The German Genius

his readiness to be tough on Germany.” In 2002 a sociological analysis of family discussions about the Third Reich was published, entitled Grandad Wasn’t a Nazi . This revealed “the unsettling extent” to which children in Germany were inclined to “blank out” the evidence that their grandparents were complicit, “even when that evidence is acknowledged and uncontested.” 51
    At the same time, their elders have become progressively more interested in the war. Wulf Kansteiner’s studies of German television, especially the broadcasts of ZDF, the Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen, and the documentary films of Guido Knopp, show—among many other things—that programs about the “Final Solution” have risen from less than 100 minutes a year in 1964 to more than 1,400 minutes in 1995, with far more interest being shown after 1987. Kansteiner says there was in Germany a “memory revolution” in the 1980s and 1990s as Germans “retrieved and reinvented their history,” and that there was a “repackaging of the Nazi past” around 1995, and a reorientation of Holocaust studies after the fiftieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, when the “elusive goal” of normalization had become a “tangible reality.” This was essentially the same point as that made by Hermann Lübbe: “The memory of the Third Reich has intensified with increasing temporal distance to the Nazi past.” Again, the crucial decade, the turning point, is the 1990s.
    An explanation for the delay inside Germany in facing up to its past has been constructed by A. Dirk Moses, a historian at the University of Sydney (though he has also worked in Freiburg), who gives a “generational account.” His study, published in 2007, will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 41 but, essentially, Moses—whose references are admirably copious—says that the generation known in Germany as “Forty-fivers,” people who were born in the late 1920s, who received their socialization in the Third Reich in the 1930s, and were on the edge of adulthood in 1945, had no other sociopolitical experience than National Socialism to go by, did not feel personally responsible for the atrocities (because they weren’t yet old enough), but afterward withdrew into the “private spheres” of family life and work, their psychological rivalries with their fathers remaining unresolved; “emotionally bound” to Hitler, they threw themselves into rebuilding the country, and remained largely silent about what had gone on in Nazi times—lest that disrupt the task of reconstruction. This meant, he said, that the nation in the 1960s was largely the same one as had existed in the final years of National Socialism, that the hierarchical and authoritarian cast of mind continued and this “silent majority” “remembered the sufferings of its own rather than those of its victims.” Furthermore, he said, many of the younger generation felt that the educated middle class incarnated these pathologies “in a particularly virulent way.” All this accorded well, he said, with the picture painted in 1967 by two psychoanalysts, Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich, in their book The Inability to Mourn , who had argued that, even at that late date, Germany was gripped by a “psychic immobilism,” unable to admit its culpability in the crimes of National Socialism, because that would involve the admission of shame and guilt on such a scale that “the self-esteem needed for continued living” would be unattainable.
    The “psychological” explanations are plausible. At the same time, the studies carried out at the Potsdam Institute for Military Research into “Germany and the Second World War,” the ninth volume of which was published in 2008, provide two new lights on this aspect of affairs. In the first place, this meticulous project (volume nine is 1,074 pages long) removes any lingering doubt that “almost every German” in the Third Reich knew what was happening to the Jews. The evidence is now too overwhelming, from the public auctions in Hamburg, where the property of 30,000 Jewish families was sold to 100,000 successful bidders, to the prisoners in Bremen who worked in full sight of the population, especially to clear bomb damage, and were known as “zebras” on account of their striped uniforms, to the ship moored in the Rhine at Cologne, filled with Jews held ready to clear the bomb damage as soon as the air raids were over, to Düsseldorf, where the