At the entrance, and on the outer walls of The President Hotel in Berlin, there are portraits of some of the world’s most prominent political leaders of the past. Among them are portraits of Winston Churchill, John F Kennedy, and South Africa’s former president, Nelson Mandela.

Below the portraits of Kennedy and Churchill, the years of their birth and death are listed. Below the portrait of Mandela, only the year of his birth is given. This is a not-so-glaring omission, unless, of course, you care about such details. There is, to be sure, any number of explanations for this omission. Maybe the hotel could just not afford to add the year of the president’s death on all the portraits on the walls, but that’s inconceivable. The hotel is part of a successful international chain which, surely, could afford to do so. Maybe they simply could not be arsed to update the details. Maybe Mandela is just not as important to them, as he has been to South Africans.

Around the corner from The President Hotel, on a bus stop shelter, there are photographs of the Nazi, Adolf Eichmann, with accompanying text describing the role he played in the slaughter of millions of European Jews, gays, Roma and other groups deemed to be ‘undesirable’ by the Nazis during the Second World War. The headline on the poster with Eichmann’s pictures reminds Germans of what was probably the darkest period in their history with the simple words ‘Never Forget’.

The photographs of Eichmann on the bus stop shelter are not defaced. With the accompanying texts they are presented as powerful reminders of a past that most people in this country would like to forget. They are kept, therefore, as mnemonic devices, to remind the Germans of their own past. A past that has given the world some of the greatest thinkers in history, and instances of the most organised and systematic cruelty the modern world has seen – most notably in the first half of the past century. The lesson from this, it seems to me, is that it is rather foolish to destroy and deny one’s own history, to torture your own memories and to destroy the iconography and other reminders of your past – never mind how painful the memories may be. However horrific the past may be, there is great danger in sanitising history, by showing only the things we agree with, or that make us feel good about ourselves. We have to learn from the mistakes of the past. We are, to be sure, the greatest link to our past. As humans we are, however, rather fallible, and given to tell only good stories about ourselves. We often need reminders, therefore, of events buried in our deepest history, however unsavoury it may be.

Walking past the iconography of German history, portraits of political leaders from around the world, of heroes and of villains, like Eichmann, it is difficult not to think about South Africa, and the horrors of xenophobic attacks on foreigners, or ‘undesirables’ and the wilful destruction of the icons of our past.

One part of the problem is tied up in notions of exceptionalism, privilege and entitlement. When one group of people, whether they are Zulu, Armenian, Croats, Muslim or Jewish, imagine themselves as unique and exceptional, or more persecuted than others, they may consider outsiders as ‘undesirable’, or ride a wave of entitlement that absolves them from responsibility.

South Africans, much like people in the United States, actually, have been seduced by a belief that we are exceptional people. While we cannot be accused of the awful, and destructive Ptolemaic parochialism that has driven the US to invade and occupy societies, carpet bomb countries and play a role in overthrowing democratically elected leaders around the world, we, South Africans, are often terribly surprised if people elsewhere in the world pay no attention to our misery. This is precisely because we have always considered ourselves to be a kind of benchmark for establishing a just society. We thought that the world would be a better place once we overcame our struggle. We seem now, to be rather nostalgic and angry, stuck in a collective neurosis, about our own morality, or lack thereof. Indeed, for as long as one cares to remember, we have always assumed that our suffering was the only suffering in the world.

For instance, when the former French president, Francois Mitterrand, visited South Africa in July 1994, and addressed lawmakers in a Parliamentary chamber, the political editor of one (South African) newspaper wrote that he (Mitterrand) had secured a place for himself in history with his visit. A most cursory read of history would, to be sure, demonstrate that Mitterrand will be remembered for much more than his visit to Cape Town…

We expected the world to stand with us against Apartheid, and now that Apartheid is gone, now that we have broken down that iniquitous system, and we seem quite unable to build anything just in its place, we seem to be faltering, spoiling for arguments and fights with paintings, statues, sculptures, and now, with foreigners.

Anyway, while the US always considered itself as a cause, not a country, we in South Africa cling to our own type of rather odious and expedient exceptionalism. No other society, it seems, has a greater claim to persecution, or a monopoly on righteousness as South Africans. We curl up, always, consumed by our self-image of exceptionalism, imagining that our pain and suffering is greater than that of others. We hold on to this pain and suffering like a child clinging to a blanket, and leverage all we can get from its use. We apply the tug of moral sentiments readily and easily, though not always honestly or with integrity. It is easier to blame our erstwhile oppressor – even those who passed along our shores many centuries ago – than to take responsibility for the society we’re creating.

We are disappointed, almost, when we are not persecuted, because persecution is a force that had given us meaning for so long. We had a moral high ground during our struggle, but squandered it early, and now are surprised when we’re held to a different standard. That was then, this is now. We’re in government now. We have to build something. We’re failing, so we create dissonant discourses, noises around us that detract from the work that needs to be done to fight poverty, inequality, patriarchy, expedience and exploitation. So we attack and destroy statues, sculptures and paintings that remind us of our past, and our present, actually…. Fighting for the removal of Rhodes’s statue – as well it should be, but not as a first order priority – seems a rather easy and expedient effort to remove all the mnemonic devices from our historical landscape. We want to be reminded of only the good things of our past. We’re trying to deny our own memories. We persecute our own memories.

The Germans expressly use images of their darkest past (like the photographs of Eichmann) as reminders against returning to cruelty and oppression. We want them removed. As we embark, then, on this new wave of displacement behaviour, tearing down statues and sculptures, and generally erasing icons of our own difficult past, it’s hard to see us stopping anytime soon, to deal with the issues that beset the country.

For now, it seems, we are nostalgic for the time when we had the moral high ground that we lost gradually, over the past two decades, and we seem to be unable to deal with it. Sometimes it seems like we have reached a moral plateau in South Africa. We used the moral impetus of the global anti-Apartheid sentiment, to get to where we are, but seem unable to take the country any further. The people who supported us during our struggle are, now, watching in silence as we let down the people of South Africa.

They may agree with the sentiments of our difficult past, but they have great difficulty accepting, or even understanding, how we could be so callous and cruel, so unwilling to learn from the rest of the world, and so mired in our own self-image of exceptionalism, certainty and absolution. They may agree that our colonial past was another brutal country, but the present seems no better – at least not for those who landed on the wrong colour in the roulette of our political economy.

Walking along the streets, across the squares and in the alleys of Berlin, I wondered what the place would have been like, if the Germans removed all the bad stories from their own past and present. I wondered what Germany would be like if they removed all ‘undesirables’ from society, presented only a sanitised image of themselves, and told only good stories. Then I remembered that they tried most of that not so long ago, and millions of people were killed.

We could learn a lot about how the Germans remember their past. We may want to start by considering ourselves as unexceptional, and imagine that we, South Africans, are not the only people who have suffered in the past. We may want to start with not treating our collective memory as an enemy, and accept that the violence we are spreading, today, may be no different from the violence that was meted out against us in the past. We must remember that. DM