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PARTISAN REVIEW
trust after what happened in Germany before and after Novem–
ber 8, 1938. [Your presence) is a precious gift, among the most
precious that was placed in our hands since 1945. It is also a
fragile, easily broken gift. I am aware that your trust is easily
shattered: by the presence of the eternal yesterday, and some–
times also from the thoughtlessness of the well-meaning.
The free community initiated forty years earlier in West Germany
was "our common home ." Kohl called for the participation of the
Jews in West Germany in the protection and further development of
this common home.
Kohl was interrupted by hecklers objecting to the presence of
the man of Bitburg in the Frankfurt synagogue. But the original re–
ception was warm, as one might expect in response to a speech by a
Catholic West German chancellor who placed the Jewish tradition
where it belongs-in the center of Western culture-and who
quoted Manes Sperber to an audience of Frankfurt Jews. It was a
kind speech, a speech of welcome and friendship which, though
made by a politician, was at least a nice gesture and at best a sign of
a genuine effort to reach out and mend fences after the wounds cre–
ated by his decision to go to Bitburg. There was no effort here to
push things under the rug, to forgive and forget, to put a best face on
the horrible truth. Kohl tried to do the almost impossible, that is, to
make the Jews listening feel more at home in West Germany by de–
scribing their presence as a "precious gift." Some say they would ex–
pect nothing less. In this century, one should be grateful for such ex–
pressions of elementary decency.
On Friday November 10, two days after .Kohl's speech in
Frankfurt, PhillipJenninger, the president of the West German Par–
liament, the Bundestag, delivered the most truthful, bluntest, most
direct, and to the point speech about the Nazi era ever given by a
major West German political leader since 1949, inside or outside the
Parliament. About a third of the way through the speech, fifty mem–
bers of Parliament from the Green Party and the Social Democratic
Party walked out of the chambers. A firestorm of protest and anger
exploded in the West German press and media. The following day,
J enninger, known as a long-standing friend of Israel and supporter
of better understanding between Germans and Jews, resigned his
position as president of the Bundestag. Jenninger's way of speaking
the truth brought his political career, at least temporarily, to a shat–
tering end.
