A PAST THAT TRULY WILL NOT GO AWAY: DEBATES ABOUT NATIONAL SOCIALISM

The well-known writer and novelist Martin Walser became the most outspoken advocate for ending what he described as constant public breast-beating over Germany’s Nazi past.^[1] Walser was in some respect similar to Grass, as the themes of national identity and national history ran consistently through his literary work. In 1998, in his acceptance speech of the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, one of the country’s most prestigious literary awards, he attacked the “national masochism” of the country’s media and of its public intellectuals such as Grass and Habermas. Constantly putting “German shame” on display, he argued, only gave rise to neo-Nazism and contributed to the neglect of the national theme in Germany. Those who listened to Walser’s speech in Frankfurt’s Paulskirche, among them many of the great and the good of Germany’s political and intellectual establishment, gave him a standing ovation. Next day many commentators in the newspapers thought that Walser was only saying aloud what many Germans were already thinking. And the novelist himself subsequently emphasised that he saw himself as the mouthpiece of the silent majority in Germany.
However, one of the few who did not cheer Walser inside the Paulskirche, was the chairman of the Central Councils of Jews in Germany, Ignatz Bubis. Bubis publicly denounced Walser as an “intellectual arsonist”. He accused the novelist of wanting to draw a line under the National Socialist past so as to make it easier to propagate a renewed nationalism in Germany. The attack rapidly divided the German public. Several influential opinion-makers, including the editor of the left-liberal Der Spiegel magazine, Rudolf Augstein, defended Walser and in turn attacked Bubis for wanting to turn the memory of Auschwitz into a perennial weapon to be used against Germany. Even chancellor Schröder intervened in the debate with a somewhat cryptic remark that a writer had to be allowed to say these things. It was the same chancellor who in fact invited Walser to join him in a public discussion about the significance of May 8 (the end of the Second World War in Europe) in 2002. Walser said little new on the occasion. He re-iterated his emotional commitment to the German nation,^[2] but it was a powerful message sent out by Schröder that Germans could now publicly discuss the issues of national pride and self-confidence.
Public opinion surveys, which demonstrate a steep decline in the knowledge about National Socialism, also show that many, in particular younger Germans, do not want to be bothered with the Nazi past anymore.^[3] Lack of knowledge about Nazism goes hand in hand with the rise in anti-Semitic stereotypes.^[4] A new intellectual anti-Semitism has been spreading in the reunified Germany.^[5] The Holocaust has never been part of the private memory of people in the nation of perpetrators.^[6] And as the personal memory of the Holocaust gives way to historical memory, the Holocaust is beginning to lose its spell over German history. It has become a history which is being successfully Europeanized and globalized as a parable of evil in history – a narrative for a cultural memory no longer linked to a specific time and place.^[7] January 27, the day Auschwitz was liberated, has been, after all, commemorated as the Holocaust Day across Europe and the wider world since 1996.
And yet millions of Germans saw one of the major film sensations of the 1990s: Steven Spielberg’s “Schindler’s List” (1993). It was very positively reviewed in the German media. One of the major publishing sensations of the 1990s was the diary of Viktor Klemperer, a Jewish professor of Romance philology at Dresden, who, throughout the Nazi years, gave an authentic record of daily life and daily discrimination against the Jews. The hero in Spielberg’s film was a German, and Klemperer affirmed his own Germanness throughout the diary, but both were nevertheless signs that the German public remained deeply fascinated with the Nazi years.
The Goldhagen debate, which raged through Germany in 1996, was another indicator that it would not be easy to push the Holocaust away from its central position in German identity politics.^[8] Daniel J. Goldhagen’s thesis about the Holocaust as a national project of the Germans driven forward by a collective “eliminationist mind-set” was rejected by the entire historical establishment. However, when Goldhagen toured Germany, mass audiences of overwhelmingly younger Germans supported the American assistant professor against his mostly elderly and slightly aloof professorial German counterparts. Certainly, the question that Goldhagen set out to answer, namely why the Holocaust could happen in Germany, does not seem to have lost any of its fascination after reunification.
The opening of the Jewish museum in September 2001 was widely welcomed as another sign that the new Germany is taking seriously German-Jewish history and culture. Even one of the most consistent critics of German attempts to come to terms with the National Socialist past, the Jewish publicist Ralph Giordano, did not hesitate to link his own identity firmly to notions of Germanness. He called on the millions of Germans who thought like him, not to give right-wing extremism and anti-Semitism another chance: “Let’s not leave Germany once again to those who will potentially ruin it. Instead let us protect, guard, and defend this democratic republic! Firmly anchored in Europe, she is also – I dare use the old-fashioned term – our fatherland.”^[9] Was this the return of dreams of a “German-Jewish symbiosis?” As Salomon Korn, chair of the Jewish community in Frankfurt/Main, reminded his fellow Germans, any talk about a “German-Jewish culture” or “German-Jewish symbiosis” remained deeply problematic in a post-Holocaust Germany.^[10]
The National Socialist past has retained its crucial significance for German identity debates in other respects too. After a long campaign the Red-Green government finally gave an official rehabilitation to those soldiers of the Wehrmacht who had been court-martialled and executed as deserters.^[11] The involvement of the Wehrmacht in the Holocaust (something known to experts for decades) came under public scrutiny in a major exhibition touring Germany since 1995. Organised by the Hamburg based Institute for Social Research, it was seen by over one million people. Right-wing protests about this alleged attempt to smear the “clean” German soldiers were met with more public interest. The exhibition had to be withdrawn and reworked, because some of the photos showed victims not of the Wehrmacht but of the Soviet secret police. But when it reopened it still pulled in the crowds. Finally, the long debate concerning compensation payments for slave labourers in the Third Reich culminated in August 2000 in the creation of a national foundation “Compensation, Responsibility and the Future.” One year earlier, the President, Johannes Rau, in a widely reported speech before the Parliament, asked former slave labourers for forgiveness in the name of the German people. From 2001 billions of euro were made available to compensate former slave labourers who individually received sums between Ј1,700 and Ј5,000.^[12] The money was paid out largely by German companies fearful that their global business interests might be negatively affected by threats of Holocaust survivors and non-Jewish slave labourers to sue the companies which had employed slave labour during the Third Reich. Still, the existence of the foundation is the most recent sign that the reunified Germany will not forget about its Nazi past.
Many local history workshop-type grassroots activities also continue to make the National Socialist past an important topic for public debate. Some commentators have even argued that the German people, not unlike the Jewish people, have become a “symbolic people”, representing the incarnation of evil in a post-Holocaust world.^[13] Any search for normalcy, which seeks to sideline the memory of the Holocaust and of National Socialism, seems doomed to failure from the start. However, normalisation no longer entails denial of the past but has in fact endorsed the Nazi past. Representatives of the new Germany readily admit German guilt and they do not deny the more gruesome aspects of German history in the first half of the twentieth century. But, at the same time, they insist that Germany has learned its lessons. Post-1945 German history is presented as a living proof that the nation has finally taken its side next to and in the midst of the Western community of “civilized” and democratic nation-states. It was precisely on this basis that Chancellor Schröder’s first state of the nation address in 1998 could argue that Germans were building a “self-confident nation” in line with levels of national pride to be found elsewhere in Western Europe.

PERSPECTIVES ON THE GDR

The only problem with such a national past is that it is necessarily one which relies heavily on the West German success story after 1945. What about East Germany, one is tempted to ask. How does it fit into this emerging national narrative of the reunified Germany? The simple answer is: not very well. Anti-communism was an important ingredient of the West German identity before 1990. Ironically, the years following the demise of Communism across Eastern Europe saw anti-Communism in the West increase.^[14] On the right many commentators highlighted the horrors of Communism, sometimes with the deliberate aim of dislocating the National Socialist past from its central place in German identity debates and making the Communist past the new focus of attention. The Red dictatorship was presented as at least as bad (if not worse) than the Brown dictatorship. After all, it was argued, it went on for much longer and corrupted society far more thoroughly than the twelve years of National Socialism. The anti-Fascism of the Communist GDR was denounced as nothing more than a propaganda tool of the SED. When it was discovered that the Buchenwald concentration camp – the most sacred territory of the cult of anti-Fascism in the old GDR – had also been used by the Soviets after 1945 to imprison about 28,000 former Nazis and opponents of Stalinism, sensationalist newspaper reports in the yellow press presented the Communist “concentration” camp in the same light as the Nazi one. Making Buchenwald a site which remembered both the victims of Nazism and Stalinism was one of the most difficult tasks in the minefields of German memory politics in the 1990s.^[15]
The publication of the “Black Book of Communism” in 1997 (first in French) fanned the flames of anti-Communism in the West.^[16] Unfortunately for its German admirers, it did not include a chapter on the GDR, but the foreword to the German edition sought to rectify this “omission”. Subsequently a range of other publications sought to present the SED regime and Communism in general in the darkest colours, highlighting one-sidedly their criminal energies.^[17] Troughout the first half of the 1990s attempts were made to remove the portrayal of the Communist resistance to National Socialism from the permanent public exhibition on the resistance in Berlin.^[18] Campaigns were started to rename East-Berlin streets named after well-known Communists. Much public attention was focused on the criminal activities of the SED regime. The Berlin based Office for Governmental and Unification Criminality investigated – throughout the nine years of its existence – more than 20,000 cases of criminal GDR activities, ranging from the violent death of those attempting to flee the GDR to sport doping.^[19]
Mary Fulbrook has described the strong vilification of GDR history in the German memory culture of the 1990s as “Checkpoint Charlie approach to German history.”^[20] But the attempt to make a blatant and simplistic anti-Communism the foundation myth of the reunified Germany ultimately had only limited success. For a start, booming historical research on GDR history has been varied. A plurality of research methods and agendas has been developed at a great number of research institutes and university departments. Many historians have emphasised that it is insufficient to reduce the GDR to its dictatorial aspects and instead have sought to understand and analyse the complex interplay between state and society in the GDR. Two official parliamentary commissions on GDR history produced much debate and a considerable amount of mud-slinging between the government and the opposition over the question which West German party had supported the “evil machinations” of the “Stasi regime” most. But they also revealed how difficult it was to see the GDR simply in terms of a dictatorship. A number of East German social scientists and historians, many of them unemployed after 1990, set up an alternative commission and produced a steady stream of publications seeking to counter what they perceived as the one-sided public denunciation of the GDR after 1990.^[21]
Debates about the impact of the secret police, the Stasi, on East German society haunted public debates throughout the 1990s and contributed in a major way to presenting the GDR primarily as a system of coercion and terror. As early as 1990 a formidable witch hunt focused on the prominent East German novelist Christa Wolf. An SED member to the end of the GDR, she only revealed her own harassment by the Stasi in a novella published after the fall of the GDR. Immediately questions were asked why she presented herself as a victim of the SED regime only after its demise. One year later, in 1991, two key representatives of the literary East Berlin-based counter-culture, Sascha Anderson and Rainer Schedlinski, were “outed” as Stasi informants. Subsequently many other former GDR notables, including many former dissidents, were accused of having been on the payroll of the Stasi. The Stasi debates undoubtedly revealed a frightening level of surveillance of every aspect and every niche of East German society. But there were also an increasing number of voices insisting that any one-sided concentration on the Stasi and the SED as central institutions in the GDR would reveal very little about how East German society actually functioned.^[22]
The mountains of files left by the Stasi were a valuable, if somewhat problematic, historical source revealing a great deal about diverse aspects of the GDR. They also served as the basis on which all East German employees in public services were screened for former Stasi connections. If the screening revealed Stasi activities, they often lost their jobs. In fact, about 70 per cent of the former East German elites were replaced by West Germans after 1990. Such a radical elite change, almost total in some areas and institutions, stood in a marked contrast to the continuities between Nazi and West German elites after 1945 and created much bitterness among former supporters of the SED regime. Such heavy-handed Western interventionism was a consequence of Western concerns not to repeat the haphazard and half-hearted coming-to-terms with the Nazi past which was characteristic of West Germany in the 1950s. Once again the reunified Germany, or, more precisely, its Western elites, were intent on demonstrating that they had learned the lessons of the Nazi past and its aftermath. But the radical removal of the former GDR elites accompanied by rapid and deep social change, affecting the whole of East German society deepened the gulf between East and West Germans. East Germans now accused their Western cousins of selling them short and colonizing the East. The East German image of the arrogant “Wessi” was matched by the West German image of the lazy “Ossi” relying on massive financial help from the West to get out of the mess created by forty years of “actually existing socialism.”^[23] The Berlin wall was gone, but, so it seemed to many, the wall in the heads of Germans East and West was growing higher every year. Nine years after the reunification East and West Germans still have completely different and mutually incompatible perspectives on life, politics and on what the future might bring.^[24]
Was there anything worth preserving of the GDR in the reunified Germany? Former supporters of the SED regime remained convinced that at least the basis for a non-capitalist economy was laid in the GDR. A socialist Germany failed because it could not find a more democratic way of organising its society. Hence, among the far left, the search open for democratic socialist alternatives to the restitution of capitalism. Some commentators pointed to a much stronger work culture in which people identified more with their places of work. East German women in particular have argued that they had achieved greater levels of de facto emancipation than their feminist counterparts in the West.^[25] Others have argued that the 1989 revolution should have bolstered concepts of active citizenship and a stronger civil society in the reunified Germany. As the world of East Germans was turned upside down in the reunification process they tended to cling to the recognisable symbols of the world they had known. Thus they, for example, campaigned heavily to retain the traffic light figure at GDR city crosswalks (Ampelmännchen), and the Jugendweihe^[26] remains highly popular in East Germany.
A veritable “ostalgia” (Ostalgie) took hold of East Germans in the 1990s. Consumer goods closely associated with the former GDR, from Trabant motor cars to Rotkäppchen sparkling wine, became markers of identity, as East Germans craved for a vanished material culture which seemed to symbolize their vanished former lifeworld.^[27] The GDR might seem an unlikely object for nostalgic gazes backward, but the success of “ostalgia,” carefully nurtured by diverse commercial interests, ultimately rests on feelings of humiliation and alienation. It is a sure sign that many East Germans have not yet fully arrived in the reunified country. Eight years after reunification a publication entitled “The GDR Turns Fifty” could still appear indicating that, in the heads of some East Germans at least, their former state refuzed to die.^[28] Popular films such as “Good Bye Lenin” looked back light-heartedly on the cosy provincialism of the GDR, and German television is broadcasting TV shows commemorating the GDR and its “heroes.”
The PDS successfully established itself as a regional political party in East Germany by presenting itself as the most creditable alternative to the “colonising” and “alien” Western party political imports.^[29] Most East Germans, however, would readily admit that many things changed for the better after 1990, but they still have been suffering from an often difficult and painful adaptation to completely changed circumstances. What happened to them was what Hannah Arendt described as “loss of world.”^[30] Few wanted the old SED regime back, but the new Germany was all-too-strange, and, what is more, it was often experienced as unwelcoming and humiliating. Walter Schmidt, former head of the Institute of Historical Research at the old GDR Academy of Sciences, talked about his own difficulties of settling in a post-reunification Germany which one-sidedly condemned the GDR to the dustbin of history: “The identity of all those who have worked here [in the GDR] cannot be maintained if everything that has been done and achieved in more than four decades is simply invalidated and declared useless. My identity is incomprehensible without the GDR, its hopes and disappointments, its achievements and errors, its expectations and its ultimate failure.”^[31]
Two often mutually incompatible historical memories are still underpinning different identity constructions in East and West Germany at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Take, for example, the 150th anniversary of the German revolution of 1848 which was a major event in both parts of Germany throughout 1998. But where the West primarily commemorated the parliamentary movement focused on the Paulskirche, the East remembered the social revolution and the fights on the barricades.^[32]
In 1999 psychologists alleged that authoritarian personalities were produced by the GDR-specific socialisation in nurseries and kindergardens. Submissiveness, conformity and compliance were rooted in the GDR educational system and allegedly explained the rise of neo-Nazism in East Germany as well as the negative attitudes of many East Germans to parliamentary democracy. Simplistic psychological arguments are, however, as Arnd Bauerkämper has pointed out, a poor replacement for historical analysis. State paternalism in the GDR put a premium on values oriented towards consensus, social harmony, and state regulation. Its strength helps to explain the difficulties of East Germans with adapting to the more pluralist, conflictual and liberal character of West German democracy.^[33]
Such problems were exacerbated by a reunification process which gave East Germans few opportunities to contribute to the making of a constitutional framework for the new Germany. The new East German Länder simply joined the old West German Länder and accepted the constitution of the old FRG. In 1990 Habermas, among others, argued for a different path towards reunification. He wanted to build a new nation on a new constitution, but the clear majority of those involved in the public debate favoured accession of the GDR to the old FRG. The Grundgesetz had, they argued, withstood the test of time and little could be gained by replacing it with another constitution. That might indeed have been the case, but it left many East Germans feeling as though they had to fit into a cast provided by West Germans. Subsequent problems with system transfer, including an underperforming economy and massive unemployment, could therefore easily translate into anti-Western feelings.^[34] But in the medium to long term the chances for a successful integration of East and West Germans still remain good. From the evidence we have surveyed here it seems unlikely that the GDR will be reduced to a dirty footnote in German history, as some observers feared after 1990. It also seems unlikely that the GDR will become the new villain in German history replacing the National Socialist years in the memory culture of the reunified Germany. A more differentiated approach to the history of the GDR alongside generational change and the increasing convergence of living standards the East and the West will chip away at the wall in the heads of Germans and contribute to the making of a less divided nation.

THE REDISCOVERY OF THE DISCOURSE OF VICTIMHOOD

Germans have not only highlighted their roles as perpetrators of crimes against humanity; they have also rediscovered themselves as victims in their twentieth-century history. If the GDR was effectively a Soviet homunculus which only lived through the grace of the Soviet occupying forces and had no deep roots in German history, then the overwhelming majority of East Germans can be presented as victims of a Communist dictatorship alien to indigenous German traditions. Such a perspective is, however, unlikely to gain significant support. The deep involvement of millions of East Germans with the GDR has been too obvious and the continuities of the GDR with some traditions of the German labour movements are too visible. More promising have been renewed attempts to present Germans as victims of the total war and its aftermath between 1941 and 1946. In 1992 Joseph Vilsmeier adopted a perspective of the honest, decent, heroic and suffering German soldier in his epic war film “Stalingrad.” It was a perspective easily recognisable to those familiar with the German war films of the 1950s. The V- day celebrations in 1995 saw the familiar urge of German politicians to present themselves as part of a Germany which had been liberated from Nazism. While Germans may speak of liberation in the sense that it allowed them to develop, over the long term, the kind of civic political culture which resembled the one more deeply rooted in the British and French democracies, the discourse on liberation has to be treated with caution, when it deteriorates into a claim that the Germans had been oppressed by the Nazis.
Most recently the Germans have been imagined as victims of Fascism and the total war, first, in connection with the Allied bombing war against German civilian targets, and, secondly, in relation to the suffering of German refugees and expellees. The publications of W. G. Seebald and Jörg Friedrich about the impact of aerial bombardment on German civilians were greeted in the German media as though a taboo had been broken at long last.^[35] Friedrich’s book in particular described powerfully and in highly emotive terms the death of the German cities and the unbelievable suffering of the people living in these cities. Germans, it was alleged by several reviewers of his book, had somehow been not allowed to talk about their own suffering in the war. Literary historians, such as Volker Hage, or writers, such as Walter Kempowski, pointed out that books on the subject did exist after 1945 and that if the public discourse was muted, it had much to do with the near-impossibility of narrating those experiences in a book form. They were, however, often present in personal family narratives, such as diaries or stories told at family gatherings.^[36]
The public outcry that a taboo topic was being rediscovered was even more marked over the case of the refugees who fled from the approaching Soviet army and the expellees driven from their homes after 1945 in line with the Potsdam agreement. Ironically, it was Günter Grass, the impeccable reunification critic, who kicked off this debate about German victimhood with the publication of a novella “Walking Like a Crab” (Im Krebsgang). It tells the story of the sinking of the German refugee ship Wilhelm Gustloff by a Soviet submarine in January 1945. It also recalls the story of the man after whom the ship was named. But most importantly, the book is about the failure of the post-war generation of Germans to bear witness to German suffering in the war. It identifies an alleged taboo topic in German writing about the war and warns that such forgetfulness about German suffering will only haunt the younger generation of Germans and make them more vulnerable to right-wing extremist propaganda. “History,” Grass formulates, “more precisely, the history that we are stirring up, is a blocked toilet. We flush and flush, the shit still floats back up.”^[37] If such blockage is to be overcome, German crimes and German suffering need to be seen together, according to Grass.
Grass’ idea that German suffering represents a blank spot in the German memory of the Second World War is, however, a myth.^[38] For the entire 1950s German victims of the war, especially refugees and expellees, were commemorated far more prominently than the victims of the German genocide and warfare. Streets in almost every town and city were named after the “lost” regions and cities in the East. The crиme de la crиme of German historiography contributed to a multi-volume “Documentation of the Expulsion of Germans from East Central Europe” which was financed by the government and published between 1954 and 1962. Innumerable memories of the “lost Heimat” in the East were published. Some of the great names of German literature, journalism and history have written about their experience of fleeing from the advancing Red Army or being expelled from their homes: Walter Kempowski, Christa Wolf, Heiner Müller, Siegfried Lenz, Arno Schmidt, Dieter Forte, Leoni Ossowski, Marion Gräfin Dönhoff, and Christian von Krockow are just some of the names which come to mind. TV and the cinema picked up the theme with a vengeance, and the very topic of Grass’ novella, the sinking of the refugee ship “Wilhelm Gustloff” by a Soviet submarine in 1945, had already been the topic of a popular 1959 movie “Night Fell over Gotenhafen.” Events sponsored by the expellees’ organisations brought together hundreds of thousands of Germans in communities of remembrance of the “lost East” every year. In the 1960s representatives of the refugees and expellees were among the most vociferous opponents of Ostpolitik, denouncing Brandt as a national traitor and cheering “Brandt to the wall.” As Ostpolitik became the common sense of German foreign policy in the 1970s and 1980s, the expellees’ organisations acquired a whiff of reactionary revanchism in many quarters. But the fate of German refugees and expellees was hardly forgotten even in this period.
Yet Grass undoubtedly hit a nerve in Germany which spent much of the 1990s convincing itself that it was somehow moving towards a more “normal” national identity. That normalcy entailed remembering the suffering of ordinary Germans. There is an uncanny resemblance of the contemporary debates to the ones in the 1950s, when German suffering was compared with and set off against the German guilt. However, in contrast to the 1950s, many Germans supporting the memorialisation of German suffering at the same time uphold the importance of remembering German guilt. It is precisely because the Germans have collectively come to terms with this past that some voices from within Germany have felt entitled not only to remember German suffering in the war but also to lecture other nations on their war crimes and to claim for Germany a higher moral authority in international politics.^[39] They include many people on the left of the political spectrum. Thus, for example, the interior minister of the Red-Green government, Otto Schily, speaking at the 1999 meeting of the Association of Expellees (BdV), explicitly criticised the left for ignoring the crimes committed against Germans at the end of the Second World War. He subsequently became one of the main supporters of the idea, launched by the BdV’s president, Erika Steinbach, of founding a documentation center on the expulsions in Berlin. Since Ostpolitik, relations between the BdV and the left in the FRG had been virtually non-existent, but in 2003 Schily, a former civil rights lawyer with a record of defending left-wing terrorists in the 1970s, received the Wenzel-Jaksch-Medal from the BdV. Other leading Social Democrats, including Peter Glotz, began supporting the idea of a documentation center. Even chancellor Schröder, who, following massive protests from within and outside Germany, eventually declared himself against a documentation center in Berlin at the present time, had come to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the expellees’ charter in 2000.
It is impossible to deny that the decision of the Allies reached at the Potsdam conference to expatriate by means of force 12 to 15 million Germans from East Central Europe was a great crime. Hence some kind of an initiative documenting the plight of the refugees would seem appropriate, especially given the continued interest in refugees and expellees in the context of ongoing global and civil wars. However, as Götz Aly has pointed out, any such center would have to document the vital link between the Holocaust and the expulsion of Germans, both of which were part and parcel of a wider history of forced migration instigated by the Nazis in the Second World War.^[40] In this way any simplistic and false comparisons between the fate of European Jewry and the fate of ethnic Germans from East-Central Europe can be avoided. It will be one of the most difficult tasks for the contemporary memory culture in Germany to discuss, side by side, the contemporaneity of German suffering and German crimes. Walter Kempowski’s massive collage entitled Echolot might indicate how this could be achieved. Thousands of pages in eight volumes contain largely autobiographical material, letters, family memorabilia, photographs, pasted together without comment, documenting “the dailyness of life in war-time Germany.”^[41] The reader is confronted with a cacophony of voices telling stories of loss and suffering from diverse perspectives. Just to give one example: around the time “Wilhelm Gustloff” sank and thousands of helpless German civilians drowned, close by, on the shores of Eastern Prussia, the death march of thousands of remaining inmates from the concentration camp Studthoff ended with their SS guards shooting them in the surf of the Baltic sea. Bringing this kind of events together in the memorialisation of the twentieth-century German past without fostering apologetics for the unrivalled criminal energies of Nazi Germany will be the real challenge for the 21st century.