Normalising cultural memory? The ‘Walser-Bubis debate’ and Martin Walser’s Novel Ein springender Brunnen

Abstract

The controversy which followed Martin Walser's speech on receipt of the Friedenspreis des deutschen Buchhandels in the Paulskirche in Frankfurt on 11 October 1998 was one of the first major debates on practices of remembering the Third Reich and the Holocaust in Germany after the era of Helmut Kohl (1982-1997). It was also the first full-scale discussion among intellectuals attempting to define a new German national identity - or resisting that aim - in what is now often called the Berlin Republic. In this context it is less important, perhaps, to do full justice to the complex, self-reflexive structure of Walser's speech than to set forth the issues contested in the course of the debate, more or less irrespective of whether Walser actually intended to raise them or not. Key terms and themes of the debate are thus discussed in an analysis that looks in detail at the controversy that ensued rather than the Friedenspreisrede itself. Walser's speech was largely concerned with a critique of the frenzy of media hype and political advantage-seeking that the author sees as characteristic of the public sphere and especially of public reflections on the Shoah. For Walser, the murder of European Jews has thus been instrumentalised by large sections of the media and by an apparently dominant left-liberal intelligentsia as a means of denying German national identity and maintaining the position of a cultural and political elite.