Exorcising Auschwitz German post-Holocaust taboos come under at

BERLIN -- For a nation that swore off nationalism after World War II, Germany is having an unusual election campaign. Taboos that once muted any serious discussion of the topic are being cracked -- not by some far-right fringe, but by the two main candidates.

One is Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder. In May he publicly debated the meaning of patriotism with a popular author who has enraged Jews by saying that the Holocaust is used as "a moral bludgeon" on Germans.

Schroeder's conservative challenger, meanwhile, has engaged in a war of words with the Czech Republic on behalf of ethnic Germans who were expelled at the end of the war.

Germany's last election four years ago focused attention on the arrival of the "Berlin Republic" -- the government's return to a capital with a Nazi past, under the first chancellor young enough to have no memory of the war.

The parliamentary election in September is shaping up as a test of German reflexes as much of Europe moves to the right. Alarming for many, even open anti-Semitism has been revived in German mainstream politics as well as cultural life.

"It's partly about the issue of national identity," said Andrei Markovits, a German history professor at the University of Michigan. "The Germans somehow want to exorcise Auschwitz. But it will still be a stigma for at least a number of decades."

Germans have debated the limits of national pride and their yearning to be a "normal" nation ever since east and west reunited in 1990, re-creating a big Germany of 83 million people at the heart of Europe.

Finding a German identity

The differing approaches were evident in May, when Schroeder and novelist Martin Walser argued the point in a public debate. Where Walser tied nationalism to emotions, Schroeder spoke of not feeling his German identity until age 10, when the German soccer team won the 1954 World Cup. Where Schroeder urged Germans to take pride in their post-World War II accomplishments, Walser delved into the post-World War I peace that in his much-disputed view helped pave the way for Nazism.

Schroeder's challenger, Edmund Stoiber, has also turned his sights to the past, strongly suggesting that the Czech Republic be barred from joining the European Union until revokes the decrees that exiled the Sudeten Germans in 1945.

It's a touchy subject, given collaboration of Sudeten German leaders with Hitler. The last conservative chancellor, Helmut Kohl, had hoped to heal the wound five years ago when he signed a 1997 treaty on good relations with Prague.

Stoiber also insists that Germans need not shy away from debating curbs on the country's liberal immigration policy, rooted partly in a will to atone for Nazi race laws.

Postwar German society, ever fearful of any hint of tolerance for the forces that gave rise to Hitler, has tended to shun displays of nationalism, even dumping the first stanza of its anthem to get rid of "Deutschland Ueber Alles." Germans have also tended to avoid issues such as the Sudeten expulsion, lest they be accused of portraying themselves as the victim.

As for anti-Semitism, Germans have long reassured themselves that it was firmly banished to the far-right fringe, which holds no seats in parliament.

But even that taboo has come under attack -- from a respected party that helped build Germany's postwar democracy and from Walser, whose latest novel was condemned by critics as pandering to anti-Jewish stereotypes.

The opposition Free Democratic Party, yearning to return to its old role as coalition partner in the next government, injected tones widely viewed as anti-Semitic into its populist campaign strategy.

Its deputy leader, Juergen Moellemann, was already known as a supporter of the Arab cause, but he stirred outrage when he warned that Michel Friedman, a Jewish TV talk show host, might fuel anti-Semitism with his "intolerant, spiteful style."

Forced to apologize, Moellemann said he was asserting Germans' right to criticize Israel for its treatment of the Palestinians. But many critics felt he was insinuating that Jews are to blame for anti-Semitism.

"This is the treacherous thing," said Wolfgang Benz, head of the Center for Anti-Semitism Studies at Berlin's Technical University. "Latent resentment of Jews has been around for years, but no democratic party ever set its sights on it."

Meanwhile, Walser's new novel, "Death of a Critic," has gone straight to the top of the best-seller list, accompanied by furious controversy over the unflattering portrayal of its main character -- a Jewish Holocaust survivor modeled on Germany's best-known literary critic, Marcel Reich-Ranicki.

One of Germany's most respected newspapers, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, called the book a "document of hate" and refused to serialize it.

Walser insists the book is a comedy about the power of critics and the media and is not anti-Semitic. German Jewish novelist Rafael Seligmann agrees, though he thinks the novelist has "crazy ideas," and Germany's best-known author, Guenter Grass, has called the attacks on Walser "close to character assassination."