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DVU (a far-right-wing, anti-foreign party) in Sachsen-Anhalt led Schroder
and Naumann to "involuntarily extend a hand to the right-wing populists."
Whatever their motives, they now "sat in the same boat wi th the dull advo–
cates of putting the past behind. For the brown-black milieu, this project
[the memorial] had always been a thorn." In
Der Tagesspiegel
of August 11,
1998, Harald Mastenstein pointed out that the appeal for a line drawn under
the past, which had been the distinctive feature of the postwar German
right, was now expressed "in more elegant terms" by SPD Minister of
Culture Naumann when he spoke out against the construction of the
memorial. "In the dawn of the Berlin Republic," wrote Mastenstein , "a
new, surprising constellation of fronts has emerged. The majority of the
Christian Democratic Union, the Party of Democratic Socialism [the suc–
cessor to the Socialist Unity Party in East Germany], and the Greens are in
favor of the Berlin memorial, while the right-wing conservative artists of
repression of the past and the power hungry left-wing trendies of the SPD
are against it." In mid-August, in
Die Zeit,
I wondered what had happened
to the SPD's traditions regarding the need to face the Nazi past.
Perhaps just as surprising, certainly for those whose familiarity with
Kohl's views on memory stop with Bitburg and the historians ' dispute of
the 1980s, was the Chancellor's emphatic support for building the memo–
rial. During the fall election campaign, Kohl was asked by the
Frankfurter
Allgemeine Zeitung
on September 17, 1998 whether he was certain that
Germany needed the proposed Berlin memorial. He responded that the
issue concerned "the core of our self-understanding as a nation." There
was, he continued, broad agreement in parliament and in the public "that
Germany...bears a responsibility for seeing that the memory of the
Holocaust be kept alive... [and that] in addition to the sites of the Nazi
crimes themselves and to the centers documenting these crimes, a central
place of public reflection [should] be created." To further confound con–
ventional wisdom, the cultural page of
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
repeatedly urged that the Eisenman memorial be built. Eduard Beaucamp
complained in the
FAZ
of August 12, 1998 about the double standards
prevailing in German intellectual and political life. "Imagine," he wrote,
"that a designated conservative cultural official announced in the midst of
an election: 'We are going to rebuild the old Hohenzollern castle, and will
stop work on a Holocaust memorial that has been promised and discussed
for ten years.' The scream about the emergence of a restoration, the awful
repression [of the past], the encouragement of dangerous traditions would
be indescribable.... Is it not worthy of a great nation," Beaucamp contin–
ued, "to immortalize... the deepest abyss of its history?"
Fortunately for supporters of the Berlin memorial, the chair of the
commission examining the proposals,James Young, was able to convey the
