Guilt about the Past Read Free Page B

the media. In a few years our star will begin its descent.
    On our birthdays we give speeches about what we wanted to accomplish and what we achieved. Most of these speeches broach the subjects of the Third Reich and the Holocaust. For those of us employed in the humanities – in universities, culture and the media – the past, at one time or another, was or still is our topic; I don’t know of any colleague of mine who hasn’t, as I also have, given lectures and seminars on legal doctrine and practice in the Third Reich. For those of us working in politics, the administration, and the law, the past sharpened our understanding of freedom, equality, and a just system of government; the lessons to be learned from the Third Reich are an integral part of the advanced training programs for administrators and judges. When those of us in business or who offer professional services contemplate the ethics and responsibilities of their chosen fields they also contemplate the former involvement of these fields in the Third Reich and the Holocaust; they have organised exhibitions and publications on the role of doctors in the Third Reich, pharmacists in the Third Reich, chemists in the Third Reich and so forth.
    For most of us our formative years were deeply influenced by the past of the Third Reich and the Holocaust. Its memory stood at the centre of our arguments with our parents and our rebellion against them. During the sixties, when those actually involved were reluctant to speak of the past, we developed a strong need to confront them, provoke them, ask them what they had done. Some of you may have seen the film, The Nasty Girl , in which a schoolgirl assigned to write a paper about her town decides to explore its wartime history, and encounters massive hostility from her older neighbours – this was a common experience among my friends. We regarded it as self-evident that the past had to be talked about, researched, taught, learned. Our image of German history acquired its contours from its shadow. When travelling abroad we were confronted as heirs of this past, and such confrontations came to define our experience of ourselves as Germans. Dealing with the past became a part of our self-perception and self-expression, even if it only played a minor role in our work.
    Hence, for my generation the past is still very present – and not just for the intellectuals. Two summers ago, during the soccer World Cup, I was watching a match in a beer garden in Berlin. When the German team scored its first goal, a worker my age threw his arms into the air and shouted, ‘ Wir sind wieder wer !’ (‘We are somebody again!’). So even this worker saw himself under the long shadow of the past and experienced this moment as a liberation, as a chance to get back into the light. Since the expectations and ideas of our generation now define the cultural mainstream, the past that has moulded us and still occupies our thoughts has found its way into every corner of public life.
    That was not without risk. During the sixties, the public discussion about the Third Reich and the Holocaust had to be insisted upon against great resistance. To break down the resistance of those who would rather have repressed and forgotten the past, the topic had to be raised again and again. But even after there was no longer anyone who needed to be convinced that the past may never be repressed or forgotten, my generation still prided itself on its moral fortitude. And it kept discussing the past as if doing so still demanded courage, still justified pride, still could not happen often enough.
    The result has been a sort of banality. The Holocaust has become small change that is easily handed out. Yet another memorial event, conference, article or book against forgetting the past, another comparison between Auschwitz and some awful contemporary event. The analogies stretch far; I have seen Kosovo and Darfur compared to Auschwitz, Saddam Hussein to Hitler,