Magazine / History / Holocaust Denial / Article | 18/04/2007

The memory of the Holocaust in Israel and Germany

In the historic discourse in Germany and in Israel the Holocaust oscillates between normalisation and instrumentalisation. Where are the differences and where the commonalities, asks Dan Bar-On.

The culture of memory of the Holocaust has changed quite dramatically over the last six decades in both Israel and Germany. In early years after W.W.II the Holocaust was side-tracked in both countries due to more immediate agenda: Israel has just finished its War of Independence, with its own criteria for heroism and loss (which only the Ghetto fighters and Partisans could match) and Germany became the battlefield of the emerging Cold War, divided between West and East.

Remembrance: two million people visit the Jewish memorial Yad Vashem every year.
Photo: AP

Silencing of the past and normalization of the present was the name of the game in both countries. On the other hand, perhaps these new agendas enabled the leaders of both countries to sign an agreement of reparation, as early as 1952, an agreement Israel needed badly for its economic survival and Germany needed for its moral recognition among the post-war democratic Western nations (Segev, 1992).

Only in the mid-fifties, a law was passed in the Israeli Knesset (Parliament) nominating Yad Vashem as the official place of Memory of the Holocaust in Israel, and appointing a special annual memorial day for the Holocaust, in April, a week apart from Passover and from the Independence Day. If still in the 70th, the latter was the most prestigious of these three memorial events among young Israelis, since the early 90th the Memorial Day of the Holocaust became by far the most important day of the three, even in the eyes of Israeli Jewish young people whose parents emigrate from Arab countries (Bar-On & Selah, 1991). This can be an indicator of the dramatic changes that took place in Israel in relation to the collective memory of the Holocaust and its role in becoming the corner stone of the collective Israeli identity since the eighties (Bar-On 1999).

In Germany, silence and distortion dominated the scene in early years. The crimes against humanity of the Nazi era were neither taught in schools nor part of the unofficial daily discourse. In a study of German students, as late as the early 90th, only 11% knew or admitted that their grandparents have been in the Nazi party, while 16% believed their grandparents were in the resistance and 49% did not know anything about their forefathers during that era (Bar-On, Hare, Biener & Brusten, 1993). Perhaps, not by coincidence, in Germany an official memorial day was designated only after the Unification of Germany in 1989 (January 27th, the day Auschwitz was taken over by the Red Army), and a central memorial place of the Holocaust in Berlin, the renewed Capital, is being completed only these days, after a long controversy concerning its location and nature: Among others, should the nation where the Nazi perpetrators came from remember its Jewish victims only? Should such a place not focus on its past perpetrators? The question is now – will the new site in Berlin become part and parcel of every official visit in Berlin, as Yad Vashem became for the Israeli government over the last decades? In this context, it is interesting to notice that Germans allowed themselves only recently to mourn their own losses, in Dresden or of the ethnical cleansing from Czechoslovakia and from the East (Hirsch, 2004). Perhaps, Germans felt earlier that they had no right to mourn their own losses, in the light of what happened to the victims of the Nazis during the Holocaust.
I would like to suggest that in both countries memory culture and the culture of de-memorizing the Holocaust are interwoven. These happen on at least two levels: The public-political level, where the culture of memory became more and more instrumentalized for political benefits, and the private level, where the working through of the past, thereby delineating it from current issues, is the more important process, though more difficult to achieve. Sometimes, political efforts to over-emphasize the memory of the Holocaust backlash in the form of a de-memorizing process on the more private level, and visa versa. As I am by far more familiar with the Israeli culture of memory then that in Germany, most of my discussion will focus on the Israeli scene.

I had recently the opportunity to work in parallel on the after-effects of the Holocaust on second and third generations and on the present Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I would like to share with you some of my impressions and thoughts concerning the interaction between them. I view Israel's current situation as a state of condensed interaction of conflicts in which we do not have the privilege to disassociate them from each other and work them through separately, one by one. I will focus on that aspect mainly in relation to the private grassroots level

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