The German Genius

Americans, and 50 percent of Britons were proud of being British, only 20 percent of Germans were proud of being German. Michael Stürmer, another historian, argued that only by restoring their history to themselves could Germans recover their pride again. He added that Germans were “obsessed with their guilt,” and that this obsession was interfering with their ability to develop a sense of national identity, which by implication had political and cultural consequences. He resented the implication, he said, that Germany “must be viewed continually as a patient in therapy.” 29 As historian Charles Maier put it, “There has been no closure in this debate, only exhaustion.” 30
    This was underlined by the Jenninger affair. In November 1988, at a ceremony to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of Kristallnacht , Philip Jenninger, president of the Federal German parliament (and therefore the second-highest official, after the president of the republic himself), delivered a speech in which he treated the Holocaust as an historical event and therefore not necessarily unique, and as one in which, moreover, many Germans were “bystanders”—i.e., not directly responsible. Although many people, including many Americans, thought his speech was courageous, many others were outraged and Jenninger was forced to retire. 31
    The same memory pattern repeats itself in respect to art. It was only in the mid-1990s that the world belatedly woke up to the fact that thousands of paintings—old masters and Impressionists alike—which had been looted by the Nazis from their Jewish owners, were circulating freely on the auction market, and had been doing so since shortly after 1945. Auction catalogs had for years openly printed the provenance of paintings, stipulating that they had been acquired by prominent Nazis, from Hermann Göring down to well-known dealers, but for sixty years no one had paid proper attention. It was only after two Russian art historians discovered a cache of pictures in Moscow—pictures that had been thought destroyed in Berlin—and the strengthening feeling about the Holocaust, that this scandal was fully exposed. The same was true about “dormant accounts” in Swiss banks. Here too, countless accounts belonging to Jews who had been sent to the death camps were “rediscovered” in Switzerland in the late 1990s, when almost anyone could have spotted this outrage much earlier. (One of the reasons the Swiss refused earlier claims was that claimants had no death certificates, as if the SS issued death certificates in the camps.) In March 2006, a Swiss book, Observe and Question , alleged that, during World War II, the Swiss authorities had turned away thousands of Jewish refugees who attempted to cross into neutral Switzerland. Swiss nationalists vowed to block distribution of the book. Here, too, this information could have been exposed much earlier.
    The same argument applies to Belgium. The country’s prime minister formally apologized to the Belgian Jewish community for its role in the Holocaust—but not until 2002. The conclusions of a government-sponsored report, 1,116 pages long and titled Submissive Belgium , were read before Parliament in Brussels in February 2007, concluding that its top civil servants had acted in a way “unworthy for a democracy.” The Belgian government, exiled in London during World War II, had advised its civil servants to work with the occupying Nazis to prevent economic breakdown but in many cases, the report said, that had “deteriorated into collaboration with persecution of the Jews and their deportation to concentration camps.” After the war, it went on, many cases (of reparation) were considered “too delicate to handle” by the military courts and “every responsibility of the Belgian authorities in the persecution and deportation of Jews was rejected.” Again, an inordinate delay. 32
    Despite making it illegal to deny the Holocaust as early as 1946, Austria, too, has had a problem in assimilating its role in World War II—and not just because Hitler was, of course, not German but Austrian. * Forty percent of the personnel and most of the commandants of the death camps at Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka were Austrian, as were 80 percent of Eichmann’s staff—and Eichmann himself. Despite these unwholesome statistics, the country’s first postwar president, the veteran Socialist leader Dr. Karl Renner, emphasized that there was “no room” for