TWO COMMENTS ON GERMANY
JEFFREY HERF
Old Arguments and N ew Problems
The history of the public memory of the Holocaust in post-1945 Germany
is also the history of efforts to drive it out of public life. These efforts have
failed in the past and chances are that, at least in the near future, the tradi–
tion of this memory will persist. Two recent episodes demonstrate these
patterns: the debate over the construction of a memorial to the murdered
Jews of Europe in Berlin; and a public dispute between the German nov–
elist Martin Walser and the President of the Central Council of Jews in
Germany, Ignatz Bubis, about the memory of the Holocaust. Both debates
have questioned the widespread conventional wisdom about the timing
and sources of Holocaust memory in German politics.
This wisdom often includes four contentions. First, that during the
first twenty postwar years in West Germany, the crimes of the Nazi past
were silenced and repressed. Second, that memory came belatedly when
this silence was broken in the 1960s following the Eichmann trial in
Jerusalem, the Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt-am-Main soon after, and, most
importantly, the confluence of generational change and new leftist
protest. Third is the assertion that an "anti-fascist" left was the primary
challenge to public amnesia and to the judicial delay of the conservative
organizers of the postwar economic and political restoration, from Konrad
Adenauer to Helmut Kohl. Fourth, to the extent that German memory of
the Holocaust existed, it did so as a result of pressure from Israel, the
American government and American Jewish organizations.
There is evidence to support aspects of these assertions. Each cap–
tures parts of the postwar story. Yet the picture they convey is
incomplete, and its transformation into conventional wisdom contributes
to ignorance of a fuller history of this memory. It thus leaves today's
adherents of continued public memory at a disadvantage. With the pub–
lication of my book
Divided Memory: The Naz i Past in the Two Germanys,
I offered a moderate revisionist history of the subject-by pushing the
origins of this memory back in time to the earliest postwar weeks and
months , and by drawing attention to the variety of
indigenous German
