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GERMANY Anti-Semitism and the GDR elections ON JANUARY 29 1989, the West German extreme right party, the Republicans, entered the Berlin Senate in triumph with 11 representatives and 7.5% of the votes. Comparable results were recorded in other regions. The principal leader of this neo-Nazi movement, Franz Schonhuber, a former SS instructor, is overtly antisemitic. In his public declarations he limits himself to affirming that "the history of Germany should not be reduced to Auschwitz", but racist and anti-semitic slogans such as "Liquidate the Turks" and "Turn the Jews into smoke" suddenly appeared on the walls of Berlin (see Le Monde, February 10, 1990 and El Pais, February
Today, with the perspective of German reunification, the blustering propaganda of the Republikaners has become even louder, and, unhappily, could find a certain echo. For Schonhuber, the return to the Greater Germany of pre-war times is a "divine mission" for the German people. If this is accompanied by a new mounting of anti-semitism "it is the Jews who have
In an insidious form, anti-semitism has begun to impregnate the West German media. Prior to the East German elections of March 18, the target of this campaign was Gregor Gysi, the secretary of the strangers, non-Germans, indeed "enemies" of Germany. It is then necessary to identify them with "Communism" show that the reunification of Germany must overcome the resistance of two "anti-national" forces — the Jews and the Communists. Hitler used to make hysterical Bolshevism", the mortal enemy of the "Aryan race". Today other expressions are used — the language of racial biology is no longer fashionable — but the logic
The terrain for this anti-semitic offenSive had already been prepared, by the revisionist historians of the Federal Republic - Ernst Nolte, Andreas Hillgruber, Klaus Hildebrand, etc. In the colconservative daily, the Frankfurter Allgemaine Zeitung, they have expressed their desire to "normalize" German history, finally considering Nazism as simply a stage of the national past. They stress the importance of going beyond "a past that does not wish to pass" so as to reaffirm the will of Germany to play the role of a great power "at the heart of Europe".
According to E. Nolte, the true responsibility for the genocide belongs rather to the October Revolution, which gave birth totalitarianism" unleashed a spiral of violence and "Asiatic barbarism" culminating in the Second World War (see "Before History", Edi-
AROUND THE WORLD was undoubtedly the work of Hitler, it would never have seen the light of day without Marx, another well known nasty
And in the GDR? Here, anti-semitism has "officially" disappeared since the end of the war. For Walter Ullbricht and Erich Honecker the only enemies of the Nazi regime were the Soviet Union and the German Communist Party (KPD). Auschwitz was only a "detail" of history. But the November revolution brought to light some of the more sombre pages in the history of Stalinism. In a pathetic effort, the reformed SED changed its point of view on the Jewish question but, alas, chose the worst way to do it.
On February 8 of this year, the then Prime Minister Hans Modrow declared solemnly that the GDR recognized "the responsibility of the German people in its entirety" for the crimes against the Jews by the Nazi regime (see Le Monde, February 9, 1990). Now, this declaration is fairly grotesque, for several reasons. On the one hand, it only reverses the idea of a "negative essence" attributed by the Nazis to the Jews, attributing it to
On the other hand, it appears as all the more grotesque in that it is made by a party which, far from representing "the German people in its entirety", no longer even represents its own members. What would the old German Communists - there are still some left —who suffered first Hitler's prisons and then the cells of Prussian Stalinism, make of such a declaration?
More modestly and more honestly, the leaders of the PDS could recognize which they have never done - their own responsibilities. Between 1928 and 1933, their ancestors - the KPD of the "heroic comrade Thalmann" — did not hesitate to ally themselves with the Nazis to combat "social fascism". According to Die Rothe Fahne, the KPD daily, it was not necessary to unite against Nazism, because Hiter's victory would open the way ic ions du Cerf, Paris. 1988). If Auschwitz proletarian revolution. > reconstituted East German Communist