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PARTISAN REVIEW
Jeffrey Herf:
I agree.
Mitchell Ash:
To Professor Tamas: I am amazed at what you've said.
What about the new German nationalisms that seem potentially more
dangerous than those weird ideas you've had such a wonderful time sati–
rizing? I'm talking about the nationalism of the German establishment,
of the Kohl government, of the folks who want to put statues by Kathe
Kollwitz in the middle of Berlin and have people come and worship
them. The attitude is, "Everybody died in the Second World War." And
you have not talked about the rather fluid boundaries between the dis–
course of these extreme writers and that of the establishment.
Gaspar Tamas:
Yes, I think we must solidifY the fluid boundaries, oth–
erwise it is difficult to express everything. That's a shortcoming of all in–
tellectual discourse.
It
is true that this kind of intellectually undemanding
German nationalism exists, but it is pretty innocuous. In my correspon–
dence with Professor Kurzweil about my presentation for this conference,
she asked me to talk about "a view from Hungary." But there's no view
from Hungary; people there don't think about Germany at all. The only
foreign country they think about is the United States. It's the only one
that counts. My experience is of Eastern Europe. I would argue that the
establishment of German nationalism, compared to the heroes of the
West and the liberated East European countries, is a joke. For example:
The good boy of the new Eastern Europe is Bohemia, called in an un–
gainly manner the Czech Republic. The Czech court has just upheld the
constitutionality of the Benesh decrees, which declare the collective guilt
of ethnic Germans and Hungarians in the former Czechoslovakia and or–
der the confiscation of their goods, stripping them of citizenship and
civic and human rights. These decrees were upheld a week ago by the
Czech constitutional court. Ten days ago the same decrees were declared
valid by the Slovak government. These decrees are fascist in character. So
the fact that the German government is putting up monuments of ques–
tionable taste and even more questionable truth, it seems to me, is rela–
tively innocent. Reconciliation can be achieved only on the basis of
truth. These are lies, but they don't seem to me very dangerous.
Carnes Lord:
Thank you very much.
Karola Brede:
When Habermas talks of the nationalism of the German
mark, he doesn't mean that everyone should have money but that, sym–
bolically, German national identity embeds emotional distance. The term
