Andrew Port Presents on German Responses to Foreign Genocides
On February 8, 2024, the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research and USC Max Kade Institute for Austrian-German-Swiss Studies hosted Andrew Port (Professor of History at Wayne State University), who delivered a lecture about his new book entitled “Never Again: Germans and Genocide After the Holocaust.” In the lecture, Professor Port discussed how Germany’s Nazi past shaped German responses to mass violence in Cambodia, Bosnia, and Rwanda. Professor Port tackled the role of memory and contemporary human rights discourses in genocide remembrance and discussed the limits of memory in confronting the past and present.
Professor Port opened his lecture with an anecdote about the German response to mass violence in Bosnia, particularly the use of the term “concentration camp” to describe Serbian atrocities and camps established to imprison Bosnian prisoners in Sarajevo. In contemporary violence, the culturally constructed imagery of concentration camps of the past emerged. Living in Germany at the time, Professor Port was interested to see how Germans would respond. In a post-Holocaust Germany, cultural references shaped the reflections of and responses to genocide.
He oriented his lecture around significant figures, their attitudes and responses, and their roles in shaping German memory culture. This list of people includes Rupert Neudeck, André Glucksmann, Bernard Kouchner, Helmut Schmidt, and Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer.
Rupert Neudeck (1939-2016) was typically amongst the first Germans to arrive in zones of armed conflict and organized dozens of humanitarian aid missions – including in Rwanda. Neudeck was influenced by Bernard Kouchner and André Glucksmann and their humanitarian efforts saving the so-called “boat people” in the South China Sea. He was also profoundly shaped by his experience watching the bombing and sinking of the Wilhelm Gustoff in 1945. Neudeck and his family were supposed to be on the ship, Port explained. This motivated Neudeck’s investment and interest in sea rescue because of this early encounter with the fear of drowning. Neudeck and his family were rescued on the Cap Anamur, which Neudeck later chartered to bring Vietnamese refugees to West Germany.
As a German philosopher, Neudeck believed that it was crucial to live alongside the people being rescued. Conversely, East German official documents included complaints by German doctors in Cambodia about the lack of air conditioning in the hotels provided for them. Germany responded to the Cambodian genocide by welcoming 14,000 refugees from Indochina. German responses were shaped by German histories of flight and expansion, Professor Port argued. Pacifists often came down on the side of humanitarian intervention. Of course, there were negative responses to refugees, Port explains. Helmut Schmidt, the chancellor of West Germany from 1974 to 1982, believed that it was not Germany’s role to intervene in Cambodia because the violence was believed to be typical to this region.
German responses were shaped by the mass migrations in the 1970s – which came to be defined as the decade of human rights by scholars due to the worldwide interest in human rights and humanitarianism. This decade saw the release of the TV miniseries Holocaust in Germany in 1979, which came alongside the dissemination of information about the Cambodian genocide, a provocative juxtaposition. Unique to German responses, Professor Port argued, was the role of German collective memory of the Holocaust and Germany’s culpability in this genocide. Foreign genocides present a less-stilted picture of German memory work.
Underlining German responses was the notion that these instances of mass violence were not caused by the Germans. Returning to the Serbian concentration camps in Bosnia, Professor Port examined the competing narratives typified in the slogans “Never Again War” and “Never Again Auschwitz” with questions circling around what the German response to this mass violence conflict should be. The nuances contained in both slogans touch on the varying burdens of history that shape Germany’s memory culture and demonstrate what the parameters of the possible were for Germany in their response.
In the lively and lengthy Q&A that followed his lecture, Professor Port touched on the role of Holocaust memory in the reparations for the German genocide of the Herero and Nama in German Southwest Africa and how the German colonial presence in Rwanda is rarely discussed. He also addressed the responsibility migrants have to their host countries’ histories and the ways in which migration and memory culture shape each other. Professor Port also addressed the different responses from East and West Germans and the conventional narratives about the so-called 68-ers.