ABSTRACT
The historian and publicist Jochen Thies rightly spoke about a group of 50 to 60 year old opinion makers, who can on account of their age be described as the last burnt children of National Socialism. Their credo ran as follows: the German nation-state destroyed itself in 1945, and as a consequence Germans in East and West must renounce a restoration of the nation-state. Some people did not believe in the restoration of German unity because of a lack of optimism, or of historical and political imagination. That can be forgiven at once. But it is quite a different matter in the case of those who also believed the two-state Germany to be desirable. Otherwise a generation of German intellectuals will have to deal with the uncomfortable questions of a younger generation. These will demand of their fathers why they participated so enthusiastically in the rationalization of division.
