DIVIDED MEMORY: The Nazi Past in the Two Germanys.

By Jeffrey Herf. Harvard Univ. Press. 560 pp. $29.95

Herf, a historian at Ohio University, reveals how the leaders of both post-World War II Germanys manipulated memory of the Holocaust for political ends. Rather than following the path of Vergangenheitsbewng (coming to terms with the past) paved in the early postwar years by, for example, the West German Social Democrat Kurt Schumacher and the East German Communist Paul Merker, the two nations construed history through the distorting lens of ideology.

During the 1950s, West German chancellor Konrad Adenauer allowed millions of Nazi-era civil servants and judges to reassume their former positions. Adenauer believed that integrating the former Nazi supporters could help stabilize and nurture the new democracy. The nation paid a heavy price for his decision: a series of scandals about the Nazi records of these officials, which in turn fueled widespread political disaffection, especially among young people. With time, political freedom and open debate led to criticism of the Adenauer years, criticism that included efforts to comprehend the Nazi past.

In the East, Communist Party leader Walter Ulbricht shamelessly followed Stalin’s anti-Semitic policies, purging "Cosmopolitanism" in 1952-53 to establish communist martyrdom at the core of anti-fascist memory. To justify the communist dictatorship, Ulbricht interpreted the murder of millions of Jews as nothing more than confirmation of Nazi brutality. Herf, who gained access to the archives of the Central Committee of the SED (East Germany’s communist party) and those of the Ministry of State Security (the Stasi), is particularly incisive here. Although anti-Nazism became part of the East German collective memory, the "Jewish question" remained largely unconfronted for years. Still, the seeds were planted. In one of its first declarations in 1990, East Germany’s democratically elected parliament— which governed for the six months prior to reunification—expressed remorse for the crimes of the Nazi past and for the policies of the communist regime toward Jewish people.

—Burkhard Koch