Germans no longer ready to apologise

If you were looking for the acceptable face of post-war Germany, it would be hard to find a better candidate than Klaus von Dohnyani, the former mayor of Hamburg. A lifelong Social Democrat whose father was executed by Hitler, Mr von Dohnyani has been a leading figure on the Left for more than a generation.

So it comes as no surprise that he found himself "speechless" this weekend when he was accused of latent anti-semitism by Ignatz Bubis, the leader of the Jewish community in Germany.

"I have been involved in creating a civil democracy in Germany since 1945. I was invited to speak to the German parliament in 1997 on the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. Bubis was there. He knows my speech," Mr Von Dohnyani wrote in yesterday's Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

It was a different speech that sparked the latest controversy in Germany's relations with its Jews - an address by the novelist Martin Walser to a group of publishers in Frankfurt. Mr Walser, who is also of the Left, complained that the media's preoccupation with the Nazi past made him want to switch off and he condemned "the constant presentation of our shame". Describing the proposed Holocaust memorial in Berlin as "a nightmare the size of a football pitch", he claimed that the memory of Auschwitz was being used to intimidate Germans.

Mr Bubis, who narrowly survived the Holocaust but lost most of his family to Hitler's exterminators, accused the writer of "intellectual arson". Mr von Dohnyani stepped into the argument, condemning "the all too frequent attempts of others to use our conscience for their own advantage, to abuse it, to manipulate it".

He upset nobody by complaining that German schoolchildren had to endure being taunted as "Nazis" when they went abroad and that the British press used images of Hitler in their campaign against the euro. But then he took a step too far.

"Jewish people living in Germany must also, of course, ask themselves if they would have behaved much more bravely than most other Germans if it had only been the disabled, the homosexuals and the gypsies who were taken off to the death camps after 1933," he wrote.

Mr Dohnyani's remark was undoubtedly tasteless and the Jewish leader described it as wicked but his sentiments are shared by many Germans who feel no responsibility for events that took place before they were born.

Germans have been confronting one another regularly with their Nazi past since the trial in 1963 of those who were in charge of the death camp at Auschwitz. The student revolt in 1968 was accompanied by a new openness about the past.

The television series Holocaust gave the process of self-examination a new impetus in 1979 and, more recently, Daniel Goldhagen's book Hitler's Willing Executioners shed new light on the role of ordinary Germans in the murder of the Jews.

Chancellor Gerhard Schroder was still a baby when the second World War ended and, like many members of his generation, he sees no reason why Germany should not be perceived as a "normal" nation. To this end, he is discussing with some of Germany's biggest firms the establishment of a compensation fund to benefit those who were forced into slave labour by the Nazis.

The Nazis forced more than 10 million people to work as slaves in factories, mines and on the land. Companies such as BMW, Daimler-Benz, Krupps, Siemens and Volkswagen used slave labour. Although the German government has paid out almost £1 billion in compensation to Hitler's victims since 1945, few slave labourers have benefited and most private firms have been reluctant to offer any compensation. The companies' change of heart owes less to a sense of moral responsibility than to fear of bad publicity should tens of thousands of former slave labourers take legal action against them. Two American lawyers are already representing thousands of victims. The German firms, are determined to work out a deal before a single case comes to court. The latest wrangle over Germany's relationship with its past highlights how complex the politics of memory can be, so that everyone can feel like a victim. "Germans will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz," according to the Israeli psychoanalyst Zvi Rex.

Another Israeli, the historian Saul Friedlander, asked last week: "Is a normal society a society without remembrance, one that avoids grief, that turns away from its own past so that it can live only in the present and future?"