To the Editor:
I was deeply moved by Lucy S. Dawidowicz’s article, “In Berlin Again” [August], not only because of its excellence, but because I had recently returned from a ten-day study mission to Germany after some forty years and had similar feelings.
It is a new and better Germany—or, at least, today’s Germans (those of the post-World War II generation) cannot be judged by their fathers and mothers or by our feelings and memories.
Germans and Jews are inextricably related. For many Germans, there is guilt, remorse, concern, and disbelief that their forefathers were the cause of the Holocaust. For Jews, there is the ineradicable knowledge that their scars, the deaths of their families and friends, the loss of their homes, and their bitter memories were caused by the Germans.
I found an ambivalence among Germans about what they as Germans should do, think, and feel about the sins of their parents. After all, the horrors of the war took place before most of today’s Germans were born. If it is morally correct that the sins of the fathers not be visited upon their children, why should that principle be discarded when it comes to the Germans?
And yet, the Germans I met know they cannot escape history, even if they were to try. They are continually reminded of it in the press, in meeting Jews or Israelis, in watching TV, going to the movies, or asking their parents what they did to help Jews. Who were the killers if not their elders? Even when visiting another country, they know they will be asked the very questions they have asked their parents, only this time it is they who must give an accounting.
The tensions of the German-Jewish equation have led to a growing desire to forget the past, to deny responsibility for what a prior criminal government had done, to ameliorate the severity of past horrors by saying that others were guilty, too, or to blame those who harp upon what occurred—“Why must Jews continue to press for war trials?” Such reactions . . . represent a new form of anti-Semitism—at least for Germany. . . . And therein lie deeper problems, for which I found no satisfying answers. How can the present be discussed without reference to the past? How does one remember the evils of a past generation without stigmatizing the present one? How does one befriend today’s generation (which wants to meet Jews) without sanitizing the previous one? And how does one teach young Germans—or Jews—of the past without their wanting to escape any connection with it, and resenting instead those who remind them of it?
Philip Perlmutter
Newton, Massachusetts
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To the Editor:
Lucy S. Dawidowicz, in the account of her understandable apprehensions in revisiting Berlin, through which she had first passed in August 27, 1939, has missed an opportunity to understand some symbolism in the change in the city.
She writes of the Gedächtniskirche on Breitscheidplatz. Rudolf Breitscheid was the leader of the German Social Democratic party in the Weimar republic parliament; he was caught in southern France after the fall of that country and deported back to Germany; he died in a Nazi prison.
The meeting she attended was held in the Otto Braun auditorium of the Staatsbibliothek. Otto Braun was the leader of the German Social Democrats in the Prussian Diet, whose government, in 193132, was ousted by a combined Nazi-Communist vote at a time when the Nazis and Communists were covertly cooperating . . . to destroy the Weimar republic.
Throughout Berlin there are numerous highways (e.g., Otto Suhr Allee) and places marking the memory of German socialists and democrats. Berlin, of course, honors General Lucius Clay, who defended the city during the airlift, with the Clay Allee. Small steps to restitution. Important ones.
Adam Karmon
Cambridge, Massachusetts
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To the Editor:
I applaud and heartily confirm Lucy S. Dawidowicz’s assessment of the German Weltanschauung, especially vis-à-vis the Germans’ guilt-ridden conscience for allowing the Nazis to come to power and unleash their program of hate and destruction upon the Jews and an unsuspecting world. I have also witnessed the sharp contrast between the generally more liberal and educated younger generation of Germans born since Germany’s military defeat in 1945 and some of the still unreconstructed older Germans who, though they may deny it, were not simply dupes of Hitler but also aided and abetted his crimes against humanity.
Whereas younger Germans are indeed “favorably inclined toward Israel”—a fact I can readily confirm from repeated firsthand observations during an Israel study tour last year—I am not quite so certain about their elders, who even today pretend, as Mrs. Dawidowicz notes, that they were unaware of the horrors committed in their name and in their very midst. And in spite of mounting historical evidence, there continue to be anti-Semites who refuse to believe this evidence, and dismiss it as Zionist propaganda and “Auschwitzlüge” (“Auschwitz lies”). Nevertheless, I am encouraged that as critical an observer as Mrs. Dawidowicz seems convinced that young Germans in West Berlin (unlike many Austrians) earnestly desire to know about the hideous past and wish to draw a lesson from it so that the crimes of their elders will not be repeated.
Yet when all is said and done, this writer at least is compelled to echo the skepticism of Nobel Peace Prizewinner Elie Wiesel who in his book Against Silence (1985) scored the passivity of these elders, the passivity of the world as a whole which remained silent while Hitler committed his crimes against European Jewry. “Until we find out,” says Wiesel, “why men act the way they do, everything is in doubt: God, man, morality, life.”
Henry Regensteiner
New York City
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To the Editor:
Lucy S. Dawidowicz has written another excellent article, in which she presents a unique and personal picture of Germany today. However, despite her impression that Germany has undergone a postwar transformation, one cannot help wondering if in their hearts the Germans have changed at all.
According to the percentages given by Mrs. Dawidowicz, 15 to 30 percent of the German people still harbor anti-Semitic attitudes; another 5 to 10 percent belong to the extreme Right, and a certain percentage to the New Left. I assume that these figures represent only West Germany. By adding the East German Left and its Nazi sympathizers, plus the so-called modern anti-Zionists and the thousands of prewar foreign Nazi volunteers who reside in Germany with their families, one may arrive at a figure not much different from the original core of Nazis in 1933. . . .
I honestly believe, however, that modern Germany will not be the first to show its true colors; that distinction now belongs to Austria and its President. As a survivor who knew both Germans and Austrians under the worst conditions, I would, if given the chance to choose between a true German and an Austrian, take my chance with the German. . . .
Jan Reynolds
Riverdale, New York
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To the Editor:
Lucy S. Dawidowicz hesitated about being “In Berlin Again,” but she easily overcame her doubts with the assertion that “Berlin stands at the center of Europe, at the crossroads of East and West”—as if it had been moved lately. The fact is that everyone finds an excuse to visit a country which committed the worst crimes in history and surely in the history of the Jewish people. The lines have been drawn once and for all: one cannot weep on Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, and go to Berlin.
Mrs. Dawidowicz went in order to attend a “scholarly meeting” about the life of Jews in Nazi Germany. . . . According to her, the conference became a “mini-drama of Jewish history” in the sense that the Germans were confronted with their past.
This is hard to believe. The reaction of German Jews to persecution was and is of only passing interest to Germans of today. The creative powers this persecution released in the 30’s were centered around a deepening of Jewishness and went on despite all difficulties. I fail to see the connection between this historic fact and the Germans of today.
Anyway, the presence of a few exiles coming from New York will not be able to change attitudes acquired over a lifetime. At best, the presentations will be valued as crude propaganda. I would prefer that the President of West Germany tell his countrymen that they are lying if they pretend not to have known the fate of those deported and that they should come forward to tell the truth. After forty years one man stands up. This shows that if there should ever be a trend toward humanity and a renouncing of the past, it can only come from inside Germany, from people of stature and authority, not from exiles. . . .
To quote Chancellor Helmut Kohl, as Mrs. Dawidowicz does, is not convincing. As a boy he was a member of the Hitler Jugend and he was indoctrinated with massive doses of Nazi propaganda. The Bitburg affair cannot be forgotten: with Kohl’s permission SS-killers assemble every year. Words are fine; deeds would be better.
So it all comes down to a bunch of illusions which polls and statistics cannot support. I have learned not to believe any German. After speaking to hundreds of them (outside Germany), I found only one who confessed to having been a Nazi. Before fleeing Germany, I was manager of the Berlin Office of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency from 1934 to 1938, and I can testify that even former schoolmates of mine who once paraded in their Nazi uniforms now claim that they were never supporters of the regime. But a survey conducted by the University of Cologne a few years ago showed an overwhelming animosity toward Jews and an explosive pattern of rejection.
If Mrs. Dawidowicz had read the inadequate and almost sickening description of the Nazi period in history textbooks now used in German high schools, she would not be so optimistic about the future generation. In school they do not learn about the Nazi past. At home it is taboo to talk about it. . . . Where then shall they learn about the misdeeds of their fathers and grandfathers? The moral devastation the Nazis bequeathed to the German people is there for all to see. The torturers and concentration-camp beasts are still alive. Those Jews who rush to Berlin, Salzburg, and Baden-Baden rub elbows with them. This, too, is a moral question.
Arno Herzberg
Union, New Jersey
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To the Editor:
“In Berlin Again” by Lucy S. Dawidowicz brings back a vital period in Jewish history in a vivid and personal way. Mrs. Dawidowicz makes us remember the past . . . but also evaluates the changes in Berlin today realistically. She writes with a rare blend of historical acumen and compassion for people.
Sylvia Benjamin
Montreal, Quebec
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