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political sources of its emergence. For this is also the history of an often
very unpopular and irritating yet distinctively German tradition of
remembering the crimes of the Nazi era. While German nationalists have
long sought to present this tradition as a humiliating ri tual imposed by for–
eigners, named and unnamed, and the generation of the 1960s has been
reluctant to acknowledge voices amidst the silence of the 1950s, both
dimensions are important to recall-especially in light of last year's con–
troversies.
Observers of the German scene have often asked why Germans forgot,
repressed, or avoided public discussion of the Holocaust. Given extensive
support for Nazism, a party membership of seven million in 1945, twelve
million soldiers (many of whom fought on the Eastern front), the absence
of a successful internal revolt, bitter resistance to the Allies until the end
of the war, and about one hundred thousand persons with some direct con–
nection to the Holocaust (the Allies indicted ninety thousand Germans for
war crimes and crimes against humanity in the immediate postwar months
and years), it is not hard to understand why after 1945 these people and
their friends and relatives would keep their heads down and their mouths
shut, assert that they "forgot" their past activities, and give their votes to
politicians who promised to leave the past behind.
Thus the silence is easy to explain. The more difficult questions are the
following: given all of this, why was there any public m.emory of the
Holocaust at all? Why, against many expectations of the early postwar years,
did this memory emerge-most strongly in the restorationist Federal
Republic? And why was it definitively repressed in anti-fascist East
Germany? I believe that public discussion and political memory did not
begin in the 1960s wi th the new left and Brandt's
Ostpolitik
but during the
pervasive silence and avoidance in the late 1940s and early 1950s. It rested
on "multiple restorations" of previously defeated non- and anti-Nazi polit–
ical traditions. Thanks to the Allied victory and the postwar occupation,
leaders of these traditions were able to return to poli tical life. The inaugu–
ration of a distinctively West German tradition of public meITlOry was above
all due to efforts by the leading Social Democrats-Kurt Schumacher, the
leader of the Social Democratic Party after 1945; Ernst Reuter, the Mayor
ofWest Berlin; and the parliamentary leader Carlo Schmid-and by the lib–
eral Theodor Heuss, who held the symbolically significant office of Federal
President. In East Germany, a minority of Communists, especially those
returning from exile in Mexico City, attempted to incorporate the memo–
ry of the murder of the Jews into East German anti-fascist public discourse,
conU11emorative ceremonies, and policy. But as a result of the anti-cos–
mopolitan campaign in the Soviet bloc, they had been purged, imprisoned,
or driven into exile by the winter of 1952-1953.
