Letter from Berlin

The moral obligation to confront one’s crimes is never easy. That has been famously true of Germany ever since its defeat in World War II a half-century ago. How its people have, individually and collectively, wrestled with the horror of the Holocaust, and tried to atone for the century’s most monstrous crime against humanity, are matters that continue to roil emotions.

Several recent events have cast a powerful spotlight on Germany’s continuing effort to find its moral center. Martin Walser, one of the country’s most gifted and prominent writers, recently received a top literary award. In his acceptance speech, he stunned his listeners when he demanded an end to the use of Auschwitz as a “tool of intimidation” and a “compulsory exercise.” Walser went on to say, “Instead of being grateful for the incessant presentation of our shame, I am starting to look away.” He decried the persistent use of the “Auschwitz hammer” to bang Nazi crimes into the heads of present-day Germans. As a consequence, he charged, many Germans have simply renounced responsibility for the Nazi past. His audience applauded. Until Walser, no one of his stature had dared to openly express this widely held view.

One man in the audience who refused to applaud was Ignatz Bubis, head of the 80,000-member Jewish community in Germany. Bubis condemned Walser’s remarks as “moral arson,” which could only inflame the neo-Nazis and lend credibility to those who would deny Auschwitz. Several prominent listeners who applauded Walser would later turn on him. German President Roman Herzog tried to have it both ways and condemned as “intellectual cowardice” all attempts to wipe out the historical memory of the Nazis, while admitting that Walser had provoked an important public debate. For good measure he called Bubis a “German patriot.”

The controversy helped propel Walser’s latest novel, “A Surging Fountain,” the portrait of a youth, his own, in Nazi Germany, onto the bestseller list. Germany’s “literary pope,” the critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki, himself a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto, compares it with Thomas Mann’s epic “Buddenbrooks.” Others, however, criticize Walser for having the audacity to write an apolitical novel set on the eve of the Holocaust. It is anything but apolitical. His description of the split in his own family belies the myth that ordinary Germans saw themselves as a master race. His liberal father, a bon vivant, distrusts the Nazis while his mother, who runs the family inn, looks on helplessly as her customers desert her in favor of nearby innkeepers who are only too eager to organize beer-swilling recruiting sessions for the local Nazi party organizers. She joins the party in order to assure the survival of her family.

The controversy over Walser’s Auschwitz remarks is only one of the ghosts from Germany’s recent past which are stalking the land. Restitution claims in the United States by former slave laborers in German companies during World War II has thrown into sharp focus the intimate association between the Nazis and German industry and finance. After denying any responsibility for decades, the companies this last week agreed to set up a $1 billion-plus fund to meet the demands of the victims who are still alive in the United States and Eastern Europe. Behind their willingness to pay lies the very real fear of losing business in the United States if they fail to act. Earlier, the mighty Deutsche Bank revealed that in 1942 the bank had financed the construction of Auschwitz as well as the adjacent IG Farben factory which employed Jewish prisoners and the nearby Birkenau camp, which exterminated 1 million of them. Deutsche Bank’s decision to rush into print with such incriminating information is explained by the fact that the German bank does not want to be seen as attempting to cover up its past at a time when it is seeking approval by U.S. authorities for its takeover of Banker’s Trust.

There is also the ongoing debate that continues to rage over the construction of a Holocaust memorial in Berlin. A vast site for the memorial lies barren in the center of the city, symbolically located between Hitler’s bunker and the Brandenburg Gate. With Germanic thoroughness, the pros and cons of the various architectural models for the memorial have been aired in countless discussions and meticulously recorded by the media. Peter Eisenman, a New York architect, perhaps succumbing to the German penchant for oversize monuments, submitted the winning design with a field of several thousand headstones symbolizing the Holocaust. Criticized for its abstractness and sheer size, the design was later scaled down somewhat and then modified. It now includes an adjacent Holocaust repository to house parts of Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation, a project favored by Michael Naumann, the new German government’s cultural czar. Although there are widespread misgivings about the design, parliament may decide to go ahead with the proposal rather than be accused of seeking to further delay the memorial. Behind it all lies the fear that the outside world will interpret a further delay as a sign that Germany is no longer willing to face its recent past.

That fear is misplaced: Germans are a people who, try as they might, cannot escape responsibilty for the sins of their fathers.