Neuville-St.-Vaast, France – For three days I staked out the brick entrance to a sprawling German cemetery from where it was just possible to see in the distance the magnificent monument at Vimy Ridge which commemorates those Canadians who fought and died on the Western Front during the First World War.
My intention had been to speak with Germans about their perceptions of the war, which began six weeks after Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated on June 28, 1914 in Sarajevo. I utterly failed.
During what were three days of glorious sunshine in northern France, I did not see one German man, woman or child visit what is the largest German military cemetery in western Europe. In fact, only 40 or 50 people a day – mostly Britons with a handful of Belgian tourists and Dutch cyclists – dropped by to pay their respects to Kaiser Wilhelm’s war dead.
Meanwhile, five minutes up the road by car at Vimy, several thousand visitors a day swarmed the Canadian memorial and toured an adjacent battleground where, somewhat paradoxically, several busloads of German teenagers who had no time or inclination to remember their own war dead listened intently to what young Canadian guides had to tell them about Canada’s war.
“I guess they feel there is nothing for them here,” said Malcolm Tebbett, an Englishman who was visiting this German cemetery while on a pilgrimage to France with his wife to establish a vestigial connection to a distance relative who fought and died in France for the British army.
This “Soldatenfriedhof” run by the German War Graves Commission is one of the starkest reminders of what a charnel house northern France was during a conflict that idealists once optimistically called the War to End All Wars.
A staggering 44,833 Germans, most of whom would have died in the trenches or “going over the top,” are buried in serried rows in this beautiful, desolate place with only songbirds and the sound of the wind to comfort them. There are so many German war dead buried under an immaculate carpet of grass that there are four names written on every grey cross. The only interruption to the perfect sense of order is the presence of several dozen gravestones with the Star of David etched on them.
It is a surprise to see Stars of David representing Jewish Germans lying next to their Catholic and Protestant compatriots, but, of course, Jews were well integrated, important members of Imperial German society before Adolf Hitler came to power. They served, and often with distinction, during the last days of the Second Reich as Hitler, a foot soldier himself at that time, would have known.
Der Spiegel, the German news magazine noted in a cover story earlier this year, that the war is being loudly celebrated a century later in Britain, where there are 844 memorials that recall the conflict. Astonishingly, the BBC is producing 2,500 hours of documentaries, dramas and discussions about the conflagration. The Imperial War Museum in London has launched an impressive project on the Internet that recalls every conceivable aspect of the conflict. All students attending publicly funded school in Britain will have a chance to tour the battlefields on the Western Front.
The British government is spending more than $80 million on a slew of ceremonies and memorials. By contrast, the German response to the anniversary has been muted. Chancellor Angela Merkel has said she has no plans to mark the centenary, upon which her government is only spending $6 million to recall.
The German highlight will probably be the visit on August 3 that its president, Joachi Gauck, will make with French President Francois Hollande to a hill in the Alsace that the two countries once fought a bloody battle over.
There are, of course, logical reasons that explain German antipathy about remembering any war. Britain and France were the victors in 1918. The Germans were the vanquished. Alsace was lost.
But barely remembering the First World War this summer, despite the loss of two million German lives, is mostly about not remembering any war because of German guilt over their country’s conduct during the Second World War. Yet despite its savagery, the first war was not in any way tinged by the pure evil of Nazism.
“There was no great honour in WWI. There is no great honour in any war,” said Tebbett, who was moved almost to tears by the enormity of the graveyard that he found himself standing in. “Maybe the Germans will want to remember at some stage.
“Where they have to get to is where they have no memory of it (WWII). Once the parents and grandparents are gone there can be history without guilt.”