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Yet, for the main part of the 1950s, crimes committed in the name of national socialist Germany were not openly addressed. The reluctance to incorporate the teaching of history, as a subject in its own right, into the curricula of West German schools (Jeismann, 2001, p. 26) illustrates how few attempts were made to make history—and national socialism in particular—central to the formation of political identity. Anti-Semitic acts of vandalism in 1959 and 1960 showed the failings of this approach and highlighted the necessity of making Auschwitz central to Germany’s collective memory (Jeismann, p. 27).
The 1960s saw a turning point in Germany’s approach to its past. A number of commercially successful books, including Melita Maschmann’s account of her time in the League of German Girls (Bund Deutscher Mädel [BdM]) and Peter Weiss’s Die Ermittlung, based on transcripts of the Auschwitz trials (1963–1965), offered a critique of Germany’s past and pushed the memory of genocide into public debate. Memorials and exhibitions to commemorate the victims of national socialism were built (see Grossmann, 2000, pp. 98–99). A younger generation now openly faced Germany’s past and confronted the question of Germany’s responsibility. In the 1970s, the Left discovered the forgotten “other Germany” and started to engage with the thoughts of Jewish exiles. However, much of the Left’s interest in Jewish history and victims’ stories formed part of a Marxist analysis of fascism, which saw anti-Semitism as “the forfeiture of the cosmopolitan, liberal humanist culture associated with German Jews” (Grossmann, p. 101). Among the Left there was little interest in the murder of East European Jews by the Nazis (Grossmann). In politics, West Germany’s Ostpolitik pushed Germany’s invasion of Poland and the Soviet Union into collective memory. In order to reassure Eastern European states and its citizens, West Germany had to demonstrate a sharp break with the past. It had to show that it was not “the fascist regime bent on regaining lost territories which Communist propaganda had depicted for twenty years” (Herf, 1997, pp. 345–346). Political rhetoric, especially by Chancellor Willy Brandt (1969–1974) and Helmut Schmidt (1974–1982), expressed West German guilt and penance.