Towards Atonement

In the last week of the Jewish year 5711, West Germany's Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, waxy-pale and dressed in funereal black coat and striped trousers, gravely strode to the rostrum in Bonn's Bundeshaus. Speaking for new Germany at its best, the 75-year-old Christian Democrat offered a measure of atonement for old Germany at its worst.

Hitler's Nazis, he said, had committed "terrible . . . unspeakable crimes . . . in the name of the German people, imposing on them the obligation to make moral and material amends." The Chancellor reminded the deputies that the West German Constitution rejects "any form of racial discrimination." He pledged his government to unrelenting prosecution of all Jew-baiters.* The Bundestag listened in strained silence, broken only by the distracting paper-shuffling of a neo-Nazi member, sideburned Franz Richter, who was ostentatiously leafing through his morning mail.

Intent on his manuscript, Adenauer read on: "The Federal [Bonn] government is prepared jointly with representatives of Jewry and the State of Israel. . . to bring about a solution of the material reparation problem in order to facilitate the way to a spiritual purging of unheard-of suffering . . ." At this point Richter, the neo-Nazi, stomped from the chamber. But when Adenauer finished his address, the rest of the Bundestag rose in a standing ovation. As Adenauer hurried off the rostrum, speakers for all major parties came forward to echo and endorse his sentiments. All, that is, but the Communists.

Bonn's heartening gesture to the Jews--though it persisted in the theory that Hitler's deeds were done "in the name of the German peoples" rather than by them--was unquestionably motivated in part by Germany's guilty conscience. It was also the result of Israeli and allied pressure. Last spring the Israeli government (which refuses to speak directly to Germany) demanded, in notes to the Big Four powers, $1.5 billion in reparations from West Germany to help pay the cost of resettling Jews in Israel. Most likely form of payment, if & when a German-Israeli deal is negotiated: manufactured goods.

The Jewish reaction to Adenauer was skeptically approving. Remembering the 6,000,000 Jews exterminated by Hitler, the Jerusalem Post commented: "There is no Canossa where Germans can perform penance except that reared by their own conscience." But it also applauded Adenauer's "moral impulse and courage."

* Restitution of property losses to Jews still left in West Germany (22,000 out of a prewar Reich total of 550,000) has been going on since 1947. In the U.S. and French zones, about half of the claims are settled; in the British zone the percentage of settlement is much lower.

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