“Interpretation battles” was the motto of the 53rd German Historians’ Day, which took place in Munich this week, but the most prominent specialist controversy of late never occurred: the so-called “Historikerstreit 2.0”. Not a single one of the more than 150 events was dedicated to the recent struggle over the question of the singularity of the Holocaust and the memory of colonial crimes.
Instead, a different rift opened up in the Holocaust interpretation: The “Freedom of Science” panel discussed how Poland’s ruling party PiS is hindering research into Polish participation in the Holocaust – and what that means not only for the researchers concerned, but also for them professional cooperation with historical institutes in Poland.
Jan Grabowski, Polish historian at the University of Ottawa, reported on his conviction by a Warsaw court for his book “After that is only night”, published in 2018. The 1700-page study shows how Polish civilians helped the German occupation to track down and murder Jews who had fled ghettos and concentration camps. Grabowski attributed complicity to the majority of the more than 200,000 victims. This joins a growing body of scientific evidence that has scratched the Polish narrative of national innocence since the early noughties.
In 1700 pages, Grabowski worked out how Polish civilians helped murder escaped Jews
The PiS took action against it in 2018 with an amendment to the law: Anyone who held the Polish nation jointly responsible for National Socialist crimes saw themselves threatened with up to three years in prison. In 2008 a similar law failed before the constitutional court. This time the PiS rowed back after international criticism. Grabowski should instead apologize publicly – for half a page that incriminates the then mayor of the small town of Malinowo in eastern Poland. His 80-year-old niece had sued with the help of the government-affiliated foundation “Fortress of the Good Name” – according to Grabowski symptomatic of the civil rather than criminal action of the PiS.
In August, a Polish appeals court overturned the judgment against Grabowski with reference to the freedom of science. In the conversation, however, the acquitted emphasized that the situation for Holocaust researchers in Poland remains difficult. Martin Schulze-Wessel, former chairman of the Association of Historians in Germany, saw in Poland – unlike in Belarus – less of a direct attack on academic freedom. Rather, the government tries to compete with academic research by popularizing “alternative narratives” through social institutions.
The ruling party does not want to know anything about the Polish co-responsibility: Cover of the two-part original edition of Jan Grabowski’s study “Afterwards is only night”, published in 2018.
So the panel wrestled about how historians should behave towards the Pilecki Institute, which was founded and equipped by the Polish parliament in 2017 to investigate the history of the country under National Socialist rule. Stefanie Schüler-Springorum, head of the Center for Research on Antisemitism at the TU Berlin, pointed the dilemma to the question: “Change through rapprochement or demarcation?” Grabowski, whom the head of the Pilecki Institute in Berlin vehemently contradicted against representations from “After that is only night”, accused government-affiliated research institutions in Poland of hate speech against himself on Twitter and spoke out against cooperation.
Schulze-Wessel, on the other hand, would like to remain open to a dialogue – “with the reservation that it should end in dissent”. The peculiarity of Polish history seems too important to him: no country suffered more from the “horrors of German occupation,” but in Germany memories of the suppression of the Warsaw Uprising have faded alongside the memory of the Holocaust. At the same time, Poland had the greatest number of “Righteous Among the Nations”, although there was the death penalty for the support of Jews. Of course, Schulze-Wessel does not want this to be understood as an excuse for the PiS’s actions, but warned: “The strong emphasis and political exploitation of these aspects in Poland should not prevent us from talking about them in Germany.”
When Germans discuss the crimes of the National Socialists in Poland, however, this harbors explosive factors. Last year, Foreign Minister Heiko Maas wrote together with the historian Andreas Wirsching on the 75th anniversary of the end of the war mirrors: “Germany alone bears responsibility for the Second World War and the Holocaust. Anyone who sows doubts about this and forces other peoples into the role of perpetrators is inflicting injustice on the victims.” Jan Grabowski did not want to doubt the authors’ good intentions, but complained that such blanket statements played into the cards of the Polish government’s narrative.
On a different sheet of paper than the manuscript of the political speech, of course, is the question of what shape German historical scholarship can take on the Holocaust in Poland, not least with regard to cooperation with Polish institutes. Martin Schulze-Wessel also finally admitted that he had no magic formula here.