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PARTISAN REVIEW
ones most likely to know the difference between
Erktaren
and
Vcrstt–
hen,
and to understand the importance of meaning in human life
and in politics, were the very deputies whose ears were too sensitive
to hear Jenninger's reconstruction of the German
mentatiti
of 1938.
After years of rhetoric of "coming to terms with the past," when faced
with a man who actually was doing so right before their eyes, they
turned on him with rage and scorn, aided and abetted by their out–
raged colleagues in the press and media. There should be no doubt
about this: Jenninger said nothing in his speech that is not to be
found in the great works of the German and German-Jewish histor–
ians of Nazism-Karl Bracher, Raul Hilberg, George Mosse, Fritz
Stern, among others. These facts and analyses, some over thirty or
more years old, were apparently too much for the left in the West
German Parliament to stomach. So they shot the messenger while
the conservative party ran for cover.
The resignation of Phillip Jenninger, not his speech, was a dis–
grace. He was quite right in assuming that after years of euphem–
ism, West Germans needed to speak to West Germans about the still
not well-understood nor well-digested historical facts. Jenninger has
revived West German memory not by talking-yet again-about
coming to terms with the past but by doing something much more
difficult and important, that is, by talking about what happened in
the past. Everyone has talked about reviving German memory. Jen–
ninger did it. He was not too subtle or too difficult to understand.
His mistake, as Orwell would have understood, was in being all too
clear and to the point.
