Translated material
The inviolable past?
Complex questions of history
What are the issues of historical topics related to “particularly sensitive” in other countries and how they do with them - The New Times recognized in the UK, Germany, Poland and France
There are no impossible questions 
12 years ago, the American comedian Robert de Val, after a tour of the British Islands, came to the conclusion that there are five main forbidden topics for their inhabitants: the attack on September 11, 2001, abuse of children, the Holocaust, the rape and death of the queen-material (she died shortly before). During the polemic, which unfolded on the Internet, it turned out: all the topics listed by de shaft are actually regularly affected by comedians in sketches, although some spectators sometimes protest. But still, a typical English reaction in such cases is to grumble: “Fu, how non -tactty!”, And then laugh from the heart, if it turned out funny, of course.
For example, writer David Aik earned a lot of money on his books, in which he argued that the British royal family belongs to the family of lizards who penetrated the Earth from space and seized power over the ground. No one thought to drag him for this nonsense. Even though one of the sources of his research, Aik announced the notorious “protocols of the Zion sages”.
And even more it is difficult to imagine a question in Britain that could not even be asked. Public irritation can cause only politically incorrect answers. Another thing is if you resort to the so -called Loaded Questions - questions in which an odious answer is already laid. The writer and film documentary Daniel Wulf gave an example of this question: “Whether Britain was worth fighting with Hitler at a time when he destroyed“ such disgusting types as Jews ”. Such a statement can destroy the British reputation, Wulf believes.
But after all, there was no question of anything like that in the “rain” survey - rather, on the contrary, it was dictated by compassion in relation to the victims of the blockade. If the survey implies the slogan of “the victims should not have been in vain,” then Wulf says, the British analogue could be considered the following question: “Was Britain to participate in two world wars in general.” And he set and sets himself quite often, and even a negative answer to him will not cross you from among the respectable members of the society.
The denial of the Holocaust remains very reproducible, although criminally and not punishable in the British Islands. Supporters and propagandists of denial, as a rule, turn out to be racists and anti -Semites. One of the most famous and relatively respectable of them is the Briton David Irving, who assured that the existence of gas chambers in Auschwitz was “fiction”, they say, the Poles made the layouts after the war. Everything became clear when the text of the lullaby was published, which Irving sang to the children: "I am an Aryan child, not a Jew and not a sectarian, I will not marry a monkey or a customary." Irving was punished by the court, but not for the preaching of socially unacceptable views, but for the fact that, on the contrary, he tried through the court to plug the throat to his ideological opponents, which convincingly smashed his theory. In any case, it was a civil lawsuit, not state persecution. Denial of the Holocaust, explains Daniel Wolf, is the denial of well -known and detailed facts. The question of the consequences of the possible retreat of the Soviet troops from Leningrad is historical and is devoted to a little investigated problem.
Was it necessary to hand over Berlin? 
It seems that already in the question itself is a provocation, if not a mockery. But not everything is so simple ...
Hitler, a man who destroyed tens of millions of people, by definition cannot be good. However, a survey conducted at one time by Leipzig University showed: 10% of the population of Germany wish him (Hitler) of the return. The same in Austria: on the study of Linzer Market-Institut, about 42% of the Austrians believe that "with Hitler, everything was bad." And in one of the polls (and countless they have been conducted over the past half a century), almost half of the respondents agreed with the opinion that many cities (Berlin, Königsberg, Bres, Budapest) had to be handed over to avoid destruction and hundreds of thousands of victims among the civilians (as by the way, the French did, preserving Paris).
The theme of the Nazi past and everything connected with it is very sensitive to the Germans. But at the same time, everything that does not fall into the framework of criminal prosecution (propaganda of Nazism, the denial of the Holocaust, racist statements, etc.) is quite acceptable for public interest.
Here is the last example.
At the end of 1945, the American administration transferred copyright to the Bavarian Ministry of Finance to the Nazi book Mein Kampf. The fact is that it was Munich who was the last official address of the registration of Adolf Hitler, so that all his confiscated property, including the rights to Mein Kampf, turned out to be the property of Bavaria. Since then, Hitler’s book has been published in many countries of the world, but not in Germany. Moreover, the German authorities legally persecuted all foreign publishers who reprinted the book without scientific comments on it. So, in 2004, one of the Czech publishers of Mein Kampf was sentenced to three years conditionally. In 2005, the Bavarian authorities were able to prohibit a similar publication in Polish. True, the storage of the house and the sale of "lifetime" publications, for example, through antique stores, was recognized by a legal act at Germany Sé La VI: back in 1979, the court was adopted.
However, by the end of 2015, the copyright of the land of Bavaria was printed to print the Nazi manifesto (according to German laws - 70 years after the death of the author). That is why in recent years a group of scientists from the Munich Institute of Modern History (IFZ) worked on the academic publication of this book. It was assumed that it would be released with serious scientific comments that would eliminate all myths and speculation. Moreover, several years ago, one of the British publishers, as part of a special project, began to produce extensive excerpts from Nazi newspapers with comments on historians in Germany. The Bavarian authorities then accused the publisher of Nazi propaganda, but the German court nevertheless decided that the publication was carried out exclusively for scientific purposes.
The link to academic research, it seems, and this time could not outweigh the prejudice of the Bavarian authorities against the publication of Mein Kampf. After long thoughts, the land government at the end of last year decided to abandon such an publication as a sign of respect for the memory of the victims of national socialism. “Numerous meetings with the victims of Nazism and their relatives convinced us that any form of reprinting this book would leave a deep psychological trauma in society,” said Ludwig Shpanle, Minister of Education and Culture of Bavaria. Representatives of the Central Union of Jews of Germany expressed support for the decision of the Bavarian authorities.
Meanwhile, the director of the Institute of IFZ Andreas Virching not only expressed bewilderment of historians in connection with the decision of the Bavaria land against Mein Kampf, but also announced his intention to publish an annotated edition of the book after the expiration of copyright. According to the scientist, Hitler’s various works have been published more than once in a large number in Germany as “significant from the point of view of the history of work”, and the Bible of the Nazi movement is the main source here.
It is curious that German lawyers also took the side of the scientists. For example, the Federal Association of Lawyers reminded the authorities of Bavaria that since 2015, the spread of Hitler labor can be carried out at all without any comments and it will be extremely difficult to prevent this. At the same time, according to lawyers, Hitler’s book would become “a good argument in explanatory work” equipped with explanations and comments on experts.
Like this. So, even the most sore topics can be discussed.
Warsaw uprising: a feat or a mistake? 
Not only in Russia or Eastern Europe - all over the world today there is a serious change in the system of moral coordinates: there is a shift towards individualistic values, humanism, to the understanding that the rights of an individual should be protected by society. And this, of course, is reflected in the perception of history. If earlier people thought of such concepts as “victory in the war”, “the benefit of the state”, now more and more historians suggest that the victims were sometimes unjustified. And this applies not only to the blockade of Leningrad. For example, one of the pages of Polish history, which is considered a great stage in the formation of the nation - the Warsaw Uprising of 1944.
On August 1, 1944, when the Red Army was already standing on the east coast of the Vistula, and German troops were extremely weakened, the Polish underground decides to raise an uprising in Warsaw in order to bring an independent Polish government (the so-called government in exile). It was a very naive and even utopian idea. Milly was directed against the Germans, politically - was due to fear that Poland would once again lose its independence, falling into submission to the USSR. The uprising was brutally crushed by the Germans, up to 200 thousand people died, the city was completely destroyed.
Even then, many said: the decision of the underground was not just a mistake, but the crime for which I had to pay an expensive price. (The question of the “behavior” of the command of the Red Army, which stood on the other side of the Vistula and did not interfere, we will leave the brackets, this is already said a lot, now we are talking about something else.) But over time, the uprising began to romance in Poland, and even say that it served as a moral basis for the Polish peaceful resistance, which ultimately led to the creation of the “solidarity” movement in 1980.
It is interesting, however, that in Polish historiography, both points of view have been present for 70 years. Moreover, in the Communist Polish People’s Republic, a view of the Warsaw uprising was used in order to discuss modern political problems in the ezopic language. Journalists, scientists asking for a question, it was worth giving 200 thousand lives for foggy goals, thereby raised a dispute regarding what to do with the communist regime at all - whether it is necessary to work with it or any collaboration of a priori is bad and we must prepare for a new uprising.
How the Holy Republic has turned into ordinary democracy 
But with age, the republic took an increasingly democratic form. After all, the very essence of democracy is the ability to accept criticism and be an object of revision. Since the 1970s, tangible shifts in this direction were noted. The first victim of Descalization was the myth of the French Revolution. In 1978, historian Francois Fuhre proclaims that the “French revolution has been completed” (“comprehension of the French revolution”), thereby causing a storm of emotions. Even after two centuries after this turning event in our history, it is difficult for us to begin to treat the revolution as a “desacralized” historical phenomenon, which can be analyzed with the cold objectivity of the historian. Francois Fuhre confronts both the Marxists and the ardent Republicans, defending a critical approach without any taboos. In those years, the ideas of dissidents of the countries of the socialist bloc serve as a model of Western intellectuals, striving to reconsider the dominant ideology of both gallists and Marxists.
At the same time, the American historian Robert Passton crushes ideas about French collaboration during the Second World War. In his opinion, the idea, according to which, Marshal Peten defended the French from Hitler is false. On the contrary, the Vishi regime on his own initiative went much further than the Reich's requirements. In the 1980s, the Hollist myth of immaculate France finally collapsed. A decisive act of this rethinking: in 1995, President Jacques Shirak recognizes the involvement of the French state in Jewish water in Paris in the summer of 1942. More and more idealized episodes of French history, requiring detailed analysis, pop up. In 1998, Prime Minister Lionel Jospen recalls the dysersitires who refuse to fight in 1914-18 and rehabilitates the soldiers “executed for clarity”. Other delicate facts are subjected to merciless revision: excesses of the persecution of collaborators after liberation; mass killings during the war in Algeria committed by the army and the police, including on the streets of Paris; The horrors of colonization.
Of course, such a revision of history sometimes causes the most negative reactions. Someone begins to lament about our desire for repentance. In 2005, one of the laws even mentions the “positive aspects” of the colonial system. Others do not understand why the law is pursuing overcome on the basis of racism, xenophobia or homophobia. Indeed, it is in the name of these laws that the dignity of all and each (more or less) is protected in a multinational and culturally diverse state, which is France.
In fact, for several decades, the sacred and inviolable republic has turned into democracy, where a discussion on any topic is possible if it does not hurt someone's dignity. This means that life in a society endowed with a common fate is possible even without sacred the glorious moments of history. On the contrary, the discussion nourishes democracy.