Memory and Power in Post-War Europe: Studies in the Presence of ...

190 Jeffrey Herf
about the rope.’ 6 In the Adenauer era those who won national elections
in the Federal Republic and had a democratic mandate opposed a vigorous
programme of justice for past crimes and supported a programme
of premature and undeserved amnesty. This tension between justice and
early democratisation is a major theme of post-war West German history,
as well as of the transition from dictatorship to democracy in the twentieth
century in general. Daring more democracy with an electorate which
included crucial voting blocs opposed to putting the past on trial meant
attaining less justice.
The distinctive West German government tradition of remembering
the crimes of the Nazi past began as elite tradition that sounded a soft
dissonant note in the larger West German silence. It was inaugurated by
Theodor Heuss, the first occupant of the largely honorific position of
Bundespräsident of the Federal Republic. He used the office of president,
and its insulation from the electoral struggle for political power, to remember
publicly the crimes of the Nazi era, and to define the office as
a repository of the nation’s conscience and memory. To his critics, he
was the cultured veneer of the Adenauer restoration, and an advocate of
eloquent memory separated from politically consequential justice. Yet in
speeches about German history and in extensive private correspondence
with Jewish survivors, resistance veterans, and West German and foreign
intellectuals, Heuss began an elite tradition of political recollection that
would eventually contribute to broader public discussion and action. He
could have done much more. Others in his position would have done,
and later did do, much less.
Heuss delivered his most important speech regarding the Nazi past at
memorial ceremonies held at the former Nazi concentration camp at
Bergen-Belsen on 29–30 November 1952. Officials of the Federal
Republic and representatives of many governments and of Jewish organisations
gathered to dedicate a memorial to those persecuted at the Nazi
concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen. The ceremonies were a decidedly
Western event which reflected the realities of the Cold War and divided
memory. Attending were government representatives from Britain, the
United States, Denmark, Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland,
Sweden, France, Yugoslavia, Israel and the Jewish communities in
Germany, Europe and the United States. None of the communist states
was represented.
6 Theodor Adorno, ‘Was bedeutet Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit’, in Theodor Adorno:
Gesammelte Schriften, 10, 2 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1977), 558.