The "Holocaust" Reception in West Germany: Right, Center and Left

Abstract

I was in Frankfurt last year to do research on aspects of Critical Theory. But, as with other American working in West Germany for similar reasons, the subject of and was never far from my consciousness. The topic was not a new one for me. My father had fled from Hitler's Germany in 1937. I had opposed the war in Vietnam with arguments drawn from Hannah Arendt's reflections on the banality of evil. I viewed my own New Leftism as a logical outcome of a German-Jewish tradition of political and moral intellectualism with which I identified. But living in Frankfurt, while it did not produce a wholly new Jewish identity to supplant a secular left-wing identification, it did encourage my thinking about relations between and Jews, and and the Left. These personal thoughts coincided with a rather bizarre episode. The American culture industry appeared to have made the topic of Germans and Jews a huge public discussion for the first time. This essay on the West German reaction to the tv film Holocaust represents my still uncompleted personal reflections as they intersect with a still uncompleted national debate. Holocaust was shown on West German television during the last week of January, 1979. An estimated 20 million viewers watched each of the four segments of the program.' In the weeks before and months following the telecast, West German newspapers and magazines were filled with material related to the program and its subject. It was not unusual to hear and read that West Germany had engaged in its first widespread public discussion of the