Still the Unmasterable Past? The Impact of History and Memory in the Federal Republic of

ERIC LANGENBACHER

For decades, collective memories of the Nazi period and the Holocaust have influenced greatly the Federal Republic of Germany. Despite fears that such pro- gressive memories would decline after unification, the last twenty years have wit- nessed the institutionalisation of this memory regime. More generally, coming to terms with this past has been a constant political and cultural dynamic since 1945, even if the intensity of this process increased after the big debates of the 1980s. The last decade, however, has witnessed the development of a more plur- alistic memory regime in the Republic, with collective memories of the East German dictatorship and, more importantly, the long-dormant memory of German suffering competing with memory of the Holocaust for visibility and influence. This article concludes with some speculation about the future of col- lective memories in Germany in light of evidence that the phase of intensive memory work may be coming to an end. The long-unmasterable past may be overcome.

INTRODUCTION Few countries have been as beholden to the past and the collective memories based on it as has the Federal Republic of Germany. The history in question long has been under- stood to refer to crimes committed by Germans during the Third Reich, above all the Holocaust – comprising an ‘unmasterable past’ or a ‘past that won’t go away’.1 The attendant discussions and debates have produced a comprehensive process of working through or mastering the past (Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit or Vergangen- heitsbewa¨ltigung), resulting in a ‘culture of contrition’ or ‘sorry state’,2 which has greatly influenced German politics and culture, largely determining acceptable discourses, taboos and policy alternatives in domestic and international arenas. This has occurred despite widespread expectations that unification would result in normal- isation, re-nationalisation and a decline in Holocaust memory: ‘almost of necessity, the aesthetic enticement to remember the Heimat will prevail over the ethical imperative to remember the Shoah’.3 In contrast, the 1990s and early 2000s witnessed a seamless and interconnected series of Holocaust memory events. Over the last decade, however, some major potential shifts in German collective memories and attitudes towards history have occurred. More recent historical phases, such as the period of division, and dormant memories (for example German suffering) have risen to prominence to compete with memories of German crimes for visibility and impact. This article assesses the political and cultural German Politics, Vol.19, No.1, March 2010, pp.24–40 ISSN 0964-4008 print/1743-8993 online DOI: 10.1080/09644001003588473 # 2010 Association for the Study of German Politics HISTORY AND MEMORY IN THE FRG 25 impact of the past in the Federal Republic, focusing especially on the more pluralistic post-unification phase, but looking also at the evolution of memories in earlier periods. I conclude that by the sixtieth anniversary of the founding of the Federal Republic, Germans have rather comprehensively worked through their difficult historical legacy. I also speculate about the future of this long unmasterable past.

MEMORIES IN UNIFIED GERMANY The political impact of dominant Holocaust-centred memories was evident immediately after 1990. Debates raged over moving the capital to Berlin, with the latter quickly shedding its reputation as Cold War Frontstadt to being equated with Nazi decision- making and thus inappropriate as the symbol for German democracy. Since then, numer- ous controversies have erupted over the articulation of the new capital’s memorial landscape, exemplified by the debates over the national memorial to the victims of fascism, the Neue Wache and later over rebuilding the Stadtschloss.4 The most attention was generated by the ‘Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe’ (Holocaust Memorial) unveiled in 2005, which had produced a decade-long discussion about appropriate com- memorative practices in the ‘land of the perpetrators’.5 In 1998, after the writer Martin Walser characterised the planned memorial as ‘a football field-sized nightmare’ and expressed his need to ‘look away’ from Auschwitz, Ignatz Bubis, then Chairman of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, observed ‘intellectual arson’ (geistige Brandstiftung), which rehabilitated anti-Semitism and weakened German democracy.6 In 2003, there was controversy over the firm Degussa, which had been subcontracted to provide an anti-graffiti chemical for the Holocaust Memorial because it was the same company that had produced the Zyklon-B gas used in Nazi death camps. Memorials to other victimised groups (homosexuals, Sinti and Roma) soon followed, leading some to remark that Berlin was becoming the ‘capital of remorse’ (Hauptstadt der Reue).7 Throughout 1995, fiftieth anniversary commemorations generated fraught elite dis- cussions about how the end of the war and Nazism should be remembered. The public, however, was not conflicted: only 1 per cent chose ‘flight and expulsion’ or ‘Germany lost the war’ as the meaning of 8 May.8 Shortly thereafter, debates enveloped the travelling Wehrmachtausstellung (exhibition about the crimes of the German army) and Daniel Goldhagen’s provocative bestseller Hitler’s Willing Executioners in which he characterised the Holocaust as a ‘German national project’. Both questioned entrenched taboos concerning the responsibility of average Germans for Nazi crimes.9 Discussions about unclaimed World War II-era bank accounts and insurance policies kept Holocaust issues in the public consciousness, and negotiations over compensating labourers enslaved by the Nazis and their capitalist collaborators dominated headlines at the end of the decade, resulting in a multi-billion dollar settlement.10 By the new century, ‘round’ anniversaries became routine political events, produ- cing important pronouncements asserting responsibility and contrition for the crimes of the past, such as former Chancellor Gerhard Schro¨der’s speech at the sixtieth anniver- sary of the Warsaw Uprising. Other dates – 9 November (fall of the Wall and ‘Reich- skristallnacht’) and 27 January (the liberation of Auschwitz and, since 1996, an official Gedenktag) – have become annual commemorations. High-level visits of German politicians to Israel (Chancellor Angela Merkel’s March 2008 trip) and by 26 GERMAN POLITICS foreign dignitaries to former concentration camps (US President Barack Obama at Buchenwald in June 2009) also have become expected rituals.11 Public opinion largely supports this memory culture. In May 2001, 67 per cent thought one can learn from history (20 per cent not)12 and a 2005 poll found that 38 per cent (18 in 1994 and 27 in 2002) thought it essential to know about the Holocaust, 38 per cent very impor- tant, 17 per cent somewhat important and only 4 per cent unimportant.13 The influence of history and memory is especially apparent in more mundane con- troversies. For example, an international scandal ensued shortly after unification in the eastern German town of Fu¨rstenberg over building a supermarket on part of the expan- sive grounds of the former concentration camp of Ravensbru¨ck. Considered sacrile- gious by many, protests led to the abandonment of the venture. In the summer of 2001, plans to build a car dealership in Erfurt on the site of the ruined factory of the company that produced the crematorium ovens for Buchenwald and Auschwitz (Topf und So¨hne) were hotly contested. Leftist squatters occupied the grounds until an ‘appropriate’ commemorative solution could be found.14 In 2003, CDU Bundestag backbencher Martin Hohmann delivered a speech in which he questioned references to present-day Germans as a Ta¨tervolk (people of perpetrators) and asserted that the same could be said about Jews because of their disproportional influence on early Bolshe- vism. Conservative journalist Eva Hermann caused a stir in 2007 when she opined that Nazi family policy was not ‘all bad’, and in 2008–09 there was debate about governmental plans to reinstate the iron cross service medal for the Bundeswehr. Critics pointed out that although the distinction dates back to 1813, it was irrevocably tainted by the Nazis. The government responded with alternative ‘bravery medals’ (Tapferkeitsorden).15 History and memory have also influenced basic precepts of foreign policy, such as ‘reflexive multilateralism’, democracy promotion and the renunciation of chemical and nuclear weapons. Over the 1990s, existential debates were informed by compet- ing, historically conditioned maxims: nie wieder Auschwitz or nie wieder Krieg, with the former eventually predominating. Participation in NATO out-of-area missions and humanitarian interventions especially in Afghanistan, as well as both the deepening and widening of European institutions were all conditioned by these discussions.16 Helmut Kohl justified European Monetary Union not (only) on economic efficiency grounds, but as a means to prevent forever a return to Europe’s bloody history and Joschka Fischer lobbied for the eastern expansion of the in the early 2000s as a ‘duty’ due to crimes committed there by Germans during the Nazi era.17 Arguments and lessons arising from interpretations of the past have also permeated policies regarding the right to asylum, immigration, citizenship, multiculturalism, Leitkultur and citizenship tests. Such issues even became factors in the 2002 Bundestag election campaign, with a pamphlet circulated by leading FDP politician Ju¨rgen Mo¨llemann widely criticised as anti-Semitic.18 Above all, there is the pervasive concern over right-wing extremism. Many Germans fret over what is a small and politically weak fringe in international comparison and they support drastic counter-measures, both domestically and abroad, exemplified by the proposed consti- tutional ban on the right-radical NPD in 2001–02 and the vigorous response to Jo¨rg Haider’s Freedom Party in Austria in 2000. Most Germans continue to support HISTORY AND MEMORY IN THE FRG 27 restrictions on liberal democracy, like a lack of national-level referendums or a ban on Nazi symbols and slogans. Indeed, in a 2002 poll, 86 per cent of Germans ‘are still appalled by Hitler’s crimes against Jews’, an increase of 11 per cent since 1991.19 Since unification, the memory of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) also has been confronted. An official ‘working-through’ process, focused particularly on secret police surveillance, included various laws granting citizens access to their files, two Bundestag Commissions of Inquiry (Enquete-Kommissionen) in 1994 and 1998, a foundation (Stiftung zur Aufarbeitung der SED-Diktatur),20 and several museums and memorials especially at the former Stasi Headquarters on Berlin’s Normannenstrasse. Efforts were also made to bring perpetrators of communist crimes to justice, including border guards (Mauerschu¨tzenprozesse), as well as (problematically) higher-ups like Erich Mielke and Egon Krenz.21 Discussions also transpired about how the GDR worked through Nazi crimes, as well as how easterners have done so after unification. With the exception of a brief period immediately after World War II, for most of the GDR’s history Nazism was considered ‘dealt with’ because the basic cause (capitalism) had been destroyed and all victims were subsumed under the rubric of antifascist heroes.22 At the very end of the regime, however, there were some incipient efforts to confront the Holocaust, recognise Jewish victims and commemorate what was lost (e.g. partial rebuilding of the on the Oranienburger Strasse in East Berlin). The East German Parliament’s first act in the spring of 1990 was to apologise formally for the crimes of the Holocaust. Other places, particularly Dresden with its entrenched self-conception as victim, have had more challenges in confronting their Nazi pasts.23 Some authors have argued that the greater incidence of right-radical sentiment and violence in eastern Germany today – for example, the attacks on hostels housing foreigners in Hoyerswerda in 1991 and Rostock in 1992, the success of the right-radical NPD (9.2 per cent in the 2004 Saxon Landtag election, but 5.6 per cent in 2009) – is (partially) due to the inadequate process of working-through the Nazi legacy.24 Moreover, right after the Wende there were debates about the comparability of the communist and Nazi dictatorships and the alleged prioritisation of the East German legacy by conservatives, presumably in a (failed) attempt to relativise the Nazi period and the Holocaust.25 Efforts to downplay the nastiness of the communists were buttressed by two additional trends. First was the rapid rise of nostalgic and positive memories of the GDR – Ostalgie – exemplified by films like Sonnenallee (1999). Second, in response to perceptions of a western ‘takeover’, omnipresent econ- omic stagnation and the heightening of East–West differences (die Mauer im Kopf), was the rise of the regionally concentrated PDS (after 2007 the Left Party). This party of former/reformed communists was both a cause and consequence of persistent regional differences and Ostalgie, and it resisted broader efforts to come to terms with the East German past. As the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Wall approached, efforts to work through this past intensified. State-sponsored studies led to recommendations for the commemoration of the and of the GDR, as well as an overarching government concept for memorials in 2008.26 Intellectually, institutions such as the Zeitgeschichtliches Forum Leipzig opened in 1999 and the Zentrum fu¨r 28 GERMAN POLITICS Zeithistorische Forschung Potsdam have spearheaded research on the GDR and recent books such as Martin Sabrow’s Erinnerungsorte der DDR attempt to codify sites of memories.27 Finally, several museums have sprung up including the Doku- mentationszentrum Alltagskultur der DDR in Eisenhu¨ttenstadt which opened in 1999 and the DDR Museum in Berlin unveiled in 2006. In addition to these efforts, the recent rise in interest was also pushed by popular culture and election campaigns. The popular film about the Stasi, Das Leben der Anderen (2006), re-introduced the period to younger and international audiences. Debate flared up during the 2009 campaign for the federal presidency as to whether the GDR should be deemed an Unrechtstaat, a term long used to characterise the Nazi regime.28 Many easterners and western leftists (e.g. Gesine Schwan,29 the SPD candidate) would not endorse this usage partially because of fears that the Third Reich would be relativised, showing both the power of the Left Party, as well as the resilience of Holocaust memory. These conflicting and ambiguous political cultural trends affected commemoration of the fall of the Wall, with the twentieth anniversary celebration in November 2009 being a muted, even sombre occasion.

REPRESSION OF THE PAST? Most observers acknowledge the contemporary impact of history and memory but, before the mid-1980s, opinions diverged over the degree to which the young Federal Republic had worked through its difficult historical legacy. Many leftists and liberals perceived little confrontation with the past from the 1950s until the 1980s, a failure they thought was a moral black mark on the country that needed to be rectified for the country truly to be rehabilitated. From this perspective, the Adenauer era was a disappointing period of ‘restoration’, when West Germans evaded and repressed their Nazi past.30 These silences facilitated the continuation of attitudinal pathologies like anti-democratic political predispositions, xenophobia and anti-Semitism. In a famous 1959 essay, Theodor Adorno concluded that West Germans clung to traditional beliefs, Nazi thought-patterns and authoritarian personalities, endangering democracy and threatening a return of Nazism.31 Another influential study, The Inability to Mourn, argued that Germans had libidinally and narcissistically identified with Hitler so that ‘the Fu¨hrer’s failure was a failure of their own ego’. Misplaced psychic defences stunted the growth of the ‘national collective of Hitler followers’, leading to a general ‘impoverishment of the ego ... [an] inability to tackle the problems of present-day society’.32 The responsible and rabid Nazi elite, most of whom were conveniently dead, were contrasted with innocent ‘ordinary Germans’ and honourable Wehrmacht soldiers.33 Abstract, agent-less historical conceptions implied that the ‘German catastrophe’ fell out of thin air and portrayed the Nazi period as an aberration from ‘real’ German traditions. Theories of totalitarianism compounded the problem by stressing the affinities between and Soviet , relativising German crimes in the process. Moreover, this willed gap with the past ‘was, to a certain extent filled by the manic achievements of the “economic miracle” – that has been responsible for much of the psychic and political immobility of large segments of the German population’.34 HISTORY AND MEMORY IN THE FRG 29 All of these deficiencies impeded badly needed value change and facilitated peri- odic waves of xenophobia, such as the desecration of synagogues and Jewish ceme- teries in 1959 or the 1969 Bundestag election in which the right-wing NPD almost gained representation. Negative path dependence constituted what Ralf Giordano called a ‘second guilt’; survivors of Nazi persecution were re-victimised by being denied appropriate recognition of their suffering and the justice or compensation necessary for recovery.35 The unwillingness of older generations to work through this past – exemplified by Adenauer’s call ‘to let the past be’ and the widely accepted mentality ‘to draw a final line under the past’ (Schlußstrichmentalita¨t) – created a moral burden for successor generations. There was ‘an almost limitless need for amnesty’, which impeded appropriate lustration, denazification, or criminal trials in many areas of social, political, cultural and economic life.36 Early restitution and com- pensation efforts, such as the Luxembourg Agreement of 1952 that led to payments to the Jewish Claims Conference and Israel, were criticised as cynical. Adenauer is often quoted: ‘now as before, the power of the Jews in the economic sphere is extraordinarily strong ...this reconciliation ...from the moral and political, as well as the economic standpoint is an essential requirement for the Federal Republic’.37 According to this view, repression began to erode in the 1960s thanks to the efforts of the emergent post-war generation, the ‘68ers’, and to events such as the Eichmann Trial in 1961.38 Socialised under fundamentally different conditions and lacking com- plicity in Nazi crimes, members of this generation relentlessly questioned their elders, state and nation. The youth revolt took on special acuity in West Germany, given the festering historical legacy. Such ‘telescoping’ meant that ‘the 1968 generation ... [took] over the task of interpreting their parents’ lives’.39 Particular attention was devoted to the ‘fascistoid’ continuities with the past: ‘that WWII, fascism and more specifically Nazism had not been defeated after all – a fear that Nazism, by mutating had continued to thrive in the 1950s and 1960s and onward, always in new disguises’.40 Only at this point did a real confrontation with the past emerge, but it was only a begin- ning, confined mainly to leftist milieus. The vast majority of Germans were still unre- formed, exemplified by the success of the former Nazi who became Chancellor Kurt-Georg Kiesinger and by the ‘Hitler Wave’ of the early 1970s.41 It was only in the late 1970s that processes of working through the past became socially extensive. Most authors consider 1979 to be the turning point, with the broadcast of Holocaust on German public television (viewed by one in two adults) and with heartfelt debates in the Bundestag regarding the statute of limitation on murder, which was rescinded, thus facilitating further prosecution of Nazi crim- inals.42 Nevertheless, ‘retrograde’ voices persisted. Strengthened after the emergence of Kohl in 1982, some conservatives advocated normalisation of the burdensome past in order for Germans to regain a needed sense of national pride. Major public controversies ensued. The Bitburg Affair (1985) was set off by a ceremony attended by Kohl and Ronald Reagan at a military cemetery (containing some SS graves), honouring both American and German soldiers as victims. The more intellectual Historikerstreit (1986–87) revolved around how much of a usable or patriotic past Germany could have, how the Holocaust fitted into German national identity and whether there was space for other collective memories. The Jenninger Affair (1988) resulted in the resignation of 30 GERMAN POLITICS the CDU Bundestag President, who delivered a speech on the fiftieth anniversary of Kristallnacht that seemed to justify the reactions of Nazi-era Germans. More generally, Kohl’s memory politics were considered highly problematic, such as his 1983 speech in Israel, where he stressed the ‘grace’ of his generation’s ‘late birth’ as a factor leading to the de-emphasis of Nazi crimes and to a diminution of collective responsibility, as well as plans for the Haus der Geschichte in Bonn, which supposedly mirrored the patriotic ‘CDU version’ of history. Liberals and leftists eventually predominated in the important public-political and intellectual debates of this decade, establishing a degree of cultural hegemony for Holocaust memory. Ju¨rgen Habermas elucidated the ascendant moral and political lessons: The only patriotism that does not alienate us from the West is a constitutional patriotism. Unfortunately in the cultural nation of the Germans, a connection to universalist constitutional principles that was anchored in convictions could be formed only after – and through – Auschwitz. Anyone who wants to dispel our shame about this fact ... anyone who wants to recall the Germans to a conventional form of their national identity, is destroying the only reliable basis for our tie to the West.43 Observing ‘apologetic tendencies’ at work in a new conservatism, his alarm at the dangers lurking underneath the surface of German society also grounded his opposition to unification a few years later. Like many others including Gu¨nter Grass, he considered the division of the country to be just punishment for the crimes of the Nazi past.44 In the post-unification period, many authors considered the contrite memory culture to be fragile. Nationalism, aggressiveness, xenophobia and self-pity – all of the pathological forces present before and since 1945 – gained renewed legitimacy and empowered a ‘new right’ in politics and the media. Jan Herman Brinks asserted that such actors ‘believe ... that it is time to draw a line under the Third Reich ... to downplay [its] importance ... [and] sees the present unification only as the second phase of the real unification that is still to come’.45 The spontaneous outpouring of flag-waving patriotism during the hosting of the football World Cup in 2006 seemed to confirm many of these fears.46 More esoterically, Erich Santer argued that the obsession with the past was actually an unhealthy response to trauma or narrative fetishism: ‘the construction and deploy- ment of a narrative consciously designed to expunge the traces of trauma or loss ...is a strategy of undoing, in fantasy, the need for mourning by simulating a condition of intactness’.47 Caroline Wiedmer wrote that unified Germany was characterised by deceptive ‘anti-memories’ where ‘mourning is actually replaced by the discourse surrounding it’.48 In this view, Goldhagen’s popularity was based on a simplistic before–after narra- tive, of a murderous past contrasted with the transformation of the post-war period, which ‘fulfils an understandable desire on the part of younger Germans: by agreeing with his book, they can stand on the side of the accusers rather than on that of the accused’.49 Similarly, the appeal in the late 1990s of Victor Klemperer’s wartime diaries was a manifestation of ‘how German readers nowadays identify with the victims rather than the perpetrators, which makes it easy to avoid asking difficult HISTORY AND MEMORY IN THE FRG 31 questions about how the Holocaust arose in the first place’.50 The Walser-Bubis Affair exhibited the emergence of ‘memory-resistant, secondary anti-Semitism’, apologetic tendencies and the pathological need for closure, revealing that ‘responsibility for Auschwitz is not anchored in public consciousness’.51 Such attitudes were believed to facilitate the rise of rightist crime, especially attacks on foreigners.

‘THE ACTUAL, IF UNWRITTEN, CONSTITUTION OF THE FEDERAL REPUBLIC’52 Thus, many prominent authors have been rather pessimistic concerning the degree to which memory of Nazism and the Holocaust influenced the Federal Republic. Despite many accurate points, there are several shortcomings to this dominant account. For example, in the early post-war years there were more public debates and efforts to work though history than many of these authors admit. Barbro Eberan observes: ‘the debate over the question of guilt in the licensed German press was rather intensive and comprehensive’, revealing ‘an honest effort at self-understanding and insight into guilt’.53 Books like Karl Jaspers’ The Question of German Guilt (1949) and Frie- drich Meinecke’s The German Catastrophe (1947), later lambasted for apologetic atti- tudes towards the German nation and bourgeoisie, eviscerated the Third Reich. Moreover, ‘already in those years, in the almost still-smoking ruins of their cities, a radical and undeniable departure from the worldview, the systems of domination and the political aims of the National Socialists took place’.54 Many Germans indeed condemned the leadership of the Nazi regime, attitudes usually assessed as evasive, but which were also important first steps towards political cultural change. Looking at survey data, the proportion of Germans thinking that Hitler was the person having done the most for Germany shrank from 10 per cent in 1950, to 6 per cent in 1955 and 4 per cent in 1958.55 In 1946–47, 95 per cent disagreed that there is some advantage to war (2 per cent agreed) and 83 per cent disagreed that a nation is weakened by democracy (8 per cent agreed).56 Widespread pacifism – a ‘culture of anti-militarism’57 – has characterised the country since 1945, dramatically in oppo- sition to NATO membership and rearmament in the mid-1950s, in the peace movement of the early 1980s and concerning the American campaign against Iraq after 2003. Nevertheless, a 1946 poll concluded that 41 per cent in the US zone were anti- Semites or intense anti-Semites, yet a 1949 poll revealed only 20 per cent as ‘definitely anti-Semitic’.58 Many West Germans long believed that anti-Nazi resistance was treachery,59 but by 1989 perceptions had reversed with 81 per cent thinking the mili- tary resisters were patriots and only 14 per cent traitors.60 The proportion of West Germans who thought ‘National Socialism was a good idea, badly carried out’ increased between 1945 and 1949 from about 45 to 55 per cent, and remained at rather high levels throughout the 1950s.61 Yet in a 1951 survey 46 per cent of respon- dents listed as ‘good aspects of Nazism’, job opportunities and living standards, 38 social welfare, 10 organisation but, ‘not a single respondent said that the persecution of Jews was good or that Nazi social welfare policies were bad’.62 The general de-legitimisation of the Nazi regime created a promising environment for democracy. In 1947, 56 per cent preferred a democratic republic ten years hence, 21 per cent didn’t say/know, 11 per cent wanted a monarchy, 10 per cent a socialist regime and only 2 per cent preferred a dictatorship.63 Richard Merritt goes on to 32 GERMAN POLITICS note that 80 per cent of respondents gave a democratic response to 5/5 or 4/5 questions and another 13 per cent to 3/5, concluding that in the spring of 1946, ‘perhaps the climate of anti-democratic thinking was in fact no greater in post-war Germany than elsewhere’.64 Michael Bernhard argues that Weimar voting patterns already showed that the future western zones had greater democratic potential than in the East (due to socio-economic modernisation and the greater incidence of Catholics) and that this also helps to account for the rapid democratisation and early stability of the Federal Republic.65 Several authors also show that this period witnessed quite a bit of commemorative activity, predominantly by various victims’ groups, but also with substantial local par- ticipation.66 A critical elite vanguard – President Theodor Heuss (‘collective shame’), SPD leader Kurt Schumacher, and even Adenauer at times – advocated a comprehen- sive moral accounting with the past.67 Manfred Kittel asserts in his suggestively titled The Legend of the Second Guilt that massive efforts to confront Nazism characterised the entire period and that coming to terms with the past was its leitmotif.68 Most politicians believed that the best way to preclude a repetition of Nazism was to ensure stable democracy through improved institutions and legal safeguards.69 At the time of the establishment of the Federal Republic in 1948–49 these more formal efforts included the explicit inclusion of a non-amenable bill of rights in the Grundge- setz; the establishment of certain agencies like the Bundesverfassungsschutz (Office for the Protection of the Constitution) to oversee the rule of law and to monitor anti- constitutional activities; and, later, the strict mandate of the Bundesbank to fight inflation in light of the widespread belief that Weimar-era hyperinflation had paved the way for Hitler.70 Other efforts included the renunciation of chemical and nuclear weapons, treaties of reconciliation with countries such as France and Israel, agree- ments with non-governmental representatives of victims and efforts to ‘build Europe’ stretching over the 1950s and beyond. Many actors believed that these formal ‘self-binding’ efforts were sufficient to prevent state-sponsored crimes and would ensure a stable and prosperous future. Anne Sa’adah writes that such ‘institutionalist’ strategies accept the population ‘as is’ and aim to create a community of behaviour by conceding equal membership to all who outwardly obey democratic rules.71 Ongoing discussions about the past can be counterproductive because they might generate resentment and jeopardise social integration.72 Others distinguish between Vergangenheitspolitik (practical policies addressing the past) and Geschichtspolitik (public-symbolic action),73 with the former clearly emphasised during the early post-war era. Hermann Lu¨bbe, while describing the clear and constant public recognition of the moral defeat of National Socialism (always the central legitimisation of the Federal Republic), also believes that there was indeed a ‘certain silence’ during the Adenauer era — ‘the social psychologically- and politically-necessary medium for the transformation of our post-war population into the citizenry of the Federal Republic of Germany’.74 The price was to let much of the past be and to accept many compromised individuals in public positions, especially in the courts, business and the police. Yet, ‘although there was much personal continuity of German elites before and after 1945, there was no continuity of their commitment to Nazi ideology or activity’.75 HISTORY AND MEMORY IN THE FRG 33

THE MEMORY OF GERMAN SUFFERING When looking back at the early years of the Federal Republic, Hans-Ju¨rgen Wirth asserts that many authors ‘demand mourning over the lost and de-legitimised Nazi ideals, but neglect the immediate pain and suffering of the German population in the face of destroyed houses, the dead and the maimed in their own families’.76 Indeed, in 1945 Germans had just lived through years of total war and an apocalyptic defeat – events that formed the memory of German suffering. This history includes the flight or expulsion (Vertreibung) of 12–14 million Germans from the former eastern provinces (e.g. Silesia and now mainly part of Poland) and elsewhere in Central Europe (e.g. Sudeten Germans from Czechoslovakia); the bombing of most cities by the British and American Air Forces, which killed approximately 600,000 civilians (part of 5–6 million war dead); the rape of as many as 2 million German women by members of the Red Army; and the internment of millions of sol- diers in the USSR, some for a decade.77 This collective memory was especially poignant for many ‘expellees’, who consti- tuted 16–25 per cent of West and ’s post-war population and the interest groups that represented them, such as the Sudetendeutsche Landsmannschaft and the national umbrella group, the Bund der Vertriebenen (League of German Expellees, BdV). In the early years of the Federal Republic, all parties competed for expellee votes, but, by the mid-1960s, the CDU and especially the CSU (expellees were over 20 per cent of Bavaria’s population) increasingly monopolised expellee issues and the memory of German suffering after the 1970s. The successful integration of poten- tially revanchist expellees was one of the most important achievements of the Federal Republic. Cultural productions revealed the salience of this memory, especially the so-called Heimatfilme of the Adenauer era (e.g. Gru¨n ist die Heide (1951)), but also later in, for example, Deutschland, bleiche Mutter (1980), and in many literary works like Grass’s Die Blechtrommel (1959). In terms of policy, an entire ministry was devoted to expel- lee issues until 1969, the Lastenausgleich (equalisation of burdens) helped expellees (and others) gain new homes and livelihoods by taxing those who had not sustained major wartime losses, and state funding for expellee groups’ cultural activities was substantial. Foreign policy, especially the non-recognition of communist regimes (Hallstein Doctrine) and the refusal to accept the –Neisse line as the border with Poland were maintained much longer than most policy-makers desired largely because of the electoral power of expellees.78 By the 1970s and 1980s, this memory (and its representatives) rapidly lost main- stream influence. As ‘post-national’ generations came of age, and as the Federal Republic pursued reconciliation and de´tente in the new Ostpolitik, this memory increasingly was perceived as revanchist and right-wing. The ‘fear of being applauded by the wrong side’79 became widespread: ‘the cause of the expellees ...found little or no outlet in societies busy ignoring or apologising for the sins of their fathers. To raise it loudly smacked of apologising for fascism’.80 Or as Green politician Antje Vollmer put it: ‘Someone, so we thought, had to pay for the unimaginable German crimes ... All the suffering was actually the bill for the war of aggression and for Auschwitz. And “that was good so”.’81 34 GERMAN POLITICS The Historikerstreit not only determined the prominence of Holocaust memory in German collective identity and culture, but also de-legitimised the memory of German suffering. Nevertheless, the expellee groups continued their efforts and the CDU/CSU maintained links to this not insignificant constituency. The memory also erupted periodically on the national stage, for example in 1985 when Kohl controversially attended a rally of Silesian expellees and in 1990 when he equivocated for several months on the final recognition of the Oder–Neisse border. Largely absent in the first post-unification years, this memory returned unexpect- edly in the last decade, leading many to fret that this ‘return of German self pity’ would relativise the memory of the Holocaust and its progressive achievements.82 Increased attention was already evident around the May 1995 anniversary when a pro- minent newspaper advertisement (‘Gegen das Vergessen’) admonished Germans for having forgotten the expulsion. The memory returned forcefully, however, only in 2002 with the publication of Gu¨nter Grass’ Im Krebsgang and Jo¨rg Friedrich’s Der Brand: Deutschland im Bombenkrieg, 1940–1945.83 Over the following years, an intensive discussion ensued – extensive print media treatment, a series of television (and feature film) productions like Downfall (2004), Dresden (2006), Die Flucht (2007), Die Gustloff (2008) and Anonyma: Eine Frau in Berlin (2008), as well as numerous ‘pop histories’, especially Guido Knopp’s documentary productions for the ZDF television network, such as Die grosse Flucht (2001). Despite (or perhaps because of) the productions’ mass popularity – Dresden garnered a 32.6 per cent and 31.2 per cent market share on the two nights that it was aired – many intellectuals have been highly critical of perceived ‘populism’ and insufficient contextualisation.84 Such developments met with a marked backlash from much of the German left and from abroad, notably Poland. Critics focused on efforts by the BdV and its leader, Erika Steinbach to create a Zentrum gegen Vertreibungen in Berlin, which would memorialise the expulsion of the Germans, as well as other instances of ethnic cleans- ing, and sensitise individuals to the ongoing potential of such acts. Many liberals and leftists – who after the implementation of Brandt’s Ostpolitik had ceased to represent expellee issues and who had come to embrace memory of the Holocaust – such as Schro¨der and Fischer, and especially members of the Polish elite (e.g. Lech and Jar- osław Kaczynski of the right-wing Law and Justice Party) lambasted the initiative and demonised Steinbach, who in 2003 was depicted on the cover of wprost magazine in an SS uniform riding Schro¨der. Critics felt these efforts signified worrying historical revisionism making the ‘perpetrators into victims’ and would relativise crimes com- mitted by Nazi Germans. The controversy ebbed after 2008 when the Grand Coalition decided to fund the Zentrum and find it space in Berlin. Nevertheless, the situation with Poland is still tense. For example, there have been interminable discussions about returning the ‘Berlinka’ archival collection to the German capital, moved to Silesia for safe-keeping during the war. Polish officials have asserted their rights to possession because the documents were ‘abandoned by fleeing Nazis’ as a former foreign minister once put it. In 2006 when Grass admitted to having been briefly in the SS, several politicians such as Lech Walesa threatened to revoke his honorary citizenship from the city of his birth, Gdansk. Prime Minister Jar- osław Kaczynski argued at the European Summit in June 2007 that Poland should have a voting weight in EU institutions based on its hypothetical population had Nazi-era HISTORY AND MEMORY IN THE FRG 35 depredations not occurred. Most recently, there was the reaction to a 2009 Spiegel cover story that looked at European collaborators in the Holocaust. Despite careful contextua- lisation, clear acknowledgement of Nazi German responsibility, and little attention devoted specifically to Poles, Jarosław Kaczynski asserted that ‘the Germans are attempting to shake off their guilt for a giant crime’.85 Mention should also be made of the relationship with the Czech Republic. Relations in the 1990s were tense in light of efforts by Sudeten Germans to revoke the Benesˇ Decrees, which had stripped Sudeten Germans of citizenship, rights and property, to sue in Czech and European courts (1995, 1999, 2002), and even to threaten to hold up Czech accession to the EU.86 It was therefore unsurprising in late 2009 when Czech President Vaclav Klaus vacillated on signing the Lisbon Treaty because of fears that the attached European Charter of Human Rights would facilitate more lawsuits. After officials in Berlin and Brussels agreed to an explicit exemption, Klaus backed down.87

CONCLUSION Since unification, the Federal Republic has continued the process of working through its difficult past – efforts, however contested and criticised, that have characterised most of its history. Today, multiple histories and collective memories – of German crimes, German suffering and German communism – circulate and vie for influence. Yet throughout the post-unification period, the dominance of Holocaust-centred memory was never in doubt and it remains the ethical imperative for German political culture. That said, virtually every author agrees that a more intensive process of working through the past set in by the late 1970s (mid-1980s at the latest), a phase that is now over a quarter-century old. What is the future of this ‘unmasterable’ past? Will the salience and intensity of memory issues continue? On the one hand, discussions and disputes concerning memory may continue (especially with Poland) and the Holocaust memory regime is entrenched deeply in the symbolic and commemorative landscape of the country, within the elite and intel- ligentsia, and in school curricula. On the other hand, it has been a decade since a major policy was explicitly justified by a memory argument. Policy-making – responding to the post-2008 economic crisis, the Bundeswehr deployment in Afghanistan and European policy – appears much more rational, even self-interested. In September 2009, the government even erected a memorial to soldiers killed in action since 1955 – a gesture that would have been unthinkable 20 years ago. Even pride in the German national community is no longer taboo. Moreover, there is some nascent evidence indicating that interest in all memories may be diminishing. For example, a historical keyword analysis of the holdings of the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek88 illuminates the preferences of scholarly, writing or library communities (Figure 1). With the exception of the GDR, all other keywords only started to increase in the early and mid-1980s, with the zenith of attention in the 1990s. They all have begun to decrease since the early 2000s, despite a rise in the overall number of books published.89 This could indicate that the phase of vigorous memory work may be concluding, a situation that troubles the many who support Holocaust 36 GERMAN POLITICS

FIGURE 1 KEYWORD FREQUENCY FROM DEUTSCHE NATIONALBIBLIOTHEK

memory as a moral necessity for Germany.90 If this trend can indeed be substantiated, what may account for decreasing interest in history and memory? Is the German past finally worked through, overcome or ‘mastered’ and is this cause for concern? Perhaps it was overly ambitious to expect that Holocaust memory could be main- tained with the same level of engagement and intensity 65 years after the demise of the Third Reich in an increasingly multicultural, Europeanised and globalised country. The Federal Republic today – so different from the Germany that committed genocide – may find it challenging to identify with the community of perpetrators and their crimes. Perhaps almost all outstanding historical issues have been addressed. Indeed, the last 25 years were precisely about the resolution of unresolved issues from the Nazi and/or post-war years (some of which were ‘frozen’ by the Cold War): revising the conception of victims to include East European civilians or gay men; compensating slave labourers; property restitution in the territory that was the GDR; debates about the complicity of average Germans, industry and the Wehrmacht in Nazi crimes; as well as the memories of German suffering and the GDR. Perhaps the country has moved well beyond a transitional phase or ‘floating gap’ between experienced communicative and institutionalised cultural memories.91 The latter is abstracted from the lived experiences of historical agents and must labour to maintain the emotional resonance typical of the communicative variant. With the gen- erations that perpetrated or witnessed Nazi crimes passing away and the third and fourth generations reaching adulthood, Nazi-era memories may be transmogrifying necessarily into cultural memory or simply history.92 Perhaps it is time to ask whether Germany’s past finally has been worked through or ‘mastered’ – not in a manipulative or evasive sense – but rather in spite of good intentions and because of the power of time. Memory may be eroding because of its very success, having made itself redundant. Perhaps Herf was correct that daring more democracy meant more memory and more justice. But what happens when the HISTORY AND MEMORY IN THE FRG 37 past has been worked through comprehensively and democracy is firmly rooted? What happens after the final prosecution of the last Nazi perpetrator (John Demjanjuk on trial in Munich since November 2009)? Perhaps largely because of the breadth and depth of the process of confronting the past and constructing collective memories, Germans have transformed utterly the values, institutions and social structures that made the Third Reich and the Holocaust possible. This, by the way, is exactly what Theodore Adorno proclaimed ‘coming to terms with the past’ to mean during the early years of the Federal Republic and which today is an irrefutable fact.93

NOTES

1. C. Maier, The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust and German National Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988); E. Nolte, ‘Vergangenheit, die nicht vergehen will’, in Historikerstreit: Die Dokumentation der Kontroverse um die Einzigartigkeit der nationalsozialistischen Judenvernich- tung (Munich: Piper, 1987). 2. K. Wilds, ‘Identity Creation and the Culture of Contrition: Recasting “Normality” in the Berlin Repub- lic’, German Politics 9/1 (2000), pp.83–102; J. Lind, Sorry States: Apologies in International Affairs (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009). 3. S. Friedlander, Memory, History and the Extermination of the Jews of Europe (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), p.126. 4. H. Dubiel, Niemand ist frei von der Geschichte: Die nationalsozialistische Herrschaft in den Debatten des Deutschen Bundestages (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1999); S. Kattago, ‘Representing German Victimhood and Guilt: The Neue Wache and Unified German Memory’, German Politics and Society 48/16 (1998), pp.86–104. 5. See P. Carrier, Holocaust Monuments and National Memory Cultures in France and Germany since 1989: The Origins and Political Function of the Ve´l’ d’Hiv’ in Paris and the Holocaust Monument in Berlin (New York: Berghahn Books, 2005). 6. As reprinted in F. Schirrmacher, ed. Die Walser-Bubis Debatte: Eine Dokumentation (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1999), pp.12, 13, 34. 7. K. Schuller, ‘Erinnerungsort deutscher Geschichte. Hauptstadt der Reue. Gedenkpolitik ist zu einer Hauptdisziplin geworden’, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 18 Dec. 1996, p.13. 8. ‘8. Mai: Scham, aber keine Schuld’. EMNID Umfrage und Analyse, Heft 3/4 (1995); K.H. Jarausch, H.C. Seeba and D. Conradt, ‘The Presence of the Past: Culture, Opinion, and Identity in Germany’, in K.H. Jarausch (ed.), After Unity: Reconfiguring German Identities, (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1997). 9. See D. Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996). J. Elsa¨sser and A.S. Markovits (eds.), Die Fratze der eigene Geschichte: Von der Goldhagen-Debate zum Jugoslawien Krieg (Berlin: Elefanten Press, 1999); G. Eley, The ‘Goldhagen Effect’: History, Memory, Nazism: Facing the German Past (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2000). 10. G. Schoenfeld, ‘Holocaust Reparations: A Growing Scandal’, Commentary (Sept. 2000), pp.25–34. 11. R. Wittlinger, ‘The Merkel Government’s Politics of the Past’, German Politics and Society 26/4 (2008), pp.9–27. 12. E. Noelle-Neumann and R. Ko¨cher, Allensbacher Jahrbuch der Demoskopie 11: 1998–2002 (Munich: Saur, 2002), p.540. 13. J. Golub, ‘Current German Attitudes Towards Jews and Other Minorities’, in Working Papers on Contemporary Anti-Semitism (New York: American Jewish Committee, 1994); ‘German Attitudes toward Jews, the Holocaust and the U.S.’ (New York: American Jewish Committee, 2002, 2005). 14. A. Assmann, F. Hiddemann and E. Schwarzenberger (eds.), Firma Topf & So¨hne – Hersteller der O¨ fen fu¨r Auschwitz: ein Fabrikgela¨nde als Erinnerungsort? (Frankfurt: Campus, 2002). 15. N. Kulish, ‘Bid to Revive the Iron Cross Awakens Germany’s Angst’, New York Times, 19 March 2008; See also E. Langenbacher, ‘Twenty-first Century Memory Regimes in Germany and Poland: An Analy- sis of Elite Discourses and Public Opinion’, German Politics and Society 26/4 (2008), pp.50–81. 16. T.U. Berger, Cultures of Antimilitarism: National Security in Germany and Japan (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998). 38 GERMAN POLITICS

17. T. Banchoff, The German Problem Transformed: Institutions, Politics and Foreign Policy, 1945–1995 (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1999), p.178; ‘Außenpolitik im Widerspruch’, Die Zeit 6/45 (2000). 18. ‘Germany and its Jews’, The Economist, 15 June 2002. 19. ‘Abschied vom Klischee?’ Der Spiegel 24 (2002), p.26 20. A.H. Beattie, Playing Politics with History: The Bundestag Inquires into East Germany (New York: Berghahn Books, 2008). 21. See A.J. McAdams, Judging the Past in Unified Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 22. See J. Herf, Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in the Two Germanies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 23. See S. Vees-Gulani, ‘The Politics of New Beginnings: The Continued Exclusion of the Nazi Past in Dresden’s Cityscape’, in P. Jaskot and G. Rosenfeld (eds.), Beyond Berlin: Twelve German Cities Confront the Past (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2008). 24. See D. Art, The Politics of the Nazi Past in Germany and Austria (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 25. K. Suhl, ed., Vergangenheitsbewa¨ltigung 1945 und 1989. Ein unmo¨glicher Vergleich? Eine Diskussion (Berlin: Verlag Volk und Welt, 1994). 26. S.F. Kellerhoff, ‘Deutsche Vergangenheit Kabinett beschließt neues Gedenksta¨ttenkonzept’, Die Welt, 18 July 2008. 27. M. Sabrow (ed.), Erinnerungsorte der DDR (Munich: Beck 2009); modelled on E. Francois and H. Schulze (eds.), Deutsche Erinnerungsorte (Munich: Beck, 2001). 28. P. von Becker, ‘Debatte um DDR-A¨ ußerung: Rechts-, Halbrechts-, Unrechtsstaat’, Der Tagesspiegel, 19 May 2009. 29. Gesine Schwan, a former academic, published Politik und Schuld: die zersto¨rerische Macht des Schwei- gens (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1997). 30. H. Kurthen, ‘Antisemitism and Xenophobia in United Germany: How the Burden of the Past Affects the Present’, in H. Kurthen, W. Bergmann and R. Erb (eds.), Antisemitism and Xenphobia in Germany after Unification (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp.41–2. 31. T. Adorno, ‘What Does Coming to Terms with the Past Mean?’, in G. Hartman (ed.), Bitburg in Moral and Political Discourse (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1986). 32. A. Mitscherlich and M. Mitscherlich, The Inability to Mourn: Principles of Collective Behavior (New York: Grove Press, 1975), pp.63, 31. 33. M. Schornstheimer, Bombenstimmung und Katzenjammer: Vergangenheitsbewa¨ltigung: Quick und Stern in den 50er Jahren (Cologne: Pahl-Rugenstein, 1989). 34. E.L. Santner, Stranded Objects: Mourning, Memory and Film in Post-war Germany (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), p.4. 35. R. Giordano, Die zweite Schuld oder Von der Last Deutscher zu sein (Hamburg: Rasch und Ro¨hring Verlag, 1987). 36. H. Berghoff, ‘Zwischen Verdra¨ngung und Aufarbeitung: Die bundesdeutsche Gesellschaft und ihre nationalsozialistische Vergangenheit in den Fu¨nfziger Jahren’, Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unter- richt 49/2 (1998), pp.97–114, here 112, 97. 37. Herf, Divided Memory, p.286; see also M. Fulbrook, German National Identity after the Holocaust (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999), pp.65–7. 38. H. Bude, Bilanz der Nachfolge: Die Bundesrepublik und der Nationalsozialismus (Frankfurt: Suhr- kamp, 1992), pp.30–33; J.M. Mushaben, From Post-War to Post-Wall Generations: Changing Atti- tudes toward the National Question and NATO in the Federal Republic of Germany (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998). 39. The term is Heinz Kohut’s as discussed in H. Schissler (ed.), The Miracle Years: A Cultural History of West Germany, 1949–1968 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), p.12. 40. P. Berman, ‘The Passion of Joschka Fischer: From the Radicalism of the ‘60s to the Intervention of the ‘90s’, The New Republic, 27 June 2001, pp.36–59, here p.45. 41. A.S. Markovits and B.S. Noveck, ‘West Germany’, in D.S. Wyman (ed.), The World Reacts to the Holo- caust (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), p.428. 42. Ibid., p.432; F.P. Lutz, Das Geschichtsbewußtsein der Deutschen: Grundlagen der politischen Kultur in Ost und West (Cologne: Bo¨hlau, 2000), p.105. 43. J. Habermas, The New Conservatism: Cultural Criticism and the Historians’ Debate (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), p.227. 44. R. Zitelmann, ‘Wiedervereinigung und deutscher Selbsthaß: Probleme mit dem eigenen Volk’, in W. Weidenfeld (ed.), Deutschland Eine Nation – doppelte Geschichte (Cologne: Verlag Wissenschaft und Politik, 1993). HISTORY AND MEMORY IN THE FRG 39

45. J.H. Brinks, Children of a New Fatherland: Germany’s Post-War Right-Wing Politics (London: I.B. Taurus Publishers, 2000), p.xiii. 46. I. Majer-O’Sickey, ‘Out of the Closet? German Patriotism and Soccer Mania’, German Politics and Society 24 (2006), pp.82–97. 47. Santner, Stranded Objects, p.144. 48. C. Wiedmer, The Claims of Memory: Representations of the Holocaust in Contemporary Germany and France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), p.207. 49. U. Herbert, ‘Academic and Public Discourses on the Holocaust: The Goldhagen Debate in Germany’, German Politics and Society 17/3 (1999), p.50. 50. Klemperer, a Jewish professor, survived the war (and compassionately witnessed the February 1945 bombing) with his gentile wife in Dresden. S. Aschheim, Culture and Catastrophe: German and Jewish Confrontations with National Socialism and other Crises (New York: New York University Press, 1996), p.127. 51. M. Brumlik, H. Funke and L. Rensmann, Umka¨mpftes Vergessen: Walser-Debatte, Holocaust- Mahnmal und neuere deutsche Geschichtspolitik (Berlin: Verlag Das Arabische Buch, 2000), pp.25, 7. 52. J. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven, CT: Yale Univer- sity Press, 1993), p.25. 53. B. Eberan, Luther? Friedrich der Große? Wagner? Nietzsche?...?...? Wer war an Hitler Schuld? Die Debatte um die Schuldfrage 1945–1949 (Munich: Minerva Publikationen, 1983), pp.201, 205. 54. H. Graml, ‘Die verdra¨ngte Auseinandersetzung mit dem Nationalsozialismus’, in M. Broszat (ed.), Za¨suren nach 1945: Essays zur Periodisierung der deutschen Nachkriegsgeschichte (Munich: Oldenbourg Verlag, 1990), p.171. 55. E. Noelle-Neumann, The Germans: Public Opinion Polls, 1947–66 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1981), p.241. 56. R. Merritt, Democracy Imposed: US Occupation Policy and the German Public, 1945–1949 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), pp.124–5. 57. Berger, Cultures of Antimilitarism. 58. S. Shafir, Ambiguous Relations: The American Jewish Community and Germany since 1945 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1999), pp.142–3. 59. A. Krzeminski, ‘Der Kniefall’, in Francois and Schulze (eds.), Deutsche Erinnerungsorte. 60. ‘Mit Gestrigen in die Zukunft? Spiegel Umfrage u¨ber Hitler, die NS-Vergangenheit und die Folgen’, Der Spiegel, 15 (1989), pp.150–60; P. Steinbach, Widerstand im Widerstreit: Der Widerstand gegen den Nationalsozialismus in der Erinnerung der Deutschen (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schoningh, 2001). 61. Merritt, Democracy Imposed, p.97. 62. Ibid., pp.100–101. Shafir notes that in 1949, the Office of the US High Commissioner concluded ‘as a social problem anti-Semitism is of minor significance’. Shafir, Ambiguous Relations, pp.140, 143. 63. P. Merkl, The Origins of the West German Republic (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963); Merritt, Democracy Imposed, p.338. 64. Merritt, Democracy Imposed, p.1 25; see also K. Baker, R. Dalton and K. Hildebrandt, Germany Trans- formed: Political Culture and the New Politics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981). 65. M. Bernhard, ‘Democratisation in Germany: A Reappraisal’, Comparative Politics (2001), pp.379– 400. 66. Young, Texture of Memory; K. Neumann, Shifting Memories: The Nazi Past in the New Germany (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2000), p.201. 67. See J. Herf, ‘Legacies of Divided Memory for German Debates about the Holocaust in the 1990s’, German Politics and Society 17/3 (1999), pp.9–34. 68. M. Kittel, Die Legende von der ‘Zweiten Schuld’: Vergangenheits-bewa¨ltigung in der A¨ ra Adenauer (Berlin: Ullstein, 1993). 69. F. Wielenga, Schatten deutscher Geschichte: der Umgang mit dem Nationalsozialismus und der DDR- Vergangenheit in der Bundesrepublik (Vierow: SH-Verlag, 1995), p.4; M.A. A. Sa’adah, Germany’s Second Chance: Trust, Justice and Democratisation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); M. Bernhard, Institutions and the Fate of Democracy: Germany and Poland in the Twentieth Century (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005). 70. P. Katzenstein, Tamed Power: Germany in Europe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997); A.S. Markovits and S. Reich, The German Predicament: Memory and Power in the New Europe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997). 71. Sa’adah, Germany’s Second Chance. 72. See R. Rohrschneider, Learning Democracy: Democratic and Economic Values in Unified Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); Lind, Sorry States. 73. P. Bock and E. Wolfrum (eds.), Umka¨mpfte Vergangenheit: Geschichtsbilder, Erinnerung und Vergangenheitspolitik im internationalen Vergleich (Go¨ttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1999), p.9. 40 GERMAN POLITICS

74. H. Lu¨bbe, ‘Der Nationalsozialismus im Deutschen Nachkriegsbewußtsein’, Historische Zeitschrift 236/3 (1983), p.585. 75. Shafir, Ambiguous Relations, p.76. 76. Wirth, ‘Von der Unfa¨higkeit zu trauern’, p.13; T. Moser, ‘Die Unfa¨higkeit zu trauern: Ha¨lt die Diagnose einer U¨ berpru¨fung stand? Zur psychischen Verarbeitung des Holocausts in der Bundesrepublik’, Psyche 46/5 (1992), pp.389–405, here p.393. 77. J. Friedrich Der Brand: Deutschland im Bombenkrieg, 1940–1945 (Berlin: Propyla¨en, 2002); T. Urban, Der Verlust: Die Vertreibung der Deutschen und Polen im 20. Jahrhundert (Munich: Beck, 2004). 78. See P. Ahonen, After the Expulsion: West Germany and Eastern Europe, 1945–1990 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); M. Kittel, Vertreibung der Vertriebenen? Der historische deutsche Osten in der Erinnerungskultur der Bundesrepublik (1961–1982) (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2007). 79. C. Schneider, ‘Jenseits der Schuld? Die Unfa¨higkeit zu trauern in der zweiten Generation’, Psyche 47/8 (1993), pp. 754–74, here 755. 80. P. Finn, ‘Debates is Rekindled over WWII Expellees’, The Washington Post, 11 Feb. 2002, pp.19–20. 81. ‘Die verdra¨ngte Trago¨die’, Der Spiegel 6 (2002), pp.192–202. 82. See B. Niven, Germans as Victims: Remembering the Past in Contemporary Germany (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). 83. G. Grass, Im Krebsgang (Go¨ttingen: Seidel, 2002); Friedrich, Der Brand. 84. ‘Feuersturm mit Millionenpublikum’, Spiegel Online, 7 March 2006; N. Ro¨ttgen and R. Ku¨nast, ‘Daheim zu Hause’, Der Tagesspiegel, 12 July 2009; see also W. Kansteiner, In Pursuit of German Memory: History, Television and Politics after Auschwitz (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006), p.180. 85. J. Puhl, ‘A Wave of Outrage’, Spiegel Online, 21 May 2009; ‘Die Komplizen: Hitlers europa¨ische Helfer beim Judenmord’, Der Spiegel 21 (2009). 86. See E. Langenbacher, ‘Ethical Cleansing? The Expulsion of Germans from Central Europe during and after World War Two’, in N. Robins and Adam Jones (eds.), Genocides by the Oppressed: Subaltern Genocide in Theory and Practice (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009). 87. E. Cody, ‘Europe’s Future, Tangled by its Past’, The Washington Post, 23 Oct. 2009. 88. This is based on year of publication, 1945–2008. See http://www.d-nb.de/; research completed between 25 May and 12 June 2009. 89. For more details see E. Langenbacher ‘The Mastered Past? Collective Memory Trends in Germany since Unification’, German Politics and Society, 28/1 (2010). 90. Herf, Divided Memory, p.7. 91. A. Assmann and U. Frevert, Geschichtsvergessenheit, Geschichtsversessenheit: Vom Umgang mit deutschen Vergangenheiten nach 1945 (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1999); L. Niethammer, ‘Diesseits des “Floating Gap”. Das kollektive Geda¨chtnis und die Konstruktion im wissenschaftlichen Diskurs’, in K. Platt and M. Dabag (eds.), Generation und Geda¨chtnis. Erinnerungen und kollektive Identita¨ten (Opladen: Leske und Budrich, 1995). 92. This usage follows P. Nora, ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire’, Representations 26 (1989), pp.7–24. 93. Adorno, ‘What Does Coming to Terms with the Past Mean?’; D. Goldhagen, ‘Modell Bundesrepublik: Nationalgeschichte, Demokratie und Internationalisierung in Deutschland’, Bla¨tter fu¨r deutsche und internationale Politik 4 (1997), pp.424–43; J. Habermas, ‘U¨ ber den o¨ffentlichen Gebrauch der Historie. Warum ein Demokratiepreis fu¨r Daniel Goldhagen?’Bla¨tter fu¨r deutsche und internationale Politik 4 (1997), pp.408–16; R. Dalton, Citizen Politics: Public Opinion and Political Parties in Advanced Industrial Democracies (Chatham: Chatham House Publishers, 1996). Copyright of German Politics is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.