BRITISH IDENTITY AND THE GERMAN OTHER A Dissertation ...

Amidst these shades of the past and future uncertainties, countervailing arguments
played up “forty years of solid achievement” since “Zero Hour” (1945), highlighting the western-
oriented vision and firm leadership of Konrad Adenauer, West Germany’s first chancellor, and
Germany’s evolution toward tolerance and social conscience, exemplified by special ties with
Israel and by the greater political assertiveness of women, labor and especially youth. 10 Indeed,
against the backdrop of West Germany’s record of pro-Zionism, active participation in the
prosecution of Nazi war criminals, and payment of substantial reparations totaling over 17 billion
DM to Israel and families of Jewish victims, the perception of a greater willingness on the part of
Germans since the 1970s to discuss the crimes of the Nazi period, and acknowledge some degree
of national complicity, probably owes as much to the mere endurance of peaceful democracy as
to any other cause. 11
deterministic approach. See, for example, Margaret L. Anderson, Practicing Democracy:
Elections and Political Culture in Imperial Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2000); and Jan Christopher Palmowski, “The Politics of the ‘Unpolitical German’: Liberalism in
German Local Government, 1860-1880,” Historical Journal 42 (1999): 675-704.
10 Craig, “A New, New Reich?” 28-29, reviewed the arguments for positive change
through prudent government and political dissent, respectively, in Dennis L. Bark and David R.
Gress’s two-volume A History of West Germany, vol. 1, From Shadow to Substance, 1945-1963;
vol. 2, Democracy and Its Discontents, 1963-1988 (Oxford; New York: Blackwell, 1989-) and
Peter H. Merkl, ed., The Federal Republic of Germany at Forty (New York: New York
University Press, 1989).
11 John Ardagh, Germany and the Germans: An Anatomy of a Society Today (New York:
Harper & Row, 1987), 391-400, included the following milestones in this transition to greater
openness: Chancellor Willy Brandt’s unabashed homage to Polish Jews killed by Nazis during
his 1970 state visit to the Warsaw ghetto memorial; Federal President Richard von Weizsäcker’s
1984 speech, on the fortieth anniversary of the German surrender, commemorating Holocaust
victims and urging acceptance of the truth of Nazi horrors; the closer scrutiny of Hitler’s Third
Reich in schools and media during the 1970s, including broad exposure to Hollywood’s 1979
Holocaust series; and a greater readiness among youth to speak out and confront lingering denial
in older generations.
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