Last year, when invited to visit Dachau...

Last year, when invited to visit Dachau by the chancellor of West Germany, President Reagan declined. “I want to put that history behind me,” he said. The Germans, he said, “have a guilt feeling that’s been imposed on them, and I just think it’s unnecessary.”

And yet, the President decided to visit the German military cemetery at Bitburg, where the soldiers of the notorious SS are buried. Only after a worldwide expression of moral outrage did he agree, after all, to honor the millions of Jewish men, women and children who were the innocent and helpless prey of the SS by laying a wreath at Bergen-Belsen. Even then, the President insisted that the fallen Nazi soldiers “were victims, just as surely as the victims in the concentration camps.”

“Reagan’s decision to visit Bitburg . . . may have been a blunder,” says Geoffrey Hartman, editor of Bitburg in Moral and Political Perspective (Indiana University: $9.95). “Blunder or not . . . (t)he anguish, especially though not exclusively within Jewish circles, and particularly among those who survived the Holocaust, has still not passed away.”

“Bitburg” is a compelling and wholly successful effort to preserve and scrutinize not only the specific moral atrocity which the President’s visit represents, but also the underlying questions which it poses: How do we guard the memory of the Holocaust from the eroding forces of historical revisionism, diplomatic expediency, moral equivocation and sheer forgetfulness? “The universe of death we call the Holocaust or Shoah creates, as Calude Lanzmann has said, its own sacred and isolating wall of fire,” writes Hartman. “The very fact that it happened repels us. Yet, it also makes us aware how painful it is to stay with a knowledge that is about evil rather than about good, and so tempts us to simplify what happened or commemorate it merely ritually.”

But Hartman and his distinguished fellow contributors to “Bitburg”--including Raul Hilberg, Saul Friedlander and Primo Levi, with a previously untranslated essay by the late Theodor Adorno--are unflinching and uncompromising on the Holocaust and the abuse of history at the hands for those, like our President, who wish to “put history behind them.”

Through its rich collection of source materials--chronologies, contemporary press accounts, photographs, cartoons and historical documents--the book fixes Bitburg in history and memory. On this foundation of scholarship, Hartman has erected a monument to the victims of the Holocaust, and a moral guidepost to the world after Auschwitz.

Umberto Baldini explores one of the more redeeming artifacts of Western civilization in Primavera: The Restoration of Botticelli’s Masterpiece (Abrams: $9.95), a detailed and superbly illustrated study of the 15th-Century Italian master and his work. A disciple of Savonarola, and a favorite of the Medici, “(h)e emerges . . . as a revolutionary artist who brought to painting an exalted and enduring religious sense that almost anticipates that of the Reformation,” writes Baldini.

Above all, this lush and elegant little volume is a celebration of “Primavera,” which Baldini calls “one of the greatest, most authentic revelations of the Renaissance and its new message,” and its painstaking restoration by contemporary art historians, curators and technicians. We see the work in a new light as it is rendered in ultraviolet, radiographic, infrared reflectographic, photogrammetric and macrophotographic processes, all of which reveal the painting’s most intimate anatomy in vivid detail and startling perspective--a single flower, one of more than 500 plants, grasses and flowers depicted by Botticelli, takes on the appearance of bas-relief in a macrophotograph. Baldini reveals how the work of restoration has not only enhanced our appreciation of the artist’s technique, but also deepened our understanding of his intention and inspiration.

“An incomparable work of art, Primavera is clearly the product of a highly refined culture,” writes Baldini. “Botticelli’s contact with even the greatest intellects could not have stimulated his artistic imagination to such a pitch. . . . For it was neither literature nor philosophy that he sought, but art.”

NEW AND NOTEWORTHY: Flowering Plants, with text by Nancy Dale and color photographs by members of the California Native Plant Society (Capra Press, P.O. Box 2068, Santa Barbara 93120: $15.95) is a unique field guide to the flora of the Santa Monica Mountains and the coastal and chaparral regions of Southern California. More than 250 plant species are described and depicted in photography and botanical drawings, and the book includes maps and other information about wildflower walks. Away for the Weekend (Clarkson N. Potter: $10.95) is a revised and updated edition of Michele and Tom Grimm’s authoritative and imaginative guide to a year’s worth of weekend trips within 250 miles of Los Angeles.

Titles reviewed in Paperback Originals have been published in paperback only or in simultaneous paperback and hardcover editions.