For this story we travel to Germany and a journey inside a nation’s conscience. In a country still haunted by its past, any criticism of the Jews – or indeed the state of Israel -- has been off limits. For understandable reasons. But now, more than half a century after the horror of the Nazi years, one politician is attacking what he calls political correctness. And in the run up to a crucial general election, this breaking of the unspoken taboo has provoked bitter debate. Is it a matter of standing up for freedom of speech – or, as his opponents allege, a smokescreen for anti-Semitism? Europe correspondent, Geoff Hutchison, with this report on Germany’s new shame game.

Hutchison: The Jewish museum in Berlin ensures that Germans can never forget the slaughter of the innocents.

Hutchison: The hundreds of thousands of German Jews. and the millions of other European Jews murdered during World War Two, in the name of ethnic purity. 00:22

Auschwitz -- this is a German invention and this is a German responsibility independent of the generations. 00:48

Friedman: and the grand kids are responsible, not for the past, but for learning from the past, that the past will never have a chance any more in the present or future times.
Hutchison: Another symbol of modern Germany is the National Parliament, the Reichstag – torched by Hitler in the ‘30s, rebuilt in the ‘90s, to signal Germany’s reunification and re-emergence as a world power. 01:26

Since the Red Army smashed its way into Berlin and Reichstag in 1945, generations of Germans have struggled to come to terms with the atrocities committed by the Nazis. 01:44

Hutchison: Yet despite decades of national soul searching, anti-Semitism seems on the rise again – the ghosts of Germany’s past intend to haunt it still. 02:00

Hutchison: Young Germans queue to go through the Reichstag. Virtually all of them have a link with the horrors of the 1930s and ‘40s. Their grandparents, or the grandparents of friends, somebody they know -- or knew -- was there. It’s not easy for them. 02:30

Tim Sander’s grandfather was in Russia, both as invading soldier and prisoner. 02:53

Tim: I know that they did cruel things, before and after -- but I don’t know what, and I don’t really want to ask him, because I mean sometimes we talk about, but it is hard to get deep into it, because I don’t want to hurt him.

Hutchison: Tim Sander is a student,
Reckling: and so is Tobias Reckling. 03:18
Spill & Korinth Carolin Spill is a make-up artist in the film industry, and Nadja Korinth is a student and translator.
Korinth Nadja: People want it to become a matter of the history books. I think the slightly dangerous thing about this that is you might just do that without ever having found the roots of why it started. 03:27

Hutchison: This is no dry academic debate. Right-wingers and skinheads have attacked Jewish synagogues right across Europe in recent years. Current tensions in the Middle East mean more German police on duty here in Berlin. 03:41

Friedman: Anti-Semitism is not a German invention. Anti-Semitism existed before Germany 04:00
Friedman: and I know that this is a catastrophe. but as racists will exist also in hundreds of years.Hutchison: National elections are approaching and the conservative Free Democrats aspire to a fifth of the vote. 04:08
Mollemann in parliament FDP Vice-President, Jurgen Mollemann, attracted attention early in the campaign, by condemning Israeli military incursions in the Occupied Territories ordered by Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon. 04:27

Mollemann: I think his behaviour , his political approach is absolutely unacceptable. It’s producing the risk of a war in the Middle East. He’s refusing nearly each and every decision of the United Nations Security Council and violating the basic rights of the Palestinian peoples. 04:46

Hutchison: But Mollemann went further, claiming, controversially, that Sharon’s actions fuelled anti-Semitism, as did the statements of leader’s of Germany’s Jewish Council. 05:10

Friedman: This Vice President of the Party -- and he is the Vice President of the Party -- said 05:53
FriedmanSuper:Dr. Michael FriedmanCouncil of Jewish Communities on TV that anti-Semitism is due because of Sharon’s policy and the arrogant presentation of the Vice President of the Jewish Communities in Germany, Michel Friedman, that means myself. 05:30

Hutchison: History is part and parcel of Dr. Michel Friedman’s make-up. As well as being the Vice President of the Germany’s Council of Jewish Communities, he’s a member of the main conservative party, the Christian Democrats, a doctor of medicine, a lawyer and the host of two television shows. Coincidentally, on this occasion, Ariel Sharon was his guest. 05:46

Mollemann: He obviously tries to keep the public interest away from Sharon’s policy and to intensify an internal national debate on our history, on our behaviour towards the Jewish community. 06:12

Friedman: Here we were deeply in a anti-Semitic debate at his best. Because selling that, you are back hundred years and hundred years saying the Jews are responsible that you don’t love the Jews. And as long as the Jews behave as we want them to behave, we like them and if they don’t behave as we like them to behave, then don’t be, don’t be surprised that we hate them or we kill them even. 06:33

Mollemann: These accusations are ridiculous and arrogant and unacceptable. My political career now is going on since 30 years and never, ever before somebody accuse me to be a, to take a anti-Semite approach. Never. 07:02

Hutchison: Dr. Annette Vogt, an authority on German-Jewish affairs, is walking in the square where the Nazis burned all literature unacceptable to the Party.Vogt: It could be possible 07:26

Vogt: that Mollemann was going forward to make a test. What you could say now in Germany after 50, 60 years after the Nazi regime and what not. 07:39

Hutchison: Some young Germans, though, feel the anti-Semitic tag can be too readily applied. Still: There are plans in the Knesset that say

Still & Korinth non-Jewish persons are not allowed any more to buy land, within Jewish communities. This is racist, but when I say this is racist, am I anti-Semitic? 08:00

Tim: That’s the point, I think there are many voices against Israel and Israeli politics, but not against the fact that these people who live there are Jewish or something else. It’s just against their politics, against Sharon and what he does.

Hutchison: The debate is hot in Berlin, but is it playing outside the capital? 08:35

This is Überlingen, near the Swiss border. It’s a spa town where people come to sail, walk, relax and unwind. It’s one of the loveliest parts of Germany. But even here, it seems, there is a shadow of Germany’s Nazi past, of Adolph Hitler, of the camps, and particularly the deliberate extermination of the Jews – the Holocaust.

Hutchison: We’ve come to Überlingen to meet Martin Walser, the distinguished author claims the friendship of important German writers and intellectuals. Now though, Walser is being pilloried for his depiction of a Jewish character in his latest novel. And he’s been called an anti-Semite because of it. 09:18

Walser: You must know, or you probably know, that the reproach to be anti-Semitic in Germany is the most serious reproach. 09:48

Hutchison: Walser believes there is still too much emphasis on the obscenities of Nazi racial policies of the 1930s and ‘40s. 10:11

These are horrors we all recognise because the Nazis, as historian William Shier commented, “took pictures like tourists in hell.”

Walser: I feel that they abuse German past as a subject in television shows. They do more than they should. 10:37

I have to turn my face off the screen if they again and again and again Auschwitz. I can’t stand it -- the repetition, the repetition, the repetition of these terrific scenes of Auschwitz. 10:50

Walser: There will be no chance, no possibility – it’s nothing is that impossible as a new Auschwitz. 11:20

Hutchison: Michel Friedman’s perspective, though, is that Germans should never be allowed to forget. 11:31

Friedman: Forty-eight people of my family died because of the lie of individuals to say we can’t do anything. Three survived -- my late grandmother and my parents -- because somebody proved that this sentence is a lie. 11:42

Every human being can change the world and this was Oscar Schindler. He put my parents on the list. 12:01

Hutchison: Martin Walser has lost his American publisher, his own publisher has turned on him and his new novel, unlike his previous works , will not be serialised in prestigious German broadsheets. 12:18

Walser: It means that if you quote the German past, something out of the German past, then you can resign on every further argument. It’s enough, you know, it’s a cudgel. 12:33

It’s not necessary to prove what you are saying. The cudgel itself does everything. 12:52

Korinth: What he did was expressing a way of feeling about German history which many old people feel. And he said I cannot stand being confronted with pictures of Auschwitz any more. And that’s my -- he didn’t even explain it, he just said it’s a feeling, I can’t stand it. It makes me feel bad. 13:04
Hutchison: The question though is whether what happened during the Second World War should inhibit all discussions about Jews. Mollemann’s views on Israel struck a chord. Mollemann: After this debate started I got 13:31

44,000 letters, faxes, e-mails within one month from all over Germany. In each of those letters, “Thank you for talking so frankly about Israeli Policy. It has been necessary and we Germans must be allowed to discuss it frankly. Please go on, be courageous.” 13:46

Friedman: We are able to debate everything, but to compare Israel’s policy with the Nazi policy is not a debate. 14:15
Friedman Friedman: I got hundreds and hundreds of letters of hate, telephone calls, letters of violence, letters of promising me my death. This is for an individual whose family was killed in the Holocaust, an experience in the year 2002 which is certainly a difficult one. 14:25
Sander, Korinth & Still Hutchison: These students have their lives in front of them, they’re like most young students in western societies, confident, idealistic, but in their case a little inhibited by their history. 15:52

Still: When you are talking about a Turkish person that treated you bad, you have to take care about how you say it and to who you talk about it, because you might be accused of being racist and people start saying “Oh this happened 50 years ago, 60 years ago and it’s happening again.” I wasn’t born then….and this has to be stopped. 15:04
Sander Sander: It is there always and in school we talk about it and there is something there underneath always but it’s not on top. 15:33

Still: They still have to learn about the history at school, but they have to know that they are not guilty. I don’t want to be treated as though I was guilty. 15:41

Vogt: The younger generation is not guilty. They become guilty when they don’t want to know the history, when they are thinking we are looking only forward. Because then they are not careful enough. They have to know about the history but they are not guilty, of course not. 15:56
Archival -- Hitler Music 16:12

Hutchison: The events of the 1930s and ‘40s will eventually recede from the forefront of people’s minds. But they’ll never go away. 16:21

Hutchison: That history is a burden on both Jews and German, but it’s a burden Michel Friedman accepts. This Jewish doctor, lawyer and politician, believes in his country. He believes in Germany, and his future there. Friedman: Germany has 100,000 Jews who are giving in confidence their existence and their future in this country.

Only 57 years after the Holocaust, we are the third biggest west European Jewish community after France and Great Britain again. Germany is respected and accepted. I f this is a burden I like this burden. 17:07

Credits GERMAN JEWSReporter: Geoff HutchisonCamera: John BenesEditor: Simon BrynjolffssenProducer: Andrew Haughton 17:32