Yes, good afternoon, welcome, everybody. I often say,
and it's a it's a genuine sense that it's always a delight to have someone from within Oxford come and share their work related to Israel with us.
And today, we're lucky to have Dr. Catherine Lightener, who is the IKEA Foundation research fellow in international relations at Lady Margaret Hall.
Catherine wrote her Deverill here at the University of Oxford dealing with the diplomatic relations between Israel, Germany and Austria.
Her research focuses on collective memory and values within international relations, mainly how Woodwell I'm sorry,
mainly how the Second World War and the memory of the Holocaust affected interstate relations.
And she is the author of the book recently published by Oxford University Press.
So congratulations, Catherine, for this titled Collective Memory in International Relations.
And the title of her talk today is A Road towards Atonement.
Questionmark, Why Only West Germany came to atone for the Nazi Crimes.
The recording doesn't see my fingers doing the quotes. Thank you for coming and thank you for that lecture.
Thanks very much. I hope.
So perhaps I can start by, you know, placing the question that I'm dealing today with in the broader kind of subject that I work in.
So as Ya'akov already said, I work on memory within the discipline of international relations and political science.
That means I mainly focus on how countries remember a tragic and often shameful past.
So I'm interested in who the memory actors are, which version of the past becomes dominant and why its specific points in time,
and what consequences this all has for societies and our national identities and their values.
So I got interested in this topic because I was raised in Austria, a country that voluntarily became part of the German age in 1938.
Yet it has for a long time told a very different story about its Nazi past.
And particularly the stark contrast to West Germany's approach towards that same past has always puzzled me.
So take, for instance, these two pictures from the post-war period.
So the first picture on the left was taken in Vienna in 1955.
It shows the Austrian foreign minister, together with his colleagues from the four allied powers,
they are waving to the cheering crowds because they are celebrating the Austrian state treaty, which they had just signed.
So this is a happy scene where people are celebrating. On the right hand side, you see a very different picture that made diplomatic history.
It was taken in December of 1970 at the monument dedicated to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
You can see Willy Brandt kneeling in silence while lost in the sort of millions of murder people.
So two very different pictures.
Yet these two acts have in common that they were both performed by politicians leading to former Nazi perpetrators states, Austria and West Germany.
But apart from that, these scenes could not have been more different.
So one statesman gives a picture of his country's innocence and liberation from undeserved victimhood,
whereas the other statesman betrays his country as a guilty, morally responsible and remorseful perpetrator.
So from these two act alone,
it therefore becomes clear that the ways in which the Nazi legacy was officially remembered in West Germany and in Austria differed fundamentally.
And this, of course, begs the obvious question as to why these is turned out so differently.
And to get an answer. I went back to the archival of documents.
So particularly I looked at the diplomatic exchanges between Israelis, Austrians and West German diplomats in the 1950s, as you know,
in 1950 to West Germany and Israel signed the so-called Luxembourg agreement about reparations,
which laid, as I argue in this presentation, the basis for what I call the German atonement approach.
So what is meant by an atonement approach? And obviously this is a symbolic official political approach.
Of course, there can be no real atonement for the Nazi crimes.
Yet today, and broadly speaking, the duty to remember the Holocaust, the profession of responsibility for the atrocities committed,
the admission of guilt and shame on part of all Germans,
as well as the ensuing effort to make good again can be said to form the cornerstone of Germany's national memory approach.
And here again, I mean the official memory approach.
Of course, in any society, at any given point in time, there are many competing memories out there in the public.
Yet this official approach in West Germany was one of atonement since the Luxembourg agreement of 1952.
But even so, then how did they really get there and this question nowadays is not only of historical interest,
but also of renewed importance to a emerging field on scholars and practitioners who work in transitional justice.
Wherever states and the international community want to deliver some form of restitution to victims of war crimes, they often invoke the Truman model.
So from Serbia to Turkey to Japan to Chile, the recommendation is always the same when it comes to dealing with your shameful past.
Just do what the Germans did, however, what did they really do?
And that's the central question that I want to pursue in this presentation.
And, you know, just as a disclaimer before I start, I mean, I don't mean to imply with all of this that I'm that the German atonement approach,
you know, is desirable from a political or a moral point of view in other perpetrator states.
Nor do I tend to say that the German approach was perfect.
Now, as we all know, you know, there were many problems in West Germany as well, including issues of delayed justice,
superficial apologies, rising anti-Semitic sentiments, and, of course, the emergence of the far right movement.
Therefore, if we can call the German approach as a model, then only insofar as it is still rare in comparison to other cases.
And this returns us to the central question as to why did the Germans begin to walk down this unusual route?
And now if if we look into the literature, so the literature gives us the following answer as to how a country's official memory approach comes about,
it emerges from within the country, from the interaction between the government and its society.
In fact, there exists a large body of work that describes this domestic political struggle with memory,
usually in some form of instrumentalise session of the past by powerful actors to gain political legitimacy.
And when we approached you for forms as a political tool to win over a domestic national audience and to achieve domestic political goals,
so the memory of atonement must have been employed by political actors to win political legitimacy amongst the West German public.
Well, this in West Germany was certainly not the case in the aftermath of World War Two.
In fact, the first German chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, won the first free elections in 1949,
not least because he promoted an agenda of westernisation and democratisation at the explicit expense of memory.
In the aftermath of World War Two, the West German public memory landscape was one of silence about the past.
If anything, the memory was one of victimisation by the war, by the Nazi regime, by the Soviet occupation, the allied bombings,
the expulsions from the east but certainly not one of the country and its people is atoning and therefore guilty perpetrators.
So the assumptions of the traditional politics of memory literature, therefore, do not seem to apply in the aftermath of a war,
it seems highly unlikely that politicians instrumentalise memory for political gain, particularly not in the form of atonement for past crimes.
So the route that is suggested in the politics of memory literature doesn't seem to have led to the official TRAMAINE Atonement for.
So perhaps not the domestic incentives led to this tournament,
but instead the international incentive structures provided by the environment of the 1950s.
In other words, did the international community and as was often claimed retrospectively,
the United States of America pushed Germany onto the road towards atonement?
So on the post-war international stage, Germany, unsurprisingly, was the pariah,
especially Israeli diplomats actively worked against Germany's restoration within the international community.
They fiercely opposed any participation for Germany in international organisations and meetings,
and all direct contacts between Israelis and Germans were forbidden.
Any remaining necessary diplomatic exchanges were conducted only through the occupying powers.
So Israel in the beginning years had made it crystal clear that it wanted nothing to do with Germany.
At the same time, however, the allied powers began to reconstitute their relationship with one another,
which by nature entailed forming a new image for the Federal Republic of Germany,
and to that end, the Western allies, particularly the US, aimed at developing West Germany's Democratic character.
The American high commissioner for Germany, John McCloy, for instance, expressed in 1949,
the way the Germans will behave towards the Jews will constitute the crucial test for German democracy.
Notably with this, however, McLaurin Naida referred to Israel more to the option of atonement.
Instead, he focussed on the domestic divisions and the potential to test the nascent democracy internally.
More over there, like a closer look into the exchanges happening in the in the diplomatic back
channels at the time immediately call into question that the allied powers,
especially the U.S., were crucial in pushing Germany towards paying reparations to Israel.
By 1951, the allied powers had twice explicitly rejected Israeli appeals to pressure the FARC into reparation payments.
Whilst there there's also a, quote, world, while the Soviet Union had not even replied to the Israeli appeal,
the U.S. saw no legal basis for such a move,
pointing to the fact that neither the state of Israel nor the federal republic had existed at the time when the crimes were committed.
Only when pressed further by Israeli Foreign Minister Moshe with his US counterpart,
who was Dean Atkinson at the time, revealed that financial concerns played a role in this American refusal.
So with the war with West Germany entirely dependent on US aid, the US simply feared that it would end up paying reparations for Germany themselves.
However, at least the US would not oppose reparations on the condition that the Germans actually pay them themselves.
And by the way, a similar Uninterest endorsement came from the British and the French,
so the Israelis may go ahead and find a solution directly with Germany, but only without their direct involvement.
So what distances the Western allies might have been sympathetic from a moral point of view,
however, they were entirely uncooperative from a real political point of view.
For the U.S. in particular,
the beginning Cold War made West Germany's rearmament and its placement within the wider Western world community a priority,
the country's financial and moral punishment through reparations was not regarded as helpful to that end.
So following this logic, in the end, it's very interesting, Akesson, as early as in 1950,
recommended to Israel to establish normal diplomatic relations with the Bundesrat Republic with no preconditions attached.
So. We see from this, and unlike what is often claimed retrospectively,
that allied powers and the United States cannot be credited to instigate the Truman vote towards atonement.
They neither explicitly requested reparations, nor did they render them or nor did they render their efforts,
his reintegration into the Western world community conditional upon them.
Furthermore, when you screen the broader international zeitgeist or the mindset of the time in the 1950s,
we find no direct hints that atonement would be regarded as a useful political strategy.
There was no international legal basis for reparations. If anything, then internationally,
the contours of this idea emerged only slowly and unintentionally in the wake of
the Nuremberg trials and in the wake of a nascent discourse about human rights.
However, there are links to remembrance and atonement were made mainly retrospectively and did not have much political salience at the time.
So as such,
the international incentive structures and the zeitgeist of the post-war years were at best fruitful for atonement but nowhere directly generated,
atonement is an explicit option or strategy for the effort to.
So what then was it that sparked this atonement approach and one could enquire about Israel?
Did Israel push West Germany towards a tournament?
Well, in Israel in the beginning years, as you well know, the public memory landscape was also one of silence.
If anything,
the notion of victimhood was widely discredited as a shameful identity for a nascent nation by both survivors and the new Israeli pioneers,
Israeli political leaders. First and foremost, David Ben-Gurion stood for a new Israel which looked forward rather than backward.
Yet the economic necessities of the Israeli state in a hostile environment soon gave way towards a more pragmatic approach,
at least on the side of the Israeli politicians, particularly the president of the Jewish World Congress,
Norm Coleman, here, they played a crucial role when he began to insist that pursuing reparations,
in addition to individual claims, would be an essential contribution to resettling the large amounts of displaced in Israel.
So following these pragmatic considerations, the total rejection of Germany was already weakened by 1950,
and Foreign Minister Moshtarak had put out at least the perspective for contacts conditional upon a form of restitution.
So importantly, what is the political end on the political level in Kenya?
Israel had signalled that it was willing to take up its painful victim status, at least internationally.
And why? Because it promised to lead to strategic gains.
And with this, they had accepted atonement as a political, pragmatic pathway from normative point of view.
And this remains a tenor throughout the reparation negotiations.
No money in the world, of course, could ever wipe out the trauma and guilt.
Now, at the same time in West Germany, Konrad Adenauer faced the volume predicament.
As I've mentioned to you earlier.
Domestically, he had won the election by promoting democracy and westernisation at the expense of silencing the Nazi past.
However, internationally now West Germany was ostracised as a pariah because of this past,
and the recovery of its status would therefore imply a confrontation with the atrocious legacy,
especially now that Israeli diplomats had started to drop hints for an eventual
rapprochement through reparation payments and fitting the pieces of this puzzle together,
Adenauer issued the following statement within the first days he took office.
So he said in so far as it is possible, in the aftermath of the annihilation of millions of people beyond,
for the German people are willing to make good the injustice committed against the Jews in Germany by a criminal regime,
we consider restitution a good moral is our duty.
The federal the federal government is committed to initiating appropriate action.
So crucially, with this statement out an hour now to signalled that he was willing to participate in the
political project that is atonement and that his country would take on the role of the guilty,
atoning perpetrator internationally.
But and as was the case with the Israelis, this painful role was only taken up because it promised strategic gains internationally.
In other words, I don't know. I had grasped the option of seeking status for his country with atonement,
despite his awareness that the Nazi crimes can never be made good again in a moral sense.
So I argue in my research that both sides had begun to view atonement as a pragmatic
political solution in a situation where normative absolution is impossible.
So atonement was born as a political strategy, and it is this thinking that was translated into concrete next steps,
which in the end led up to the 1952 Luxenberg agreement.
So. What's crucial for such a strategy to be born is this willingness on this on
both sides to present and construct themselves into perpetrators and victims.
Now, how did this happen?
Well, the Israeli officials and for those of you who were interested in the historical details, they were called David Horovitz and Morris Fischer.
They were crucial here by upon meeting Adenauer in Paris.
And obviously, this meeting was fully secret. They made it clear from the very start that their cooperation would be contingent
upon a public condemnation of the Nazi crimes by the German chancellor.
And with this,
they requested nothing less from Ardino than to publicly portray his country as a guilty perpetrator and his decision for reparation as atonement.
That is a skilled payment.
And importantly, with this move, Israeli diplomats had made the rules of this bargain clear that the federal republic is the guilty,
atoning perpetrator and they are accepting reparations only on the basis that they call themselves as such.
And this, crucially, did not happen in the Austrian Israeli case and by the way,
also not in other examples that could be comparable like in Japan or between Japan and China.
I'll talk about these cases a little later.
So for now, back to the West German case for I don't know, of course, this Israeli request created a predicament in his meetings with the Israelis.
He had understood that his public condemnation of the Nazi crimes was necessary to begin this road towards atonement.
However, while on the one hand such a public condemnation was now desirable, to realise an international goal,
on the other hand, is ran entirely counter to aid in our domestic strategy with the Nazi past.
So the crucial test for the German democracy that McCloy had talked about came when Adenauer
brought this issue of reparations before the German Bundestag in September of 1951.
Now, I'm not reading out this entire document to you, but I'm talking you through it and I'm highlighting the the most important bits.
So in this speech, I know for the first time publicly acknowledged and and that's quote now the overwhelming suffering
that the time of National Socialism has inflicted upon the Jews in Germany and the occupied countries.
Now, this was the acknowledge, the acknowledgement that the Israelis had decided, however,
domestic issues were now listening mainly to this speech to render his view acceptable to the broader German public.
Adenauer, Sarsae stuck to a passive voice when referring to the suffering of the Jewish people so as not to accidentally identify the perpetrators.
So he cautiously underlined that.
And that's now also, quote, Even if a significant part of the German population did not personally participate in the crimes against the Jews,
unspeakable atrocities were nevertheless committed in Germany and that alone obligated them to a moral and material compensation.
Now, from this word, and you already see that Adenwala speech represents a tightrope between two memory audiences.
To the outside,
he delivered a remarkable early statement that signal to the world that it signalled a West German commitment to a tournament to the world.
All the building blocks that I described to you earlier were already dear.
He acknowledged of wrongdoings in the German name expressed guilt, shame and remorse, as well as the will for the good moral.
However, inside the country, there was no incentive structure for a tournament as such internally,
a tournament only only stood this test of democracy because of the now troubling circumlocutions,
which exculpated the majority of the Germans from the guilt.
OK, so to draw conclusions in the West German case,
the international incentive structures and the zeitgeist provided at most an indirect push towards atonement.
Instead, what was crucial was the evolving negotiation between West Germans and Israelis and their
mutual acknowledgement of one another in their respective perpetrator and victim roles,
even though these roles were entirely unpopular, if not rejected domestically.
So this was the story that led West Germans towards atonement.
And now let's look to Austria. Why did they not come onto the road towards atonement?
So all the building blocks that I've just outlined to you for not on that
strategy were not in place between the Austrians and the Israelis to begin with,
the Israeli efforts to ostracise Germany internationally were never extended onto Austria.
Bilateral relations between Austria and Israel started as early as 1950.
And despite domestic protests in Israel, Israel never turned Austria an enemy state.
Israeli diplomats instead opted for a normalisation with Austria.
And here you can read a quote from the first Israeli council in Vienna, Austria.
So here he says, I've become convinced that we have to make a decision between the following two possibilities.
Either we continue with the current conflict. That is a bit of recognition, a bit of anger, and then we exploit our special position in order to,
as we did with Germany, claim reparation payments from Austria.
Or we stop carrying on with this strategy because we've already missed the right point
in time and we promote a full normalisation of the relationship in our own interest.
So this advice from the You Once More reveals a certain degree of an active agency and choice of the victim to press for atonement or not,
and while in 1951 the official Israeli strategy apparently still manoeuvred somewhere in between,
the decision soon tilted towards normalisation and the Israelis and Austrians began to negotiate a
bilateral credit agreement at the same time when reparations were negotiated with the restaurant.
Now, a credit, of course, is a business agreement between two equals,
and it's very different by nature to a reparation agreement between a former victim and its perpetrator.
Interestingly, in the very beginning of these negotiations,
Israeli diplomats attempted to use the credit agreement to pressure Austria into
what they had euphemistically called an accompanying French friendship declaration.
And Israeli diplomats envisioned this friendship declaration as something similar to Ardino,
a speech that is they wanted an active acknowledgement of the Nazi crimes against the Austrian Jews.
Yet in the Austrian case, Israeli diplomats only recommended this, but did not insist on such a statement.
Now the Austrians were entirely opposed. And as internal documents reveal, completely outraged about what they portrayed as an absurd Israeli request.
However, in reality, they understood this Israeli attempt as an attack.
And now this is a quote from an archival document,
a way to present Austria with the bill of the Nazi past through the back door of a credit agreement.
And then in a remarkable early statement of Austria's victimhood narrative, Austrian diplomats replied to the Israelis with this, quote,
So the Republic of Austria, which had itself been violently occupied, occupied by Nazi Germany, had nothing to do with these things.
And therefore, Austria sees no reason to explicitly stated in the friendship declaration.
In the end, a neutral formulation customary in normal business agreements between two friendly countries was signed off.
And here you can see this formulation, the Republic of Austria and Israel aiming at strengthening the existing bond of peace
between them by a contract that fostered the amicable exchange between the territories,
reflecting the intellectual, cultural, economic and business aims of their peoples have decided to.
So. By accepting such a credit agreement,
Israel had acknowledged that Austria had acknowledged Austria in its role as a victim rather than as a perpetrator,
and the two countries begin mutually beneficial economic relations.
At the same time, when guilt payments were pursued from the FARC and on his way to the signing ceremony in Luxembourg,
Foreign Minister Charrette underlined this difference once more and announced Israel will not demand reparations from Austria.
Israel accepts the supposition that Germany is responsible for the acts committed
against the Austrian Jews since they took place only after the Anschluss.
Now, retrospectively, the question naturally arises as to why Israel had done so.
And historians up until this day try to understand its decisiveness in this matter.
I'd argue that, as was the case with regards to West Germany, the international environment had played a crucial role in the allied powers,
had designated Austria as the first victim of Nazi Germany as early as 1943.
And this, of course, was a wartime calculation. However, it was picked up by Austria's anti Nazi elite who began to form the Second Republic.
And for Austria, particularly when looking outwards to international incentive structures,
a story of victimhood under Nazi Germany had immense political expediency,
not least because it opened the possibility for a swift departure of the occupying powers and the country's independence.
As such, and as was the case in West Germany, albeit now towards a different road,
the international community indirectly allowed Austria to build its memory of innocence and victim.
At the backdrop of the beginning, competition between East and West,
the Soviet Union and the U.S. were interested in absorbing Austria from its past by placing it as a neutral buffer between between them,
rather than dividing it up as they did with guilty Germany and especially the U.S. was
willing to play along with Austria's fabricated victimhood to secure it from Soviet claims.
And this probably also forced the Israelis into the direction of accepting a different status for Austria and Germany.
And as a result of all of this, Austria by 1955 was independent, however,
its independence and neutrality came at the expense of blocking its road towards a tolerant.
OK, conclusions about how to look ahead.
Um, I hope to have shown you in this presentation that in the case of West Germany.
The country's official atonement approach originated certainly not domestically, but rather in its international interactions and incentives.
However, while the international environment, including its most powerful actors and the broader mindset of the time,
provided at most an indirect push towards atonement,
what was crucial was this evolving reciprocity between West Germany is designated perpetrator in Israel as its victim.
So counter to the conventional view, the allies, especially the US, had not deliberately pushed the FARC into operations.
In fact, they had refused Israeli requests twice.
However, this refusal perhaps had the unintended consequence of forcing both sides into direct negotiations with one another,
a step that essentially paved a pathway towards settlement.
And notably, and again, somewhat counter to widespread beliefs, whether the FRC and Israel were normative allies with the idea of atonement,
they are domestic struggles, in fact, suggested they were not had little weight in the discussion about reparations.
What mattered was that both sides accepted to translate their normative atonement means
into strategic international aid and strategic ends could only be constructed together.
So atonement is an active political project, albeit couched in this normative language, it needs to unfold.
Therefore, it is a deliberate roleplay between the perpetrator and its victim.
And crucially, this didn't happen in the Austrian case and it also did not happen in the case of another one of World War Two perpetrators,
states, Japan, like in Austria, in Japan, reciprocity of the victims was wholly absent from the picture.
And now, obviously, I'm not an expert in East Asia, but the People's Republic of China, which would have been the target of Japanese reparations,
unlike Israel, never reciprocated early attempts and prefer to forgo war reparations in return for political recognition in the post-war environment.
And the United States, too, had provided no incentives for Japan again and against the looming Cold War,
the U.S. had an interest in protecting Japan's old place and stopped us with in East Asia rather than ostracising Japan as the East Asian pariah.
So as a result, the popular internal narrative of Japan as a victim was unlike and in the West German case and like in the Austrian case,
internationally accepted in the post-war years. Now and I'm ending here.
What does all of this mean to those with a normative agenda who want to
encourage atonement approaches for other perpetrator countries around the world?
Well, I'd suggest to look closely at the international relations of potential donors and victims,
but also the international community and its powerful actors that may infuse atonement with the recognition of starters.
And they may this time around deliberately to facilitate direct negotiations between the concerned states.
The changed normative environment that we live in the 21st century,
so the age of apology as it was taught by some scholars, can only help with this effort.
However, as I hope to have shown,
your moral complicity in this normative idea surrounding atonement was neither
given nor an essential part of the deal between the Israelis and the Germans.
What, however, did change the equation on both sides was the understanding of atonement as
a pragmatic political tool to leverage political advantage internationally.
So it was this insight that incentivised strategic compliance with atonement without
having to rely on a normative alignment with the spirit of atonement itself.
Thanks very much.