Norbert Seitz has an excellent essay in Die Zeit that seeks to explain the current political use of comparisons to the Nazis. He breaks the history of the use of these comparisons into three phases: (1) the cold war, in which Nazi-comparisons served the purpose of vilifying communism and also demonstrating West German distance from the Nazi regime, (2) the late 1960s, in which the comparisons were used primarily on the left to attack bourgeois repressions (historical, economic, cultural, and otherwise), and (3) the post-Historikerstreitera, after 1986.

The Historikerstreit was a public battle in the pages of newspaper editorials over the uniqueness of the Holocaust and the proper moral and historical approaches that Germans should have toward it. The World Jewish Congress has a good overview of the issues involved in the Historikerstreit, in English, here. A German teacher of mine at Davidson College, Scott Denham, has a helpful short bibliography on line for a course he developed, here.

According to Seitz, after the Historikerstreit seemed to establish that the Holocaust was a unique event, some critics hoped that comparisons with the Nazis would fall out of fashion. But Seitz argues that two things have mitigated against such a development: the "scandalization" of politics and the de-historicization of the Holocaust itself. The rhetoric and practice of scandal is such that comparisons with the Nazis are used by politicians seeking media attention and by people who wish to tarnish the reputations of politicians (as, he implies, the Schwaebisches Tagblatt did when it repeated Herta Dauebler-Gmelin's off the cuff remarks at a party gathering last spring. See my earlier blog on this topic for links). Seitz also calls attention to the proliferating comparisons between Hitler and other figures in the 1990s, such as Saddam Hussein, Milosevic, and bin Laden. In this context, Hitler is used as an ahistorical metaphor for evil in an attempt to legitimate current political battles.

Setiz's essay is an interesting example of the theoretically rich discussion that Germans have had over the relationship between national self-understanding, memory, and politics. It could be that there is a similarly rich discussion going on in the U.S. concerning our relationship to chattle slavery and racial segregation, but so far I haven't really been able to find it, even though one might expect to see hints of it in the wake of Trent Lott's recent troubles. The only thing that the furor over Lott's comments has in common with the furor over Roland Koch's comments is that both occur within the politics of scandal mode. So far I haven't seen anyone say anything particularly interesting about those politics with respect to American national memory.