What is the new historians' dispute about, whose tricks the audience can follow in the newspapers, on the radio and on the Internet?
And whose vehemence and sharp tone must appear incomprehensible to anyone who is confronted with it only as an occasional reader or casual listener.
Claudius Seidl
Editor in the features section.
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When it comes to criticism of German remembrance and remembrance, which (as the Australian genocide researcher Dirk Moses writes) is based on a catechism, a collection of rules of faith, the most important of which is that the Holocaust is to be regarded as a singular and incomparable crime against humanity, why every contextualization, every historicization is prohibited? And which politically amounts to the fact that the Germans, as the people of the perpetrators, are bound to irrefutable loyalty to the state of Israel, no matter how badly it subjugates the Palestinians? In addition, this German catechism obscures the view of the crimes of colonialism, which first formed the overall context in which the Holocaust must also be viewed.
Or, as the other side assumes, is it primarily about the left trying what the conservatives failed to do in the first historians' dispute: to relativize the Holocaust and interpret it as one crime among many, just one chapter in the long history of crimes of the West, with the result that the German guilt no longer weighs so heavy and the German obligation to Israel is no longer binding, yes, in general, that the State of Israel is no longer treated as a place of refuge and potentially the last bastion of the Jewish people to be defended by all means would have to?
But as a settlement colony of white people and as an oppressor and colonizer of the Palestinian people?
Who can walk upright again now?
The writer and historian Per Leo has in his new book “Tränen ohne Trauer” (Klett-Cotta, 20 euros), which is more an essay than a historical-political non-fiction book and yet grounded with many footnotes (and which one repeatedly contradicts the intentions of his Author is allowed to read), given a few surprising answers, among which possibly the most useful, the politically most urgent and closest to life is that all the commemoration and remembrance, the beautiful wreaths and the serious expressions in front of monumental memorials so often so hollow, false, lying are that the greatest merit of this historians' dispute could possibly lie in this: namely that those who oppose relativization and post-colonization should urgently rethink their own rituals, ways of speaking and gestures of emotion.
Singularity is a term that is more sharply defined in astronomy (the place where space-time curves into infinity) than in the history of the crimes of mankind, an abstract, non-illustrative term and, when it comes to German crimes, a thesis, which one can formulate a hundred times and reject again without having gained a lot of new knowledge. As long as you don't ask what was so unique for whom and why.
What was unique for the Jews was the experience that after more than two thousand years of persecution, hatred and discrimination, at a time when many could hope that conditions would improve, they saw themselves surrounded by neighbors who had decided to do so to wipe out the entire people of the Jews. And who did that until Allied armies stopped the killing. What was unique was that the Germans, a civilized people in civilized Europe, elected a criminal as their ruler barely two generations after they had finally become a nation and then still defended the regime with the last of their strengths, as almost everyone knows or suspects could see where the Jewish neighbors had been dragged and what monstrous things had been done to them.