Abstract
The legacies and memories of the past always inform political decisionmaking in the present, but the tumultuous nature of Germany’s twentieth-century history has focused considerable attention on the issue of “coming to terms” with the Nazi past (Vergangenheitsbewältigung). This is a slippery term that encompasses specific attempts to bring Nazi perpetrators to account and seek justice for their victims, as well as a more general effort to face up to and remember the 12-year period of Nazi rule under Adolf Hitler (1933–1945). The highly emotional and morally charged debate about the adequacy of this process has often hindered, and even substituted for sober analysis of the past’s role in Germany’s postwar politics.
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Suggestions for Further Reading
Frei, Norbert, Adenauer’s Germany and the Nazi Past: the Politics of Amnesty and Integration (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002).
Fulbrook, Mary, German National Identity after the Holocaust (Oxford: Polity, 1999).
Garton Ash, Timothy, In Europe’s Name: Germany and the Divided Continent (London: Vintage, 1994).
Herf, Jeffrey, Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in the Two Germanys (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1997).
Marcuse, Harold, Legacies of Dachau: The Uses and Abuses of a Concentration Camp, 1933–2001 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
Maier, Charles S., The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust and German National Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988).
Markovits, Andrei S. and Reich, Simon, The German Predicament: Memory and Power in the New Europe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997).
McAdams, A. James, Judging the Past in Unified Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
Niven, Bill, Facing the Nazi Past: United Germany and the Legacy of the Third Reich (London: Routledge, 2002).
Roberts, Geoffrey K., Party Politics in the New Germany (London: Pinter, 1997).
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© 2005 Max Paul Friedman and Padraic Kenney
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Beattie, A.H. (2005). The Past in the Politics of Divided and Unified Germany. In: Partisan Histories. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-09150-5_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-09150-5_2
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
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