Vertrauen ist gut, Kontrolle ist besser

Brigitte Zypries, the German Minister of Justice announced plans to crimilise holocaust denial across Europe - a plan the Bundesrepublik hopes to fasttrack through during its sixth month EU presidency. I don't think the laws have much chance in being passed (the UK for one has indicated its reluctance)

Zypries is invoking quite a heady historicism to her plans- “This historical experience puts Germany under a permanent obligation to combat systematically every form of racism, anti-semitism and xenophobia. And we should not wait until it comes to deeds. We must act already against the intellectual pathbreakers of the crime."

For me, the interesting point is not so much the hype about whether this will pass into law, or even the pertinent debate over censorship/offence etc. The question is rather, over what comes first, the word or the deed? Banning words and symbols won't, I think, halt the rise of extremist movements - and it's a lesson which Zypries would do well to learn from the history of National Socialism. The Justice minister seems to belong to the school of thought that teaches German guilt through absolute complicity - the Daniel Goldhagen school of shoah atonement. I don't think the story is so simple. German's didn't exterminate the Jews because they were all vicious anti-semites (i choose this phrase carefully, clearly most card-carrying nazis were) - instead its a complex pattern of guilt, willed ignorance and utopian delusion.

The road to Auschwitz was not paved with anti-semitic hate - but all the more tragically, with the mundane and petty pieces of ordinary people's lives - people who looked away because everything was just swell for them. People who hated because it was easier too. The path to the holocaust was the path of least resistance.