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PARTISAN REVIEW
last concern takes on special importance in light of the startling growth
in the desecration of Jewish cemeteries in Germany in recent years.
The site has now been approved by the German parliament, and is
about to enter the critical stages of moving from planning to construc–
tion. When Professor Jackel and Mrs. Leah Rosch, two advocates of the
site in Berlin, visited Israel, they asked to meet with Israeli journalists–
apparently hoping for unambiguous support. But their request arouses
a faint smile: it testifies to a complete misunderstanding of the public
debate in Israel, and in particular in the Israeli media. The hosts-the
Friedrich Ebert Foundation in Israel-found out that the number of
lsraeli journalists interested in the subject can be counted on the fingers
of one hand. A commemorative site in Berlin, however important to the
German public, may perhaps derive its inspiration from Yad Vashem,
but will always remain foreign to lsraelis.
Yad Vashem is not only a place of commemoration: it also comprises
an archive, a publishing house, and an international center for Holo–
caust studies. And most Israelis are familiar with its museum-visiting
it is part of the Israeli "rite of passage." All young Israelis have proba–
bly visited the museum at least once-while at high school or as part of
their army service. When they left the museum, they certainly remem–
bered with utmost clarity the identity of the victims, as well as the iden–
tity of the murderers, the Germans. But whether these murderers were
the 55, members of the Einsatzgruppen, units of other nationalities who
were called upon to collaborate with the Nazis, or the Wehrmacht is of
no special significance to the Israeli observer who is not a historian. He
or she would probably be amazed to discover their identity and to real–
ize how important these questions are to the German public.
The traveling exhibition documenting the crimes of the Wehrmacht,
which was initiated by the Hamburg Institut fur 50zialforschung in
1995,
caused a real commotion in Germany. The active involvement of
Wehrmacht soldiers in the murder of civilians, a phenomenon known in
studies of Nazism for at least fifteen years, took on a completely differ–
ent meaning in photographic documentation. The pictures confronted
the general German public with the inescapable recognition of the fact
that the Wehrmacht was also involved in the Nazi murders, and cannot
be considered a "clean" domain-an army like any other army, commit–
ted to a military ethic, and fighting other armies, not a civilian popula–
tion. The exhibition was tantamount to slaughtering the German sacred
cow. And, when the exhibition was about to travel to New York, Bog–
dan Musial, a historian, argued convincingly in an academic article that
eleven of the exhibition's total of 1,433 photographs did not document