Sinking Ships, the LostHeimatand Broken Taboos: Günter Grass and the Politics of Memory in Contemporary Germany

Nazi Germany and the Luso-Hispanic World

From Monnet to Delors: Educational Co-operation in the European Union

‘History, more precisely, the history that we are stirring up, is a stopped up toilet. We flush and flush, the shit still floats back up.’Günter Grass, Im Krebsgang: Eine Novelle (Göttingen: Steidl, 2002), 116. All translations from the German are my own. Since February 2002 Paul Pokriefke, the narrator of Günter Grass's latest book, Im Krebsgang: Eine Novelle (Walking like a crab: a novella), has offered these words of wisdom to several hundred thousand readers who have made Grass's book an immediate bestseller in Germany. With plans for the book to be translated into no fewer than thirty-one languages, Pokriefke's insights will soon be available to an international audience.Eva-Maria Mester, ‘Deutschstunde in Lübeck: Übersetzer trafen sich mit Günter Grass’, Deutsche Presse-Agentur (DPA)-Europadienst, 2 April 2002.

In a recent collection of essays on Germany's relations with Latin America Natalja Karthaus argued that ‘Latin America was never a priority area for German foreign policy’.Natalja Karthaus, ‘Lateinamerika als Bezugsfeld der (bundes-) deutschen Außenpolitik’, in Manfred Mols and Christoph Wagner, eds., Deutschland-Lateinamerika: Geschichte, Gegenwart und Perspektiven (Frankfurt/Main: Vervuert, 1994), 53. Karthaus's verdict can, in fact, be extended to the Luso-Hispanic world as a whole, thus including Portugal and also, for most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Spain.On aspects of the history of German – Spanish relations see now Conrad Kent, Thomas K. Wolber and Cameron M. K. Hewitt, eds., The Lion and the Eagle; Interdisciplinary Essays on German – Spanish Relations over the Centuries (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2000). Even Hitler's foreign policy, despite its global aspirations, is included in Karthaus's assessment.The focus of this article is largely on Brazil, Argentina, Spain and Portugal. These four countries were of comparatively greater importance to the Nazi regime than the other Latin American countries. On the latter see, inter alia, Jobst-H. Floto, Die Beziehungen Deutschlands zu Venezuela 1933 bis 1958 (Frankfurt/Main, Vervuert, 1991); María M. Camou, Los vaivenes de la politica exterior uruguaya ante la pugna de las potencias; las relaciones con el Tercer Reich (1933–1942) (Montevideo: Fundación de Cultura Universitaria, 1990); Klaus Volland, Das Dritte Reich und Mexiko. Studien zur Entwicklung des deutsch-mexikanischen Verhältnisses 1933–1942 unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Ölpolitik (Frankfurt/Main, Berr: Peter Lang, 1976). To Hitler, both Latin America and the Iberian Peninsula (with the exception of Spain during the first year of that country's civil war and again in 1940/41) were of marginal relevance to his foreign policy objectives. This verdict notwithstanding Nazi Germany maintained regular, indeed in some areas close, relations to the countries of Latin America and the Iberian peninsula which warrant closer examination.

This article presents an historical analysis of the European Union's educational policy from the inception of the European Community to the establishment of a directorate for education in the European Commission in 1993. It tells the story of a policy that was not anticipated in the original EEC programme but which developed as a result of the Single Market plan and the gradual acknowledgement that educational issues were related to common economic concerns.For a recent discussion of education, economic integration and the Single Market plan see Brad K. Blitz, ‘Professional Mobility and the Mutual Recognition of Qualifications in the European Union: Two Institutional Approaches’, Comparative Education Review, 43, 3 (August 1999), 311–31. The story turns on the ideas and efforts of key individuals working within the Commission and in national ministries. These functionaries took the lead in formulating a limited European educational policy based on co-operation, the sharing of information and, much later, the creation of specific action programmes that sought to increase the mobility of students, teachers and skilled professionals across the Community. During the political uncertainty that characterised the Community in the early 1970s, the functionaries identified education – which was understood to include any formal instruction that prepared the student for a qualification in a particular profession, skill or trade – as a potential policy area that could provide the floundering Community with direction at supposedly low cost to member states. From vague discussions about the value of a skilled and mobile workforce that were enshrined in intergovernmental resolutions, the idea of a European educational policy was eventually seized upon by officials within the Commission and institutionalised in trans-European programmes and Commission-sponsored organisations. Assisted by the European Court of Justice, the Commission was able to initiate educational programmes that received the blessing of the member states and later secured a place for education in a new directorate. Although education never because a supranational policy, it raised the Commission's standing and supported claims that the Community was actively creating a ‘people's Europe’.

‘The subject of identity, both personal and collective, is on the agenda in the West, as well as in post-Soviet Russia… The current intellectual climate encourages us to regard every expression of meaning and every assertion of identity as susceptible to reinterpretation’ (Laura Engelstein and Stephanie Sandler, Self and Story in Russian History, p. 4). And indeed, identity has become the focus of a great deal of theorising in contemporary social science. Whereas formerly the individual was characterised chiefly by his membership of a social class or group whose history could be reconstructed by a social historian, nowadays we prefer to stress the multiplicity, and especially the fluidity, of such groupings. A recent article by Rogers Brubaker acknowledges the importance of this concept of identity, while trying to show that it covers a multiplicity of uses and tends to blur the boundaries between a number of different notions.Rogers Brubaker, ‘Au delà de l'“identité”’, Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales, 139 (September 2001), 66–85. See also Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper, ‘Beyond Identity’, Theory and Society, 29 (2000), 1–47. Brubaker criticises this over-use and proposes its replacement by multiple concepts. It is true enough that social scientists have used the term somewhat indiscriminately: ‘attributed identity’, ‘acknowledged identity’, ‘group identity’, ‘individual identity’, and so on. On the other hand, David Kertzer and Dominique Arel are more positive: ‘The past decade has seen a great outpouring of interest in the nature of collective identities of various kinds.’ They see a close relationship between ‘state modernity and the impetus to categorize’, and hence stress the importance of ‘the official state certification of collective identities’.David I. Kertzer and Dominique Arel, eds., Census and Identity. The Politics of Race, Ethnicity, and Language in National Censuses (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). They argue for the usefulness of a concept which may be broad, but does make it possible to group together various ways in which individuals and community relate to each other, or individuals to communities and states, or individuals to their own history. And indeed, this constant interaction between self and state, a relationship created through a multiplicity of categories constructed by administrators, individual perceptions and political authorities, builds up a multiplicity of collective and individual identities.

During the Second World War, countless individuals were robbed of their freedom, particularly their freedom of movement, and put into some form of captivity while being deprived, to a greater or lesser extent, of their rights. The most dramatic example by far, the concentration camps, does not concern us here. I shall be dealing in the first place with the fate of prisoners of war during and immediately after the conflict. Numbered in millions, their destinies were very different depending on when and where they were captured, and to which country and ‘race’ they belonged. But there was also another large group of people who lost their freedom, and most of their rights, during the Second World War: civilian internees. I shall be considering their fate here insofar as it is discussed in the works under review below. However, it should be noted here that internees, unlike prisoners of war, were not covered by international law; internment camps cannot be equated with prisoner of war camps.

As can be seen from the range of books reviewed here, there is considerable interest in studying European foreign policy. Numerous questions about European foreign policy merit attention: how and why has the European foreign policy system evolved? how does it operate? what does it produce? and what effects does it have on the outside world and on European Union (EU) member states? All of these books grapple with at least some of these questions.

Brad K. Blitz is Senior Lecturer in International and Development Studies at the University of Surrey Roehampton. He received his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1998. He has recently published articles on European public policy and social policies in Comparative Education Review and South European Society and Politics.