Translator: Nadine Hennig Reviewer: Robert Tucker
Hello everybody.
Audience: Hello.
Keith Lowe: Fantastic! This is like a schoolroom or something.
(Laughter)
My name is Keith Lowe.
I am an historian of the Second World War
and its aftermath,
and even I have to admit
that I've chosen a pretty crowded field to study.
I went into my local bookshop recently,
and this is what I saw.
Thousands of books about the Second World War
are published every year,
and, actually, to tell you the truth,
this is only a very tiny selection of what's on offer.
We in the West,
and, actually, increasingly people in other parts of the world too,
we are just a little bit obsessed by the Second World War.
We have whole TV stations which seem devoted to it.
We write books about it, we write novels about it,
we make films about it.
We have university courses which are devoted to the Second World War.
Whole museums are built to house World War II collections.
Even our politicians like to get in on this act.
Whenever there is an important anniversary of the war,
they tend to gather and commemorate it,
and make speeches.
So, for example, at the 70th anniversary of the D-Day landings,
June 2014,
17 heads of state took time out of their schedules
to come and spend the day on the Normandy beaches.
Seventeen!
This included people like Barack Obama, Vladimir Putin,
the chancellor of Germany, Angela Merkel, and so on.
From my own country,
we sent not only our Prime Minister, but also Queen Elisabeth II,
who is - I mean, she is now in her nineties
and largely retired from public life.
What other international event can do all this?
Even international summits struggle
to get so many world leaders into one place at the same time.
My question is: Why?
What is it that all these world leaders, in fact what is it that all of us,
think it is that we're remembering?
Why are we all so obsessed by the the Second World War?
You might think that somebody like me
would be pretty pleased with this situation.
As long as the World War II industry is booming,
I am always going to have a job, right?
But actually there is something about it
that I find really a little bit disturbing,
and I don't know whether that is just because
I have an inherent distrust of a lot of politicians,
or whether it's because I've been trained to always question everything.
But it strikes me that a lot of the rhetoric
that gets thrown around about the Second World War,
particularly by people like politicians and journalists and diplomats and so on,
a lot of it doesn't seem to be about the Second World War at all;
it seems to be about something else.
I'm not sure if I've exactly put my finger on precisely what that thing is,
but it seems to be something like a way of fostering national pride,
or just trying to get people to feel good about themselves.
Along the way, it seems to me
that the Second World War has been turned into a little bit of a cartoon,
where everybody knows who the good guys were,
and everybody knows who the bad guys were.
There is precious little space left anymore
for any of that difficult grey area in between.
To give you some kind of an idea
about what on earth it is I am going on about,
let me tell you a story from my own country, from Britain.
In Britain, we like to think
we are the real heroes of the Second World War.
We tell stories about how we stood alone against the Nazis,
about how we endured the bombing of the Blitz;
how we kept calm and carried on,
and eventually fought our way back into Europe
and liberated it.
We still call the Second World War
"Our Finest Hour",
as if it is some kind of golden age in our history.
So whenever there is any kind of anniversary,
or important event based around the Second World War,
we Brits really go for it.
One of these events happened quite recently, in the summer of 2012,
when we opened up a brand new war memorial
right in the middle of central London.
It was a memorial to the men of Bomber Command,
the men who flew the planes over Germany, dropped bombs and so on.
This is what it looks like.
As you can see, it's not exactly a shy and retiring piece of architecture,
it's actually quite huge.
It's by far the largest war memorial that we have in London,
and I can tell you there are a lot of war memorials in London.
As you walk into this thing,
there is an inscription which tells you
that it's dedicated to the 55,000 men of Bomber Command
who lost their lives during World War II.
Now, when this first opened, in the summer of 2012,
I went along to have a look, see what I thought of it,
have a walk around.
There is something really quite moving about it actually.
You step in through these great big pillars,
and, up on the wall, you can see carved into the stone,
there is a quotation from Winston Churchill
saying exactly how much we owe to these men who lost their lives.
Parts of the memorial are built out of an actual World War II aircraft
that was shot down during the war.
So they put a lot of thought into this.
It's actually really quite inspiring.
So as I was walking around this monument,
I couldn't help but feel this real surge of pride.
I felt proud of these men
who had given their lives for something that I hold dear.
I felt proud of my country,
I felt proud of the British way of life which had produced heroes like this.
And yet,
there was this little voice in the back of my head
which just wouldn't go away
because I know that 55,000 men of Bomber Command
died during World War II,
but I also know that 500,000 Germans
died beneath the bombs that these men dropped.
A lot of those Germans were Nazis,
and I dare say that a lot of them probably deserved it.
But the vast majority of these people
were just ordinary men, women and children, just like you and me.
Are any of these people at all mentioned on this memorial?
Of course they are not.
If you would suggest such a thing in the summer of 2012,
you probably would have been lynched.
The Germans were our enemies during the Second World War.
You can't mention the Germans on a British national monument.
And yet not to mention them,
to pretend that somehow this didn't happen,
or even worse, that somehow it doesn't matter,
that too makes me feel a little bit uncomfortable.
Okay, the Germans are a difficult problem,
so let's just put them to one side for a minute,
and let's think instead about the other nationalities.
And here is where the story starts getting interesting.
Because if there is one thing
that we Brits always forget about the bomber war,
it's the fact that we didn't only bomb Germany.
More than a third of British and American bombs dropped on Europe during the war
were dropped not on Germany
but on those countries we were supposed to be liberating.
As a consequence,
50,000 French civilians were killed by our bombs.
10,000 Dutch civilians were killed by our bombs.
Are any of these people mentioned on this memorial?
Of course they're not.
And it was while I was thinking about that particular group,
that it finally dawned on me -
actually something I probably should have realized right from the start -
which is that memorials like this aren't designed to tell the whole story;
they are only designed to tell those parts of the story
that make British people feel good about themselves.
That's all very well and good,
but it does come at a cost.
And I couldn't help thinking when I was walking around this thing:
This was the summer of 2012,
this was the summer
when the Olympic Games was coming to London.
So at exactly the moment
when the entire world was arriving in our city,
the message that we were advertising
was that we will remember our wartime dead,
but we won't remember yours.
It's like the exact opposite of the Olympic spirit.
It's not only the British who do this, of course it's not.
Every nation does it,
the Americans, for example.
The Americans like to call their wartime veterans
"the greatest generation that any society has ever produced",
as if they have some kind of monopoly on heroism or something.
(Laughter)
They backed it up with a thousand Hollywood movies
full of square-jawed American heroes
defeating evil in the name of truth and freedom.
The Chinese are the same.
You know that in 2013 alone,
Chinese TV companies produced over 200 TV dramatizations
about the Second World War,
each of them telling almost an identical story.
Only, of course, this time,
it's the Japanese who are all the evil monsters,
and the Chinese who are all selfless heroes.
And, of course, I could say the same thing about the French
or the Koreans or the Norwegians or the Greeks.
We all do this.
We all like to think that we were the heroes.
We all like to think that we were the victims.
But what we don't like to remember is those grey areas.
And it's that which I find most uncomfortable about this,
because, as far as I am concerned,
it's the grey areas that make history interesting.
In a sense, all good history is about the grey areas.
But a lot of people don't seem to have time
for complicated stories.
They don't have time for difficult and uncomfortable emotions.
In fact, I'm quickly coming to the conclusion
that a lot of people don't really have time for history at all.
What they really want is a myth.
Now, you might ask yourselves:
What does any of this matter?
I mean, we all like a good story, don't we?
If that story makes us feel good about ourselves,
then so much the better.
It's all in the past anyway, so what does it matter?
But that's just the problem, isn't it?
Because it's not all in the past.
And there is a dark side to all of these stories and myths
that can be really damaging.
When the former Yugoslavia tore itself apart in the 1990s,
it did so with World War II songs on its lips,
and World War II atrocities in its heart.
When the Ukraine crisis broke out in 2014,
Ukrainians and Russians accused one another of acting like Nazis.
And then, of course, Hillary Clinton weighed in
and started comparing Vladimir Putin to Hitler.
These sorts of comparisons
don't do anything to foster rational debate.
If you were in an argument with someone,
the last thing that is going to calm things down
is that you start accusing them of being a Nazi.
If you don't believe me,
next time you're in an argument with your wife or your husband,
give it a try and see what kind of reaction you get.
(Laughter)
I can see some of you seem to have tried it.
(Laughter)
My point is that as soon as we start bringing the Second World War
into any of our arguments,
we get so sort of carried away with our own national myths
that all we actually end up doing is stirring things back up again.
Let me give you a couple of examples.
Take this economic crisis which has rocked the world since 2008.
Here we are in Athens, and you all know about the economic crisis.
All across Southern Europe,
people have been suffering a real austerity,
and largely this has been imposed by the European Union.
But it's not always the European Union that gets the blame for this.
Quite often, as the largest and most powerful country in the union,
it's Germany that gets the blame.
Now, how has this been portrayed in the press?
Have we had a calm, rational economic debate about it?
This is the way that the Italian press portrayed the situation in 2012:
"Quarto Reich."
(Laughter)
"The Fourth Reich."
This is the Italian way of saying
that modern-day Germany is no better than the Nazis,
as if there is a direct link between World War II and today.
And take a look at that picture.
They've managed to dig something out
that makes it look like Angela Merkel is making a Nazi salute.
(Laughter)
How about the Greek press?
(Laughter)
How have the Greeks portrayed it?
Well, here is a Greek newspaper.
(Laughter)
from the same year,
2012,
and you will notice a photograph of Angela Merkel once again,
this time in a Nazi uniform.
Obviously, it has been photoshopped.
But what about that headline in red?
"Memorandum macht frei."
This is a direct reference to the motto
that was written above the gates of the concentration camps
in places like Auschwitz and Dachau.
The implication here is that the whole of Greece
is going to become like one giant German concentration camp
as a consequence of the economic deal they've had to do.
Now, this is the sort of thing that makes an historian like me
want to just give up and go and become a window cleaner or something.
(Laughter)
I mean, it's historical nonsense.
None of these headlines have anything to do with the Second World War at all.
They are about a modern-day problem, a modern situation.
The only reason to mention the Second World War
is to provoke an emotional response.
If I have one message that I want you to take away with you today, it is this:
Whenever you hear a politician, or a journalist, or a diplomat,
mention the Second World War,
I want alarm bells to ring.
Because when public figures speak about the Second World War,
they are not talking about what actually happened,
they're invoking a myth.
So whenever you hear a politician mention the war,
I want you to ask yourselves
what it is he is really trying to do.
Is he trying to inspire you? -
In which case that is relatively harmless.
Or is he trying to fill you with fear?
Is he trying to draw people together?
In which case, again, that is relatively harmless.
Or is he really trying to drive people apart?
And above all, I want you to remind yourselves,
and to remind everybody you know,
that the Second World War is over.
(Laughter)
We live in a different world,
with different values and different problems.
These problems will never be solved,
and they certainly will never be solved peacefully,
if all we can think to do is to resurrect the Second World War.
You know, history is a messy business,
particularly the history of the Second World War.
It's not there to make us feel good about ourselves;
it's often ugly and uncomfortable,
and desperately complicated.
It's full of those grey areas.
If we could all just learn to accept that,
then this world, our world, would be a much more peaceful place.
Thank you.
(Applause)