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traditions. From then until the time of Federal President Richard von
Weizsacker's speech of May 8, 1985, the West German tradition of mem–
ory rested on a sense of individual responsibility: to face the truth about
the past rather than wallow in collective guilt.
Despite years of anti-fascist discourse, the East German regime
repressed the memory of the Jewish catastrophe and then moved on to
anti-Zionist and at times anti-Semitic ideology and policy, both at home
and in the Middle East. The Communist normalcy, established in the anti–
cosmopolitan purge of 1952-1953, remained intact until 1989. In April
1990, the first act of the short-lived East German parliament was to
acknowledge East Germany's responsibility for the Nazi past and to criti–
cize its Communist predecessor for refusing to pay restitution to Jewish
survivors, for not giving primacy to the memory ofJewish persecution, and
for its decades of hostility to Israel. The collapse of European and East
German Communism (and of its attendant rituals and discourse of anti–
fascism) in 1989-1990 opened the door, for the first time since 1945, to a
public recollection of the genocide of European Jewry.
Of course, many feared that German unification instead would usher
in a new era of forgetfulness accompanied by nationalist euphoria. In fact
there were disturbing signs. Neo-Nazi skinheads attacked foreigners phys–
ically and actually murdered some in firebombings in Molln and Rostock.
Conservative politicians toyed with anti-foreign sentiments in election
campaigns. Young nationalist journalists and intellectuals questioned the
continued validi ty of Germany's Western ties, penned biographies of
Hitler that gave scant attention to anti-Semitism and the Holocaust, and
offered views of national identity centered on ethnic homogeneity. In
1995, during ceremonies commemorating the end of World War
II,
an
influential group of conservative politicians and intellectuals sought to dis–
place a focus on the memory of the Holocaust to the beginnings of
Germany's division and the expulsion of Germans from Eastern Europe
after 1945. In the 1990s, on the right wing of German politics and culture,
an intellectual-political lobby reemerged which urged that Germany
should "finally" be considered a "normal" country, and that a "line be
drawn under the past." Following unification, many wondered if the era of
public memory of the Holocaust associated with the Bonn Republic was
going to end in the new Berlin Republic.
In the 1990s, such nationalist euphoria failed to sweep Bonn's tradi–
tion of memory from public life. Unemployment, which hovered around
12 per cent nationally, was and remains as high as 20 to 30 per cent in the
former East Germany. This fueled resentments and offered electoral
opportunities for regional right-wing successes. Yet a nationalist right wing
did not take hold at the national level. Moreover, the traditions of public
