European identity has become an all-pervasive concept. In the debate on integration it is used so frequently that to call its currency inflationary would be an understatement. Thus there is an evident risk of the concept turning into a catchall formula whose possible meanings vary arbitrarily from one context to another. Typically, those who tend to evoke it with emphatic intentions are also inclined to amalgamate what they take to be the ‘objective’ attributes of a European identity, as they may be derived from the realms of geography, history, culture and politics, with normative proposals for what should placed at the core of this identity, be it the canon of ‘occidental values’ or the idea of a ‘social’ Europe. All in all, adding the adjective ‘European’ to the identity concept does not seem to help very much in clarifying terms in a discursive field which is in any case permeated by all kinds of semantic ambiguities.

In this chapter, I do not intend to give a systematic inventory of the manifold ‘identity issues’ discussed so intensely in different social science disciplines over the last two to three decades. As is to be expected, the steady multiplication of scholarly uses of the category has already triggered the first massive counter-reactions. Brubaker and Cooper (2000: 2–3), for example, speak of an ‘“identity” crisis’ in the social sciences, a crisis they relate to the devaluation of meaning caused by overproduction.

Since its inception in the 1950s, European integration has been a multilingual undertaking. This is true, in the first instance, in a quite trivial sense: relations between states are communicative relations. Interactions among political and administrative elites who belong to different language communities generally necessitate translation. The domain of international politics is, after all, also a domain of interpreters, and Europe is no exception to this rule. But beyond this, the European Union (EU) differs markedly from other more or less well-established arenas of interstate cooperation in that it officially accords multilingualism a very prominent place in its institutional architecture. In this chapter I will focus on the political background of the institutionalization of the EU's language regime and the practical implications of multilingualism for the European institutions.

For many years, the language issue occupied a rather inconspicuous place on the European political agenda. If newspapers had highlighted the ‘Brussels language problem’ in their headlines 20 or 30 years ago, politically informed readers would have assumed that they would find a report on the conflict between the Francophone and Dutch-speaking communities in the Belgian capital. Today, by contrast, many readers would be more likely to associate such headlines with the language situation in the EU. In fact, since the signing of the Treaty establishing the European Union, public interest in the European language regime seems to be increasing steadily, at least if one goes by press reports. German newspapers, at any rate, have recently devoted much attention to the subject.

In 1995 almost 300 ‘Conservatives and critical Liberals’ published an appeal under the heading ‘8 May 1945 – Against Forgetting’. It cited the first President of the FRG, Theodor Heuss: ‘Basically, this 8 May 1945 remains the most tragic and questionable paradox for every one of us. Why? Because we were saved and destroyed at the same time.’ The advertisement asserted that, in contrast to Heuss's apt characterisation, the date of the unconditional surrender of the German Reich had increasingly come to be represented as ‘liberation’ by politicians and the media. This meant, according to the campaign, that there was a danger of forgetting that this day had marked not only the end of the National Socialist terror regime but also ‘the beginning of the terror of expulsion and of new oppression in the east and the beginning of the division of our country’. That was a problem, because an ‘image of the past that conceals, suppresses or qualifies these truths cannot be the basis for the self-conception of a self-assured nation that we Germans have to become in the European family of peoples in order to rule out comparable catastrophes in future’. This implies that the Germans must remember the ‘full truth’. This apparently simple demand, however, poses serious problems. In later chapters I address the question of truth as an issue of representability; this chapter explores something related but different, namely the question of the suppression, silencing or forgetting of (aspects of) the past in memory.

Talk of the Germans' ‘wounds of memory’ seems to suggest that their pain results from having suffered in the Second World War. The idea that Germans should ‘never again’ wage war could be seen to derive from this, from the desire to avoid such suffering in future. The previous chapters perhaps supported such an interpretation. War was represented as something that in some way ‘came over’ Germans as civilians. This, however, is at best a truncated representation of German memories of the Second World War and the wounds associated with them. This chapter considers a different aspect, and one that some may regard to be ‘war itself’, namely the experience of soldiers. Memories of the soldiers' war are no less controversial and emotional than are those of the effects of the war on civilians, especially where the issue of Wehrmacht crimes is concerned. Chapter 2 noted that the issue of Wehrmacht atrocities was central to the Kohl doctrine, but was concealed or at least de-emphasised in the argument made in support of Bundeswehr deployments to Bosnia in 1995. This problematic is examined here from a different angle. The atrocities in question and their significance for how Germans remember the Second World War have not been discussed so far. Taking this aspect into account makes it possible to appreciate that the ‘wounds of memory’ are not just about the suffering which might be seen as inflicted by others but also about the guilt surrounding the Germans' horrific actions in the past.

When, several decades after Carlo Schmid's impassioned plea, the Germans were confronted with the question of war, they seemed to follow his lead. They seemed to want nothing to do with war. Many objected strongly to the 1991 Gulf War; thousands took to the streets. Most prominently, Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher asserted that war could not under any circumstances be a means of politics, a view that was shared by opposition politicians. This forceful rejection of war in general and the Gulf War in particular was often illustrated, underlined and justified with references to and memories of the Second World War. In his statement on the Gulf War Chancellor Helmut Kohl mentioned, first of all, the Germans' experiences of war, their memories and their resulting ability to understand the suffering of people caught up in war. These experiences, Kohl asserted, ‘have been deeply ingrained in the memory of our people as a whole’. Later, when the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) had to decide whether the country would itself use military force, the Second World War became a common point of reference in the debate.

This book has explored how German memories of the Third Reich and the Second World War have been articulated in a variety of contexts. It has highlighted what one might call the double implication of speaking of the past. On the one hand, the book has examined the closures in such discourses, how they seem to rule out potential objections, thoughts and queries, in particular those that question how the past came to be the past in the first place. On the other hand, and crucially, the book has followed up how the invocation of memory inevitably offers opportunities to challenge the closures that are being produced, in particular when tensions are made visible. These tensions might at times be related to something as simple as the existence of a variety of memories of the past, but they also indicate that remembering retrospectively conjures up a past that never quite existed in this way when it was the present. In this final chapter, I draw out the wider implications of this argument, implications not only in relation to the particular political situation explored but also to wider questions about war and the practice of scholarship. Thus, rather than tying everything together into a neat bundle of conclusions that have already been shown, this chapter opens the arguments up to new questions, implications and challenges.

Kinkel's reinterpretation of the implication of Second World War memories asserted not only that it was possible for Germans to contribute to international military operations but that it was imperative. Chapter 2 showed that his argument was problematic. Nevertheless, it paved the way for an increasingly assertive use of force by the FRG. Yet in the summer of 2002 the government and the people categorically refused to consider any involvement in the proposed war against Iraq. This was perhaps particularly surprising in view of the claim that Iraq would be liberated as Germany and Japan had been in 1945, an idea that should have sat nicely with the justifications for using military force that Kinkel had offered. These revolved around the Germans' responsibility, as a result of Allied liberation and the guilt of the Nazi regime, to actively contribute to wars against oppression. Yet there was widespread agreement in the FRG that the war against Iraq was unjustifiable. Thus, whilst others were debating the pros and cons of invading Iraq, the Germans had a debate about a different war: the Second World War, and in particular their memory of the bombing of cities.

This chapter explores memories of this ‘strategic bombing’. It starts by observing the scale of the destruction wreaked upon German cities and then explores three occasions for discussing the so-called ‘air war’: firstly, the ‘year of remembrance’ 1995 and in particular the federal president's speech on the fiftieth anniversary of the bombing of Dresden; secondly, a debate about the failure of German writers to adequately represent the air war; and thirdly, a recent book by a historian that led to considerable controversy.

Debates about political performances of memory and rituals of commemoration largely focus on what they construe as ‘the past’ and our present attitude to it: How, if at all, should Germans remember the Allied bombing of cities during the Second World War? What are the implications of particular versions of memory for the political present? How may ‘the Germans’ adequately imagine their own identity through such memories? Other difficult questions, for example, about truth, ethics and emotion, have been raised in the preceding chapters by exploring memories of the Second World War as they are articulated in novels. So far the argument has, however, bypassed any consideration of one of the most intriguing – and in some senses most obvious – aspects of memory: the question of temporality. Walser's assertion that we may not remember the past as it was when it was the present draws attention to this. That memories change over time is, of course, neither a surprisingly new nor a particularly controversial insight. Yet thinking through what this means for conceptions not only of memory but of temporality itself produces challenges to what appear to be deeply held assumptions. Memories disturb our conception of temporality, and this is crucial, because temporality is implicated in what we perceive to be ethical.

The present chapter starts by briefly considering memory and temporality,highlighting not only how uneasily memory seems to sit in the non-space between past and present but also how both modern physics and our experience pose challenges to a linear understanding of time.

When I grew up, war was bad. Unconditionally bad. What was particularly bad was Germans being involved in any war. ‘We’ had started two world wars, after all. Although Germans are still seen as profoundly biased against war, war has been able to dramatically improve its reputation. Germans still hesitate to call it that when they are involved – Kampfeinsatz (combat mission) being the most martial terminology thinkable – but war, in some guises, has become acceptable. And I am still struggling to understand. What is perhaps most astonishing is that the Second World War – the very reason war was so assuredly bad – came to be instrumentalised in justifying this shift, in justifying the permissibility of war.

One of the intriguing aspects about the debates I explored for my previous book, in which I trace this shift, was that from the Gulf War onwards the Second World War and memories of it were invoked in order not only to make sense of the problem of using force today but to argue for it. In other words, the bad war was used to argue that war wasn't so bad after all. At the same time, it was used, of course, to warn against war. This is intriguing, especially since – even though the Second World War was mentioned time and again – not very much was said at all about that war and Germans' experiences in it.