FORMER WEST GERMANS AND THEIR PAST
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evolved into the vast, incredibly costly and often traumatic exercise
known as
Wiedergutmachung,
literally "making good again," or compen–
sation. In the same vein, the West German - but not the East German -
government accepted responsibility for the public debt of the Reich, in–
cluding its social security obligations to its citizens.
Sounds like plenty of overcoming to me, starting from day one, you
might say, and you would be wrong. Because when people say
Vergan–
genheitsbewiiltigung,
they do not, usually, mean being marched past dead
bodies in Dachau; they do not mean listening to the Nuremberg trials;
they do not mean de-Nazification or compensation. They mean, usually,
the public criticism launched from the political left as part of the social
and cultural revolutions of the 1960s; criticisms aimed at existing prac–
tices of teaching about the Third Reich, at existing policies of compen–
sation, at the lack, as the left saw it, of public apology and public hu–
mility about the past, and at the allegedly authoritarian features persisting
in nominally democratic West Germany. The complaint, in short, was
that West Germans were not thinking and talking about a certain part
of their history in the right way. Above all, they did not have the right
feelings about it. The point was therefore to devise such a right way and
impose it.
We in America have some experience with agenda-setting exercises
of this kind and know, therefore, that once the process has begun it
feeds on itself There is no logical point at which the critics are satisfied
and say, fine, now we have overcome the past, let's go on to something
else. And this feature of such exercises explains, of course, the curious ca–
reer of
Vergangenheitsbewiiltigung,
which is that it grew in scope, serious–
ness, and alleged urgency as time passed; the further away the war got,
and the fewer the survivors and therefore the fewer the criminals, the
more ardently did the proponents insist that the exercise was incomplete
and needed to be pursued with ever more vigor. And if all other argu–
ments failed, one was sure to work, namely the argument that, for all
the efforts of the proponents, the West Germans were backsliding. They
were forgetting; they were allowing wrong feelings to creep back into
their thoughts. If even the prodigious efforts already made could not
stop such backsliding, we were told, that clearly meant that there was
much, indeed almost everything, left to be done.
I am not implying that we as historians, Germans, or simply inter–
ested parties should ever stop talking about the Third Reich. I want to
distinguish an alleged desire to sweep the Third Reich under the rug - a
desire often attributed, usually unjustly, to the critics of
Vergangenheitsbe–
wiiltigtlllg
-
from a desire to get away from moralizing pedagogy and
