1945 – 1949 – 1989: Dealing with Two German Pasts

Apart from denazification, the Americans in particular promoted in western Germany after 1945 the “invention” of contemporary history as an academic discipline and as a political and moral task. In this way important foundations were laid for a self‐critical engagement with the past. This engagement — which for decades was associated with the generation of the Flakhelfer — was ultimately able to overcome the counter‐movement in the politics of the past which commenced above all in the Federal Republic from 1949, but which became visible in the GDR as well. Since 1989/90 an open engagement with the rule of the SED and the Stasi has been possible in the East of Germany as well, to quite some extent capable of building on the critical historical research carried out in the West. There is much which speaks in favour of a judicious comparison of the fluctuations in the dealings with both pasts, but it is also apparent that the second cannot be understood in the absence of the first.