“Honorable men”: Robert E. Lee, Erwin Rommel, and the Memory and Forgetting of Defeat and Guilt

In October 2017, White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly criticized those who wanted to bring down statues of Confederate General Robert E. Lee, defending him as “an honorable man.” Geraldo Rivera also took part in the heated debate about Confederate monuments: “#RobertELee is a lot like #ErwinRommel a glorious yet failed warrior, untarnished by the sins of his brothers.” With his tweet the Fox News commentator and former talk show host responded to a Twitter post by the economist and columnist Paul Krugman who had asked: “On statues of Robert E. Lee: what would we think if German towns put up statues of Erwin Rommel, also a good general serving a vile cause?” This article looks at the larger debate about the Lost Cause and the history and memory of slavery and the Civil War in a case study focusing on Robert E. Lee, trying to raise some larger questions of memory and forgetting through a comparison with Erwin Rommel. The article analyzes the special places Southern General Robert E. Lee and Feldmarschall Erwin Rommel have occupied in the memories of the American Civil War and World War II, respectively. It will argue that to find something honorable in all the evil of lost wars that were fought for the wrong ends can be regarded as an individual and collective way to deal with pain, guilt, and defeat. Part of this is honoring the soldiers and their sacrifices, focus on famous battles, and celebrate distinguished generals while ignoring and “forgetting” what the real goals of these wars had been. Today, both Rommel and Lee have been pushed off their pedestals, in the case of Lee statues even literally. But the fact that Lee and Rommel have been glorified as honorable, loyal, and patriotic military men also by those who were their opponents/enemies makes this comparison even more interesting, because it cannot be explained by a collective amnesia in order to suppress and forget guilt and crimes. In connection with remembering, the author argues, it is also important to take a closer look at the different functions of “forgetting” that have been described by Aleida Assmann and other scholars, especially at what Assmann calls “complicit” and “constructive” forms of forgetting. Both examples show that these types of forgetting protected perpetrators, helped shape a selective historical narrative, and were also important in new beginnings and reconstruction after a catastrophic defeat.