JEFFREY HERF
383
the truth about the past, to assume responsibility for its consequences, and
to draw lessons from it.
In the summer and fall of 1998 the conventional political fault lines
were confounded as debate over the Berlin Memorial became intertwined
with the upcoming national elections. Social Democratic candidate and
soon-to-be Chancellor Gerhard Schroder, in a striking departure from his
predecessors (Schumacher, Brandt, and Schmidt), took what previously
had been primarily a conservative line: Germany and Germans should
focus on the present and future and put the burdens of the past behind.
The confusion was deepened further by Michael Naumann, Schroder's
appointee as Minister of Culture, and a former editor at
Der Spiegel,
Rowohlt Verlag,
and Henry Holt Books in New York. In some of his first
public comments, Naumann appeared to reject emphatically both the gen–
eral idea of such a memorial as well as its particular form: it was, he argued,
superfluous. The "authentic" sites of memory were the already existing
memorials in former Nazi concentration camps. A new one would only
detract from those already existing, and from museums in Berlin such as
the Foundation on the Topography of Terror, the Museum of the Wannsee
Conference, and the new Jewish Museum. He said that the monumental–
ism of the Eisenman-Serra design was reminiscent of Albert Speer's
architecture. Naumann's opposition and Schroder's reservations raised old
suspicions about some of the leftist generation of 1968, from its Marxist
anti-fascism to its hostility to Israel. Was this generation of German left–
of-center politicians lacking the emotional link to Jewish issues? If so,
perhaps it was not so surprising that Germany's first government of
1968ers should express doubts about the wisdom of building a memorial
to the murdered Jews of Europe.
At the end of August, following the furor over Naumann's pronounce–
ments, Schroder wondered in
Die IMlche
if it was "right and at all possible
to present abstractly the unimaginable horror committed by the Germans."
It is hard to understand what in 1998 was " unimaginable" about what the
Nazis did to the Jews. No less surprising and disappointing was the public
criticism of the memorial by some German liberals. On February 4, 1998,
eighteen prominent intellectuals and scholars with impeccable liberal cre–
dentials, including Gunter Grass and Marion Grafin Donhoff, expressed
concerns about a memorial devoted only to the murdered Jews without
mentioning other victims of Nazi racism. They concluded that "an aban–
donment due to insight would do honor to all participants."
Younger liberal journalists and commentators criticized these views.
Malte Lenung, writing in the lively Berlin daily
DerTagespiegel
on July 27,
1998 attacked the "right-wing populism of the left-wing intellectuals. .. [as
having] formed an alliance with the mob." The electoral success of the
