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Contemporary Germany and Denial: Is ‘Nazism’ All there is to Say?

With unfailing persistence, Germany’s early twentieth-century history retains its worrisome contemporaneity. Ever since 1945, and since the late 1960s far more openly and contentiously, the Nazi past has continually forced itself into public voice. When that happens – through biography or memoir, popular movie or TV drama, the prosecution of war crimes, new documentation, the surfacing of previously buried scandals – German historians find themselves called upon to speak. That occurs in the classroom clearly, but also in the press, on television, in one kind of public forum or another, and now on the Internet and in the blogosphere too. Among historians themselves such discussions have flared intermittently into raucously intense controversy. This highly charged quality reflects the enormity of the Nazi past, to be sure. But that urgency has always been overdetermined: talking about Nazism is usually a means of arguing about other issues as well. In its public and intellectual culture, contemporary Germany has been notable for a readiness to face a difficult and shameful past. Since the 1960s, beneath the sign of Vergangenheitsbewältigung – coming to terms with, or disarming and overcoming, the past – contingents of German historians and public intellectuals more broadly have seemed uncommonly willing to grapple with the legacies of Nazism, principally in the West German Federal Republic (FRG), and then after 1989–90 in Germany overall. But what, more precisely, have been the rhythms and temporalities? Where were the impediments and resistances? Where are the silences and what has been left unresolved? How have the long-running consequences of unification since the early 1990s informed and reshaped the questions? How far does the Holocaust stand in for a more complex set of challenges and recognitions? What does it displace from consideration? How do current political difficulties – Greek events, refugee crisis, paralysis of the European Union (EU), near-collapse of the European project – articulate with these longer histories? What else is being denied?