ABSTRACT
I have argued in this book that German unification in 1990 opened up the possibility for the projection of a more inclusive image of the National Socialist past in the public realm. This, in turn, has led to an increased awareness on the part of today’s Germans of the true extent and nature of the crimes committed during the 1933-1945 period. It has also led to a broader understanding of the term ‘perpetrator’. The degree of involvement of ‘ordinary Germans’ was greater, it is now realized, than was for a long time assumed. Equally, there was a wider range of victims than previously recognized. In the same measure, moreover, Germans have come to take leave of the self-pitying notion that they were also victims of Hitler, and there is now less inclination to place the suffering of German expellees or the victims of Allied bombings above that of Jews. The process of inclusiveness has been resisted, and I have pointed to counter-paradigms, such as Kohl’s Neue Wache, which sought to exclude any specific focus on German crime and responsibility, preferring to label all Germans as victims. Equally, while post-1945 injustice in the east of Germany rightly found a place in the exhibition landscape of the new Länder after unification as Germany faced its ‘double past’, there have been attempts to present the German Special Camp inmates exclusively as victims. A number of new museums and memorial sites in east Germany, moreover, are designed to cast the GDR in as negative a light as the National Socialist period, thus seeking to offload responsibility for the total-itarian past onto east Germans, and to play down the crimes of Nazism. Despite these caveats, however, this book comes on balance to a positive conclusion about Germany’s preparedness, as a country, to confront National Socialism and acknowledge German criminality.
