COMMENTARY: Germany is still a tormented land

c. 1998 Religion News Service (Rabbi Rudin is the national interreligious affairs director of the American Jewish Committee.) UNDATED _ The subject of my early December speaking tour in Berlin, Bonn, and Trier,”The Jewish Community in a Pluralistic America,”was of great interest to my German audiences. However, for me, the visit was a dramatic reminder […]

c. 1998 Religion News Service

(Rabbi Rudin is the national interreligious affairs director of the American Jewish Committee.)

UNDATED _ The subject of my early December speaking tour in Berlin, Bonn, and Trier,”The Jewish Community in a Pluralistic America,”was of great interest to my German audiences. However, for me, the visit was a dramatic reminder that although nearly 55 years have passed since the end of World War II, Germany remains a conflicted and tormented land as it seeks somehow to come to terms with the Holocaust.


During my visit, the always-lively German print and electronic media were filled with two highly public debates. The first focused on the size, location, shape, and purpose of a proposed national Holocaust memorial. While the United States and Israel both have superb memorial museums commemorating the murder of 6 million Jews in Europe between 1933 and 1945, surprisingly none has been established in Germany.

Various political and economic explanations have been offered to explain this startling fact, including the long and bitter post-war division of Germany, its strategic front-line position in the Cold War, and the rebuilding of a shattered nation into an economically strong and democratic society.

Now a unified Germany, a full member of the European Union, is engaged in a public debate about the appropriate way to permanently remember the Holocaust, even though its brutality can never be adequately expressed in any language or monument. Berlin, the new capital of the Federal Republic, has been selected as the site for the memorial, and in an ironic historical stroke, plans call for a large memorial to be erected almost on the exact site of Hitler’s Chancellery building and underground bunker.

But the proposed memorial’s large size has stirred fears that it may become a target of neo-Nazi desecration, including ugly swastika graffiti.

These fears increased when the grave of a prominent German Jewish leader was recently destroyed by vandals. But as one Roman Catholic priest put it,”What could be more important than effectively guarding a Holocaust monument in the center of Berlin, our new capital city? You can be sure the authorities would be most diligent in this effort.” The new German government, led by Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, seeks a national parliamentary debate in 1999 on the proposed memorial. Such a discussion is certain to provoke intense emotions and will reveal much about the body politic of today’s Germany.

The second debate currently underway is between a well-respected author and intellectual, Martin Walser, and Ignatz Bubis, the president of the German Jewish community. Walser was recently awarded a literary prize and he used that occasion to complain that Auschwitz, the monstrous Nazi death camp, and by inference, the Holocaust, is constantly being employed as a psychological and political”cudgel”against the new democratic Germany.

Bubis immediately termed Walser’s language a form of”moral arson”that could light _ or relight _ the fires of a”latent anti-Semitism”in Germany.

During my visit, the Walser-Bubis debate was frequently on the front pages of German papers, the focus of newscasts, and the subject of many TV and radio talk shows. Indeed, Eugene DuBow, the director of the newly opened American Jewish Committee office in Berlin, told me that almost every day the German media carries a story about the Holocaust.


Sometimes it is a recently discovered diary of a Jewish victim; other days it may be an article about the legal status of the objects of art owned by Jews before the war that were looted by the Nazis, and on other days press reports may center on class-action suits that are being proposed in the United States against such companies as Volkswagen and Mercedes-Benz on behalf of the families of the slave laborers of Nazi Germany.

Several German friends also told me that Walser reflects the thinking of many”serious people of good will”in Germany who desperately seek a”normal”existence both individually and as a respected member of the international community. Friends in the three cities in which I spoke reminded me that the 54-year-old Schroeder, a 1968 radical, had no personal involvement in World War II.

But at my Bonn lecture, a professor of Catholic theology who was 10 years old when the victorious American troops entered his home city, supports Bubis’ position believing the German Jewish leader”was correct”to criticize Walser.”The Holocaust is still much too close to us in time and in emotion for Germans to put it aside,”he said.”A half-century is just the beginning of dealing with it. It is not the end of the matter.”

END RUDIN

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