Ariel Center for
Policy Research

A JOURNAL OF POLITICS AND THE ARTS

 

NATIV   ■    Volume Thirteen  ■   Number 4-5  (75-76)  ■  September  2000   ■  Ariel Center for Policy Research

 

SYNOPSIS

 


Germany, “Historikerstreit”
and the “Goldhagen Debate”

Susanne Urban-Fahr

Since 1945 (West) Germany had to deal with the question of how to create the remembrance for the victims of the Shoah who were murdered by Germans and the other executioners who helped them in the occupied countries. While East Germany tried to do it in a dogmatic way – to manifest that the GDR is “anti-Nazism” and therefore the question about guilt and responsibility does not exist! – West Germany was clothed in silence. After the 1970s there were some media like films and books which broke this silence. A widespread culture of remembrance was built up by official institutions and by some individual initiatives and beside the “normal” anti-Semitism the outstanding face of Germany showed the will to remember. Then there was in 1987 the “Historikerstreit” and after this the “Goldhagen debate” in 1996 and in 1998 the “Walser-Bubis-Debate” – the last one between the German author Martin Walser and the head of the German Jews who are unified in the “Zentralrat”, Ignatz Bubis (who died in autumn 1999). All the debates were dealing with the need to remember and the question if the Shoah was really a unique genocide in the history of mankind. So it could be summarized that for nearly 15 years there has been a tendency not only to compare the Shoah to other crimes against humanity or even to the life of the Germans between 1933 and 1945, but to put this period, like any one period, into the whole of German history, so that these twelve years have their significance minimized in the long run. This tendency is growing and even in the official institutions in which remembrance is “created”, it exists more and more. Because of this, an end cannot really be seen to the rapid and intensive – and, for Jews, often hurtful – debates: they will continue – in a way which will show more and more indifference towards the victims.

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