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Peter Boenisch, a Bonn government spokesman, complaining about the uproar in the U.S. over the Bitburg visit, said, "We can't start denazification of the cemeteries." Exactly. That's the reason to stay away.
The President's lapse is not just moral but historical. At first, he declared that he would put the past behind him: reopen no wounds, apportion no blame, visit no death camp. But one cannot pretend that the world began on V-E day 1945. One has to ask the question: Where did the new Germany come from? Some concession had to be made to history. The President decided to make it. And he chose precisely the wrong history.
V-E day separates two German histories. The moral rebirth of Germany after the war was, and is, premised on a radical discontinuity with the Nazi past. The new Germany is built around the thin strand of decency, symbolized by people like Adenauer and Brandt, that reaches back to the pre-Nazi era. If history is what the President wants to acknowledge, it is this German history that deserves remembrance. For Kohl and Reagan to lay a wreath at Bitburg is to subvert, however thoughtlessly, the discontinuity that is the moral foundation of the new Germany.
It is a Soviet propagandist's delight. The Soviets play the Nazi-West Germany theme night and day. It is false. West Germany's honorable history is its refutation. Why then a visit that cannot fail symbolically to affirm the lie?
This is not just bad history, but terrible politics. It is all the more ironic because the only conceivable reason for the Bitburg visit in the first place is politics: alliance politics. Kohl had a problem. His exclusion from D-day ceremonies last year gave ammunition to those who complain that Germany bears equally the burdens of the Western alliance but is denied equal respect. Reagan wanted to use this ceremony to help Kohl.
Now, strengthening democratic and pro-NATO forces in Germany is a laudable end, particularly in light of domestic and Soviet pressures on Germany over Euromissile deployment. But surely there are less delicate instruments than V-E day for reinforcing NATO. And surely there are limits to alliance politics. At this point President Reagan is reluctant to change his plans because of the acute embarrassment it would cause the German government. But that injury is certain to be more transient than the injury to memory that would result from sticking to his plans.
The Bitburg fiasco is a mess, but even messes have a logic. This incident is a compound of some of the worst tendencies of the Reagan presidency: a weakness for theater, a neglect of history and a narrowly conceived politics.
Commemorating victory over radical evil demands more than theater, history or politics. Among the purposes of remembrance are pedagogy (for those who were not there) and solace (for those too much there). But the highest aim of remembrance (for us, here) is redemption. The President and the Chancellor did indeed want this V-E day to bring some good from evil. But for that to happen at Bitburg will require more than two politicians. It will require an act of grace, and that is not for politicians--or other mortals--to dispense.