Remembering the Holocaust in Germany, 1945-2000: German Strategies and Jewish Responses (review)

Comprising ten essays varying in length, focus, and quality, this volume compares and contrasts the evolution of German and Jewish memory of the Holocaust. Like many edited collections, Remembering the Holocaust in Germany originated in an academic conference—in this case, at Bar-Ilan University in December 1999. Many of the essays will seem familiar to informed readers, as the arguments have appeared in other—usually lengthier—studies by the same contributors. This is not a drawback for those unfamiliar with the latter works. For the most part, indeed, the volume offers a nice survey of some important trends pertaining to contemporary memory of the Nazi era.

Remembering the Holocaust in Germany is divided in two sections, the first of which discusses German "strategies" of coming to terms with the past. Jeffrey Herf's "The Holocaust and the Competition of Memories in Germany, 1945-99" draws upon the findings of his 1996 volume, Divided Memory, to contrast East and West German strategies of confronting the Holocaust. In West Germany considerable attention was paid to the Nazi past, but it centered largely on the Germans' own sense of victimization. By focusing on their military and civilian casualties, most Germans exhibited little concern with the fate of the Jews. For reasons of political expediency, Konrad Adenauer promoted this "amnesia" as a method of integrating perpetrators into the postwar democracy and thereby ensuring its survival.

Herf asks the provocative question whether democratization could have been advanced via a more forthright confrontation with the Nazi past, suggesting that SPD leader Kurt Schumacher may well have been up to the task had he been elected chancellor in 1949 instead of Adenauer. He does not explore further what problems might have ensued for the fledgling democracy had this, in fact, occurred and thus does not directly challenge Hermann Lübbe's thesis that postwar German democratization was predicated necessarily upon silence about the past. Herf shows how in East Germany, the communist regime's ideologically colored memory of the Nazi era (specifically, its mistrust of what it viewed as the overly fascist-minded German population) led it to limit popular political participation. In short, he argues, memory should hardly be viewed as an unambiguous good.

Similar themes are explored in Gilad Margalit's much shorter essay, "Divided Memory? Expressions of a United German Memory." Among Germans in both the FRG and GDR, Margalit finds an early postwar tendency to emphasize their own victimization during the Nazi era by likening their fate to that of the Jews. Even as progressive a figure as president Theodor Heuss compared German Luftkriegsopfer (civilian victims of Allied air raids) to Jewish Holocaust victims, while the East German regime portrayed the Allied bombing of Dresden as a war crime comparable to Auschwitz. In both cases, the governments relativized the Holocaust's singularity in the process of underscoring German suffering. The tendency to ignore or otherwise marginalize the significance of the Holocaust is also diagnosed by Y. Michal Bodemann in his essay "The Uncanny Clatter: The Holocaust in Germany before Its Mass Communication." This piece, which lacks the same analytical thrust as Margalit's and Herf's contributions, quickly surveys a range of texts from the fields of drama, history, sociology, and literature to explore the author's claim that early postwar consciousness of the Holocaust resembled a "negative memory, as in a photo negative, where only the contours of the Shoah are made visible, while the destruction itself remains occluded." Bodemann does not develop his argument in the same detail as in his recent book In den Wogen der Erinnerung: Jüdische Existenz in Deutschland (2002), however, and readers are better advised to consult this work for a more thorough analysis.

Chris Lorenz's "Border-Crossings: Some Reflections on the Role of German Historians in Recent Public Debates on...