Eye on Germany. The new morality and the politics of memory

From `Political Correctness' to `Politische Korrektheit': Discourses of `PC' in the German Newspaper, Die Welt

“…In his acceptance speech of the German publishers' Peace Prize, the writer and intellectual Martin Walser, already a self-styled victim of 'PC' (see Walser, 1994), argued that the Holocaust, as symbolized by the memorial, was being used as 'a moral cudgel' against the German people. When the President of the Central Committee of Jews in Germany, Ignatz Bubis, stepped in, an especially fierce round of an old dispute was launched (for analysis, see Conard, 1999;Niven, 2002;Scharf and Thiele, 1999;Schirrmacher, 1999). But particularly worrying for the then federal president, Roman Herzog, was the way in which such a crucial intellectual debate had allegedly deteriorated into a series of rather less productive mutual recriminations.…”