| Abstract | In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Radical History Review 81 (2001) 113-132 Public History [Figures] The politics of memory in post-World War II Germany -- both West and East -- have long been contentious. The public preoccupation with the history and memory of Nazism and the Holocaust, created by historians and public intellectuals, filmmakers and artists, novelists and memoirists, as well as by an eager public that consumes and critiques their cultural productions, dates from the 1960s and 1970s. But the immediate postwar years were hardly ones of silence. Even as Germans denied guilt and knowledge of the past and embraced 1945 as a zero hour or Stunde null, they kept alive questions of causation, complicity, and continuity. In the west, efforts to claim victim status accompanied a general acknowledgment of societal responsibility but not individual guilt. In the east, responsibility was put on capitalism and the successor state in which it survived, while the working class was celebrated for its resistance or consoled for its victimization. The politics of memory in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, when initial constructions of the Nazi past were disrupted, revised, and again recontested by such events as the Eichmann trial, the American television film Holocaust, and the German series Heimat, have been well studied. The controversies about history and memory that have accompanied the shift from the Bonn to the Berlin republic mark a new phase of "coming to terms with the past." The Bonn republic was built and ruled by the Wehrmacht and Hitler Youth generations. It was, however reluctantly, a nonnational or perhaps a postnational state. Whatever its economic power and military strength, its capacity to exercise those abroad was significantly constrained. And the cold war provided stable ideological tropes and rhetorical forms in which to confront the past and present. The Berlin republic, an entity still very much in formation, is a national state, able, if not always eager, to intervene in Europe and beyond. It is dominated by the children and grandchildren of those who experienced Nazism and the Holocaust, those who are children of the cold war or of the post-cold war order. Three recent controversies have both continued and altered the politics of memory in the Berlin republic. The first surrounds Daniel Goldhagen's book Hitler's Willing Executioners; the second involves a widely traveled photo exhibition, provocatively but accurately entitled War of Annihilation (Vernichtungskrieg): Crimes of the Wehrmacht, 1941-1944; and the third swirls around the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, or Mahnmal, which is to be built in Berlin. How have both the Bonn and Berlin republics shaped and been shaped by the politics of memory? Why has the past not passed away, as many hoped and many others feared after unification in the early 1990s? Why, to quote Miriam Hansen and Michael Geyer, does "the present desire and need" the past? What groups -- politically and generationally -- have been involved as both producers and consumers of these controversies? What do these very public and often very acrimonious debates, conducted by prominent public intellectuals, journalists, and academics in leading newspapers and magazines, television programs and public lectures, tell us about the nature of the Berlin republic, the identity of its intellectuals, and the preoccupations of its population? What do they tell us about the elusive German search for "normality"? The politics of memory have changed in significant ways since unification. First, they are intimately intertwined with the renewed emphasis on the nation and efforts to develop a national rather than postnational identity. Second, more generations are involved. The Historians' Debate of the late 1980s was primarily conducted by those who were adolescents or young men at the end of World War II; the controversies of the 1990s include not only the Hitler Youth generation, but also the " '68ers" and the younger critics of both their parents and grandparents. Third, debates about history and memory have become more contentious because they no longer center primarily on the uniqueness of the Holocaust or the structural/ systemic causes of genocide. Rather, they focus on the identity, behavior, and motives of the perpetrators and on the appropriate commemoration of and compensation for victims. This has fueled a counterdiscourse on Germans as victims and...
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