Coming to terms with genocidal pasts in comparative perspective: Germany and Australia

The question of how countries deal with the material and symbolic legacies of totalitarian rule, genocide, and civil war in their immediate pasts is spawning a growing body of research on recent national and regional cases -post-apartheid South Africa, postcommunist central and eastern Europe, and post-dictatorial South America -as well as on the 'classic' instances of postwar Japan and Germany. 1 Closely related is the voluminous literature on collective memory, much of which studies the impact of trauma on cultural and political group identity. 2 Nowhere is the connection between genocidal pasts and collective memory more evident than in the Federal Republic of Germany, which is widely recognized as the paradigmatic case of what there is called a successful Vergangenheitsbewltigung or Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit -the 'mastering', 'working through', or 'coming to terms with' a national history dripping with the blood of civil war and genocide. In this instance, in an appropriate symmetry, it is the paradigmatic case of genocide -the systematic murder of millions of Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, mentally disabled, and other groups. In Germany, 'coming to terms with the Nazi past' is a key element in the development of its democratic and liberal political culture after 1945. What of such a discourse in Australia? Since the publication over the past quarter century of substantial research on nineteenth century frontier violence, and more recently, of the Bringing Them Home report on the forcible removal of Aboriginal children from their families, talk of genocide is in the air. Yet, many Australians object that it is not a term relevant to the history 5.