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How did the leaders of postwar Germany deal with the crushing memory of the Holocaust? Did they own up to it? Some did, while others tried to suppress or to marginalize it; but those who triumphed politically were the ones who dared to face the problem. Gradually, too, the German people have come to grips with their responsibility. This is the fundamental message of Jeffrey Herf’s stimulating and original Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in the Two Germanys (Cambridge ma: Harvard University Press, 1997). Germany is an ideal place to study the links between the Holocaust and the politics of memory, not only because the Nazis of Germany were the initiators and the chief executors of the satanic plan to kill the Jews but also because the relevant documents are available—and because the country was divided for forty years after the war. The French have had to cope with the memory of their shared guilt in collaboration and in the Holocaust within an undivided country. Since every French government has felt responsible for protecting the prestige and the dignity of the entire nation, they have generally preferred to remain silent about the issue. In Germany, by contrast, two separate and mutually hostile regimes worked to turn the memory of the Holocaust and other Nazi crimes to their own advantage, while also wielding it as a weapon in the global cold war. It is one of the great ironies of our time that the Communist regime in East Germany, which claimed to be free of guilt with regard to the genocide of Jews, came to spout anti-Semitic slogans and to act as one of the bitterest enemies of Israel, while West Germany, governed at least on the middle level by former T H E N A Z I P A S T I N T H E T W O G E R M A N Y S This article first appeared in the March 20, 1998, issue of the New Republic under the title “After the End.” 35 Nazis and quite reluctant to prosecute war criminals, became a genuine friend of Israel and the Jews. Moreover, while East Germany (and Communists everywhere ) tried to ignore the memory of the Holocaust, West Germany, which the East Germans regularly described as fascistic, led the rest of the world in making restitutions to the Jews and in inviting a national self-examination. All of this is persuasively, often brilliantly, demonstrated by Herf (though a shorter book with fewer repetitions would have been just as persuasive). Herf does not propose to write a study of the German public. The people figure in his book mainly as the subjects of occasional opinion polls. Herf’s heroes and antiheroes are, rather, the political elite, especially those wielding the most power in the decade or two after World War II. The list of these notables includes , on the Communist side, Paul Merker, a dedicated Stalinist in the East German Politburo who nevertheless championed restitution to the Jews, thereby inviting his own ruin, as well as such intrepid followers of the evertwisting Moscow party line as Walter Ulbricht, Wilhelm Pieck, Otto Grotewohl , and Alexander Abusch. On the West German side, the principal characters are Federal Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, Federal President Theodor Heuss, and the Social Democrats Kurt Schumacher and Ernst Reuter. What bound all these men together, aside from the burden of guilt that they shared with the rest of the German nation, was that none of them ever tried to deny the horrors that had been visited on the Jews and other victims of Nazi rule. Of course, total defeat by the Allied powers, as well as Allied prompting (especially at the Nuremberg trials), helped the German leaders along the road to honesty. Still, with this major concession to truth the consensus of the German leadership came to an end. Subsequently, they disagreed among themselves on such things as whether Nazi crimes had been committed in the name of, or by, the German nation; whether the capitalists and the landowners of Germany, or the Nazi rabble, were to blame; whether only a small group of criminals or many Germans were involved in the killings (and who among the Germans ought to be punished); and whether, and at what price, the forgiveness of Jewry ought to be sought. How fortunate is Herf’s generation of historians! Earlier specialists who wished to learn about political decision-making in East Germany had to be satisfied with interviewing...

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