More Reconciliation than Truth

David Blackbourn

• Adenauer’s Germany and the Nazi Past: The Politics of Amnesty and Integration by Norbert Frei, translated by Joel Golb
  Columbia, 479 pp, £24.50, September 2002, ISBN 0 231 11882 1

Over the long term, Germans have made a good job of confronting the criminal, genocidal character of the Third Reich. Historical writing, schoolbooks, literary works, public and political debate all point to an engagement with the years 1933-45 that came earlier and was more intense than anything we find in Japan, or in Austria, self-styled ‘first victim’ of National Socialism. Earlier – but still delayed. In 1967, Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich published a famous book, The Inability to Mourn, on the collective German repression of painful memories after 1945. Norbert Frei pursues the same theme by examining political debates in the early years of the Federal Republic. His book originally appeared in 1996 with the title Vergangenheitspolitik (the ‘politics of the past’, or ‘policy for the past’), a term that has since entered general use in Germany. Others had written on the subject before Frei, notably Jörg Friedrich and Ulrich Brochhagen; more have done so since. But no one has written better. This is an important work: very well researched, reflective, sharp in judgment yet alive to complexity.