The Right Way to Remember : In Britain and Germany, fierce debates about painful memories of war

Britain and Germany have been struggling in recent weeks with the memory of the terror-bombing of Dresden in February, 1945. The Queen Mother has agreed to dedicate a larger-than-life-size statue of Sir Arthur (Bomber) Harris, who insisted on that joint U.S.-British action despite the fact that British intelligence called it unnecessary and the U.S. air command was reluctant; perhaps 80,000 civilians died. The mayors of Dresden and other German cities have asked that the memorial be canceled.

That struggle is less important, however, than the struggle that is taking place within Britain between the Bomber Command Assn. and such voices as that of the London Independent. In a poignant editorial, that newspaper called Harris “wrong on both moral and practical grounds. There is a moral difference between accidentally and deliberately killing civilians.” It is to the British airmen whose lives Harris squandered “that a memorial should be raised, not to the commander who sent them to their deaths,” the Independent concluded.

A similar double struggle is taking place in Germany over the German film “Europa Europa.” Based on the harrowing true story of a Jewish boy who escaped genocide by masquerading as a German soldier, the film has received extraordinary acclaim in the United States but has had little distribution in Germany itself. Because of the opposition of Germany’s semiofficial Export Union, moreover, it will not be a contender in this year’s Oscar race for best foreign-language film.

At one level, this struggle may seem to be about Germans and Jews. But here too the more crucial struggle is the one within Germany, between the Export Union and German directors such as Michael Verhoeven, Volker Schlondorff and Percy Adlon, who have rightly sought to make the near-suppression of this film a scandal.

Remember your sufferings, forget your crimes, and you make war. Forget your sufferings, remember your crimes, and you make peace. Memory is a fearsome tool. All of us children and grandchildren of World War II must learn how to use it.