9 - Representations of the Nazi past II: German wartime suffering

Summary

The decade after German unification witnessed the institutionalisation of a culture of public commemoration of the Holocaust. In the 1990s, moreover, a series of debates on Germany's Nazi legacy took place which, at the time, were taken by many observers to signal the final phase in the process of coming-to-terms with the past (Vergangenheitsbewältigung). It was no longer a matter, for the most part at least, of confronting an unwilling population with an uncomfortable historical reality but of integrating the Nazi period into the cultural memory of post-1990 Germany. Thus, by the end of the 1990s, a kind of national ‘ownership’ of the Nazi period, with an emphasis on German responsibility, seemed well established. At the same time, the accelerating growth of a memorialisation culture in post-1990 Germany, as evidenced by the almost obsessive presence of the Nazi past in the mass media, and especially television, has arguably transformed the Third Reich into a ‘heritage’ site.

Since the turn of the millennium, however, there appears to have been a shift in German memory discourse away from a resolute focus on German responsibility for the Holocaust and towards a focus on the Allies' devastating aerial bombardment of German cities, the mass rapes of German women during the Soviet advance, and the expulsions of ethnic Germans from East Prussia, Silesia, Pomerania and the Sudetenland at the end of the war. ‘German suffering’, a topic which had long been regarded as the preserve of right-wing historical revisionists, was suddenly a mainstream media issue.