Speech On German Unity Day 2003
He attracted public attention with a speech on German Unity Day on October 3, 2003. He set out to repudiate the supposed accusation of the Germans being a "nation of perpetrators" ("Tätervolk") during the Holocaust. To his end, he elaborated at length on the involvement of Jews in the violent 1917 Russian Revolution.
Hohmann starts from noting a strong sense of self-contempt among Germans and quotes Hans-Olaf Henkel, the vice president of the Federation of German Industry, who has stated that "Our original sin paralyzes the country". Hohmann thinks that an undue occupation with Germany's past - which he distinguishes from a necessary admission and remembrance of German crimes - lies behind discrimination against fellow-countrymen. Among examples, he mentions the refusal of German government officials to consider demanding compensations by Russia, Poland and the Czech Republic on behalf of forced German labourers in World War II, in the same way as Germany pays compensation for those they forced to labor camps.
He notes that, while the notion of collective guilt is usually denied, it is very much applied to Germans. Other nations tend to white-wash their history, like the French who hail the bloody French revolution as some kind of emancipation and the imperialist dictator Napoleon as a benevolent father of the people. The Germans, on the other hand are depicted in black and white as perpetrators and their enemies as innocent lambs. He vehemently denies the thesis of Daniel Goldhagen about a general German complicity in Hitler's politics.
To illustrate his point, that this treatment of Germans is absurd, he draws a parallel with Jews, who, he argues with painstaking submission of evidence, have, to a remarkable extent taken part in communist activities, such as the Russian revolution. Hohmann states: "Thus one could describe Jews with some justification as a nation of perpetrators...Judged by these facts, it would feel justified to call the Jews a people of 'perpetrators'." His conclusion is: "That may sound terrible. But it would still follow the same logic, as the one used to call the Germans a people of perpetrators." To make it clear that the judgement follows only if you accept the premises he is out for demolishing, he explains that "neither the Germans nor the Jews can be termed a nation of perpetrators".
Hohmann goes on to note that the Jews who participated in revolutionary activities where such who had been alienated from their religion and heritage - a trait, he observes, they shared with national socialists. The target of his speech, hence, is secularisation. "Because of that neither 'Germans', nor 'Jews' are a people of perpetrators. It can be said with every justification, though, that: The Godless, with their godless ideologies were the perpetrators of this last, bloody, Century."
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