West German chancellor Willy Brandt had knelt before a memorial to the Warsaw Ghetto, saying as a German he felt ashamed of what had happened. Strauss's "walk tall" speech, with its implicit criticism of Brandt kneeling in guilt before the site of the Warsaw Ghetto, was very polarizing. "History In A Land Without History" In a feuilleton published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on 25 April 1986, the German historian Michael Stürmer complained that most Germans lacked pride in their history, which he felt threatened the future. Stürmer wrote "...that in a land without history, the future is controlled by those who determine the content of memory, who coin concepts and interpret the past". Stürmer warned that with most Germans lacking pride in their history that this a destabilizing factor that nobody could predicate where it would end. Stürmer felt that the left had too much power in regards to the memory of the past, complaining that the Social Democrats were still concerned 40 years after 1945 with "battling the social foundations of fascism in the Federal Republic". Stürmer wanted for historians to find the "lost history" that would inspire national pride in being German. Stürmer wrote Germany's allies were becoming concerned with the German lack of pride in their history, stating "the Federal Republic has political and economic responsibility in the world. It is the centerpiece of European defense within the Atlantic system...It is also becoming evident that the technocratic underestimation of history by the political Right and the progressive strangulation of history by the Left is seriously damaging the political culture of the country. The search for a lost past is not an abstract striving for culture and education. It is morally legitimate and politically necessary". Zweierlei Untergang In May 1986, a book by Andreas Hillgruber, Zweierlei Untergang: Die Zerschlagung des Deutschen Reiches und das Ende des europäischen Judentums (Two Kinds of Ruin: The Smashing of the German Reich and the End of European Jewry), was published in Berlin. The book consisted of two essays by Hillgruber, in which he argued the end of Germany as a great power in 1945 and the Holocaust were morally equivalent tragedies. Much of the controversy generated by Zweierlei Untergang was due to the essay Der Zusammenbruch im Osten 1944/45 (The Collapse in the East 1944/45) in which Hillgruber presented an account of the Eastern Front in 1944-45 and mourned the end