When French President Jacques Chirac stepped up to the podium on July 16, 1995 he spoke words that none of his Fifth Republic predecessors ever dared utter. It was the commemoration of Vel d’Hiv, the 1942 mass round up by French police of Paris-area Jews.  Some seven thousand, over half of whom were children, were confined to a popular indoor sports stadium called the Vélodrome d’Hiver, where they languished in deplorable sanitary conditions without sufficient food.  The vast majority later perished at Auschwitz.  It was one of the most shameful chapters in modern French history.  In front of the mayor of Paris, the Chief Rabbi of France and a crowd of dignitaries gathered for the occasion, Chirac became the first president of the Fifth Republic to officially acknowledge the responsibility of the state.  

Why do some countries choose to remember and take responsibility for their past actions as perpetrators?  According to memory studies expert Itay Lotem, the emergence of self-critical, perpetrator memory is a novel post-World War II development which he locates in West Germany and France.  Heroic memories of past victories and even losses have long been a feel-good staple in the national repertoire.  But the idea that nations should take responsibility for shameful actions and that this could somehow be beneficial is based on an entirely new political rationale.  How that rationale emerged, gained global resonance, and ultimately failed to fill the hopes of new actors in new contexts is the subject of Itay Lotem’s book, Dealing with Dark Pasts: A European History of Autocritical Memory in Global Perspective.

The development of autocritical memory in both France and West Germany centered on World War II and the Holocaust.  In neither case did the idea of taking responsibility for the crimes of the past gain immediate appeal.  The sentiment of being doubly victimized by the Nazi regime and by the allied bombings and occupation was the initial reflex for most Germans.  For France, the invention of the myth of resistance, or that most French opposed the Vichy regime and the German occupiers, was vastly more appealing than acknowledging the reality of collaboration.  For both Germany and France, it took time and some advantageous conditions to articulate the political rationale for a new perpetrator memory. 

While the establishment of autocritical memory in Germany became a marker of successful addressing of responsibility in public and in the political sphere, the very inner-German character of these debates meant that it had never been a tool for fighting racism, achieving reconciliation or even fostering conversations with descendants of victims. Itay Lotem, Dealing with Dark Pasts: A European History of Autocritical Memory in Global Perspective. 

The rise of autocritical memory was first and foremost a process of elaborating the reasons why it was beneficial to acknowledge the crimes of the past.  In West Germany, for example, philosopher Karl Jaspers argued that addressing the different degrees of guilt from the Nazi era could help Germans learn to talk to each other again.  This was a future oriented process between Germans that could free them from the past and lay the foundation for a healthier existence.  In the French case Jewish survivor groups and activists like the lawyer Serge Klarsfeld and his wife Beate used the crimes against humanity laws from the Nuremberg Trials to prosecute Vichy officials amnestied after the war.  This was a state-centered project based on the argument that just as the state had a duty to remember (dévoir de mémoire in French) the sacrifices of its veterans, it had the same duty to remember past injustice inflicted on its citizens.  

The development of autocriticial memory was a process that took time.  The generation personally implicated in the Second World War and Occupation was often unwilling to shine a light on a shameful past.  In the case of West Germany the 1968 student movement marked a major turnpoint as the first generation to come of age after the war demanded greater accountability for actions taken in the name of the German people.  In France it was not coincidental that Jaques Chirac, the first president of the Fifth Republic too young to be caught up in the collaborationist past, became known as the «duty to remember» president.  Beyond generational change, the prosperity that both France and West Germany enjoyed during the high growth decades following the war made it easier to focus on an unsavory past rather than daily bread and butter issues. 

The establishment of autocritical memory in France and West Germany was profoundly transformational.  The words vergángenheitsbewältigung (dealing with the past in German) and devoir de mémoire became common parlance.  Both countries incorporated considerable resources memorializing and educating students about their nations’ shameful pasts.  In both France and Germany, laws were past criminalizing Holocaust denialism.  In France the Gaysott Act (1990) imposes a one year prison sentence and a 45,000 euro fine for any convicted of questioning, minimizing or denying crimes against humanity as defined by the 1945 London Charter.  In Germany, a similar conviction can carry up to a five year prison sentence.  

Where autocritical memory began to falter was when international actors tried to package it into a model to address the political concerns of the 1990s.  As authoritarian regimes gave way to democracies, first in Latin American in the 1980s then in the former communist bloc countries in Europe in the 1990s, West Germany and its vergángenheitsbewältigung culture seemed to offer answers to how to secure successful political transitions.  Moreover, blockblocker films like Schindler’s List (1993) and the attention given by international organizations to Holocaust memorialization, drew greater attention to West Germany’s apparent success in confronting its past.  The hope was that by drawing from West Germany’s example, as well as other countries like Argentina and South Africa, international actors could create a transferable model that could help other countries transition to democracy while also contending with traumatic pasts. 

The examples of Serbia and Poland revealed the flaws in this thinking.  Serbia, for example, still retained much of the same leadership after the end of the wars caused the breakup of Yugoslavia.  With heads of state like Milosevic still in charge, there was little interest in critically assessing the crime perpetrated by the Serbian state. Cooperation in handing over accused Bosnian Serb war criminals, like Ratko Mladić or Radovans Karadžičs, became the litmus test for the willingness of the Serbian state to confront its past.  Coupled with a sticks and carrots strategy of offering or withholding incentives like financial aid or European integration, international policy makers ended up fostering resentment and fueling Serb nationalism and sentiments of victimization. Similar policies in Poland fueled similar resentments of international authorities.  Compressed in time, lacking home grown efforts to critically assess the past, autocritical memory never had the chance to take root and ultimately lost out to the memory politics of victimization.    

One of the fundamental misunderstandings of autocritical memory is the reason why it took shape in France and West Germany.  The purpose was never to promote reconciliation between the perpetrators and the victims.  It was never intended to offer recognition or to valorize the injustices experienced by the victimized.  In West Germany there were very few Jews left after the Holocaust for reconciliation to serve any purpose.  Autocritical memory hinged on developing conversations between Germans about the need to take responsibility for and to come to terms with the Nazi past.  In France, with its age-old state centered culture, activists struggled for and ultimately prevailed in the fight for the state to take responsibility for the crimes perpetrated by French authorities during the war.   

Recognizing the power of auto-critical memory to address past wrongs, memory activists in the present have tried to harness it to spotlight the experience of the victimized.  In the French case in particular, memory activists mobilized the past to draw direct connections between the colonial era and the reality of racism and discrimination in the present.  Autocritical memory, however, was never intended to heal society of its social ills.  Researchers have shown that simply spotlighting the experiences of victimized groups does not necessarily build empathy.  The importance, and often neglected history of autocritical memory, is the time and effort required to articulate the political rationale to take responsibility for past misdeeds.  If this process is imposed rather than cultivated internally and supported by a favorable economic context, there is always the danger of the kind of nationalist backlash we are witnessing today.