German Media and National Identity By Sanna Inthorn

However, as the past is approached in a more open way than before, there are concerns that the memory of the past no longer has a hold over the ways in which social and political actions are shaped. Debates about the generational change and its political consequences were fuelled in September 1998, when Germany’s postwar generation, in a coalition of social democrats and Greens, came to power. In contrast to Kohl’s foreign policy approach, heavy with historic rhetoric, the prospect of a German foreign policy less influenced by the memory of the past and more receptive to domestic demands became a realistic possibility (Haftendorn, 1999, p. 24). In Germany, fewer and fewer politicians have biographical links with the national socialist past. The Holocaust has arrived in collective memory. Despite this change, the past still informs German identity. Acknowledgment of and reference to the memory of Auschwitz have become discursive tools to signal support for democracy and universal human rights. In 1999, for example, German politics mobilised this memory to support the decision to send out Bundeswehr troops to Kosovo (Jeismann, 2001, p. 33). Not sending German soldiers—indeed, a lack of response—would have been interpreted as allowing genocide like Auschwitz to happen. Thus, the Holocaust has become a symbol of genocide. Evoking its memory is a way of signalling Germany’s democratic identity and opposition to racism. The past serves as an affirmation of the present and as a signal that Germany is different from what it once was (Jeismann, 2001, p. 138). Despite this affirmation of German identity as liberal and democratic, however, right-wing extremism has a clear presence. Between 1996 and 1997, the number of xenophobic attacks (fremdenfeindliche Straftaten) rose by over 20% from 1,631 to 1,973 incidents. The number of anti-Semitic attacks rose by 15% from 719 to 825 incidents (Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, 1999). The trend continued in 1998. In the first half of that year alone, 937 xenophobic or racially motivated attacks (fremden- und ausländerfeindliche Straftaten) were registered (europäisches institut für migrationsstudien, 2003).