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were the soil for Nazi propaganda, and that there was widespread
support for solving the "Jewish problem" by sending the Jews to
Madagascar.
It is true, that the National Socialists made great efforts to keep
the reality of the mass murder secret. But it is also true that
everyone knew about the Nuremberg laws, that everyone could
see fifty years ago what was happening in Germany, and the
deportations took place in public.
Jenninger quoted a previous West German member of parliament,
Adolf Arndt, who in 1968 said, "The essentials were known." But
Jenninger said, in the end, "The Jews stood alone. Their fate met
blindness and cold hearts."
We must, Jenninger continued, reject efforts to place the his–
torical truth into question, to play with numbers or deny facts. That
amounts to defending what cannot be defended. Such efforts are
"senseless" for "until the end of time, people will remember that
Auschwitz was part of our, of German history." No less senseless
was the effort to "finally put an end" to talk about the past.
It
is a past
that will not go away. Young Germans had a right to know the truth
of how it came about. The preoccupation with the crirpes of the Na–
tional Socialist past had grown with time. For Jenninger, confronta–
tion with the past was possible only in the "painful experience of the
truth. This self-liberation in the confrontation with horror is less tor–
turous than its repression":
Ladies and gentlemen, keeping memory fresh and alive, and ac–
cepting the past as part of our identity as Germans-only this
promises us of the older generation as well as the young libera–
tion from the burden of history.
Like Kohl, two days before, Jenninger concluded his remarks
with affirmation of an ethic of responsibility for the future, for
preservation of peace, for the right of the existence of the Jews in
secure borders, survival in the third world, tolerance at home, and
support for individual human dignity.
A speech delivered is not the same as a written text. News
reports said Jenninger's speaking style left something to be desired,
and that it was not clear to members of parliament that he was evok–
ing the mood of Germans in 1938, instead of advocating these views.
