German Media and National Identity By Sanna Inthorn

Public debate over German national identity and the past continued to flare up in the 1990s, which saw the enthusiastic public reception of Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (1996). Goldhagen’s thesis argued the case for a German tradition of anti-Semitism and ordinary Germans’ involvement in the Holocaust. The book, which deals with the horrors of genocide in an open and explicit way, was criticised by many historians for its simplistic dichotomy of a perpetrator/victim scenario and a general lack of academic rigor, among other shortcomings. In contrast, the German public welcomed Goldhagen’s attempt to address the question of collective guilt as a chance of escaping a perceived climate of moral indifference (Bartov, 2000, p. 45; Grossmann, 2000, p. 114). Certainly, Hitler’s Willing Executioners was not the first time Germany came face to face with the horrors of national socialism and genocide. The American television series Holocaust (1979) is an example, prior to Goldhagen’s thesis, of a text that punctured the atmosphere of repressing and allowed Germans to discover their past again (Grossmann, p. 96). Yet, in the 1990s, Goldhagen struck a particular cord. After unification, Germany faced a climate of “political, economic, and moral uncertainties” (Grossmann, p. 118). Embracing Goldhagen’s argument offered the possibility of reaffirming the power of the West and its democratic values, not least because Goldhagen suggested that 1945 marked a turning point for German society, which since then had seemingly given up all anti-Semitism (Fulbrook, 1999, p. 230; Grossmann, pp. 118–119; Jeismann, 2001, p. 152). There were signs that a younger generation was more distanced from the past, but at the same time acknowledged the place of Auschwitz in their national history and identity. Younger Europeanised Germans “are less shameful but also less defensive. They seem able to unburden themselves from the ‘moral cudgel’ while still recognising that Auschwitz is an absolutely central and impossible-to-extinguish element of their history and national identity” (Grossmann, p. 128). Arguably, the cumulative effect of debates over German identity and its past—among them the New Left’s challenge to avoidance and judicial delays of the Adenauer era, Brandt’s Ostpolitik, the broadcasting of Holocaust, Bitburg, Weizäcker’s speech, and the Historikerstreit—had kept the Holocaust and the Nazi era in public debate (Herf, 1997, p. 362). It could be said that the conservative government under Kohl confronted a society that had “increasingly adopted the contrasting argument about democracy and memory inaugurated by Heuss and Schumacher” (Herf, p. 362).