ABSTRACT
Germans live in the shadow of their awful past. Much of the Federal Republic’s history has centered around trying to understand the mistakes which led to Nazism in the past and trying to avoid them in the present. This effort has involved nothing less than the attempt completely to remake a people and polity. It formally began under Allied supervision in 1945 at ‘Stunde Null’ (‘hour zero’) when Germany and the Germans were to be severed from their aberrant past and linked to a common future with their victors. The (West) Germans were to receive not just a new state, but a new collective identity as well. And the state was to be democratic rather than authoritarian, the identity liberal rather than German.
