JEFFREY HERF
389
monumentalized for the first time by a memorial. These sections of his
speech are unworthy of a bearer of the Peace Prize."
For the past decade, Bubis's has been a clear voice opposing the
nationalist intellectuals, journalists, and politicians who hoped that unifi–
cation would mean the end of what they denounced as the humiliating
West German tradition of public memory of the Holocaust. With that in
mind, he commented that the tone and content of Walser's denunciation
of the Holocaust memorial was indicative of "intellectual nationalism"
and was "not free of undertones of anti-Semitism." He was particularly
irritated that so few members of Germany's establishment had taken
Walser on, or had cri ticized Bubis for doing so. It seemed as if Walser had
only "said what most thought." Bubis too wanted Germany to become a
normal country, but the demand for normality should mean that Jews
again could live there and be welcome. Normality, however, "cannot mean
the repression of memory, or the need to live with new anti-Semites and
a new racism as expressed by right-wing extremists." He concluded that
"we owe it to the victims of the Shoah not to forget them! Whoever for–
gets them kills them one more time." The
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
as
well as German television arranged subsequent meetings between Bubis
and Walser. In one of these conversations, Bubis retracted the phrase
"intellectual arsonist," but his efforts at reaching some common ground
were one-sided. Walser retracted nothing, played the part of the wounded
party, and added another argument: that the memory of the Holocaust
should be individual and private; that it was not appropriate for public
expression; and that public memory was not necessary and only fostered
ri tualized li p service.
Though Walser did express what many Germans feel-and who can be
surprised that some would have such sentiments?-he did not succeed in
convincing the broader political and intellectual establishment that public
Holocaust memory was driven by base motives, inspired by unnamed
groups hostile to Germany, and bereft of roots in Germany's own postwar
political traditions. Indeed, following the reaction to their own statements,
and observing the fault lines that formed around the Walser-Bubis con–
frontations, Schroder and Naumann gradually understood that opposition
to a memorial in Berlin would be interpreted as a victory for Walser and
all of those who wanted, yet again, to "finally" draw a line under that past.
They understood that opposition to the memorial would be interpreted as
a departure from some of the most honorable of the postwar traditions of
the Social Democratic Party.
The history of the memory of the Holocaust in Germany since 1945
is also the history of repeated efforts to banish that memory from public
life. As no public memory could be more awful, we can be certain that such
