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

204 Jeffrey Herf
the Holocaust and eagerly offering financial restitution. On the contrary,
in the Federal Republic, with a few moderate conservative exceptions in
the formative years, it was liberals in the Heussian tradition and Social
Democrats who brought these issues to the fore. The West German experience
indicated that the claims of memory of the Jewish catastrophe
were not much stronger than the pangs of conscience of that minority of
Germans who like Schumacher and Heuss articulated ‘collective shame’.
As a result, in the early years of the Adenauer’s Federal Republic, daring
more democracy meant seeking less justice, and speaking less, not more,
about the destruction of European Jewry. In 1950s West Germany, the
memory of the destruction of European Jewry entered into national political
discourse above all because liberals, Social Democrats, and a few
atypical moderate conservatives placed moral considerations above electoral
expediency. It was not until the 1960s, when a successor generation
asked difficult questions about the Nazi past, that the minority political
traditions of memory of the first post-war decades for the first time found
a broad audience.
In neither West nor East Germany did the Holocaust fit into anyone’s
happy narrative of victory and redemption. In both East and West, as
Goldmann’s speech in Bergen-Belsen indicated, the memory of the
Holocaust crossed the fault lines of provincial and divided memory of the
Cold War. In both West and East, forgetting and repressing the memory
of the Jewish catastrophe was inseparable from forgetting the full dimensions
of the Second World War as well as the embarrassing fact that Cold
War enemies had only recently been anti-Nazi allies.
Nevertheless, and despite the great shortcomings in the matter of judicial
confrontation with the Nazi past, the leaders of the Bonn republic, in
the Heussian tradition, made acceptance of this burden of German history
a key element of national self-definition. Conversely, despite years
of anti-fascist discourse, the East German regime repressed the memory
of the Jewish catastrophe and then moved on to anti-Zionist, at times
antisemitic, ideology and policy, both at home and in the Middle East.
The communist normalcy that was established in the anti-cosmopolitan
purge of winter 1952–3 remained intact until 1989. The consequences
of multiple restorations and the post-war division of memory remained
intact until April 1990, when in its first act the short-lived East German
post-communist parliament acknowledged East German responsibility
for assuming the burden of the Nazi past. There was a striking historical
symmetry to the parliament’s action. Just as the suppression of the
memory of the Jewish catastrophe accompanied the consolidation of the
power of the East German communist dictatorship, so memory’s return
accompanied the return of democratic political life in East Germany.