JOHN JEFFERY: Of memory and (trying to achieve) forgetting

I was critical of a tourist article published a few weeks ago in the Business Day Life section on the Namibian coastal town of Luderitz and the nearby ghost mining town of Kolmanskop (“Boom towns scoured to ghostly relics”, July 10).

The article made no mention of Lüderitz’s dark past as the site of Germany’s first concentration camp in the 20th century.

Nama and Herero prisoners of war were brought to Shark Island at Luderitz and made to work on a causeway to the mainland until they died. In addition, medical experiments were conducted on some of them, foregrounding what was to come in the Nazi concentration camps. It was, as some called it, the Kaizer’s Holocaust.

My criticisms of the article were that it was wrong, in an article on tourist attractions in and around Luderitz, to ignore the historical sites of the immense human suffering that had taken place there. It is important that what happened there is not forgotten. 

I recently spent a week in Munich at the World Aids Conference and had some free time to tour the city. Munich was the birthplace of Nazism. It was where Hitler started the National Socialist German Workers’ (Nazi) Party, where he attempted an unsuccessful putsch against the Weimar government, where he was imprisoned for his role in the putsch, and where he rebuilt the Nazi Party to eventually take power in Germany. 

There is not much visible of this Nazi past. Buildings that played an important role in the Nazi regime have either been destroyed or had their Nazi links obliterated. The Nazi past is something you have to go out of your way to look for. 

There are two museums in Munich that deal with the Nazi history. The most prominent is the memorial site of the Dachau concentration camp. The camp was established in 1933 when the Nazis took power, as a place to house and kill political prisoners and others deemed undesirable. Until its liberation by the Americans in May 1945 it housed Germans, Poles, Soviets, Scandinavians, French, Italians, Serbs, Romas, gay men, Jehovah’s Witnesses, beggars and Jews, among others. It is estimated that at least 40,000 people died there. 

The museum featured a display on the Dachau war trials, which took place after the defeat of Germany. The initial momentum was lost when the West German government took over the prosecutions and enthusiasm for their continuation dried up. Repression and forgetting seemed to characterise the thinking of the West German government at the time. It took 20 years from the end of the war for the camp to be reopened as a museum, and those who wished to discuss the horrors of Nazism during this time were branded “nest foulers”. 

The more recent museum to this history is the unenticingly named Munich Documentation Centre for the history of National Socialism, which has an impressive display of Nazi Party history from 1918 until 1945, as well as an exhibition of more recent far-right-wing terrorism in the area. I would have thought one way of reducing the threat of right-wing attacks is for people to be made more aware of the history of how the Nazi Party mobilised on hate and on othering, the abuses it perpetrated, and how it ended. Mere knowledge of events itself is not enough though. It is also internalising that knowledge that is important. 

The museum was opened as recently as 2015 about 70 years after the end of the World War 2 after consultation with Munich residents as to how the horrors of Nazism should be remembered. There are other memorials dotted around the city, but these have to be searched for. 

Which brings me to SA. White South Africans owe their generally privileged position to the past. The periods of settler colonisation, land deprivation, economic exclusion and ultimately apartheid determines the advantageous class position of white South Africans whether they care to admit it or not. As white South Africans we benefit from our parents’ privileges, who in turn benefited from their parents’ privileges and so on. It is thus not a coincidence that white families now have assets of an average of R1.2m, while black families have assets on average of R70,000. 

We cannot understand the present if we do not know the past that brought us here. This includes a history of European conquest, slavery and its later manifestation as indentured labour, the seizure of land from the Khoi and the extermination of the San, the colonial wars of dispossession, the racial policies that deprived black people of their rights, forced removals, and a brutal regime that tortured and murdered people who challenged white domination. 

The assertion allegedly made by a Cape Town teacher recently that a black child should not mind the use of the “K-word” because they were too young to have personally experienced the derogatory term, is absurd. It shows a considerable lack of understanding as to how history played out in the emotional lives of teenagers. 

But how can we understand the forces that formed our country if crucial events get airbrushed out of history? The German concentration camp in Luderitz and its chilling legacy in Dachau and Auschwitz is a crucial part of Southern African and German history. The horrors of Nazism need to be remembered to ensure they are not repeated — in Germany and anywhere else in the world. We cannot have a socially cohesive SA in which all its people are able to develop to their full potential without understanding how we got here. 

As American writer James Baldwin wrote: “History is not the past, it is the present. We carry our history with us. We are our history.” 

• Jeffery is a former deputy justice & constitutional development minister and ANC MP.