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PARTISAN REVIEW
tradition of political recollection that would eventually contribute to
broader public discussion and action. He could have done much more.
Others in his position would have done, and later did do, much less.
Heuss delivered his most important speech about the Nazi past at
memorial ceremonies held at the former concentration camp of Bergen–
Belsen on November 29 and 30, 1952. Officials of the Federal Republic
and representatives of governments and Jewish organizations from Britain,
the United States, Denmark, Belgium, the N etherlands, Switzerland,
Sweden, France, Yugoslavia, and Israel gathered to dedicate a memorial to
those who died there. The ceremonies were a Western event which
reflected the realities of the Cold War and divided memory. None of the
Communist states were represented.
Nahum Goldmann spoke on behalf of the World Jewish Congress. He
described the destruction of European Jewry, recalling "the millions who
found their tragic end in Auschwitz, Treblinka, Dachau; and in Warsaw,
Vilna, Bialistock, and in countless other places." By drawing attention to
the Eastern geography of the Holocaust, he implicitly pointed out that the
geography of memory did not coincide with the fault lines of the Cold
War in the West. The Holocaust had largely taken place in a part of Europe
that was "behind the Iron Curtain." Goldmann's recounting inevitably
called to mind German aggression on the Eastern Front during World War
II,
which eventually led to the presence of the Red Army in the center of
Europe in May 1945. This was an uncomfortable and inconvenient view
of causality when Western memory ofWorld War II often gave short shrift
to the attack on "Jewish Bolshevism" on the Eastern front. To be sure,
there were efforts to separate the memory of the Holocaus t from that of
the attack on the Soviet Union, but on the whole it did not fit well into
Cold War discourse.
Heuss's speech in Bergen-Belsen, "No one will lift this shame from
us," was the strongest statement at the time of West German reflection on
the mass murder.
It
was broadcast on radio and reported in the West
German press, especially the liberal press. Heuss took issue with those who
sought to avoid the crimes of the Nazi past by pointing to the alleged mis–
deeds of others. "Violence and injustice are not things for which one should
or may resort to reciprocal compensation....Every people has in reserve its
poets of revenge or, when they get tired, its calculating publicists." He
evoked a patriotism self-confident enough to face that evil past honestly
rather than seeking to balance it by pointing to Communist misdeeds. He
placed the language of patriotism, courage, and honor in the service of
memory rather than in that of avoidance and resentment. Heuss 's moral
imperative was not a burden imposed by the occupiers but a legacy that
emerged from previously defeated democratic, liberal, and cosmopolitan
