ABSTRACT
In Germany, a difficult historical heritage, responsibility for two world wars, the resultant uprootedness of large streams of refugees, the nightmare of the Holocaust, and forty years of partition, have disrupted traditions in which a common German identity could be grounded. In West Germany, identity was experienced as problematic, caught in the tension between historical continuity and discontinuity. In East Germany, official, state-regulated and decreed national identity separated the German Democratic Republic from the German past and absolved East Germans ex cathedra of coming to terms with the Nazi heritage. Germany’s role in advocating the single currency and further European integration, as well as enlargement of EU and NATO towards the East, is a sign of continuity rather than the assumption of a new role. Germans have, of necessity, become more introspective, more preoccupied with themselves since Unification.
