ABSTRACT
As satirized by George Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four, Stalinism and other totalitarianisms have become classic cases of the manipulation of history and memory. The West German government under Konrad Adenauer did initiate substantial reparations payments to Jews in the form of tens of billions of deutschmarks in financial transfers to Israel. The upheavals of the 1960s radically destabilized the historical narrative. Survivors and scholars of the genocide against the Jews explored the Holocaust systematically for the first time. German scholars asserted historical continuities between the Nazi and post-Nazi periods, including the role of large capitalist enterprises that had managed the transition smoothly from fascism to democracy. Japan’s struggles over memory mirror in key respects those in Germany, the other major Axis power defeated in the Second World War. On an individual level, perpetrators seek to consign their atrocities to memory’s dustbin. Forgetting may represent a final stage of revision, reinterpretation, and denial, canceling any dissonance with one’s preferred self-image.
