BERLIN — Elon Musk is legitimizing one of the most taboo stances in German politics.
It’s time for Germany to “move on” from “past guilt,” he proclaimed at a rally for the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party on Saturday, just two days before the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. The line received joyous applause from party faithful.
Far-right figures in Germany have long decried the country’s vaunted Erinnerungskultur, or “culture of remembrance” as creating a society rooted in guilt for crimes committed by the Nazis, claiming that it does little but defeat the German spirit. Extreme right figures often refer to the country’s “cult of guilt.”
For decades, various figures have fought against the culture of remembrance — but they’ve usually been on the political fringes. What’s new is that the message is now coming from near the pinnacle of American power, with Musk, the rowdy billionaire and Donald Trump confidant, offering support for some of the most extreme voices in German politics.
“Children should not be guilty of the sins of their parents, let alone their great-grandparents,” Musk said, seemingly referencing the country’s history with the Nazi party.
Jewish groups in Germany and beyond expressed outrage.
“The remembrance and acknowledgement of the dark past of the country and its people should be central in shaping the German society,” Dani Dayan, the chair of Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust remembrance center, said on X, Musk’s social media platform. “Failing to do so is an insult to the victims of Nazism and a clear danger to the democratic future of Germany.”
Musk’s comments lend support to the AfD’s long-standing effort to challenge the fundamental ideas behind Erinnerungskultur. AfD leaders have in the past minimized Nazi crimes, and criticized the act of remembrance.
The former AfD co-leader Alexander Gauland, in 2018, referred to the Nazi era as a mere “speck of bird poop” in Germany’s thousand-year history and said Germans can and should be proud of their soldiers in both world wars.
Björn Höcke, the party’s leader in the eastern German state of Thuringia, once called for a “180-degree turn” in the country’s memory politics and heavily criticized the construction of the Holocaust memorial in Berlin. “We Germans are the only people in the world who have planted a monument of shame in the heart of our capital,” he said.
Contrary to the crude terms in which Musk described the situation, virtually no one in Germany argues that children should feel guilty for the crimes of their ancestors.
“Nobody makes children feel guilty for Nazi crimes,” said Steffen Seibert, Germany’s ambassador to Israel. “We want them to grow up informed and responsible and to apply the lessons of Germany’s past.”
Yet studies show that knowledge of the Holocaust in Germany is waning, and that belief in misinformation is on the rise. Almost a fifth of Germans believe that 2 million or fewer Jews were killed by the Nazis and their collaborators, according to a recent study that exposed how knowledge of the Holocaust in several countries is declining, particularly among young adults.
On Monday, Chancellor Olaf Scholz joined world leaders at Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp in Poland, to mark the 80th anniversary of its liberation.
“It must distress us how many young people in Germany hardly know anything about the Holocaust,” Scholz told several German newspapers in the run-up to the visit. “We must uphold the memory, when the last witnesses are no longer alive,” he added.
“Parties like the AfD and apparently also Elon Musk have an interest in people forgetting or not reflecting,” Carmen Wegge, a parliamentarian for Scholz’s SPD told POLITICO. Because if they did reflect, “they would realize that our democracy is in danger again.”
Musk’s ‘move on’ from the Holocaust plea challenges enduring German taboo
Source: Viral Showbiz Pinay
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