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However, remembrance of this past was always counterbalanced by praise for the German resistance and emphasis on a German tradition of valuing democracy and the individual’s dignity and freedom (Herf, pp. 344–348). While there was acknowledgment of Germany’s dark past, at the same time, there were clear signs of “a search for precursors of a ‘good Germany’ in the German past” (Herf, p. 348). The 1979 screening of the American television series Holocaust brought the Jewish fate back into public discussion. However, at the same time, critics—including members of the Jewish “second generation”—pointed out the political and religious conservativism of the Jewish community in Germany and the hypocrisy of their Christian democratic allies, which still had ex-Nazis like Hans Georg Filbinger among its ranks (Grossmann, p. 102). Germany was still caught between remembering and repressing. The 1980s saw the emergence of an expansive memory culture (Grossman, p. 102), yet incidents of repressing the past in Germany’s postwar identity kept coming. In 1984 during his visit to Israel, Chancellor Helmut Kohl (of the Christian Democratic Union of Germany [Christlich Demokratische Union Deutschlands] [CDU]) proclaimed the concept of “belated birth”, which denied the memory of Auschwitz a central place in German postwar identity. Then, in 1985 Kohl infamously shook hands with U.S. president Reagan over the graves at Bitburg, a war cemetery where members of the German Wehrmacht and the SS had been laid to rest. In the service of Cold War politics, the memory of the Second World War was distorted to highlight the victim status of Wehrmacht and SS.