Responsibility To Repent

Andrew Cohen, the Ottawa Citizen columnist who I linked to after my Vienna post, has a new piece up on Germany's forthrightness in dealing with its past. The article is written for the historic act of the current German chancellor, Angela Merkel, speaking in front of the Israeli parliament--the first German chancellor to do so.

The article points out a few things in Berlin that I hadn't noticed, such as the display set up in a corner of the Potsdamer Platz train station.

BERLIN - God only knows what will be going through the mind of Angela Merkel when she becomes the first Chancellor of Germany to address the Israeli Knesset in Jerusalem today.

The horror of the Holocaust? The legacy of guilt and shame? The responsibility to repent?

The past isn't Ms. Merkel's doing. She was born after the war, the first chancellor who can make that break with Nazism, even symbolically. Yet she makes the pilgrimage to the Knesset today, as she did the memorial at Yad Vashem yesterday, as the tribune of her people, on whom the sins of the fathers are visited, fairly or not.

She could say that it's no longer her problem. Her predecessors dealt with it. The apologies have been made, the reparations paid. It's time to stop feeling guilty.
But no, she comes to Jerusalem in sackcloth and ashes to make a statement about yesterday for Germans as much as Israelis: We abhor the past. We respect it. We remember it. We must always remember it.

Always.

Ms. Merkel will speak in German today. One Israeli legislator plans to walk out. He says that German was the last language his grandparents heard before they were murdered. To hear it now, in the secular seat of Judaism, would be "irritating."

That revulsion is understandably characteristic of a generation that would not visit Germany or buy a German car. Who are we to tell survivors of the Holocaust how to think?

But Angela Merkel cannot live in their world. Nor can Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. Nor can anyone else in 2008.

It has been 75 years since Hitler came to power and 60 years since the founding of Israel. The two are related. As the past recedes, the relationship between Israel and Germany must be built on the future, and Germany must be able to speak freely to Israel, critically if necessary. That's what friends do.

Perhaps that is the subtext when German diplomats see the visit as "a signal of the normalization of relations" (a harmless, but infelicitous, term that Hitler used to describe his ambitions for Poland).

But while official visits are about the future, they would be impossible without a recognition of the past. Ms. Merkel has respect in Israel because Germany is unique among countries in its courageous commitment to address its shame. Like all Germans, she lives it every day.

The past was unspeakable, which is why Germans speak about it. In Germany, it begins with the monuments, memorials and museums. Berlin, in particular, groans with them. There is the Holocaust Memorial, which takes up some five acres in the shadow of the Brandenburg Gate, and the Jewish Museum, the most daring in the world. There is the History Museum. There are memorials in other parts of Germany, especially Munich, and museums, too, like the one on crematoria planned for the City of Erfurt.

Those are the big statements. It is the smaller ones that are so telling. An exhibition in a dim corner of the Potsdamer Platz Station revisits the odious role of the German railways in transporting Jews to their deaths. A sign outside the U-Bahn station at Wittenbergplatz lists the names of concentration camps.

Walk the streets of Berlin, and the clouds of memory shut out the sky. The most poignant are the plaques on corners of buildings or the tiny bronze square tiles set in the pavement outside former Jewish homes. One says: "Here lived Victor Schneebaum. Deported 1943. Auschwitz. Murdered."

That is memory in stone, glass and steel. Memory comes in other ways here, too: in the documentaries on television, the stories in newspapers, government programs such as the one that has sponsored week-long visits of some 33,000 native Berliners who fled and never returned. In the schools, teachers have recently introduced a comic book in which the Holocaust is taught to a generation that cannot learn it from their parents or even their grandparents.

The other day, the foreign minister spoke at the Secretariat of the International Task Force for Holocaust Remembrance, which is now based in Berlin. Established in 1998, it is a multi-national organization supporting education as an antidote to anti-semitism.

This isn't abstract. Anti-semitism lives in Germany. Jews are assaulted. Graves and synagogues are desecrated. The Holocaust Memorial has been vandalized several times. This doesn't happen every day, and perhaps, relatively speaking, no more so than in other countries. But it happens.

Occasionally, an overwrought Jewish leader calls an official a Nazi. That stupidity happens, too. The difference between 2008 and 1938 is that the power of the state today bends to protect Jews, not to extinguish them.

Germany understands the sacred need to remember. So does this chancellor. And so must her successors, this generation and those to come, in Berlin and Jerusalem.