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National Identity and the Nazi Past by Saul Friedlander Since the defeat of 1945 , not a few Germans seem to have been caught in an intractable predicament : the Nazi past was too massive to be forgotten , and too repellent to be integrated into the normal narrative of memory . Although this predicament is still apparent , German memory of the Nazi era seems nonetheless to be undergoing a significant and increasingly rapid transformation , thechief characteristicof whichmay well be a "yearning for normality" and a wish to draw a final line ( Schlusstrich ) over the Nazi past Paradoxically , it is within this climate that , in a series of intense debates , the past came back more insistently than ever . Bitburg may have had triggering effect ; then came the Fassbinder affair , accompanied by an ongoing controversy over the buildingof historical museums in Berlin and Bonn and of a war memorial in Bonn for the dead ( all the dead ) of World War II ; and at the beginning of the summer of 1...
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