The public's way of dealing with the Nazi era in the successor states to the Third Reich can be characterized as follows: a learning process has taken place, brought about by a series of conflict-laden controversies, by means of which a critical attitude towards the Nazi era has gradually become established in the political culture of Germany. The GDR, by contrast, did not feel it necessary to accept any responsibility on account of the fact that it regarded the outcome of the war as the victory of socialism over fascism and declared itself one of the victors. Austria long suppressed or denied any share of the blame. For most of the countries allied with Germany, coming to terms with the crimes they perpetrated during the Second World War is likewise seen as problematic. This is also true of Japan, where an open debate in society is still outstanding.

However, when one examines the effects of memories which are privately passed down from one generation to the next, there is clearly no evidence that West Germany has successfully come to terms with its past. Such memories, transmitted through several generations in largely self-contained "memory domains", are not always reconcilable, whether in form or content, with public memory. Although the murder of the European Jews (as encapsulated in the terms Holocaust, Shoah and Auschwitz) ¹ as the defining memory model of the Jewish survivors has since the 1980s shifted to the forefront of the public consciousness, there are nonetheless other traditions and perspectives which have been passed down, such as the suffering inflicted upon the Sinti and Roma, the deserters and forced labourers, as well as those persecuted for their political and religious beliefs. Harder to categorize are the influxes of "migrants", who have no family connections with the Nazi era, yet as part of society are obliged to adopt a stance towards that period. Among the majority of the population in Germany, transgenerational transmission in families, i.e. family memory, is characterized by recollections of suffering which likewise claim their share in public memory; the family's own casualties of war, for instance, or stories of flight and expulsion, bombardment and imprisonment.

As far as West Germany and today's reunified Germany are concerned, two main strands can be singled out from the broad spectrum of public and private memories which are passed down.
One of these strands is the memory of the Second World War. In the decade in which the Federal Republic of Germany was founded, people tended to remember not the beginnings of the war (and the associated striving for power and world dominance) but its end, the defeat at Stalingrad and the bombardment of German cities, as well as flight, expulsion, imprisonment and occupation. In the phase of transformation from the Adenauer era to the socialist-liberal coalition, this form of memory became less important. The younger generations openly challenged the vow of silence regarding people's involvement in National Socialism. By the end of the 1960s, however, the general attitude that became established was a vaguer denunciation of the "system", while the events of the Nazi era themselves took something of a back seat. Many people considered the Federal Republic of Germany to be "fascist" and run by "fascist" forces. At the end of the 1970s, the conflicts of attitudes between the generations became less clearly marked and the wartime generations lost their political influence; now there was increasing public debate as to whether 8 May 1945 had been a day of defeat or liberation. In this respect, the speech given on 8 May 1985 by former Federal President Richard von Weizsäcker signalled a break, in the sense that it made the link between the end of the war and the crimes of the Nazis. Following reunification, the victims of Germany's war in the east – who had previously been neglected – came back into view; the debate in 1999-2001 concerning compensation for victims of forced labour heightened this focus. Meanwhile, people's widespread memory of their own suffering, categorized as "memories of the war", continued to exist in the (private) family memory and, more recently, has re-entered the public culture of memory, for example in films and publications about the bombing campaigns and the flight and expulsion from Germany's former eastern territories. The return to a focus on these experiences of suffering in the public consciousness is partly the consequence of new generations growing up; at the same time, it results to some extent in a competition for victim status and threatens to relativize Germany's responsibility for the crimes committed during the Nazi regime. It is thus easy to understand why the planned "Centre against Expulsions" in Berlin is the subject of such heated debate.

The other strand is the memory of the Shoah. In the founding years of West Germany, memories of undefined "crimes in the name of Germany" constituted part of the process of distancing oneself from the National Socialist era and led to the country's policy of making reparations. As soon as the Nuremberg Trials were concluded, the perpetrators and their crimes were banished from the public eye and received no further public attention until the 1960s, for example during the trial of Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961 and the Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt in 1963-1965. Any shared responsibility for the crimes of the Nazis generally penetrated the (private) family memory in the form of reinterpretation, denial and exculpation. Within families, for instance, even the acts perpetrated in the name of National Socialism were frequently reinterpreted as acts of resistance. Once the Shoah had moved into the forefront of the culture of memory, there was repeated criticism of its normative effect on memories, in the Historikerstreit (i.e. historians' dispute) of 1986/87, for example, and the Walser-Bubis debate in 1998/99. ² Ultimately, there was a shift in this norm-setting to the extent that the Shoah became an integral part of how Germany perceives itself, as the "Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe" – inaugurated in Berlin in 2005 - proves. Critics of this development, however, fear that the memory of Germany's responsibility for what happened will be gradually replaced symbolically by the adoption of the perspective of the Jewish victims. In concrete terms, this means that those responsible will no longer figure or be named when people remember the victims.

Just how problematic any public debate over the perpetrators of war crimes was and remains is shown by the scandal surrounding the speech given by President of the Bundestag Philipp Jenninger on 10 November 1988 on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of "Kristallnacht", the pogrom against Jews on 10 November 1938. Jenninger attempted to include the perspective of the perpetrators without directly distancing himself from this perspective, and as a result had to resign. Since the mid-1990s, the participation of Germans in the persecution of the Jews and the links between the war of annihilation and the Shoah have been the subject of broader public debate. This was the result, among other things, of the Goldhagen debate ³ in 1996 and the dispute in 1997 concerning the exhibition "Crimes of the German Wehrmacht" ⁴. More recently, the question of complicity in war crimes has been also dealt with – particularly by the third and fourth generations (the grandchildren and great-grandchildren) – in literature.

On a societal and indeed individual level, however, remembrance of the Shoah and tales of war passed down from generation to generation continue in many cases to exist separately. The linking of the memories of the Second World War and of complicity in war crimes to remembrance of the Shoah, thereby linking private and public memory cultures, remains an unresolved challenge for German society.

1) "The Holocaust" is the term generally used to describe the killing of approximately six million Jews during the National Socialist era (also known as Shoah) and the systematic mass murder of various non-Jewish groups. In my opinion, however, the term Holocaust, i.e. fire victims in its literal sense, does not do justice to the actual programme of extermination as practised by the Nazis; what is more, it encompasses a wider group of victims than only the Jews. The term "Shoah" (meaning "destruction" or "calamity") is the Hebrew word used to describe the systematic murder of approximately six million Jews (around half of the total) and people of Jewish origin in Europe during the period of the National Socialist regime. The term "Auschwitz" is used collectively to describe three concentration camps built by the Nazis from 1940 in Oswiecim (Auschwitz), near to Krakow in occupied Poland. The term also describes the systematic killing of European Jews in the Nazi extermination camps and stands as a symbol for the most extreme suffering that people are capable of inflicting upon others. 2) Historikerstreit This dispute was triggered by an article published by Ernst Nolte in which he raised, among other things, the following question: "Wasn't the 'class murder of the Bolsheviks' the logical and actual antecedent for the 'race murder' of the National Socialists?" The philosopher Jürgen Habermas then accused him and three other historians of attempting to place the Holocaust in a historical context and thereby play it down in order to give the Federal Republic of Germany a right-wing conservative national identity. (cf. http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historikerstreit) The controversy between the former Chairman of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, Ignatz Bubis, and the writer Martin Walser was provoked by the speech Walser gave on 11 October 1998 in St. Paul's Church in Frankfurt on the occasion of his being awarded the Peace Prize. However, it would hardly be possible to summarize the debate itself in a few short words here. 3) The main hypothesis put forward by American historian Daniel Jonah Goldhagen in his book "Hitler's Willing Executioners", namely that the murder of European Jews was the consequence of an "eliminationist anti-Semitism" in Germany, provoked a controversy about the motivation of the perpetrators. 4) This dispute was about the extent to which the German Wehrmacht as an institution could be held responsible for the murder of European Jews and what motivated Wehrmacht soldiers to take part in the killings. References Knigge, Volkhard/Frei, Norbert (Hg.), Verbrechen erinnern. Die Auseinandersetzung mit Holocaust und Völkermord, München 2002. Welzer, Harald /Sabine Moller/Karoline Tschuggnall, "Opa war kein Nazi". Nationalsozialismus und Holocaust im Familiengedächtnis, Frankfurt am Main 2002. Althaus, Claudia, Geschichte, Erinnerung und Person. Zum Wechselverhältnis von Erinnerungsresiduen und Offizialkultur, in: Oesterle, Günter (Hg.), Erinnerung, Gedächtnis, Wissen. Studien zur kulturwissenschaftlichen Gedächtnisforschung, Göttingen 2005, S. 289-609.