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PARTISAN ru;VIEW
their lines nor the name of the play.
First, some "rectification of names," that exercise recommended by
Confucius as the essential prerequisite to all sober reflection and good
conduct. What past are we talking about? We are talking, of course,
about the National Socialist regime of 1933-1945, and in particular that
regime's totalitarian character, its violent repression of those it consid–
ered its enemies, its lawlessness, its war of aggression, and above
all
its
policy of hunting down and murdering the Jews of Europe. We are not
talking about other German pasts, which is important to mention, be–
cause often talk in this area tends to drift beyond the confines of the
Third Reich. Let me stick, please, to Hitler and avoid the tedious ques–
tion of German original sin, of the innate tendencies of Germans toward
authoritarian government,
Blitzkrieg,
long conditional sentences, or
funny-shaped helmets.
Second, to what political uses, where, when, and by whom are we
referring? I will start by making the obvious and, I believe, significant
observation that "overcoming the past" as a political and social phe–
nomenon in post-1945 West Germany had what at first sight seems a cu–
rious history, an oddly inverted career. Consider: the war ended in 1945,
and it was in the spring of that year that local Germans were marched
through the camps of Belsen, Dachau, and elsewhere by British and
American soldiers to see the dead bodies, a legacy of the regime that had
just been destroyed.
In
1945-46, the Allies held the Nuremberg trials of
"main war criminals," which were broadcast to
all
German homes with
a radio. At least one German who later achieved some fame, the politi–
cal philosopher Jiirgen Habermas, has confessed that, as a sixteen-year–
old, he performed the act of overcoming the German past with his ear
to the radio listening to the trial. This, he tells us, was the critical expe–
rience that laid the basis for what, in the context of a later episode in
the drama, he names his "constitutional patriotism," his wish that Ger–
many might join the Western community of democratic nations.
From 1945 to 1948, the American occupiers carried out their policy
of de- Nazification which involved, among other things, asking every
adult citizen in the U.S. zone of occupation what he had done in the
war and classifying the respondents according to their answers, and to
other evidence if available, in one of five categories ranging from
"exonerated" to "heavily compromised." During those same years, both
the British and the American forces began to locate and retrieve from
Germans property that had been stolen or expropriated from victims of
Hitler's regime and to give this property back to the victims or their
heirs. This policy continued after West German independence and
