390
PARTISAN REVIEW
efforts will continue. From its earliest days, the postwar tradition of
Holocaust memory was contested, controversial, and in some quarters
deeply unpopular and despised. Yet every time German politicians have
sought to evade this legacy, from Bitburg to the less dramatic musings of
the 1968ers on the path to power in the summer and fall of 1998, they have
returned to the burdensome yet impressive legacy established by their West
German predecessors and by dissident Communists whose political voices
were silenced in the purges of the early 1950s. It would have been a sad
irony for a Social Democratic Chancellor to break a tradition whose ori–
gins lie in the very heart of the postwar SPD.
In the spring of 1999, Schroder and Naumann expressed support for
construction of the memorial. The Bundestag will vote on the project and
it seems that prospects for approval are good. In the extensive debates over
the memorial in Berlin, as far as I know, one point was not made. Several
participants did argue in favor of including non-Jewish victims of Nazi
racism. I would add that such inclusiveness would be a fitting memorial to
the traditions of the German-Jewry which the Nazis destroyed , especially
the creative moral tension between universal ethics and memory and the
tradition of particular communities. As Nahum Goldmann's 1952 speech
made apparent, this religious and cultural tradition was one of the great
contributions of the German Jews. I hope that a way might be found to
leave its imprint on the memorial devoted to its advocates.
Postscript: April 1999
Germany may decide to build a memorial to the murdered Jews of Europe
in the same year in which it, for the first time, has engaged in military
action in Europe through its participation in the NATO air campaign
against Serbia. But a historic turning point has crystallized in German pol–
itics. Politicians such as Schroder and Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer,
who came of political age as leftists in opposition to American imperial–
ism and who denounced NATO's nuclear deployment plans in the 1980s,
have strongly supported NATO's campaign. In 1983, in debates in the
Bundestag, Fischer compared Western nuclear strategy to the logic of
extermination that ended in Auschwitz. In 1999, Social Democrats and
parts of the Green Party have drawn the Churchillian lessons from the
memory of Auschwitz which previously only German liberals and moder–
ate conservatives drew. Whereas the West German left once argued that
because of Auschwitz, Germany should not engage in military action, the
generation of 1968 in power has argued that because of Auschwitz,
