c. 2000 Religion News Service

(Rabbi Rudin is the national interreligious affairs director of the American Jewish Committee.)

UNDATED _ I was recently a guest of Berlin’s Catholic Academy where I joined Cardinal Francis Arinze of the Vatican in a series of lectures on the future of religious pluralism in the new century.

Each time I visit Germany’s once and present capital, the city’s turbulent history presses in on me with such force I frequently break into spontaneous tears of sadness.

Berlin is aptly called “Faust’s Metropolis” because of its demonic past. From 1933 until the end of World War II, the city’s very name represented radical, satanic evil. Berlin was the diseased heart and the wicked soul of Nazi Germany. Even today, more than a half-century later, the names Hitler, Goebbels, Himmler, Goering and Eichmann still evoke horror.

And although it has been 10 years since the infamous Berlin Wall came down, physical and spiritual scars are evident everywhere in the city. Indeed, like Jerusalem, Berlin is painful living proof that divided cities create a political pathology that invariably foments violence and hostility.

Despite the extraordinary building boom now under way in the city, it will take years, if not decades, to heal the deep wounds existing between the affluent capitalist West Berlin and the poorer, formerly communist East Berlin.

Religion is another factor in the Berlin mix. While West Germans are among the world’s most secular people, religion was never the”enemy of the state”as it was in East Germany. And, of course, atheism was never official government policy in the Federal German Republic as it was in the East.

Because of Germany’s undeniable importance in the European Union and its rapidly growing Jewish community, two years ago the American Jewish Committee opened an office just a few hundred yards from the site of Hitler’s underground bunker. The irony of the AJC’s location is overwhelming. I constantly look out the window upon the large, empty plot where Hitler lived his last days like an underground rodent until he killed himself in April 1945 before the advancing Soviet army could capture him.

In another twist of history, the nearly five-acre bunker area is where the proposed national Holocaust memorial will be built. But like everything else in Germany relating to the Holocaust, the memorial itself is a source of friction and controversy. Berlin’s mayor, Eberhard Diepgen, long an opponent of the project, says he will not attend a ceremony to announce the construction of the memorial near the Brandenburg Gate.

Germany’s President Johannes Rau, Chancellor Gerhard Schroder, American Ambassador John Kornblum and Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel are scheduled to attend the event. The Holocaust memorial will contain more than 2,000 stone pillars, a documentation center for visiting scholars and a library of 1 million books.

Diepgen believes the memorial is too huge in scope and extremely difficult to protect from anti-Semitic vandals. Other city officials have said a large memorial may be unnecessary in Berlin, a city that already has some smaller memorials commemorating the Holocaust.

However, Michael Naumann, Germany’s chief cultural official, criticized Diepgen’s absence: “This is a significant ceremony demonstrating the fact that the memorial will be built. I am very surprised that Mr. Diepgen is not coming and hope he will change his mind.”

Germany remains a tortured nation as it struggles to find valid and meaningful ways to remember the Holocaust. The German men and women who actually participated in the mass murder of 6 million Jews are now aging grandparents whose children have usually refrained from inquiring too deeply into their parents’ wartime activities.

But my German friends, especially those active in the Catholic and Protestant communities, tell me the members of the third generation are asking “all the right questions” of their grandparents. Denial and repression about the Holocaust are being replaced by detailed investigations and an attempt to learn the truth about the Nazi reign of terror.

But how and what to remember? For years, many Germans were told the Wehrmacht, the German army of World War II, was generally free of Holocaust crimes, unlike the Gestapo and the SS. But a current exhibit in Germany reveals the army engaged in war crimes.

The debate over the national Holocaust memorial is a lightning flash that illumines the emotional landscape of division bedeviling a newly unified Germany that eagerly seeks to be a”normal”European nation. But the Faustian bargain its citizens made with Hitler and Nazism nearly 70 years ago continues to haunt every aspect of German national life.

DEA END RUDIN