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

Germany and the Holocaust since 1945 203
I am neither Jewish, nor a Zionist, though it would be no crime to be either. I
have never had the intent to flee to Palestine. I have not supported the efforts of
Zionism ...Moreover: Hitler fascism emerged among us. We [Germans] did not
succeed through the actions of the working masses in preventing the erection of its
rule and hence the commission of its crimes. Therefore, especially we Germans
must not and ought not ignore or fight against what I call this strengthening of
Jewish national feeling. 43
He recalled Soviet support for Israel, as well as the opposition of ‘English
and American imperialism’. ‘No-one’, Merker wrote, ‘will want to claim
that the Soviet government was an “agent of American imperialism”.’ 44
Merker’s defence of the bonds between communists and Jews and his
argument that these bonds should continue into the 1950s was sufficient
to ensure that he would not again play a leading role in East German
communist politics. Zuckermann quietly practised law in Mexico City.
Conclusion
Several factors contributed to the marginalisation of the memory of the
Holocaust in East Germany. First, Soviet policy during the Cold War
brought it about. In the Soviet empire, the memory of the Second World
War constituted first and foremost the memory of the suffering and victory
of the Soviet Union. There was to be no competition for attention and
empathy from weak claimants such as the Jews. Communist orthodoxy
had long excluded the Jews from those Europeans defined as constituting
a nation. Second, however, some of the same cultural trends were at
work among German as among Soviet communists. In the Cold War, the
older anti-Western legacies of the German Sonderweg found new expression
in the communist ideological assaults on the West, assaults which
evoked older antisemitic currents within German, east European and
Russian nationalisms that came to the fore in the conspiracy theories
aimed at supposedly powerful Jews during the anti-cosmopolitan purges.
Although the record of East German persecution of the Jews pales into insignificance
compared with that of the Nazi regime, the important moral
and historical point is that such a record exists at all – and existed in a
self-described anti-fascist regime in the decade following the Holocaust.
Although the memory of the Holocaust emerged in the Federal Republic,
the famous power of the Jews was never so potent as to connect memory
with justice. The most adamant advocates of the memory of the Holocaust
were not clever conservatives eager to enhance West Germany’s
reputation and prospects for integration into the West by bringing up
43 Ibid., 16. 44 Ibid., 18.