued substantive damage was about 26 billion gulden.1 The Second World War became a historisches Bezugsereignis as M. Rainer Lepsius has put it, a historical event of reference, not only for both nations and their self understanding, but also for their relationship.2 The most important factor in Dutch—German coping with the past has been a clear distinction between German perpetrators and Dutch victims. The Dutch demanded, mostly unsuccessfully, recognition of what the Germans did during the occupation, as can be seen in the negotiations for the Ausgleichsvertrag, the peace treaty between the Federal Republic of Germany and the Netherlands that was finally ratified in 1963, the external and public debates about a pardon for arrested German war criminals that persisted until the 1980s, cultural clashes at Dutch—German football matches, or the results of the so called Clingendael survey in 1993, that showed a deep mistrust of Germans among Dutch youth.3