German politics and society is regarded as dominated by memory of the two World Wars and, especially, the Holocaust committed by it. This echoes in much of the literature on German Humanitarian Interventions in general and particularly in the publications on Germany's most prominent intervention: its participation in NATO's campaign in the Kosovo crisis. In this case, it is argued that the political dis-course about the intervention was dominated by the position that Germany's history of perpetrating the Holocaust now posed a duty to the country to prevent or halt genocide elsewhere. Thus, its history demanded an intervention in Kosovo. This is regularly referenced with the famous statement by then-minister of foreign affairs Joseph Fischer's statement about the intervention in 1999: 'I did not only learn: never again war. I have learned as well: never again Auschwitz'.
Accordingly, the practice of Humanitarian Intervention in Germany is regarded as strongly influenced by historical representations of the country's past. In this paper, I scrutinize this relationship be-tween representations of Germany's past and its foreign policy vis-à-vis Kosovo, by analysing the Ger-man discourse on the decision to intervene. I show that the role of Germany's own past was negligible reason for the intervention. Central to the justification of the intervention were instead representations of recent regional events, particularly the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and the genocide in Srebrenica.
By contrasting these findings with the discourse that ensued the intervention, I show that Germany's history played a quite different role than argued in the literature. Instead of actively justifying and legitimising a proposed policy before its realization, the representation of Auschwitz as signifying a need to intervene was only used prominently in ex-post facto arguments about the intervention and its meaning for German foreign policy in the future. The representation of Auschwitz as posing a duty to intervene needs to be regarded as the result of the decision to intervention in 1999 and not as part of their cause.
The intervention in Kosovo should be understood as a transformative event for Germany's representation of its own past and not as a prime example of the political use of such memory. Following Cultural Studies, I argue that intervention constitutes a key event in changing Germany's construction of its own role vis-à-vis Humanitarian Intervention, both by being the first time German Humanitarian Intervention after the Second World War and by entirely reversing the countries representation of its history. The practice of Humanitarian Intervention, thus, not only impacts the country in which the intervention takes place but also transforms the intervening country's understanding of itself and its (historic) duties towards other countries and peoples.
