Germany: Ambivalence Amid Plenty

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When the war ended, Ralph Giordano, the son of a Sicilian musician and a German-Jewish woman, debated whether he should stay in Hamburg. The humiliations suffered during the Hitler years were fresh in his mind. He had been dismissed from an elite school because of his background; his father had lost his job for refusing to divorce his wife. But Giordano decided to stay. He loves the language, he says, the culture, the country. He wanted to be part of cleansing Germany of residues of Nazism. "If I had gone away," he explains, "be it to the antipodes, I would still be on earth. And then I | would have learned about the continued existence of National Socialist thinking in this country. It would have been intolerable for me not to have at least tried to combat it."

An acclaimed author, Giordano has spent his life waging war on what he calls Germany's "second guilt," the subconscious denial of responsibility for the Holocaust. Others share that mission. Says Kranz: "I have an obligation to discuss the Holocaust and the future with Germans, non-Jewish friends and the press. I want to go to bed at night with a clear conscience."

Werner Bergmann, a researcher at the Center for Research into Anti-Semitism, estimates that 5% of Germans are hard-core anti-Semites. "Anti-Semitism," he says, "is roughly as prevalent in West Germany as it is in other Western European countries." Heinz Galinski, the chairman of the Central Council of Jews, the umbrella group of all Jewish congregations in West Germany, agrees. Says he: "We've always had anti-Semitism here. But we cannot say that it has increased in recent months or years."

History makes every anti-Semitic incident resound more in Germany than perhaps anywhere else. In Frankfurt a year ago, the windows of a Jewish school were shattered by a bomb. A girl from Frankfurt remembers her father being called a Saujude (Jewish pig) at a football match. Jews were appalled at the insensitivity of those who wanted to designate Nov. 9 as a holiday marking the fall of the Berlin Wall; that date is the anniversary of Kristallnacht, the violent outburst in 1938 that launched the Nazis' all-out campaign against Jews.

Prejudice may grow with unification because antiforeign sentiment has surged visibly in East Germany. During the March election campaign in the G.D.R., small groups of ultra-right demonstrators sometimes supplemented the cries of "One German Fatherland!" with "Germany for the Germans! Out with the foreigners!" and "Jude verrecke!" -- "Drop dead, Jew!" Says Irene Runge, a Jewish professor of cultural anthropology at East Berlin's Humboldt University: "Never for a moment do I forget that I am in Germany."

Under the cloak of calling itself an antifascist state, East Germany would not acknowledge responsibility for the crimes of the Hitler period until the Volkskammer did so April 12. The years of silence may have stunted public awareness of the issue and, coupled with the unpopularity of the ousted Communist regime, have led to fears that the old Nazi caricature of "Jewish Bolsheviks" may be revived.