UC Berkeley

How did the Japanese and German politicians approach their nations’ problematic pasts? Whatroles did the Japan Socialist Party (JSP) and the Social Democratic Party (SDP) of Germany play in the memory and reconciliation politics of their countries? Why did their approaches differ? This dissertation provides answers to these questions. In the first chapter, I investigate how the JSP approached the reparations agreements with Southeast Asia in the 1950s. By studying Diet debates and controversies surrounding the negotiations of these treaties, I show that the Japanese Socialists exhibited much less contrition and understanding of Asian grievances than expected. In the second chapter, by contrast, I demonstrate the critical role of the German SPD in bringing about the Luxembourg Treaty – a reparations agreement between West Germany and Israel – and facilitating reconciliation with the Jewish nation. In the final chapter I analyze how the SPD approached the problem of Nazi criminals in the postwar era. Through the analysis of court trials and parliamentary debates, I show that the SPD pushed consistently for greater acceptance of the nation’s past mistakes and the need for their atonement – including judicial prosecution of the guilty. All chapters of this dissertation demonstrate that the German and Japanese Socialists played an important role in the memory making of their nations. Despite similar ideological outlooks and the positions they occupied in their domestic political systems, however, their approaches to WWII legacies differed. I argue that the reason for this lies in the different carryovers that the leftist movements brought with them from the pre-1945 era. Through the study of biographies of individual politicians, I show that the SPD’s prewar history of resistance, imprisonment, and exile significantly impacted its thinking about memory and reconciliation politics in the postwar period. By the same token, the lack thereof in the Japanese Socialist camp had serious implications for its behavior after the war. Overall, this dissertation illustrates that if we want to understand the behavior of political elites particularly in the field of public memory making, we need to know who these elites were, what they did in their past and what beliefs they held.