ABSTRACT
In his October 1998 Frankfurt speech, Walser had referred to the Holocaust Memorial planned for Berlin as the ‘monumentalization of shame’ (Walser 1999:13). He believed that any such memorial would represent the institutionalization of negative moral emotion and the raising of historical guilt to a state creed, forever blocking attempts by Germans to derive strength and orientation from a history that had more to it than National Socialism. The discussion of Walser’s speech in the media often revolved around the Holocaust Memorial. Walser supporters saw in the memorial a prime example of that ‘moral cudgel’ of which Walser had spoken. Bubis supporters defended it as the legitimate, indeed necessary manifestation of Germany’s intention to face the crimes of the holocaust. As a result of the Walser-Bubis debate, support for the memorial became associated with those who wanted to remember the holocaust, criticism of it with those who wanted to forget. This, in turn, meant that SPD Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, initially against the idea of a memorial, felt obliged to support it. The Bubis-Walser debate impacted on the memorial plans in another way. The new government, or at least State Minister for Culture Michael Naumann, favoured a shift away from the idea of a ‘pure’ memorial towards a combination of memorial and documentation centre. The SPD and Green parliamentarians, having no personal experience of Nazism, were aware that young people could not commemorate without first being informed of what it was they were supposed to be commemorating. But the gen-eral agreement that commemoration should be less abstract and symbolic, more ‘concrete’, was also a result of the intense discussion of Walser’s speech.
