Forgetting Hitler

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Disenfranchised, angry, and frustrated at their treatment as second-class citizens, youngsters in these communities are resorting to a diet of jingoistic antagonisms. With little education or understanding of German history or Middle Eastern affairs, they are exposed via cable and satellite television to a barrage of brutal images of Israeli troops, as well as to the kind of vehemently anti-Semitic propaganda regularly shown in Arab and Muslim countries by stations such as Hezbollah's Beirut-based Al-Manar, which is banned in the United States, France, Spain, and other countries. Popular entertainment includes the TV series Zahra's Blue Eyes, about a Palestinian girl who is kidnapped by an Israeli army captain so he can steal her eyes for his own blind child, and Valley of the Wolves, a Turkish blockbuster that featured the atrocities of U.S. troops in Iraq, Jews infiltrating Turkey, and a Jewish doctor who exports the organs of Muslim prisoners to America and Israel.

To deduce that what is happening within Germany's Muslim community is merely a cultural export, however, is to see only part of the story. These developments actually reflect a maelstrom of critical social issues unfolding in broader German society. While many in the Muslim community have come to see Jews as a privileged minority whose history takes up a considerable amount of the country's consciousness, so do a number of Germans. 'You can't just blame the images on Al-Manar,' says Andreas Zick, a social psychologist at the University of Bielefeld's Institute for Interdisciplinary Research on Conflict and Violence. When it comes to Israel, he says, these views 'are reinforced in German media. They are just not as vulgar.'

One of the most conspicuous aspects of contemporary German identity is a preoccupation with remembering and confronting the past. There is even a word for it: Vergangenheitsbewaltigung. Several Germans have remarked to me that their nation is nothing like Austria, which still views itself as a victim of the Nazis rather than as an accomplice. And in part they are right. No other country has done as much as Germany has to look squarely into the face of its darkest impulses. In 1996 the government sanctioned Holocaust Memorial Day. Two years ago, the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, composed of 2,711 sunken granite slabs, was unveiled over five acres in central Berlin.

Even as the Nazi era recedes deeper into history, an ongoing excavation of the past continues, churning up new and disturbing facts and arguments. Daniel Goldhagen's 1996 book Hitler's Willing Executioners, which indicted all Germans in the atrocities of the 1940s, was a best seller here, though it was highly criticized. And the myth that only the SS carried out atrocities was shattered when the controversial exhibition Crimes of the Wehrmacht (the German army) traveled across the country beginning in 1995. The country was captivated by the film Schindler's List, and the government awarded director Steven Spielberg the Great Cross of Merit with Star in 1998 for his 'very noticeable contribution to the issue of the Holocaust' through his work on the film and for the Shoah Visual History Foundation.

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