The ‘Anti-Semitism Dispute’

Abstract

Chapter 2 discussed the neue Unbefangenheit associated with the start of Schröder’s SPD-Green government and the debate on Martin Walser’s Peace Prize speech as evidence of challenges both to conventional thinking on the National Socialist past and the existence of the dialectic of normality. This chapter will assess the climate of the discourse at the end of the first term of the SPD-Green coalition in 2002. It is first useful to revisit the ideas of Schröder and Walser. On 8 May 2002, both took part in a public debate in Berlin on the subject of ‘Nation, Patriotism and Democratic Culture’. This debate reconfirmed some of the tendencies outlined thus far: Schröder standing for a neue Unbefangenheit but also Leitverantwortung based on cultural memory of the Nazi past and Walser defending a personal interpretation of this past. Somewhat controversially, the 8 May commemoration was used as an occasion for the SPD to present a positive national narrative, echoing some of the sentiments used by the CDU during the Nationalstolz debate and thereby offering further evidence of the blurring of the conventional distinction between left-wing and right-wing uses of Geschichtspolitik.