From the archive: Greece, Germany and the ghosts of the past

http://www.newstatesman.com/europe/2011/12/greece-germany-war-essay-greek[13/7/2015 4:55:25 μμ]

From the archive: Greece,Germany and the ghosts of thepast In a curious way, the memory of the war has continued to shapeGerman behaviour through this crisis just as much as it has the Greek.

The eurozone crisis has reawakened old ghosts - in particular, the ghost ofGerman mastery in Europe. In Athens, anti-German feelings have beenrunning high for some time and it is not only protesters who reach back tothe era of the Nazi occupation for analogies with the present. EuropeanUnion officials in Greece are likened to the Gestapo; Greek ministers arelampooned as collaborators. Is this a temporary blip or a sign of somethingdeeply awry?

One thing to bear in mind is that the connection between Greece andGermany goes back a long way - much further than the war. Germanliberals flocked to the Greek cause when the war of independence broke outin 1821. Greece's first king, Otto, was a Bavarian and his administration -with its imported technocrats and policemen - was pretty unpopular at thetime, so unpopular that he was eventually kicked out and replaced with aDane. That unpopularity is long forgotten; indeed, when a German, OttoRehhagel, led Greece's football team to victory in the 2004 EuropeanChampionship, he was affectionally dubbed "King Otto" in the nationalpress. Before the Second World War, Germany was seen very positively as acultural and intellectual magnet and many of Greece's most illustriouspainters, photographers, archaeologists, doctors, lawyers and bankers wereeducated there.

As in so many places, Nazism and the Second World War broke this richweb of ties and connections and replaced the varied memories of the pastwith the violence and trauma of the occupation. No crisis in Greece's shorthistory - and there had been many - could compare in terms of mortalityor, perhaps even more importantly, of the shock of these years. The statecollapsed, famine carried off thousands and the subsequent socialbreakdown and political vacuum opened the way for a resurgent left to takeleadership of the resistance to the occupier.

The liberation marked less the definite ending of hostilities than it did thetransition from one kind of partisan war to another. The left, bothcommunist and not, was not only crushed. It was persecuted for decades tocome - Stone Years was the title one film-maker gave to a portrayal of thisperiod - and when the colonels seized power (and Washington turned ablind eye) in 1967, it seemed to many inside and outside Greece that theright-wing anti-communists who had prospered helping the Germans in theearly 1940s and then the Americans in the late 1940s had come to poweragain.

The memory of the war did not end with the collapse of the junta in 1974.On the contrary, while Greece finally established a stable two-party system,some on the revolutionary left behaved as if they were still in the wartimeresistance, struggling against fascism by assassinating CIA operatives,

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BY MARK MAZOWER PUBLISHED 13 JULY, 2015 - 10:47

From the archive: Greece, Germany and the ghosts of the past

http://www.newstatesman.com/europe/2011/12/greece-germany-war-essay-greek[13/7/2015 4:55:25 μμ]

newspaper magnates and prominent businessmen. The rhetoric of the best-known of these - the 17 November terrorist group - was suffused withreferences to wartime and the rather broad tolerance of its activitiessuggested that while mainstream Greek public opinion did not fully acceptthe idea of an enduring occupation, something in that memory remainedappealing.

All of this was premised on the view that the Americans - and to a lesserextent the British - had taken over the mantle of domination from theGermans. So far as Germany itself was concerned, for decades, it rarelymade the headlines except as a destination for Greek men looking for work.Greece was the second country after Italy to sign a labour recruitmentagreement with Bonn, in 1960, and perhaps as many as a million Greeksemigrated there. (Not that many stayed: there are well over half a millionGreeks living in Greece today who spent time in West Germany beforereturning home.)

One consequence of the German economic miracle was that it allowed thewar to be forgotten, often in some fairly deliberate ways. At the end of the1950s, a notorious war criminal, Max Merten, who had run the militaryadministration of Thessaloniki, was arrested on a trip to Greece. This eventrapidly escalated into a diplomatic embarrassment not only for theAdenauer government but for the Greek conservative prime ministerKonstantinos Karamanlis. Karamanlis was in the middle of negotiatingGreece's first association agreement with the common market. The freeingof Merten - who was sent back to West Germany - from a Greek jail becamethe price of securing Germany's backing.

This all-too-revealing episode was quickly forgotten and remains unknownto most people today. They are much more likely to be familiar with the sofar unsuccessful legal battle to get German compensation for survivors ofthe massacres that took place in several Greek villages during thewar. When anti-German sentiments re-emerged in Greece last year at theonset of the eurozone crisis, they did so with little warning. This is not tosay that their emergence was especially surprising. Much of the Greekanger was reactive, prompted by a series of newspaper articles andcartoons in the German press that portrayed the Greeks as profligate andsuggested, only half tongue-in-cheek, selling off its islands and antiquitiesto raise money.

Anthropologists will tell you that modern Greece is a culture founded onthe value of filotimo - of pride and a sense of honour. In truth, it was notmerely that the national honour was being outraged. It was rather that, ashappens with warring couples, arguments over money were standing in forother problems and issues.

Morality talesOn the Greek side, bankruptcy means that people feel that the country is nolonger in control of its destiny and this is a feeling with a long anduncomfortable history of its own. During the Second World War, the crisisof the state was a crisis of sovereignty; Axis occupation was the ultimaterevelation of vulnerability and dependence on the will of others.

The spectre of default today raises very similar anxieties, albeit in lessdramatic form. Is the country simply to be seen as a collection of assets tobe sold off in a fire sale? Has the political class ceded all authority toBrussels or Berlin? Much of the anger with Germany expressed thehumiliation of a society that believed that it had finally banished the ghosts

From the archive: Greece, Germany and the ghosts of the past

http://www.newstatesman.com/europe/2011/12/greece-germany-war-essay-greek[13/7/2015 4:55:25 μμ]

of the past and the memory of its peripheral status in Europe, only to findthis achievement called into question.

Tell any German that they are behaving today as they did in the war andthey will be, quite understandably, outraged. There is, after all, no smalldifference between the early 1940s, when the occupation simply bledGreece dry and plundered it of its resources with worthless occupationcurrency, and the crisis today, in which Germany is providing large sums toGreece and being asked for more. Even if these sums are mostly goingstraight into the European banks to help them stave off bankruptcy, the factremains that the aim of this policy is not to reduce Greece to penury andstarvation but to keep it within the euro.

However, Chancellor Angela Merkel's insistence on continued austerity mayindeed be reducing Greece to penury. In a curious way, the memory of thewar has continued to shape German behaviour through this crisis just asmuch as it has the Greek. For, if Germans are outraged at endlessinvocations of the war, it is because they feel that they are trying to actexactly as the Nazis did not.

Educated over generations to see the assumption of leadership in Europe assomething that brought both Germany and the continent to the brink ofruin, Germans today are deeply reluctant to assume the responsibilities ofhegemony. Instead, they intone the mantra of living up to the rules. If thesouth Europeans can't abide by the agreements that they signed up to, theywill have to learn to do so or leave the eurozone. Leadership of Europe thusbecomes little more grandiose than a question of enforcing club discipline.It is, in its way, a kind of antiwar vision of continental leadership, one thatis much more comfortable with talk of fiscal norms and legal obligationsthan it is with anything so crass as power or domination. Put it to Berlinthat there is another vision of hegemony that they have lost sight of - onethat is not about sending in the tanks but rather about acting as lender oflast resort, recycling surplus capital and providing the social goods for thecollective that no one else can supply - and one is met with bewilderment.

The consequence is that memories of the war still bedevil nationalresponses to the European crisis today. Greek demonstrators turnthemselves retrospectively into resistance fighters and thereby craft a moralcounter-narrative to the north European charges of profligacy andcorruption. What is more, many of them believe it. German lenders seethemselves as cooperative, restrained and helping to uphold commonlyagreed principles and policies, thereby shaping their own morality tale ofeconomic virtue, which contrasts comfortingly both with the less self-disciplined behaviour of the south Europeans and with the exploitativenessof the Nazis.

It is not inevitable that these two self-serving visions will bolster oneanother. Plenty of people in Greece know - some of them even remember -the difference between Adolf Hitler and Angela Merkel. And anyonefamiliar with the history of Balkan antagonisms knows how quicklysupposedly deep-rooted hatreds vanish or become irrelevant. Nothing,perhaps, would do more to alter the climate of opinion than an opening upof German policy towards a strategy for growth.

In October, the German economics minister, Philipp Rösler, invoked the"spirit of solidarity" as he arrived in Athens, accompanied by a small armyof businessmen and investors. It was a rare appeal to a value that hasgenerally been overshadowed by the preaching of austerity. Unfortunately,

From the archive: Greece, Germany and the ghosts of the past

http://www.newstatesman.com/europe/2011/12/greece-germany-war-essay-greek[13/7/2015 4:55:25 μμ]

since then, Merkel has ridden roughshod over calls from her own advisersfor a much more expansive approach to the buying up of Greek debt, so theprospects are not good for a turn to growth.

Greece now has a national unity government under an unelected economist.The bizarre sequence of events that followed George Papandreou's surpriseannouncement that Greeks would be allowed to vote in a referendum onthe debt package brought home more sharply than anything previously thatGreek politicians were no longer masters in their own house. It does nowseem that the travails of the eurozone have produced a crisis of democracyin countries such as Greece and Italy. Not only do these countries faceincreasingly intrusive oversight of their economic management and policiesbut the markets have forced aside elected politicians in favour of Eurocrats.

Don't look backWhat seems in this situation to be of paramount importance - and wherethe history can help - is to work out how the current crisis of democracycompares with those of the past. The Second World War and the Axisoccupation that came with it certainly represented a collapse of state powerin Greece. But this collapse was triggered not, as happens now, by thepressure of global financial markets and their impact on European welfaresystems but rather by the cataclysm of Europe's ideological polarisationand interstate competition.

Viewed in this perspective, we are living in entirely new times, ones thathave almost nothing to do with the Second World War. The threat todemocracy no longer comes from fascism or communism or from the clashof rival imperial ambitions. None of these things counts any longer for verymuch. In different ways, they have all - at least, so far as Europe isconcerned - become matters of historical curiosity. The absence of armiesin the entire unfolding Euro-saga is so obvious to us that we ignore itshistorical meaning.

For the first time since Europe achieved a kind of consciousness of itself,military force has ceased to play a decisive role in the continent's politicalevolution. Our troubles are caused by an addiction - an addiction to cheapcredit that was fed by the demands of consumers, voters and politiciansand enabled by the greed of bankers and the deliberate liberalisation offinancial flows of the past 30 years. If grappling with the ghosts of the pastmay offer a kind of false comfort, it will certainly not help understand themess we are in now.

Mark Mazower is professor of history at Columbia University, New York.His books include "Dark Continent: Europe's 20th Century" (Penguin,£12.99) and "Inside Hitler's Greece" (Yale University Press, £14)