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These proceedings on the political scene were accompanied by a nostalgic fascination with Nazism and the Third Reich in cultural productions. Edgar Reitz’s television series Heimat (1984) gave a “provocatively honest” account of the good times enjoyed by most Germans under national socialism and “marginalised the persecution of Jews and the Final Solution” (Grossmann, p. 103). These attempts at normalising and denial were countered by Bundespräsident Richard von Weizäcker’s speech in commemoration of May 8, 1945. Weizäcker emphasised the need for Germans to “look truth straight in the eye—without embellishment or distortion” (as cited in Herf, p. 355). He acknowledged Germans’ collective responsibility and described the remembering of the past as a “moral obligation and a political necessity” (as cited in Herf, pp. 357–358). Yet, the seesaw effect, which caught Germany between remembering and repressing, continued. As part of the so-called historian’s debate (Historikerstreit), conservative voices called for a shift in the narration of German collective memory. Germany was to free itself from its “guilt complex”; instead of national socialism and genocide, it could include more positive and “healthy” aspects of German history, such as the Bismarckian Empire (Eley, 2000, p. 26). These calls were countered by the Left, with Jürgen Habermas as one of their leading voices. Habermas insisted that the responsibility for Auschwitz remains the starting point for Germany’s postwar democratic identity. Moreover, he argued that “the existence of Auschwitz disqualified German nationalism as an acceptable political stance” (Eley, p. 26). Despite such calls for civic identity and the fact that constitutional patriotism seemed to be an accepted alternative to the ethnic nation, German citizenship policy suggested that the country could not free itself entirely from its past. A relic of the Federal Republic’s Alleinvertreteranspruch,4 ethnocentrism determined the right to belong to the collectivity of German citizens (Hogwood, 2000, pp. 128–129).
With the dramatic events of 1989 and German unification, the definition of the German nation again was overhauled. The fatal cocktail of German ethnic identity and nationalism was on offer once again. Within Germany, voices rejoicing in unification and warnings of nationalism opposed each other.