Martin Walser - Political Engagement - Peace Prize of The German Book Trade - Frankfurt Speech and The Walser-Bubis Debate

Frankfurt Speech and The Walser-Bubis Debate

In Frankfurt, Walser made his acceptance speech with the title
Erfahrungen beim Verfassen einer Sonntagsrede (Experiences when writing the regular soapbox-speech):

Everybody knows our historical burden, the never ending shame, not a day on which the shame is not presented to us. But when every day in the media this past is presented to me, I notice that something inside me is opposing this permanent show of our shame. Instead of being grateful for the continuous show of our shame I start looking away. I would like to understand why in this decade the past is shown like never before. When I notice that something within me is opposing it, I try to hear the motives of this reproach of our shame, and I am almost glad when I think I can discover that more often not the remembrance, the not-allowed-to-forget is the motive, but the exploitation of our shame for current goals. Always for the right purpose, for sure. But yet the exploitation. Auschwitz is not suitable for becoming a routine-of-threat, an always available intimidation or a moral club or also just an obligation. What is produced by ritualisation has the quality of a lip service . The debate about the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin will show, in posterity, what people do who feel responsible for the conscience of others. Turning the centre of the capital into concrete with a nightmare, the size of a football pitch. Turning shame into monument.

At first the speech did not cause a great stir. Indeed, the audience present in Church of St. Paul received the speech with applause, though Walser's critic Ignatz Bubis did not applaud, as confirmed by television footage of the event. Some days after the event, and again on 9 November 1998, the 60th anniversary of the Kristallnacht pogrom against German Jews, Bubis, president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, accused Walser of "intellectual arson" (geistige Brandstiftung) and claimed that Walser's speech was both "trying to block out history or, respectively, to eliminate the remembrance" and pleading "for a culture of looking away and thinking away". Then the controversy started. As described by Karsten Luttmer: Walser replied by accusing Bubis to have stepped out of dialog between people. Walser and Bubis met on 14 December at the offices of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung to discuss the heated controversy and to bring the discussion to a close. They were joined by Frank Schirrmacher of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and Salomon Korn of the Central Council of Jew in Germany. Afterward, Bubis withdrew his claim that Walser had been intentionally incendiary, but Walser maintained that there was no misinterpretation by his opponents.