Students in Taiwan should focus on the period after German reunification to draw lessons on how to deal with transitional justice.
The News Lens
Date: 2018/03/22
By: Alexander Görlach
As Taiwan still struggles to deal with its despotic past and the cruel reign of the KMT,
Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons CC By SA 3.0
which lasted for several decades after their retreat from the mainland in 1949, students in Taiwan often ask me about transitional justice in Germany.
Germany too, so the students say, had to grapple with the aftermath of dictatorship. So how did the Germans deal with their former tormentors, “after 1945, after the Second World War?” This last clarification strikes me every time I hear it.
In the minds of these young people who so eagerly want to know about German history, their focus is the Nazi party’s rule, their ferocious tenure that was responsible for the death of tens of millions. When they think of “transitional justice,” they refer to the genocide of the Jews and the Nazis’ destruction of an entire continent. Some of them know of the Nuremberg Trials, in which the protagonists of the Shoa, otherwise known as the Holocaust, and those responsible for the war were sentenced. [FULL STORY]