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been a Social Democratic politician in Weimar; after being imprisoned in
a Nazi concentration camp, he went into exile in Ankara, Turkey. The
Communist leadership in East Germany also came of political age before
1933 and drew on an intact political tradition. Walter Ulbricht (1893-
1973), a comrade and friend of Rosa Luxembourg's and the effective head
of the East German government, was born in 1893. Otto Grotewohl
(1894-1964), co-chair of the Socialist Unity Party, and Wilhelm Pieck
(1876-1960) were of that generation as well. So was Paul Merker (1894-
1969), the leading German Communist in 1920, whose unsuccessful
efforts to raise the Jewish question in East Berlin led to his political
downfall.
In 1947, Schumacher first supported restitution for the Jewish survivors
of the Holocaust in West Germany. In the early 1950s, the parliamentary
debates over restitution payments to Jewish survivors enabled Adenauer,
with SPD support, to pass legislation despite the divisions and lukewarm
support of his own party. When Germans then called for an end to discus–
sion of the Nazi past or compared their own suffering in the war to that of
the Jews, SPD leaders such as Carlo Schmid pointed out the unique nature
of the mass murder ofJews. In Berlin, Reuter spoke passionately about the
need to remember the Jews who fought and died in the Warsaw Ghetto. In
the Bundestag in the 1950s and 1960s, Adolf Arndt led the fight, usually
in the face of resistance from the conservative and "liberal" Free Demo–
cratic Party to extend the statute of
limi
tations on crimes of murder so that
the prosecution of those accused of mass murder could continue. Willy
Brandt was the first West German Chancellor to visit Israel. His bent knee
in Warsaw in 1970 signaled to the world that "the other Germany" was
now in power and willing to place the memory of past crimes at the cen–
ter of national attention. In the 19705, Helmut Schmidt spoke eloquently
in Auschwitz, and on the occasion of the fortieth anniversary of the anti–
Jewish pogrom of November 9, 1938.
Yet the dominant stance towards the memory of the Holocaust was
quite different. Though not a member of the anti-Nazi resistance,
Adenauer had opposed the Nazis and had been briefly imprisoned by the
Gestapo. His wife's early death after the war at the age of fifty-seven
stemmed from her two suicide attempts due to her despair over having
divulged information about his whereabouts in a Gestapo interrogation.
Adenauer believed that Nazism was the result of Prussian authoritarian–
ism, the weakness of individualism, the "materialist world view of
Marxism" which eroded religious faith and fostered nihilism, and an ide–
ology of racial superiority which filled the vacuum left by the erosion of
the dignity of human beings grounded in Christian natural right. For
Adenauer the antidote to these ills was democracy based on Christian
