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Introduction Chapter 1 German, European and Global Recollection Notes Introduction 1 Following Adorno, the term Auschwitz is not taken to refer to the actual exterm­ ination camp but rather as 'a shorthand for the caesura of Western culture as well as for the deep wound in the body of the Jewish people'. Cited in Efraim Sicher (ed.) (1998) Writing and Memory after Auschwitz, Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 14. Chapter 1 German, European and Global Recollection of the Nazi Past 1 See Maurice Halbwachs (1968) La memoire collective (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France). On collective memory, also see Jan Assmann (1999b) Das kulturelle Gediichtnis. Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identitiit in friihen Hochkulturen (Munchen: Verlag C.H. Beck); Paul Connerton (1989) How Societies Remember (Cambridge-New York-Melbourne: Cambridge University Press); David Sutton (1998) Memories cast in stone. The relevance of the past in everyday life (Oxford: Berg); Harald Welzer (2001) Das soziale Gediichtnis. Geschichte, Erinnerung, Tra­ dierung (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition); and James Fentress and Chris Wickham (1992) Social Memory. New Perspectives on the Past (Oxford UK-Cambridge USA: Blackwell). 2 The concept of 'willing executioners' refers to Daniel Goldhagen's controversial thesis that 'eliminationary anti-semitism' led Germans to support and perpetrate crimes against the Jews. See Daniel Jonah Goldhagen (1996) Hitler's Willing Executioners. Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (London: Little, Brown). 3 Karl Jaspers drew the distinction between criminal, political, moral and meta­ physical guilt. In his view, all Germans were politically guilty as members of a nation in whose name the atrocities of the Second World War had been com­ mitted, and criminally guilty if responsible in legal terms. Moral guilt was however a matter for the individual conscience, the individual being responsible for his own actions. Metaphysical guilt concerned non-action, that is, a failure to try and stop the atrocities of the Third Reich or to show solidarity with the victims. See Karl Jaspers (1974) Die Schuldfrage. Von der politischen Haftung Deutschlands [originally published in 1946] (Munchen: Piper Verlag), especially 42-7. 4 German citizenship was formerly based on blood according to the ius sanguinis principle. However, new citizenship laws introduced in 1999 mean that citizen­ ship relates instead to the ius soli (territorial) principle, whereby nationality can be granted according to where someone is born. German citizens thus do not necessarily have blood links to the Third Reich. Viola Georgi has conducted an interesting study into attitudes towards the Holocaust and the Third Reich amongst children of ethnic minorities in Germany. Some identify themselves with the Jews, feeling discriminated against on account of their skin colour or religion. Others, however, express a sense of association with German history. 234 Notes 235 See Viola B. Georgi (2003) Entliehene Erinnerung. Geschichtsbilder junger Migranten in Deutschland (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition). 5 The term Stunde Null denotes the idea that 1945 represented a new beginning for Germany. It encapsulates both the desire to forget the twelve years of National Socialism and the hope of a better future, although in practice it was impossible to achieve such a clean break with the past. 6 Adenauer also had to deal with the millions of ethnic Germans expelled from Central and Eastern Europe after the war. By 1950, some eight million expellees had settled in West Germany, comprising approximately 16.5 per cent of the West German population. Another four million had settled in East Germany. Although integration did happen, many expellees remained bitter about the loss of their homelands to what became eastern bloc countries. See Bill Niven (2002) Facing the Nazi Past. United Germany and the Legacy of the Third Reich (London: Routledge),96. 7 In Ancient Greece, the term ethnos defined a loose, rather federal form of social organisation made up of a collection of towns and villages, in contrast to the centralised polis. It is used here in the sense of a society linked together by certain characteristics and common origins, along the lines of the German Volk. 8 The term, usually attributed to JUrgen Habermas, was originally used by Dolt Sternberger. See Heinrich August Winkler (2001) 'Ende aller Sonderwege', Die Gegenwart der Vergangenheit: Spiegel Special, Nr.l, 56-62. 9 Adolf Eichmann was one of the architects of the Final Solution, that is, the Nazi plan to implement a systematic genocide of European Jewry. 10 There were three such debates - in 1965, 1969 and 1979 - on whether the IS-year statute of limitations on prosecution for National Socialist crimes should be lifted. In 1979 it was decided that the IS-year period would not apply, so it was not possible for war criminals to escape punishment with the passage of time. See Jeffrey Herf (1997) Divided Memory. The Nazi Past in the Two Germanys (Cambridge Massachusetts-London, England: Harvard University Press), 335-42. 11 The contested term Sonderweg refers to the idea that Germany took a different path to modernity than other European countries. Proponents of the viewpoint consider the Sonderweg to have led to the rise of Nazism. 12 http://www.historikerkommission.gv.at. 13 They are also not restricted to the Holocaust: Robert Hughes, for example, argues that contemporary American culture is being corroded by a 'culture of thera­ peutics' where confessing one's 'sins' is tantamount to redemption. See Robert Hughes (1993) The Culture of Complaint: the {raying of America (New York-Oxford: Oxford University Press). 14 Japan opened a Jewish Holocaust Museum in Fukuyama in 1995, dedicated to the memory of the children who died in the Holocaust, and in the same year an Anne Frank exhibition was shown at Hiroshima. There is a Holocaust Center in Cape Town, South Africa (http://www.ctholocaust.co.za/). 15 The point was made at a lecture by Peter Novick entitled 'Is the Holocaust an American Memory?', JFK Institut Berlin, 7 February 2001. 16 Ibid. 17 See http://www.usc.edu/schools/college/vhi/. 18 The Task Force's website is at: http://www.holocausttaskforce.org. 19 http://www.hmd.org.uk. 20 Ibid. 21 Anne Frank Trust, http://www.annefrank.org.uk. 236 Notes Chapter 2 Schroder, Walser and the Dialectic of Normality 1 Subsequent references to the speech are given in the text as page numbers in brackets. Walser has previously expressed disillusionment at being forced into a certain role as an intellectual. See, for example, the essay tUber freie und unfreie Rede' (1994), in Martin Walser (1997) Deutsche Sorgen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp), 468-86. 2 Both Klaus Harpprecht (writing in Die Zeit) and Salomon Korn (writing in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung) mention possible Jewish targets, including the Central Council of Jews in Germany, the World Jewish Congress and 'inter­ national Jewry', although Korn concedes that the ambiguity of the speech led to these conclusions. See Klaus Harpprecht, 'Wen meint Martin Walser?' in Frank Schirrmacher (ed.) (1999) Die Walser-Bubis Debatte. Eine Dokumentation (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp), 51-3; and Salomon Korn, 'Es ist Zeit. Die andere Seite des Walser-Bubis-Streits', in ibid, 304-7. The Schirrmacher volume contains a comprehensive selection of newspaper articles relating to the Walser debate. Subsequent references to articles reprinted in this publication will be given in the text as WBD, together with page numbers. 3 On these and other common far right terms, see Stefan Frohloff (ed.) (2001) Gesicht Zeigen! Handbuch fUr Zivilcourage (Frankfurt-New York: Campus Verlag), 146-50. 4 For a summary of far right reactions to the speech, see Dietzsch et al. (1999) Endlich ein normales Volk? Vom rechten Verstandnis der Friedenspreis-Rede Martin Walsers. Eine Dokumentation (Duisburg: DISS); and Joachim Rohloff (1999) Ich bin das Volk. Martin Walser, Auschwitz und die Berliner Republik (Hamburg: Konkret Literatur Verlag), 66-75. Rohloff provides a rather tenuous assessment of alleged far right thinking in Walser's work based on the essays in Walser's Deutsche Sorgen (1977). In some cases, Rohloff twists the context of what Walser has written to assert that his views are allied with those of the far right. For example, he sees Walser's crit­ icism of German division as evidence of nationalist thinking, his comment that one should perhaps not recognise the Federal Republic or the GDR as anti­ Americanism, and his wish to see Germany united as a way of drawing a line under the National Socialist past. See Rohloff, II-56, especially 16-19 and 26-7. 5 Salomon Korn also thought that Walser may have been referring to the com­ pensation debate. See WBD, 445. 6 Bubis was one of the property investors who secured permission from the Frankfurt authorities in the 1970s to destroy certain properties, but rented these out to students prior to demolition. This resulted in student protests and clashes with police. The events are dealt with in Rainer Werner Fassbinder's play Der Mull, die Stadt und der Tod (1981). 7 This view is held by the German Jewish journalist Henryk Broder. See the section on Leidkultur and the 'hysterical Republic' in Chapter 3. 8 Also see Herzog's speech on the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz in January 1999 in WBD, 596-605. 9 However, Schirrmacher was to withdraw his support for the author following the publication of Walser's allegedly anti-semitic novel Tod eines Kritikers in 2002. See Chapter Five. 10 On the allegedly far right content of the letters sent to Walser, see Wolf D. Hund, 'Der scheusslichste aller Verdachte. Martin Walser und der Antisemitismus', in Johannes Klotz and Gerd Wiegel (2001) Geistige Brandstiftung. Die neue Sprache der Berliner Republik (Berlin: Aufbau Taschenbuch Verlag), 183-282. Notes 237 Chapter 3 Approaches to the Dialectic of Normality 1 Following a Bundestag decision of 16 October 1998, the Bundeswehr took part in air strikes on the former Yugoslavia as part of the NATO-led 'Allied Force' mission from 24 March to 10 June 1999.
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