Only these strident disputes, often carried out in unruly fashion between the generations, explain why, in the ‘Bonn republic’, the initially widespread opportunistic adaptation to a political order introduced by the victor powers more or less changed over the decades into a principled commitment to the normative foundations of the constitutional state. However, the constant flare-up of confrontations over what the historian Ernst Nolte called a ‘past that will not go away’ made this anything but a surefire success.
They were ignited directly after the Nazi period came to an end by controversies about the Nuremberg trials of crimes against humanity or about books such as those by Eugen Kogon (camp survivor/historian) or Günther Weisenborn (in the Nazi resistance). But as a result of the rapid rehabilitation of the old Nazi elites and a population released from the anti-communist spirit of the times, they were then extinguished. So, they had to be revived again and again from the oppositional margins, against a tidal mentality of repression and normalisation.
After a decade of silence, at the end of the 1950s came the first initiatives on the ‘reappraisal of the past’, as Theodor Adorno put it. In Ludwigsburg the central agency for the prosecution of Nazi crimes was set up after the first of the trials took place in Ulm. At the same time, members of the SDS (Socialist German Students’ Union), against the advice of the SPD leadership, organised an exhibition on ‘unatoned Nazi justice’ which provoked great controversy. But it was not until the Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt, set in motion by Fritz Bauer (a Jewish judge/prosecutor), that any of this gained nationwide attention. Despite the mild judgments handed down, nobody could ignore Auschwitz any more.
Looking back, the historian Ulrich Herbert states, adopting one of the few emphatic phrases in his important Geschichte Deutschlands im 20. Jahrhundert:
That, despite millions of victims of Nazi policies, the members of the Nazi elites and even the mass murderers from the security police and SD [security service] escape by and large almost unscathed and in part even live in privileged positions as respected citizens, was such a great scandal, fundamentally contradicting every concept of political morality, that it could not remain without serious and protracted consequences for this society, its internal structures and overseas image. For decades and right up to the present 21st century it comes over, despite all the successes in building a stable democracy, as a mark of Cain for this Republic.¹
The focus on justice was only the core element of this intellectual coming to terms with the past, which sweeps over the angry or resistant parts of the populace in a series of waves. These controversies are drawn in ever broader circles until the international response to Willy Brandt, the social-democrat chancellor, kneeling at a monument to the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw in 1970 gives to this focal theme a new, political dimension, while the emotionally staged fate of the Weiss family set out in the film Holocaust (1979 when it was shown in Germany) resonates across the whole of society. This at the end of the most restless decade in the domestic politics of the old federal republic, led of course by the student protest which since 1967 had come to a head. Part of an international movement, it took on a specific accent because the younger generation for the first time openly confronted their Nazi parents and publicly excoriated the involvement of Nazi personnel who had been allowed to return to office. But even ‘1968’ had its own pre-history: historians have since drawn attention to numerous political debates and initiatives which accompanied, from the late 1950s, protest movements against nuclear rearmament and emergency laws.²
Yet this Leitmotiv, recalled in catchwords, of constantly renewed calls to ‘never forget’ would scarcely have been woven into a self-evident culture of remembrance, indeed the official political identity of the republic. The theme would presumably have disappeared with the controversies and fights of the excitable 1970s, which Herbert Marcuse ironically dubbed ‘Revolt and counter-revolt’, if one had not interposed, after the 1983 change of government, the forced politics of history set out by Kohl under the aegis of a so-called ‘moral turn’.
Kohl’s attempts at ‘dethematising the Nazi period’ (Herbert) did not end with the highly symbolic meetings with Mitterrand in Verdun and the US president, Ronald Reagan, in Bitburg, nor with his similarly clumsy efforts to try to influence the American plans for the Holocaust Museum in Washington by way of voicing ‘national German interest’.³ It was much more the case that further initiatives, such as the founding of a national museum of German history, should imbue the population with a proud sense of identity drawn from national history in its entirety.
But the speech by Richard von Weizsäcker on the 40th anniversary of the end of the war put a spoke in the wheel. At least a broad swath of public opinion was impressed by the link the federal president made between the unsparingly detailed naming of individual groups of victims murdered in the concentration camps on the one hand and the definition of May 8th 1945 as ‘Liberation Day’ on the other. This redefinition stood in deliberate contrast to how the bulk of contemporaries had subjectively experienced that day.
In the two years thereafter, the so-called Historians’ Dispute erupted, with the attempt by Nolte to relativise the Holocaust by referring to Stalin’s crimes. Against the background of Kohl’s politics of history, the quarrel was ultimately about two things: first, the significance that ‘Auschwitz’ and the murder of Europe’s Jews should acquire in the political memory of the German population and, second, the relevance of this self-critical remembrance of the Nazi past for the sustained identification of citizens with the constitution of their democratic state and, more generally, with a liberal way of life shaped by mutual recognition of the right to ‘otherness’. And yet, at that time, it still remained undecided whether this commitment would be cemented as the core element of how the federal republic’s citizens should see themselves.
The firm anchoring of this consciousness in civil society—which today finds exemplary expression in the words and behaviour of a federal president like Frank-Walter Steinmeier—is due first of all to the impassioned policy debates around history in the 1990s. I’m talking here about the unending chain of public reactions: the provocative book by Daniel Goldhagen on normal Germans as Hitler’s Willing Executioners of the Holocaust; the writer Martin Walser’s 1998 speech accepting the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, in which he disparaged ‘this permanent show of our shame’, and its spontaneous contradiction by the then chair of the Jewish Central Council, Ignaz Bubis; the roving exhibition organised by Jan-Phillip Reemtsma’s institute on the (until then) widespread denial of Wehrmacht crimes in the war of destruction against ‘Jewish Bolshevism’, and finally the building of Berlin’s Holocaust Memorial, which in the meantime Kohl himself had instigated.
These discussions were in their momentum and range incomparable with anything in the past. They caused deep rifts but were in a sense of a final nature: up till now, in any official commemoration ceremonies, the commitment to democracy and the rule of law is not just sworn in an abstract manner but much more ceremonially affirmed as the result of a difficult learning process—as the ever-conscious self-critical remembrance of crimes against humanity for which we, as postwar German citizens, bear no guilt, but for which we are nevertheless liable and carry historic responsibility (as Karl Jaspers unequivocally spelt out to his fellow countrymen and women, as early as 1946, in The Question of German Guilt).
In other respects, these discussions all the same brought no closure: given a completely new situation, the learning process must continue, because one suggestion that held sway in the old republic has proven to be false in the last few years. Those convictions and motives, upon which the Nazi regime drew, no longer belong to a past that one can count by the intervening years: they have returned with the radical wing of the AfD—up to and including its phraseology—to the democratic everyday.
After the debates on the Nazi past carried out during the 1960s, 70s and 80s the final wave stretched even into the first post-reunification decade—and yet remained more or less a matter for the west.⁴ That was true for the initiators, public speakers and participants in these debates and can be shown inter alia by the geographic distribution of towns in which the ‘Wehrmacht’ exhibition between 1995 and 1999 attracted some 900,000 visitors. This kind of selectivity in participation requires no explanation, given the anti-fascism prescribed from above for over 40 years in the east; and, certainly, it is no ground for criticism because of the completely different history of coming—or rather not coming—to terms with the Nazi past in the GDR. In the days after 1989–90 the population in the east had moreover to cope with problems reaching deep into everyday life, which the west barely noted and of which it had no inkling itself.