The German Genius

elderly Jews already living in Germany. Since the year 2000 German nationality requirements had shed their “blood and soil” criteria, citizenship being extended now to individuals born in Germany to a parent who had resided there for more than eight years. All this pointed to an increasing German accommodation with “foreignness.”
    At the same time, Fischer resisted the concept of normality that reflected the efforts by conservatives to “draw a line” under Germany’s Nazi past and “reinstate a positive German national identity.” Like Fischer, Habermas was also against this. 97
    But some Germans thought obstacles were being put in the way of their return to “normality” (seven-tenths of all Germans were born after World War II). In 1998 the novelist Martin Walser was awarded the prestigious Peace Prize of the German Booksellers Association, and in his acceptance speech—another controversy—he questioned what he saw as an increasing emphasis on the Holocaust in the 1990s, remarking that he himself had begun to “look away” when “constantly subjected to media images of Germany’s shame.” 98 He rejected the new Holocaust Memorial in Berlin as “an instrumentalisation of our shame for present purposes” and though he himself would “never leave the side” of the guilty he insisted that a private conscience, a “redemptive individuality,” was more important and relevant than “constant public preoccupation.” Although many in his audience that day agreed with him (Gerhard Schröder and Joschka Fischer were seen nodding their heads, and he was given a standing ovation), one man, Ignatz Bubis, president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, subsequently attacked Walser for being anti-Semitic in such terms that the Schröder government was forced to acquiesce in building the Holocaust monument. The philosopher Hermann Lübbe made a parallel point to Walser when he said that collective kommunikatives Beschweigen (communicative silence) about the past in the early Federal Republic had enabled West Germany to evolve into a functioning democracy by providing stability. 99 The argument continued (it was too acrimonious to call it a debate). In 2007, Saul Friedländer, the eminent historian of the Holocaust, was the recipient of the Peace Prize and in an interview he gave at the time of the ceremony claimed that Walser’s speech of 1998 was typical of a recurrent German tendency to end concern about the Holocaust.
    Karlheinz Stockhausen created another furor when, at a press conference in Hamburg on September 16, 2001, he described the events of 9/11 as “the greatest possible work of art which ever existed,” an action that “accomplished things beyond music…for ten years people practice incessantly and absolutely fanatically for one concert and then they die. That is the greatest work of art one can imagine in the whole cosmos.” 100 Subsequently Stockhausen’s concerts were canceled and there were calls for him to be placed in an asylum. But as Klaus Scherpe has pointed out, in German literary history there are many fictions of a cataclysmic America, even of New York being destroyed as a symbol of modernization (in the work of Max Dauthendey, Bernhard Kellermann, Gerhart Hauptmann).
    Habermas, who himself received the German Booksellers Peace Prize in October 2001, barely a month after the 9/11 attacks, saw parallels between religious fundamentalism and Nazism. He thought we should not attribute either to “others,” or to “barbarians,” but should recognize that both were the “fruits” (my word, not his) of modernity, that both represented the dark side of the Enlightenment. This is a bleak way for the Germans to achieve “normality,” to recognize that others may have joined them in regard to the commission of atrocities, and not everyone is likely to accept such reasoning anyway. But Habermas was surely right in pleading for “a permanent deconstruction of essential and dogmatic beliefs.” 101
    Finally, two other surveys suggest that a different kind of Germany is at last emerging, that a new phase in its postwar history is now under way. A. Dirk Moses’s study was referred to in the Introduction, when it was explained how he has offered a “generational” model for understanding how Germans have coped—or failed to cope—with the legacy of National Socialism. For Moses, the “Forty-Fivers,” the people who were born in the late 1920s and were on the verge