Memory loss

Editorial

"No society or group can live without memory," German President Roman Herzog said at a Nov. 9 commemoration marking the 60th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the "night of broken glass."

On that night in 1938, hundreds of German synagogues were destroyed and Jewish property ransacked. Nearly 100 Jews were killed and 30,000 arrested and deported to concentration camps.

Yet memory of that fateful night, and the utter horror it portended, is one that many Germans would like to excise from their national consciousness. Novelist Martin Walser recently called on his countrymen to structure a contemporary reality unburdened by their shameful history. Walser denounced the use of the Holocaust as a "moral tool," and in a veiled reference to survivors' recent claims for reparations, decried the "exploitation of our disgrace for present purposes." He said he was speaking for many Germans who are too intimidated to voice their resentment and thus remain silent.

Walser's statement was offensive, as much for the words he chose as for the unspoken subtext of latent anti-Semitism they reflected. Two generations post-Holocaust, some German intellectuals still finger Jews as the cause for German angst and stir up animosity, which is expressed both directly and in subtle whisperings of anti-Semitism spread across Eastern Europe and into the former Soviet republics. Just days before the Kristallnacht anniversary, a German Jewish memorial was defaced with swastikas. Meanwhile, a Communist lawmaker in Russia called for the expulsion of the "yids" from the motherland. Authorities appear to be waffling on plans for a major Holocaust memorial in Berlin, citing concerns about graffiti and the size of the site.

Newly elected German Chancellor Gerhard Schroder has declined to comment on Walser's remarks, but in a telling statement, he urged the German people to look ahead rather than look back.

But it is, as Herzog noted, the looking back, the careful reconstruction of memory, that informs national identity and presages the future. Memories, like promises, no matter how painful or shameful, are meant to be kept.

Home