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PARTISAN REVIEW
President in attendance, Bubis responded to Walser in a talk entitled "He
who speaks about disgrace." The full text was printed in the
Feuilliton
sec–
tion of the
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.
He did not mince words: "Martin
Walser's is the most recent effort to repress history and to extinguish mem–
ory." He "spoke four times about disgrace but not a single time about
crime." Walser had said that he could not believe that German ci tizens in
Rostock would have encouraged those who violently attacked emigrants.
Bubis responded, "What Walser does not believe are facts." In his Frankfurt
speech, Walser had spoken out in favor of "a culture of looking away and
avoidance, and of dismissal and putting things out of mind. This was com–
mon under National Socialism. Today we must not permit ourselves to
accommodate it again....Whoever is not ready to face this part of histo–
ry but instead opts for thinking it away or forgetting it must be made to
understand that history can repeat itself."
Bubis's indignation reached a peak when he described Walser's com–
ments on the instrumentalization of Auschwitz as nothing less than
"intellectual arson":
These are assertions which usually come from party leaders of the
extreme right. Our society has become accustomed to hearing them from
the right-wing extreme. However, when someone who belongs to the
intellectual elite of the republic makes a similar claim, it has a wholly dif–
ferent significance. I know no one who refers to Frey or Deckert [both
leaders of right wing parties which lid surprisingly well
in
the spring of
1998 in regional and local elections in the former East Germany]. But
certainly, the right-wing extremists will now refer to Walser.
The effect, if not intent, of Walser's speech was to make the expression of
such sentiments acceptable to the intellectual and literary elite. Bubis
chose the occasion of November 9 to try to prevent this from happening.
He said that Walser was in effect asking that, in order not to disturb his
peace of mind, we "refrain from showing films about the disgrace....Since
I assume that Walser assumes, as do 1, that one should not speak of 'col–
lective guilt,' I do not understand why Walser feels himself accused when
he watches these films." The memory of Auschwitz was necessary for
learning moral lessons but had not been, and was not, "a club." While a
variety of opinions about the proposed Holocaust memorial in Berlin
were plausible, including outright opposition, Walser had gone too far in
labeling the Eisenman design "a nightmare," or calling it a "monumental–
ization of disgrace": "The shame was monumental and will not be
