By Jonathan Freedland (THE GUARDIAN, 25/01/06):
I am writing these words on a train, travelling through Germany. And yet, it hardly feels strange at all. There was a time when a journey like this would have felt like the breaking of a taboo: the associations with the wartime past - trains, Germany - were too obvious to ignore.
I remember my first trip to this country, as a student nearly 20 years ago. Some relatives wished me luck, as if I was entering a danger zone; others wondered if it was right to go at all, as if my mere presence in Germany was an act of unwarranted, premature forgiveness. The emotions behind those sentiments were alive in me, too: I found myself looking at every white-haired man or aged matron, wondering what secrets they concealed. The language itself was abrasive to my ears: I heard not German, but Nazi.
I was not proud of these reactions. Most progressive people of my generation had moved beyond the automatic association of Germany with the war - leaving that crude equation to the "Achtung Surrender" tabloids and 'Allo 'Allo. They had come to see the country as a gentle, liberal giant, pacifist by instinct and good Europeans: Scandinavia on the Rhine. When most men of my age referred to the historic hurt inflicted by the Germans, they were referring to 1966.
But Jews struggled to feel that way. I was raised in a home that flinched at brand names like Krupp, Siemens or Mercedes - words that instantly conjured the Nazi horror. The place names - Berlin, Munich, Nuremberg - were icy to the touch.
Two decades on and those feelings are fading. Jews who would once have stayed away from Germany now visit without much of a second thought. Part of that is a response to the process of reckoning that Germans themselves have undergone in the 60 years since the fall of Hitler. The country has faced its past squarely. It tells its children the ugly truth of the Third Reich and has changed its national self-image, perhaps even its national character, as a result. As one woman explained to me in Hamburg, Germans will never again be able to feel the simplistic patriotism available to other nations: "The one sentence we can never say is, 'We have a proud history'." A once martial people has changed course: I was told that in today's Germany, the job that carries least social status is that of soldier.
Jews have responded to that. They can see that, even if the odd octogenarian in Munich or Dusseldorf had a murderous wartime career, today's Germany is a different country. But Jews have also made a shift of their own. As the Holocaust moves from memory to history, they have come to see the Nazi period as part of the past rather than the living present. That has not brought some glib forgiveness, or any easy resolve to "move on". But it has seen a change.
At its most trivial, it is a gradual closing of the wound. This month, the Mel Brooks musical The Producers opened in Israel - featuring a Hebrew Springtime for Hitler, an Israeli dressed as the Fuhrer and multiple swastikas. "Yes, Hitler is in Tel Aviv and the sky isn't falling," wrote the Israeli commentator Tom Segev. A recent episode of Larry David's Curb Your Enthusiasm, the cult US comedy, featured a row between a Holocaust survivor and a brainless ex-contestant on the reality TV show Survivor, in which the latter insists he suffered greater hardship than the former. ("We had to wear flip-flops.") David got away with it. What would once have been utterly forbidden, and too painful, is slowly becoming possible.
This is welcome for those Jews who have wanted to step out of the shadow of the Shoah. It's true that some have made the Nazi era the centre of their Jewish identity: witness the American Jews putting enormous energies into creating Holocaust museums in even relatively small towns and cities. But others have wanted to celebrate Jewish life rather than forever mourn Jewish death.
Last year I published a book, Jacob's Gift, which told three stories drawn from my own family. One centred on an immigrant to London who reinvented himself in Palestine as a servant of the British mandate; another told of a communist great uncle who led a union of Jewish tailors in London's East End; the third focused on my mother, whose teenage years were spent in the new state of Israel. The Holocaust was present in all three stories, but it was not their centre. And I noticed something in the reaction among Jewish readers: they seemed almost relieved. That was one of my objectives. I had wanted to defy the Nazi propagandist and anti-semite, David Irving, who likes to declare that the Holocaust was the only interesting thing that ever happened to the Jews. I wanted to write a book about 20th-century Jewish life that was not covered in swastikas.
But this desire to emerge from the Shoah shadow runs into constant obstacles. For one thing, it seems to loom larger the further we get away from it. The flow of books and films on the Nazi era does not slow; switch on any of the TV documentary channels and it's a good bet you'll come across archive footage of goosesteppers and brownshirts. Other than Henry VIII, Hitler may be the only historical figure children in British schools ever learn about.
And there is a larger, sadder problem. No matter how much time seeks to heal this wound, there are those determined to reopen it. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran may be too ignorant to realise what effect it has when he strives again and again to question the veracity of the death of 6 million Jews at the hands of the Nazis. He has, in the six short months since his election, variously called for Israel to be wiped off the map, branded the Holocaust a myth, suggested a Tehran conference for the world's Holocaust deniers and, most recently, told Europe to brace itself to take in millions of Jewish refugees from Israel.
Coming from a man apparently bent on building a nuclear bomb, how does he expect all that to sound to Jewish ears, except like a warning of a terrible calamity to come, one with the most painful historical echoes? The rest of the world may look at Jews and see a well-established, secure community, and they may look at Israel and see an armed occupier and regional superpower. But when a man like Ahmadinejad starts talking, Jews and Israelis look in the mirror and see something very different: that famous image of a frightened child, his arms in the air, cowering from Nazi guns. It may sound like a form of collective madness, but remember: the gas chambers were in operation only 60 years ago. If the Jewish psyche is still wounded, that should hardly be a surprise.
And the trouble appears closer to home, too. The Muslim Council of Britain will once again boycott tomorrow's national ceremony to mark Holocaust Memorial Day. MCB spokesman Inayat Bunglawala was asked on the BBC Radio 4 Sunday programme whether he was not sending a signal by refusing to attend. "We also send a signal by staying away from the Gay Pride march," he said. How could he compare the two, he was asked. "It is a religious principle," he replied.
The effect of such actions is to make Jews, who might otherwise be trying to move forward, rush back to assert all over again both the truth and singular nature of the Nazi whirlwind. We want to escape this shadow, but deny its reality and you plunge us right back into it.