Bloggers Flunk History

Just to be clear about the Victory Column: It is not a Nazi monument. Obama has not flunked history — or offended Germans — by choosing to speak there. The original source of this story is, again, my own employer, so I know when bloggers inflate the details out of all proportion. Some minor German politicians have grumbled about the Siegessäule’s history, for political reasons, but their comments aren’t very important.

Hitler did indeed move the Victory Column to its current location in Berlin, and he did like it because it commemorated Prussian victories over the French and other enemies around 1870. But no one I know drives past the Siegessäule now in their car and thinks, “Ugh, Hitler.” The Nazi contribution to the Victory Column’s “meaning” is obscure even to Germans. In fact Nazi associations are a lot more immediate with the Brandenburg Gate, because anyone with a visual sense of Third Reich history knows the story of the torchlight march by Nazis on the night Hitler was appointed chancellor. The flames flowed under the Brandenburg Gate like a river, and Max Liebermann, the Jewish artist, watched from his apartment. “Kann jar nich soviel essen, wie ich kotzen möchte,” he said. “I can’t eat enough to puke enough.”

There’s your Brandenburg Gate, Mr. Reagan (and Mr. Clinton, and Mr. Obama). No part of Berlin is not contaminated by the Nazi past. But the Siegessäule has more to do with World War I than World War II. It’s an emblem of Germany’s mood when Germany sent a fresh generation of soldiers to fight the French in 1914, laden with dreams of victory. It works for Germans as a warning against military arrogance; the name “Victory Column” itself has a bitter and ironic taste for Berliners. Just the sort of chastening America, and even certain candidates for president—but especially some bloggers—might want to heed.

     posted 23 July 2008 by Michael Scott Moore