The Jewish Question in the German Question

Abstract

Bitburg and the Historikerstreit are the most recent reminders that the Nazi past continues to resonate in contemporary West German politics. The topos of the singularity of the Holocaust in these highly public confrontations with the past demonstrates, moreover, that the Jewish Question in today's Germany is simultaneously a sovereignty question. Since 1945, every expansion of German sovereignty has, at least symbolically, been linked to a particular image of the Nazi past. The symbolic value of the Jewish Question in the history of the Federal Republic of Germany is to hold German sovereignty in escrow. Conversely, each reevaluation of the past on the part of Germans opens for Jews a new chapter in the equally permanent link to their own collective nightmare. Since 1945 there has been what Dan Diner, writing in the first Jewish-German intellectual journal since Weimar, Babylon, described as a negative symbiosis between Germans and Jews, a kind of opposing commonality.' Yet in all the furor over the new historical revisionism, the deeper reasons for the emergence of a new strategy of oblivion have largely escaped critical scrutiny. It is not sufficient to moralize about the misuse of comparisons, or to invoke the phrase relativization to impart a sense of their injustice vis-a-vis the victims.2 The attempt to eradicate the burden of the past by means of a casuistry of comparative genocide, the symbolic reconciliation of the German and American