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prisoner of its past.” 50 As the German historian K. D. Bracher has said, all modern developments in Germany are inevitably linked back to events in the Third Reich. The Germany of before that time, for most people, simply does not exist.
    Dismaying as all this is, there is another perspective, put by two British observers, Ian Kershaw and Steve Crawshaw. History, particularly in the age of television, is almost as much about perception as about reality, and one of the misrepresentations about Germany in the world at large is the ignorance in other Western countries in regard to the events of 1968. The Prague Spring, the student riots in Paris and elsewhere in France in May 1968, and the student sit-ins at American universities are well remembered. Much less well remembered—hardly remembered at all, it seems—are the events in Germany in that same year. Those events are covered in more detail in Chapter 41, of this book. Here we need only say that 1968 in Germany saw a new generation of sons and daughters ( die Achtundsechsiger ) confront their fathers and mothers about their “brown” past, their involvement with the Nazis. This was a genuine upheaval in Germany, a searing and serious attempt by those born in the wake of the war to force the nation to confront its past. Many Germans believe they began to “move on” then and are now well past the traumas. Not everyone agrees that this has happened, of course: the Bader-Meinhof violence lasted through much of the 1970s, the historians’ dispute did not erupt until the 1980s, German novelists were still writing about the war in the early twenty-first century. Older Germans say the youthful rebellion was a myth, that the young were jealous of their elders—with a brown past or not—who had made such a success of the “economic miracle.” But Kershaw and Crawshaw believe this helps explain the “Goldhagen phenomenon”—that his book was welcomed by the public, despite being censured by more knowledgeable critics. The book, they say, helped a fresh generation, the grandchildren of the Nazis, come to terms with the past. “The acceptance of any and all attacks on the old Germany provided a yardstick for modern Germans to remind themselves that they had indeed confronted the terrible past, thus helping to neutralise its demons. Goldhagen became a player, at just one remove, in Germany’s own arguments with itself. The details of his arguments—untenable or otherwise—mattered less to the Germans than 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.
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