Jeffrey Herf
PHILLIP JENNINGER AND THE DANGERS OF
SPEAKING CLEARLY
George Orwell thought politicians should speak the truth
in simple, declarative sentences. He thought clear language would
help defeat totalitarianism. Politicians, however, know that speaking
the plain truth directly is politically risky. Therefore, they learn the
value of euphemism and unnecessary abstraction. Once in a while,
however, a politician comes along who, perhaps having read too
much Orwell the night before, falls into old patterns, speaks the
truth in simple declarative sentences - and wrecks his political ca–
reer. This happened in West Germany to the president of the Bun–
destag, and a leading member of the conservative Christian Demo–
cratic Party, Phillip
J
enninger.
The occasion was the fiftieth "anniversary" of
Kristallnacht,
what
the West Germans prefer to call
Pogromnacht,
pogrom night of
November 8, 1938. After Bitburg and the
Historikersstreit,
West Ger–
man conservatives were understandably edgy about making another
faux pas
in dealing with the Nazi past. In October, the president of
the Federal Republic, Richard von Weizsacker, whose speech of
May 8, 1985, served as a kind of moral damage control after Bit–
burg, addressed the annual meeting of West German historians. He
spoke on the subject of the recent
Historikersstreit,
the dispute ini–
tiated by Ernst Nolte's musings that Auschwitz was prefigured by
and was a mimicking reaction to the Gulag. Weizsacker would have
none of that. The Germans could not make others responsible for
national socialism. Germany under the Nazis "was led by criminals
and allowed itself to be led by them.
It
knows that this is true, es–
pecially where it would prefer not to know this .... " He criticized
comparisons of Auschwitz with other cases of ruthless extermina–
tion. "Auschwitz remains unique.
It
was perpetrated by Germans in
the name of Germany. This truth is immutable and will not be for–
gotten."! The overwhelming majority of the historians present were
1.
Richard von Weizsacker, "Speech by President Richard von Weizsacker at the
opening of the 37th Historians' Congress in Bamburg on 12 October 1988,"
Bundes–
priisidialamt Presse,
p.
2.
