INTELLIGENCE/ROGER COHEN
NEW YORK

On September 4, Wolfgang Ischinger, the former German ambassador to the United States, attended the opening game of the American football season between the New York Giants and the Washington Redskins. It was a happy occasion at Giants Stadium - made more festive by the home team’s victory.
Ischinger, now a senior executive of Allianz, a big German insurance company, was a guest of the Tisch family, prominent New York Jews who own half the Giants and a lot of New York real estate. Their get-together involved business as well as pleasure.
Negotiations were nearing completion on a deal under which Allianz would pay more than $25 million a year to have the company name on the Giants’ new $1.3 billion stadium being built next to the old one in New Jersey and set to open in 2010. The Tisches, having done due diligence on Allianz, seemed happy with the idea.
Then, all hell broke loose.
Within a week of the game, the New York Daily News had a headline screaming that the Giants “deal with the devil.” An illustration showed the stadium with a swastika daubed on it.
The spark for the uproar was the fact that Allianz, in common with most large German companies that existed at the time, dealt extensively with Hitler’s Third Reich, insuring concentration camp facilities. It has taken decades for Allianz to resolve compensation claims from heirs to victims of the Holocaust.
By September 12, the deal was off. Both sides tried to smooth over the debacle, but Allianz, which has large holdings and thousands of employees in the United States, was left in a state of shock.
“Nobody predicted this kind of firestorm,” Ischinger told me.
I am appalled by New York’s Allianz witch hunt. I lived in Berlin for three years, a period covering the establishment in 2000 of a multi-billion-dollar fund negotiated by the United States and German governments to compensate Naziera slave laborers and settle outstanding insurance claims.
As part of this accord, the International Commission on Holocaust Era Insurance Claims, of which Allianz has been a core member, has paid out more than $300 million.
Yes, it is late in the day. But the United States was party to this international pact. Allianz has long been a global corporate citizen of high repute. Stuart Eizenstat, the senior Clinton administration official who negotiated the agreement, was among those consulted by the Tisches before the uproar started.
Memory is volatile and irrational. As Pierre Nora, the French historian, has remarked, “Memory is life. It is in permanent evolution.”
The “evolution” took several decades, but Germany, like Allianz, has confronted guilt and strived to make amends. No other nation has agonized so much over finding an adequate memorialization of monstrous national crimes.
It is time for reconciliation. It is time to stop invoking the devil. It is time to stop daubing swastikas. It is time to respect Allianz’s American employees.
I said memory is irrational. The United States has a magnificent Holocaust Memorial Museum but no equivalent Washington institution dedicated to the ravages of race. Why does the Holocaust, a German crime, hold pride of place over slavery and segregation?
I am not sure. But it is clear that the election of Senator Barack Obama would be a victory over painful United States history. If America can do that, New York and its large Jewish community can also triumph over the hateful manipulation of painful memories.