Although the end of the Vietnam War lies 30 years in the past, the presidential campaign showed that it continues to provoke angry emotions and powerful political controversies. In Germany, World War II is twice as distant, yet the political warfare about how to properly commemorate the 60th anniversary of the war’s end reveals lingering wounds in German society.

The most painful controversy developed from the recent success of extreme right-wing parties in winning seats in provincial parliaments in eastern Germany. In particular, the National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD) has made headlines by its efforts to create counter-demonstrations to the official ceremonies commemorating the fire-bombing of Dresden on Jan. 13 and the capitulation of Germany on May 8.

The NPD combines neo-Nazis, Holocaust deniers, violence-prone skinheads and other dissatisfied eastern Germans into a vocal right-wing minority, which greatly disturbs the major parties. Because unemployment in the provinces that used to compose the communist German Democratic Republic averages about 20 percent, economic dissatisfaction provides the basis for radical right-wing attacks on German democracy.

As is true throughout western Europe, right-wing parties focus on immigrants, especially Muslims, as the scapegoats for all social and economic problems. A recent survey showed that 96 percent of NPD sympathizers believe that immigrants present a “danger.”

Memories and memorialization of the end of World War II provide a fruitful ground for the NPD to create publicity and annoy conventional politicians because the wounds of that war have still not healed. The city of Dresden, the seat of the parliament of Saxony where the NPD won 9 percent of the vote in September, represents the point where Germans no longer see themselves as perpetrators, but rather as victims.

On Jan. 13, 1945, repeated attacks by British and American bombers transformed this medieval jewel into an inferno, leaving more than 25,000 civilians dead. The policy of terror bombing, which reached its high point months later, as the Air Force dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on Aug. 6 and 9, was not successful in Germany. The German forces only surrendered after Berlin was conquered by the Red Army and Hitler had committed suicide.

An unexpected consequence of these attacks on civilians has been to provide some Germans with a sense of being themselves victims of Allied war crimes.

The NPD tries to exploit this opportunity to gain support for their combination of nationalist self-pity and rejection of the democratic Western world. In conjunction with the traditional commemoration of the air attack in Dresden this year, about 5,000 neo-Nazis gathered in Dresden on Sunday, Jan. 13, one of the biggest right-wing demonstrations in Germany in decades. In response, 50,000 Germans with candles and white roses demonstrated their recognition that Dresdeners were killed because Germans had murdered millions of their neighbors. “This City is Sick of Nazis” was their slogan.

For May 8, the end of the war in Europe, the NPD has announced a demonstration at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin with the slogan “60 Years of Liberation Lies – End the Cult of Guilt.” The prospect of neo-Nazis marching in jackboots through the center of the capital, right past the newly opened Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, has thrown all the established political parties into a tizzy.

Many leading politicians, including Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, have spoken approvingly of prohibiting the NPD from demonstrating, and, further, of trying to ban the party entirely as an enemy of the constitution. Another plan is to promote their own demonstration, which offers gratitude to the Allies for destroying the Nazi regime.

After decades of being told that Germans must think of themselves as a perpetrator nation, however, public sentiment to recognize German victims of war has been growing. At the local level here in Berlin, a district run by the conservative Christian Democratic Union has announced that their commemoration would include the German bombing victims. Liberal Social Democratic politicians have criticized this plan as setting German victims against the much more numerous victims of the Nazis, and as separating the agonies that German civilians faced from their origin in German-initiated war and terror.

Recent books about the civilian victims of the Allied bombing campaign and about mass rapes of the Red Army in eastern Germany have had considerable popular impact. The popular new film about the last days of Hitler and Nazi Berlin, “Der Untergang” (“Downfall”), shows most Germans as victims of Nazi insanity, rather than active collaborators.

Not all Germans were guilty, although most allowed their government to deport and kill Jews without protest. Many Germans became victims of the war that they had once supported because that war was carried on with unprecedented ferocity by their government. Germans killed innocent civilians, and then German civilians were killed. No simple formula of national commemoration will suffice to remember the complex pains of war. One lesson is clear: The memories of civilian deaths in modern wars, rarely acknowledged in the plans or reports of military administrations, persist painfully decades after the politicians who fought them are gone.

Steve Hochstadt lives in Lewiston and teaches history at Bates College. He is temporarily teaching in Germany and can be reached at [email protected].