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'After the Holocaust: National Attitudes to Jews'

THE POLITICS OF MEMORY:
HOLOCAUST AND LEGITIMACY IN POST-NAZI GERMANY*
MANFRED HENNINGSEN
University of Hawaii at Manoa

Abstract — When the full truth of the destruction of European Jews became
known to Germans after the war the enormity of the crime was received with
silence. This silence was present in almost all cultural discourses and practices for
more than twenty years. Only with the emergence of the student and social
movements of the late sixties the cultural taboo slowly lifted. The crime was
recognized. Yet the centrality of the Holocaust in the understanding of German
history, is still not seen. The current historical debates are indicative of this cultural
syndrome.

The legitimacy of German politics after the Holocaust depended on the conscious
memory of the death-event and the recognition of the historical failure to stop it. German
politics after 1945," however, was neither conceived in the spirit of this memory nor
practiced as a recognition of this failure. The end of the Nazi-empire was greeted by its
victims as liberation. Germans perceived it as catastrophe. This language of 'catastrophe'
drowned out all alternative discourses of cultural response. The German victims of
'catastrophe' refused to listen to the victims of the Holocaust. This refusal, however, did not
extinguish the German memory of the victims. Because the memory of the Holocaust
and its victims was suppressed and did not participate in the formation of cultural
structures of legitimation, it haunted post-Nazi Germany as a history of traumas in
the collective subconscious. The intensity of the German Historikerstreit since 1986 tes-
tifies to the need for an inquiry into the social and mental conditions of this memory sup-
pression.
The debate on the place and meaning of the Nazi-empire in the context of German
history is conducted primarily by historians.1 Yet the recent processing of the Nazi-past
in German society indicates that the specific Historikerstreit is but a discourse among
many in a general culture debate.2 It is a debate about complicity on all levels of society,
but especially the voluntary collaboration of the culture elites in the creation and
maintenance of the death-regime and their post-Nazi refusal to remember it. The politics
of amnesia that the intellectual, scientific and professional elites had chosen over the
politics of memory channelled productive energies into the reconstruction of the defeated
Germany. This amnesia of the culture elites, which paralleled the oblivion by the political,
economic and administrative elites, contributed to the cover-up of all traces of their own
involvement in the Nazi-Reich. The achievements of post-war reconstruction were treated
as a reward for the memory suppression of Nazi complicity.

This is a revised version of the paper presented at the 'Remembering for the Future' Conference,
Oxford, 10-13 July 1988.

15
16 MANFRED HENNINQSEN

The obvious reasons for the promotion and acceptance of the politics of amnesia
have to do with the knowledge of guilt, in both the specific and general manner suggested
by the philosopher Karl Jaspers in his lectures at the University of Heidelberg in the Winter
semester of 1945/46.3 Jaspers distinguished between criminal, political, moral, and
metaphysical guilt and charged Germany with. accepting the historical responsibility for
the terminal record of the Third Reich. Post-Nazi Germany missed this unique opportunity
to constitute itself, in radical response to the death-event, by remembering those
millions of others who had been killed in order to actualize the meaning project of the
Nazis. The new Gennany was unable to partake in the victims' meaning of the Holocaust.
To even have tried would have bordered on arrogance and the ludicrous. But the new
Germany could have celebrated those Germans who had attempted to stop the Nazis from
coming to power in 1933, or who had resisted them during the next twelve years, and had
paid for this resistance with their lives. The historical legitimacy of the new Germany
was neither founded on the responsibility for the many millions of victims who were
exterminated after they had been classified as others, nor on the remembrance of those
few thousand Germans who were executed because they had resisted becoming part of
the Nazi self.
The current German cultural debate on history has reopened questions about the
relationship of the Holocaust and legitimacy. The attempt, however, of some historical
revisionists to relativize the Nazi period in the context of German history, and to look for
comparable examples of horror in other societies, ratifies the politics of amnesia as an
official discourse of meaning.4 So far, the strategic attempt at historically disconnecting
German political legitimacy from the Holocaust has failed. As encouraging as this failure
appears, the positive, symbolic connection has not been accepted either. The traumas
of the past, which finally surfaced, have not yet been translated into a therapeutic politics
of memory.

ENDGAMES
The trend towards amnesia was present in Germany long before the post-Nazi
society began to apply this attitude to politics. It grew out of the great fear that the world
would one day make all Germans accountable for the crimes they had committed or had
witnessed others commit without protest or resistance. Hitler's Minister of Propaganda,
Joseph Goebbels, knew of this connection when he wrote in his diary on 16 June 1941, in
anticipation of the war against the Soviet Union which started six days later:'... We are
now going to destroy what we have fought against all our lives . . . The Fuhrer says:
whether just or unjust, we have to win. That's the only way. And that is right, moral, and
necessary. And when we have won, who is going to ask us about the method! Anway, we
have so much to answer for that we must win. Otherwise our entire people, beginning with
us at the top with everything that is dear to us, will be eradicated (ausradiert werden).'5
Goebbels' desire for power culminated in his, his wife's and his children's suicide on
1 May 1945.
Toward the end of March of the same year, the secret reports by the security service of
the SS on the opinion trends of the German population, which had been gathered from
1938 until the end of the Third Reich, noted:

It's true, here and there people try desperately to calm themselves with the thought that it
certainly could not end all that badly. After all, a people of eighty million could not become
 THE POLITICS OF MEMORY 17

exterminated (ausgerottet werden) to the last man, the last woman and the last child. Actually the
Soviets could not turn on the workers and peasants because they are needed in all states. People
listen attentively to everything that reaches them from the territories occupied by the English and
the Americans. Behind all these noisy consolations lies a deep rooted anxiety (Angst) and the
wish that it would not come to that.6

The SS informants reported on the mood swings of people who drank up all their liquor
supplies and others who began looking for means to commit suicide.7 But by and large the
German endgames followed a pattern that the SS report has succinctly summarized in this
way:

. . it is a widespread phenomenon that the broad masses of the people {die breiten Schichten
des Volkes) acquit themselves of any guilt for the development of the war. They refer to the fact
that they were not responsible for the conduct of the war and politics. On the contrary, they had
done everything that the leadership asked of them since the beginning of the war.8

The last five months of the war in Europe was a period of anxiety for the Germans;
a time when death-marches could be seen in the German countryside. These marches
in the direction of the old Reich were set into moton when the advancing Red Army began
to approach the death- and labor camps in Nazi occupied territories. Thousands of starved,
sick and dying camp inmates were put on trains or trucks without food, water or medical
supplies; or were simply forced to march on foot for days and weeks to new camp sites,
or often to unknown destinations. The closer the Soviet troops came to the old German
territory, and the more the Western Allies progressed into Germany, the more frequently
the death-marches were sighted near German towns and cities. The remaining populations
of the Eastern death- and labor camps which had escaped final destruction were linking
up with the inmates of the concentration and labor camps in Germany like Buchenwald,
Dachau or Bergen-Belsen. We can only speculate about the impact these terrifying
columns of misery and death may have had on the German imagination. Many Germans
who claimed no knowledge of the Holocaust must have encountered its victims marching
through their home territory. They occasionally swore at them, threw stones or even
fired shots in their direction. The sighting of the death-marches may have contributed to the
fear of massive retribution by the enemy. But these direct encounters with the death-
event became purged from memory as instantly as the mandated viewing of corpses
in Buchenwald and Bergen-Belsen by the civilian population. Germans have always
remembered the story of terror and misery of the German expulsion from the Eastern
territories. The millions of refugee treks which started at the same time the death-
marches appeared on the German honzon, remained in public memory. The refugee story
became documented in a 1954 government financed multi-volume series edited by
prominent German historians.10 To my knowledge, no studies of the death-marches by
German historians have been published to this day. The lack of interest of historians in
post-Nazi Germany perfectly reflected the lack of memory in the society at large.
The average Germans' memory which began its selectivity almost before the war
ended, was not activated by philosophers and writers, the custodians of memory. Jacques
Derrida commented on Heidegger's post-Nazi silence in a discussion at the University of
Heidelberg in February 1988 by saying: 'Without this silence we now would have the
responsibility to read him notwithstanding.'11 As burdensome as the reading may have
become, considering Heidegger's acquiescent behavior from 1933 to 1945 and his
personal explanations, this record and his comments were recently excavated and held
18 MANFRED HENNINGSEN

against him. In 1945 Karl Jaspers refused to write a letter of support for Heidegger that
could have cleared his way to resume teaching at the University of Freiburg. Jaspers
wrote a damning evaluation for the University. He claimed that 'Heidegger's way
of thinking, which essentially looks urrfree, dictatorial, and non-responsive, would
be "disastrous" in its teaching impact today.' 12 Heidegger as a teacher was not accept-
able to Jaspers as long as he had not publicly confessed his grave errors of intellectual
and moral judgment Heidegger never recanted or discussed anything. For a few years
he was not allowed to teach. By then Jaspers who had been prohibited from teaching
from 1937 to 1945 because he refused to divorce his Jewish wife, had lost all hope
that the new Germany would express its legitimacy by accepting the moral responsibility
for the Nazi-Reich. He left Heidelberg and Germany in 1948, for the University of Basel in
Switzerland.
This one-sided conflict of the two most famous philosophers in post-Nazi Germany
over the politics of memory is matched by the equally one-sided conflict of the two famous
writers, Thomas Mann and Gottfried Benn. Benn greeted the Nazis' ascent to power in
1933 with the radio speech 'Answer to the Literary Emigration" and the book 777© New
State and the Intellectuals. Thomas Mann, who was among those emigrating from the new
state, became the intellectual representative of the exiled Germans in America. During the
war he regularly delivered radio speeches to the German people on the BBC. In his last
speech, on 8 November 1945, Mann repeated the major arguments of his response to an
open letter by the German writer Walter von Molo. This writer asked Mann to return and
assist Germany in its reconstruction and to protect it against the vengeance of the victors.
Mann rejected this invitation in no uncertain terms: 'The devil's excrement (Teufelsdreck)
which calls itself national socialism has taught me hate. ..." This hate drove him to work
with all his power for the 'fall' of the Nazis. His broadcasts had been the 'fervent call to the
German people to free itself." These activities were motivated, not in the least by his wish of
'homecoming.'13 As a German he could warn the others of the approaching Nemesis. 'But
as a German,' he added, 'who feels deeply that everything German is included in the
terrible national total guilt (Gesamtschuld) he cannot permit himself to become critical
about the politics of the victors. This would always be interpreted in the sense of an
egocentric patriotism under which other peoples have suffered from Germany for years.'14
Like the rest of the German intellectuals, Gottfried Benn followed this exchange
between Mann and von Molo with great interest. His comments in his letters to a friend are
revealing for the intellectual dishonesty they display. The intellectual collaborator of 1933
told his friend on the day of Mann's broadcast that he had no wish to go again before the
public, '. . . to get involved in discussions, to expose myself to attacks in connection with
these old problems which are all 30 to 40 years old and cannot find a closure for my
generation." He mentioned Mann's letter to von Molo without any specific character-
ization.15 A month later he provided his response in a letter: 'Th. M.'s answer I find as
ridiculous as you do. Interesting how a mind, unquestionably relatively important, can be
so weak and moody in character and personality.' He prided himself in being cut from
a different cloth and added with cynical detachment: 'I certainly needed only to take a
step forward in order to become enrolled in the democratic front (!) but I'm not taking
this step because I don't care.' 16 A few months later, in May 1946, he elaborated: '. . .
in a few years today's judgment will become revised.'17 He added, in a later letter during
the same month: 'All those questions that we carry with us are totally meaningless, hollow,
obsolete.'18
The nihilism of post-modernity that had colored Benn's poems and essays since his
 THE POLITICS OF MEMORY 19

days as a doctor in a military hospital during World War I, was invoked to cover this
extraordinary dulling of judgment Certainly, the gruesome circumstances of the suicide
of his wife in July 1945 (whom he had sent from the embattled Berlin to a small town,
soon to be occupied by the Red Army, and sporadically terrorized by marauding and raping
Russian soldiers), had contributed to this ethical numbness.19 But neither his pre-Nazi
ideological preferences, nor his personal suffering in 1945 speak to the activist decision
of 1933 to identify with the Nazi-project of meaning. Like Heidegger, Benn refused to
face an obvious contradiction. In an age that both radically denounced as hollow, they
gave preference to one positive meaning project over another. However, when this
meaning project collapsed and was exposed and recognized for what it had always
been, its intellectual promoters remained silent about their legitimizing support The
will to intellectual power in the Nazi-Reich that had stirred them into action, endorsing
the removal of all Jewish and non-Jewish opponents during the first months of 1933,
became glossed over by these thinkers and accepted by their defenders as reflections.
The non-seriousness of thought became the hallmark of their endgame.

STRATEGIES OF AMNESIA
The loss of historical memory afflicted both average and exceptional Germans
alike after the war. Since what is to be remembered must be part of a memorable truth,
Germans used their experience of catastrophe to suppress, all other records of historical
memory. This general suppression of memory, however, became further intensified
by specific strategies of amnesia.
An area of special attention, in this respect was the realm of law. After all, since
the Germans had not freed themselves of the Nazis through resistance and a possible
overthrow of the regime, they had to prosecute on their own those Nazi criminals who
had not been taken care of by the victors. German prosecutors opened 90,921
investigations until January 1986, and completed 6479 cases with the successful
sentencing of the indicted criminals.20 This rather poor record of the German prosecution
of Nazi crimes has led one author, Jorg Friedrich, to coin the phrase 'cotd amnesty" for
this phenomenon. According to his history of the treatment of Nazi criminals in post-war
Germany, most members of the Nazi elites escaped punishment. When the Western
Allies handed over the scrutiny of candidates for positions of leadership in politics,
culture, education, business, law, etc. to German authority, they chose 'the most corrupt
and incriminated profession' for the job, in giving the courts this responsibility.21 The
courts were filled and dominated by judges who first had to amnesty themselves for
their systematic complicity with the Nazis. German studies, in the 1980s, on this
important chapter of reconstruction have well documented this whitewashing of a sordid
record.22 But the findings of a 1987 publication by an amateur and a military historian
on the military justice system still came as a surprise.23 Instead of 10,000 to 12,000 death
sentences being handed out by military judges against German soldiers and personnel
in the military, the figures suddenly more than quadrupled. The lower estimates of the
victims (of which 70% to 90% were executed) were included in the standard text on
this subject written by a West German law professor who had published the leading
commentary on the Nazi military penal code in 1936. As a military judge from 1941 to
1945, the author had, himself, handed out seven death sentences from January 1944
to February 1945. The German news magazine Der Spiegel called this professor's
biography: 'A German Career.'24
20 MANFRED HENNINGSEN

Having cleared themselves of their incriminating background, the judges squashed

most attempts at prosecuting other members of the ruling elites of the Nazi empire.
This collusion of the judges with other perpetrators of the elites provided for a smooth
transition to the post-war Federal Republic. No open-ended processing of crimes
during the Nazi past would keep the new Germany from functioning and becoming
integrated in the Western military defense system against the threat from the Commu-
nist East.
The 'cold amnesty' of the Nazi elites was especially crucial, as Friedrich points
out, for the military buildup of the Federal Republic in the beginning of the cold war and
its integration in the Western military command structure. After all, how could one indict,
prosecute, sentence and imprison the military leadership of the Third Reich for planning
and executing the war, or subplots in it, against the Soviet Union? And how could the same
junior officers who had served under those military leaders then be asked to prepare
West German draftees for the eventuality of a war against the same enemy? The junior
officers remembered, as did most Germans at that time, that this alliance between the
German military forces and Western military powers had been the dream coalition of the
Nazi military leaders. For the junior officers this sounded, as Friedrich called it, like a
'bad joke' since many of their former commanding officers were still sitting in Western
prisons.25 West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, therefore, had to plead with
the Western Allies for the pardon and release of those Nazi officers who were justly
tried and sentenced before he could think of getting Germany rearmed. The American High
Commissioner, John McCloy, in January 1951 began the Western amnesty program for
Nazi criminals by releasing the prisoners who had been sentenced in the various
Nuremberg trials for less than 15 years.
This amnesty program included officers who had been in charge of, or had been
accomplices to the terror perpetrated by the German military in the Soviet Union against
the civilian population or Soviet prisoners of war (POWs). In the general German
response to the criminal charges levied against the Third Reich, the military had, by
and large, remained unscathed. Whatever post-war disenchantment with the Nazis
may have finally filtered through to the population at large, the military performance
was not affected in the same manner, if at all. Despite some of the findings against
military leaders in Nuremberg, the public dealt with them as obvious illustrations of
the victors' justice. Western amnesty made it so much easier for Hitler's generals to
downplay the terroristic behavior in the U.S.S.R. and the bestial treatment of Soviet
POWs. It took a great deal of subsequent scholarship to counteract the negative impact
of the amnesty program on the understanding of the Holocaust in Germany.
This successful campaign for allied amnesty not only covered military personnel,
it also included business leaders, upper echelon administrators, police officials, physicians,
etc. Most of these former prisoners began to play important roles in the Federal
Republic which had just been founded in 1949.
Understandably, they had no particular interest in connecting the symbolic meaning
structure of the new Germany with the allied victory over the Third Reich. Since most
of them had never recognized the legitimacy of the Nuremberg justice system to begin
with, they had neither accepted the truth of the charges, nor the sentences. The
released prisoners saw themselves as martyrs of German history or, at least, as victims
of the justice of the victors. This peculiar German consciousness of victimization that
could be found, e.g., among the conservative ruling elites and the educational personnel
from elementary schools through universities, helped to undercut any attempts to generate
 THE POLITICS OF MEMORY 21

in the Federal Republic that sense of political and historical responsibility for the crimes
of the Nazi empire to which Karl Jaspers had given hope.
The release of industrial leaders like Krupp and Flick, and the directors of I.G.
Farben not only helped the reconstruction process in those industries, it also prevented
the initiation of public debate about the involvement of German economic interests in
the development and perpetration of the Holocaust. The Marxist approach toward the
understanding of the Holocaust has always hinged on the economic interests that had
been serviced by slave labor camps and massive Jewish expropriations. Limited, and
too narrowly focused as this approach has been, the economic dimension of the
Holocaust deserved some attention. After all, the slave labor camps did exist and,
through their vicious management, contributed tens of thousands of victims to the
death toll of the Third Reich. The industrial leaders knew about this and should have
been held accountable for their responsibility. In addition, this recorded knowledge
would have facilitated the processing of survivors' claims against the firms that had
used slave labor or against their legal successors. Allowing a debate about the eco-
nomic aspects of the Holocaust also would have reminded the post-war public of the
profiteers of 'Aryanization' of Jewish business interests by the Nazis. The political
discussion about financial retribution in the Federal Republic would have taken on
different forms.
One particular group of professionals deserves special consideration in the history
of post-war suppression of memory because they helped in defining, classifying, sort-
ing, killing and dissecting the victims of the death-event Medical doctors, apart from
anthropologists, geneticists and psychologists,26 did the most as Robert Jay Lifton has
demonstrated, to destroy the 'boundary between healing and killing.'27 They accom-
plished this violation of their 2000-year-old Hippocratic oath by the 'immersion of
themselves in "medical science" as a means of avoiding awareness of, and guilt
over, their participation in a murderous project.'28 This 'scientific' cover of the physicians
worked so well in the German case because even if they were not true believers in the
Nazi-Weltanschauung, the Nazis legitimated this violation of the ethical 'boundary' for
the physicians. The Nazi-cosmology, which was enacted through law, removed many
kinds of humans from general membership in the human species to be ideologically
reclassified into different categories. These categories became, in turn, the basis for
the classification system of human destruction. Scientists contributed to the emergence
and development of the Nazi-cosmology since the late 19th century, through their re-
ductionist biologism. With the Nazis in power, German scientists not only received the
go-ahead to begin research on the human species, they were provided with the ideal
research environment. The ideological vision of the renewal of the human species which
scientists everywhere had discussed before Nazi Germany, now became German
reality. Humans became research material if they belonged to selected racial groups,
showed homosexual tendencies, were mentally retarded, incurably ill, senile, social
misfits, etc. The list of potential candidates for research and destruction was open-
ended. Any group that was seen by Nazi ideologues and scientists as polluting the
human gene pool with defective genetic mutants could become targeted for genetic
and medical research, followed by destruction.
When Alexander Mitscherlich published in 1949 his report about the medical trials
in Nuremberg, Medizin ohne Menschlichkeit (Medicine without Humanity), it was sent
by the West German Medical Association (Deutsche Arztekammer) which had commis-
sioned the study, to 10,000 German physicians. The response to this mailing was
22 MANFRED HENNINGSEN

silence. As Mitscheriich later wrote in the preface to a 1960 paperback edition: 'It was
and remained a mystery — as if the book had never appeared.'29 Mitscheriich did not
attack the medical profession as a whole. Even in 1960 he conceded that among the
approximately 90,000 physicians who had practiced medicine during the Third Reich,
only 350 had committed medical crimes.30 Mitscherlich's concession was not accept-
able to the profession because they knew that these 350 could only have committed
these crimes because colleagues had not stopped them. Documenting the medical
crimes of 350, implicated by their silence the complicity of all physicians. Mitscherlich's
implicit indictment of the profession could only be answered with silence. The psycho-
analysts Alexander and Margarete Mitscheriich published in 1967 their study about
the professional and the general German syndrome of silence and called it Die
Unfihigkeit zu trauem (The Inability to Mourn). They identified the psychological mech-
anisms of memory suppression: Germans had refused to recognize what caused the
'catastrophe' and what their own psychological involvement and their personal contri-
butions had been; they created walls of self-protection against the experiences of
the past 3 1
The publication of the Mitscheriich book in 1967 was a first major reversal in the
history of the recovery of memory in post-Nazi Germany. However, it did not have much
of an impact on the medical profession. In 1987 the young German physician Hartmut
Hanauske-Abel was attacked by Dr. Karsten Vilmar, president of the German National
Medical Association (Bundes&rztekammer), for having collectively defamed German
physicians by claiming that 45% of them had been members of the Nazi party. Physicians
who had committed crimes had been a small minority, he said in an interview in the
newsletter of his organization (circ. 190,000), in which he also pointed out proudly that
his organization had commissioned the Mitscheriich report of 1949. Hanauske-Abel,
who has provoked his colleagues with warnings about nuclear warfare and medical
responsibility, did not wait long with his response. He published a special issue (circ.
15,000) of his anti-nuclear group's circular in November 1987. On the cover of that
issue, he put the title page of the first number of the 1933 German Medical Bulletin
(Deutsches Arzteblatf) with the Swastika in a prominent place. The issue itself entitled
'Medicine under National Socialism' included a documentary article by Hanauske-Abel,
a speech by Karsten Vilmar and reprints of his interview in the newsletter of the
BundesSrztekammer. The confrontation between the two physicians — the one repre-
senting the medical profession, the other a small anti-nuclear dissident group — re-
peats the themes of the cultural debate on history that is taking place in contemporary
Germany. The strategies of amnesia, which worked so well for the almost 45 years
since the war, seem to have exhausted themselves. What follows now?

THE SECOND FOUNDING

In 1987 the TV writer Ralph Giordano published a book under the title Die zweite
Schuld Oder Von der Last Deutscher zu sein (The Second Guilt or On the Burden of
Being German). This book deals with the 'second guilt' as the 'suppression and denial of
the first after 1945. l32 It discusses the 'cold amnesty' of the Nazi-elites and their integration
into post-war Germany, but it especially reflects the acceptance of this process by
a majority of Germans.33 Though it is not a flattering book about Germany, it became
a bestseller in the society it critiques. Does Giordano's public success indicate that
both syndromes of suppression are in the process of becoming cases of cultural
 THE POLITICS OF MEMORY 23

treatment? Since the second guilt covers post-war history, the overcoming of the
suppression entails a return to the founding experiences of the Federal Republic. A second
founding in the mind as one could call it may accompany the public recovery of historical
memory.
The first founding of the Federal Republic did not deal with the memory of a past
that was the Holocaust for the others. The Federal Republic insisted on being the
constitutional heir of the historical German Reich. The founders of the Federal Republic
spelled out this identity by writing into the 'Preamble' of the West German constitution
the charge for reunification with Germans in the Soviet Occupation Zone who could
not participate in this political creation. As if this charge was not enough to emphasize
the provisional character of the document, it was called 'Basic Law' (Grvndgesatz) in-
stead of constitution. This provisional constitutional order was meant to exist only for
a transitional period' (Ubergangszeif) until the 'entire German people' would 'complete
in free self determination the unity and freedom of Germany.' The 'Preamble' of the
'Basic Law' is written as the memory of a history that is not the Holocaust but the
German 'catastrophe.' The 'catastrophe' is not connected with the Holocaust, neither
historically nor symbolically, nor is it seen as an outgrowth of it The language of the
'Basic Law' does not refer to it because its framers did not want to establish that
connection.
Whatever the reasons may have been that a historical connection between Ger-
many's present and the Holocaust did not become the symbolic center of the new
founding, this connection will have to be established. The spirit of the 'second guilt'
which was present at the first founding has to be overcome in the process of ending the
'transitional period' of the Federal Republic. For 40 years of West German history a pro-
visional identity has prevented Germans from coming to terms with their history. The
Greens, Left Social Democrats and, since 1988, even some Christian Democrats have
started to discuss in public the unreality which is symbolically expressed in the 'Preamble'
of the 'Basic Law.1 This unreality, however, is not limited to the charge of German re-
unification, but includes the denial of the recognition of the Holocaust as the destructive
culmination of German history. Revisionist historians in the Historikerstreit confirm this
reading of the symbolic politics of the first founding with their attempts of recontextualizing
the Holocaust as an extreme, but relative event of organized violence.
Calling the Holocaust the destructive culmination of German history is not limited
to the death-event. Certainly the millions of victims of the Third Reich constitute a
terminal record of such magnitude that Germans in the future will have to cope with it
repeatedly. My contention, however, is that no construction of symbolic meaning is
possible that does not consciously include in the politics it intends to legitimize, the
negative counterpoint of the Holocaust. The reenactment of the founding, the second
founding in the mind, has to place its historical beginning before the 'catastrophe.'
Because the Holocaust actualizes the negative meaning the new Germany wants to
overcome, the second founding has to recognize it as the shadow it cannot escape
through denial or historical revisionism.
The intimate connection between Holocaust and legitimacy became established
when the Nazis began to actualize their project of German renewal by promulgating
the 'Law for the Restoration of the Civil Service' (Gesetz zur Wiederherstellung des
Berufsbeamtentums) in April 1933. This law decreed the retirement of civil servants.
— who were appointed after 9 November 1918 (the revolution that ended the
rule of the Kaiser and World War I);
24 MANFRED HENNINGSEN

— who lacked "the required or usual training or other qualifications';

— who were of non-Aryan ancestry (with the temporary exception of people who
had fought in the war);
— whose political record did not assure that they would at all times forcefully
support the national state;
— who showed none of the above reasons for service disqualification but could
be transferred or retired for any reason whatsoever.34
Through the use of this law, the new regime advertised very earty the criteria it would
apply in determining the loyalty of its public servants, namely total conformity to the
symbolic self-interpretation of the Third Reich. The distinctions between professional,
political and racial qualifications were not meant to be applied as separate categories.
Since race was the primary discourse of Nazi self-interpretation, non-'Aryans' were
excluded by definition. 'Aryans' could register lower marks on either the professional
or even occasionally, if rarely, the political scale. But they could not flunk the race test.
Because of the primacy of the race discourse, the legitimacy of the Third Reich was
founded, from its beginning, on the principles of dismissal, removal, exclusion, segre-
gation, concentration, expulsion and destruction of the non-'Aryan' other. The later
death-event of the Holocaust is nothing but the actualization of a possibility that always
belonged to the symbolic self-understanding of the Nazis.
The German philosopher Karl Lowith had discovered the close connection between
Holocaust and legitimacy early on in his life as a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany.
In his intellectual autobiography, written in 1940, he commented on the Jewish back-
ground of his German life: 'The German overthrow (l/ms/urz) affected me particularly
as a Jew, and it would be silly to think that one could somehow escape the general
events (Geschehen) as individual. Indeed, my life is determined by the collapse of
emancipation in Germany . . ..' For Lowith this meant, 'that one is Jew and German
just because in Germany the one has become separated from the -other. Even if one
may find a new domicile and gain citizenship in another country, a large part of one's
life will be spent in filling this crack; this will be more of an effort for those who very
strongly considered themselves to be German, before Hitler.'35
Lowith's observations reflect the discovery of the cultural dead end for German
Jews in the 20th century. His identification with German culture was relatively un-
problematic until this culture revealed to him the limits of its universality. The Nazi
discourse of race that was suddenly excluding him — despite his war service — from
membership in German society was the end to the politics of universal empowerment.
This politics emerged in the enlightenment project in the 18th century and began to
affect, if only in a limited way, German political culture in the 19th century. German
Jews had benefited from the universal overcoming of particular privileges. They had
participated in the liberal and radical politics of empowering even more underprivileged
constituencies in German society. The history of the Weimar Republic from 1919 to
1933 is the final stage in the enlightenment project's attempts to come of political age.
German Jews played a prominent role in this social drama and paid the heaviest price
when it finally failed in 1933.
But 'Aryan' Germans paid a price too. After all, their lack of resistance to the
persecution of others, beginning with the massive firing of civil servants in 1933, indi-
cated partial or total complicity with the Nazis or paralysis of political action. In both cases
it meant a reversal of the politics of universal empowerment and the return to attitudes of
authoritarian deference and acclamation.
 THE POUT1CS OF MEMORY 25

The Nazi rise to power culminated in the promise to kill German others and to dis-
enfranchise Germans themselves. This double strategy of meaning defines the center
of the Nazi-project. All German attempts at recovering the authentic meaning of politics
as discursive action have, therefore, to begin to accept the intimate historical relation-
ship of Holocaust and legitimacy. Without this politics of memory, the new Germany
will continue to be a society lacking in symbolic legitimacy.

NOTES
1. 'Historikerstreit'. Die Dokurmntation der Kontroverse urn die Erwgarhgkeit der national-
sozialistischen Judenvemichtung (Muncrten: Piper, 1987); J. Habermas, Eine Art Schadensabwick-
lung (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1987); D. Diner, e d , 1st der NationalsoziaJismus Geschichte? Zu
Historisiervng und Historikerstreit (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1987); H.-U. Wehler, Entsorgung der
deutschen Vergangenheit? En polemischer Essay zum 'Historikerstreit' (MGnchen: Beck, 1988).
N. Kampe, "Normalizing the Holocaust? The Recent Historians' Debate in the Federal Republic
of Germany', Holocaust and Genocide Studies 2.1, 61-80.
2. Psyche, 1982-1987; B. Muller-Hill, Tddliche Wissenschaft: Die Aussonderung von Juden,
Zigeunern und Geisteskranken 1933-1945 (Hamburg: Rowohlt Taschenbuch, 1984); V. Farias,
Heidegger et le nazisme (Paris: Editions Verdier, Lagrasse, 1987).
3. K. Jaspers, Die Schuldfrage:Zurpolitischen Haftung Deutschlands (MQnchen: Piper, 1987).
4. M. Henningsen, The Politics of Moral Evasion: Germany and the Aftermath of the
Holocaust', Echoes from the Holocaust: Philosophical Reflections on a Dan\ Time (Philadelphia:
Temple, 1988).
5. J. Goebbels, TagebOcher', Der Spiegel (21 September 1987), 126.
6. H. Boberarch, ed., Meldungen aus dem Reich: Die geheimen Langeberichte des
Sicherheitsdienstes der SS 1938-1945, vol. 17 (Herrsching: Pawlak, 1984), p. 6735.
7. ibid., p. 6737.
8. ibid., p. 6738.
9. Y. Bauer, The Death-Marches, January-May 1945', Modem Judaism 3:1, (1983), 1-23.
10. M. Henningsen, 'Zur Symbolik des Zwetten Wettkriegs heute", Merkur, 435, (1985),
444-451; O. von Aretin, 'Deutsche Historiker als professionelle Verdranger? Zum Vorwurf von',
Merkur 441, (1985), 1036ff.
11. S. Wehowsky, 'Heidegger und die Franzosen', SOddeutsche Zeitung, (9 February 1988).
12. H. Ott, "Martin Heidegger und der Nationalsozialismus', Heidegger und die Praktsche
Philosophie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1988), p. 65.
13. T. Mann, Deutsche Hdrer! Radiosendungen nach Deutschland aus den Jahren.1940-1945
(Frankfurt: Fischer Taschenbuch, 1987), p. 153.
14. ibid., p. 154f.
15. G. Benn, Briefe an F. W. Oelze 1945-1949 (Frankfurt: Fischer Taschenbuch,
1982), p. 8.
16. ibid., p. 12f.
17. ibid., p. 29.
18. ibid., p. 33.
19. ibid., p. 5.
20. M. Henningsen, 'The Politics of Moral Evasion', op. at., p. 405.
21. J. Friedrich, Die katte Amnestie: NS-TSter in der Bundesrepublik (Frankfurt: Fischer
Taschenbuch, 1986), p. 203.
22. J. Friedrich, Freispnjch fur die Nas-Justiz: Die Urteile gegen NS-Richter seit 1948. Eine
Dokumentation (Hamburg: Rowohlt Taschenbuch, 1983); J. MGUer, Furchtbare Juristen: Die
unbewiltigte Vergangenheit unserer Justiz (MQnchen: Kindler, 1987); J. Schoeps und H. Hillermann,
Justiz und Nationalsozialismus (Sachsenheim-Hohenhaslach: Burg Verlag, 1987).
26 MANFRED HENNINQSEN

23. M. Messerschrrtidt and F. Wullner, Die Wehrmachtsjustiz im Dienste des National-

sozialismus: Zerstdrung einer Legende (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 1987).
24. Der Spiegel, (19 October 1987), 115.
25. J. Friedrich, Die kalte Amnestie: op. tit., p. 243.
26. B. MOIIer-Hill, op. tit
27. R. J. Lifton, 777e Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genotide (New York:
Basic Books, 1986), p. 14.
28. ibid., p. 6 1 .
29. A. Mitscheriich and F. Mielke, eds., Medizin ohne Menschlichkeit: Dokumente des
Numberger Arzteprozesses (Frankfurt: Fischer Bucherei, 1960), p. 15.
30. ibid., p. 13.
31. A. Mitscheriich and M. Mitscheriich, Die UnfShigkeit zv trauem: Grundlagen kollektiven
Verhaltens (MQnchen: Piper, 1979), p. 38.
32. R. Giordano, Die zweite Schuld oder Von der Last Deutschefzu sein (Hamburg: Rasch und
R6hring, 1987), p. 11.
33. ibid., p. 19.
34. P. Lundgreen, ed., Wissenschaft im Dritten Reich (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1985), p. 12.
35. K. Ldwith, Mein Leben in Deutschland vor und nach 1933 (Stuttgart: DVA, 1986), p. 136.