ABSTRACT

Given the sheer scale and brutality of the atrocities carried out by Nazi Germany, there is hardly a book on political injustice that does not at least mention the violence unleashed under the National Socialist regime. Significantly, post-war Germany assumes a similarly prominent role in the scholarship on reconciliation. Whilst the Holocaust arguably represents the ‘crime of all crimes' against which all other forms of mass atrocity and genocide are measured, the way in which the German state has responded to its violent past has come to be regarded a model for other states that seek to come to terms with a history of violence and political injustice. Lily Gardner Feldman, for instance, argues that ‘Germany's complex motivations and multifaceted practical ways in developing international reconciliation are instructive’, making its ‘foreign policy of reconciliation after World War II … an admired and imitated model for others'.1 Frequently, analyses of Germany's foreign policy of reconciliation are comparative in nature and tend to juxtapose the East-Asian and German experience.2 Gardner Feldman situates her study of Germany's relations with its former enemies against the backdrop of the case of Japan, contrasting the ‘nuanced German approaches to reconciliation’, particularly in relation to France and Israel, with ‘the Japanese mould of ignoring or whitewashing the past’.3 In the sphere of the media, Germany is also frequently pointed to when calls for justice, state contrition and a culture of remembrance become loud in the face of egregious injustices elsewhere. As Jeremy Cliffe writes, ‘[c]ountries without Holocausts on their history books can also learn from Germany's grown-up, vigilant and dutiful culture of remembrance’.4