[ALBSA-Info] Goethe Institute and World War II

[Agron Alibali]

The Times (London) 

July 13, 2001, Friday 
Spiting the face 




The Goethe Institute is an organisation as admirable, wide-ranging and beneficent as the great German poet after whom it is named. The German equivalent of the British Council, it spends millions of marks in foreign countries to encourage the study of German, fund scholarships to German universities and promote the best of German culture. That job may no longer be possible in Greece. Despite the huge sums dispensed over the years to Greeks seeking education and opportunity in Germany, a Greek judge has ordered that the Goethe Institute in Athens be seized, auctioned and the proceeds distributed to a small town in central Greece which is claiming Pounds 20 million in compensation for a Nazi massacre of more than 200 inhabitants in 1944. 

Restitution for atrocities rightly has no time limit. It took more than 40 years before Germany agreed to compensate the elderly men and women who were forced into slave labour in German factories during the Second World War. Trials of suspected war criminals are still going on, even though most of the accused and witnesses are so old that reliable testimony is almost impossible. The brave decision of President Kwasniewski to apologise for the wartime massacre of Polish Jews in Jedwabne should go a long way to healing a legacy of bitterness. 

More recent horrors are also now receiving the legal retribution they deserve. This week's decision by the Cambodian Government to allow trials to go ahead of the butchers of the killing fields is essential if that country is to come to terms with its past. General Pinochet and Slobodan Milosevic have found that dark deeds cannot be swept away by political convenience. 

The Greek judgment, however, raises different issues. The Second World War comprises so many ugly incidents, killings, massacres and atrocities that individual compensation for each deed can only ever be arbitrary and unfair. The victorious allies knew that Germany could never be held to account for everything that happened, as no money could bring back the dead or apology assuage the bitterness. The nascent Bonn democracy accepted blame and moral responsibility. Germany has paid out billions to compensate Jewish survivors of the Holocaust; it has negotiated bilateral treaties of reparation with countries that it occupied; and it has repeatedly sought with human exchanges and political humility to bring about reconciliation and friendship. 

The people of Distomo may be bitter that they have yet to see much of the money paid out by Bonn in 1961 to atone for Greece's wartime suffering. They may also have been encouraged to pursue their claim by the example of others who have harried the Germans, playing on guilt and political expediency, to raise the level of reparations and share postwar wealth with former victims. 

If the latest court judgment means that two of postwar Germany's commitments to culture, learning and internationalism -the Goethe Institute and the German Archaeological Society -are closed, then Greece will be the poorer and vendetta politics will be strengthened. Germany today is a political friend, a vital trade partner and a military ally of Greece. No purpose is served by yesterday's short-sighted judgment, one that the Athens Government must now deeply regret. Greece and Germany must find other ways to heal remaining wartime wounds. 



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