Reinhard Kaiser against using laws to protect history

German writer Reinhard Kaiser questions the logic behind "memorial laws" that make denial of the Holocaust or genocide a punishable offence. "The credibility of the Holocaust suffers when not believing it becomes taboo... It could be that in the not too distant future the credibility of the Holocaust diminishes further - with the passage of time, with the death of survivors who can give living testimony, with the fading of memories that are passed on from one generation to the next, with the integration of a growing number of people from countries with different cultural and historical backgrounds. Educating people about it will become increasingly necessary and difficult... Perhaps it would be better to allow ourselves the freedom to abandon the regulations governing the denial and trivialisation of the Holocaust and follow the examples of Great Britain and the United States, where there have never been such laws, instead of generalising them in the form of some European framework agreement on how to deal with controversial chapters of history."

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