The War in the Empty Air: Victims, Perpetrators, and Postwar Germans

NOTES

Notes to pages 000–000 261 NOTES 1. Historical Memory and the Uses of Remorse 1. See Dagmar Barnouw, Germany 1945: Views of War and Violence (Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 1997), ch. 1, “To Make Them See”; Manfred Henningsen, “Der Ort des Holocaust in der amerikanischen Ökonomie des Bösen,” in Deutsch-amerikanische Begegnungen, ed. Frank Tromler and Elliott Shore (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 2001), 251–67. “Myth” is used throughout this study in its meaning of culturally significant story. 2. The New York Times, October 31, 2002, quotes administration officials that Mr. Bush “has smoldered with resentment” and that the administration’s policies regarding Germany were guided “by the personal anger of Mr. Bush over Mr. Schröder’s campaign, and over one of the ministers in his cabinet, who compared Mr. Bush’s tactics to those of Hitler. It was that remark that prompted Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to say the German-American relationship had been poisoned.” 3. Rumsfeld’s accusations of German disobedience and bad soldiering, drawing comparisons between a well-functioning democracy and Syria and Cuba, did not go over well with the war-weary German population (New York Times, Feb. 6, 2003). 4. See the images reproduced in Barnouw, Germany 1945, ch. 1. 5. For a good example, see Tony Judt’s sharply critical review of Peter Novick ’s The Holocaust in American Life, “The Morbid Truth: In Defense of Holocaust Obsession,” New Republic, July 19/26, 1999: “Because the Holocaust, for many people today, can speak to us mainly as a deracinated account of absolute evil, it has a special value in a world adrift on a sea of ethical and ideological uncertainty.” 6. The U.S. elite press misreported repeatedly what the undiplomatic minister of justice had actually said, missing the fact that both Hitler and Bush were caricatured in private conversation—a joke that should never have been misconstrued as an indication of reemerging German anti-Semitism. For many Americans across the political spectrum, twenty-first-century Germany is still outside the parameters of a political normalcy that Jane Kramer now seems to think desirable. (“Resentments,” New Yorker, Oct. 7, 2002, pp. 39–40); see however her more opaque if no less Notes to pages 000–000 262 judgmental position in The Politics of Memory: Looking for Germany in the New Germany (New York: Random House, 1996). 7. Quoted on NPR, Morning Edition, Jan. 31, 2003. 8. Peace Prize of the Association of German Booksellers, Oct. 1998; see the documentation of Walser’s speech and the reactions to it in Die Walser-Bubis Debatte , ed. Frank Schirrmacher (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1999). 9. Elie Wiesel (Der Tagesspiegel, Dec. 1, 1998) and Israel’s ambassador Avi Primor (FR, Dec. 7, 1998) also stated their being offended. 10. This fact explains why Die Welt, which had at first published the comments of Walser’s defenders, by no means all of them conservative, soon made it known that it was no longer supporting the debate. For the media boycott by American Jews and fundamentalist Christians because of their “kindness” to the Palestinians in reporting on the Israel-Palestine conflict, especially the devastation of Jenin, involving the New York Times, the LA Times, the Washington Post, National Public Radio, and CNN, see Felicity Barringer, “Some U.S. Backers of Israel Boycott Dailies over Mideast,” New York Times, May 24, 2002. 11. Martin Walser, “Auschwitz und kein Ende” (1979), in Walser, Über Deutschland reden (Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1989), 24–31. 12. New Yorker, June 16 and 23, 2003, pp. 69–70. 13. Bill Clinton used it a great deal when trying to sell U.S. military intervention in Kosovo, where for the duration all Serbs were evil perpetrators and everybody else “these innocent victims”; see ch. 5 of this study. 14. This includes the “elite” media; see the much discussed New York Times Magazine article “Reagan’s Son” by Bill Keller (Jan. 26, 2003). 15. At their annual convention in Atlantic City in October 1944, American Zionists across the political spectrum demanded unanimously a “free and democratic Jewish commonwealth . . . [that] shall embrace the whole of Palestine, undivided and undiminished.” See here Arendt’s critical comments in her article “Zionism Reconsidered” (rejected by Commentary in 1944 as too disturbing): Menorah Journal 33 (Aug. 1945): 162–96; reprinted in Ron H. Feldman, ed., The Jew as Pariah: Jewish Identity and Politics in the Modern Age (New York: Grove, 1978), 131–77, 131. In her little known series of...