NORMAN MANEA
The Truth as Commodity:
Remarks on the Walser Debate
Of
course, the Holocaust is not exclusively a German problem. While it
was a crime perpetuated by the National Socialists, it has a significance that
goes beyond geographical boundaries and historical fact. The question of
German guilt, especially now, after unification, remains a moral obligation
for this country, whose current and future generations have a right to learn
about what happened in the past, but also to be assured that they them–
selves bear no direct responsibility for it.
Every four or five years, I offer a seminar at Bard College entitled
"Literature and the Holocaust." I don't teach the course more frequently
because I wish to avoid developing rhetorical routines I could fall back on
in discussing this difficult topic. The first thing I tell my students is that
the Holocaust is not only a Jewish tragedy, though it was above all a
tragedy for the Jews. The Holocaust was a tragedy for the Germans as well,
and, indeed, for all mankind.
I can understand Martin Walser's irritation. No doubt it was provoked
above all by the way in which the memory of this tragedy has repeatedly
been commercialized, trivialized, and even instrumentalized to various
ends (including political ones). I have to say that for a Jew-above all for
one who has his own memories of that horror-it is not easy to come to
terms with the sensationalist notoriety that surrounds this terrible wound
and shame. I see this matter rather differently than do the activists of many
Jewish and non-Jewish organizations who, with the melodramatic pathos
of the "good cause," invoke the catastrophe again and again, to the point
of exhaustion, until all that remains is tedium.
When I arrived in the United States, I was surprised to see what a huge
quantity of literature had been written about the Holocaust. Bit by bit, a
full-f1edged industry had come into being so as to keep the memory alive.
Enough survivors were ready to participate in bizarre, theatrically earnest
exorcisms which took the form of ostensibly spontaneous discussion ses–
sions before all sorts of audiences. But I also found people who took a
critical, even sarcastic approach to this mechanism of supply and demand.
On my own, I came to combine tolerance and skepticism in my atti–
tude towards the freedom of expression enjoyed by the masses in this
