"Coming to Terms with the Past": Illusions of Remembering, Ways of Forgetting Nazism in West Germany

Abstract

Public attention to ways of coping with the Nazi past in Germany tends to focus on gestures or speeches by representatives of the state and society. However, this view "from above" ascribes nothing but a passive role to the audiences of such representational politics. The sentiments, opinions, and practices of "the masses" play no active role in these accounts. Therefore, the range and impact of messages from the seeming centers of the polity are not explored but assumed. More important, this approach ignores the stimuli affecting formal and public politics that originate from society and its classes, milieus, and groups.