Forgetting Hitler

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And yet for all the lamentation, commemoration, and education, consider that in a 2005 poll, one out of every two young Germans under the age of 24 could not define what the Holocaust was. Living in the 21st century, many young Germans no longer want to apologize for the events of the 20th, or to remain shamefaced and burdened with the crimes of their grandparents and great-grandparents-particularly in light of what they view as other nations' more recent atrocities.

This was underscored when the prominent German novelist Martin Walser accepted the Frankfurt Book Fair Peace Prize in 1998. In his speech, Walser called Auschwitz a 'moral cudgel' against Germans, rebuked the 'Holocaust industry,' and condemned the 'exploitation of our disgrace.' It was a watershed moment, for many said that Walser had the courage to finally admit publicly what so many had been thinking privately. The situation takes another complicated turn when you factor in the former East Germany, where Holocaust denial is pervasive, neo-Nazism is on the rise, and anti-Semitism runs high. Last year, the state of Saxony Anhalt was the scene of two particularly ugly incidents. In the small town of Parey, three teenagers forced another to wear a sign with the Nazi-era message 'In this town I'm the biggest swine because of the Jewish friends of mine.' In the village of Pretzien, more than 100 neo-Nazis joined a village bonfire, shouting 'Sieg Heil!' as they threw copies of The Diary of Anne Frank into the flames.

One might think that's exactly the kind of thing that would pop up in classroom discussions about anti-Semitism and the Holocaust. That is not the case. '[We] learn not about anti-Semitism as racism but only about anti-Semitism during World War II,' explains Julianne Wetzel, a research associate at the Center for Research on Anti-Semitism at the Technical University in Berlin. The Holocaust is most often talked about dispassionately in the abstract, as if it were something mounted on a wall or installed behind glass. There is very little discussion about its connection to what the country faces today. And while most Germans would probably describe recent events as the raving xenophobia of right-wing extremists, most still define anti-Semitism in Nazi-era terminology. 'Jews are always seen as victims, never as people,' says Wetzel.

When I asked young Germans if they had ever discussed the Holocaust or the role their relatives may have played in it, I received mixed reactions. Few were told directly about these things, but many had heard about the manifold suffering of their families: the hunger, the bombings, the loss of material comforts. 'A lot of people simply don't deal with it,' says Gerhard Schick, a documentary filmmaker. 'There is a big difference between knowing the facts about Auschwitz and admitting this was something horrible and also admitting that this is part of your personal history.'

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