MORE THAN A CENTURY AGO Friedrich Nietzsche wondered why it was suddenly possible to speak openly about the “recent past.” The answer, he believed, could be traced to a new generation — one that felt unrelated to this past and thereby empowered to criticize it. Nietzsche's point about new generations bringing new perspectives is seen as so fundamental that a 2008 study on the concept of generation judiciously sports the quotation on its back cover. Each generation, though it stands in the legacy of its predecessors, decides for itself what from the past is relevant to the demands of its own day. The critical distance afforded through time creates a space where the young can stand in opposition to the inventors of their history and develop their own sense of identity. Even so, the older generations still exist contemporaneously and continue to maintain, develop, and share their own perceptions of the world. In this dynamic of generational change and interchange, the memory profile of society is constantly evolving.

In the years since Nietzsche's reflections, the “recent past” has, of course, come to mean different crises or transitions in German history. Few Western countries in modern memory are so marked by caesurae of political and social changes. More than sixty years after the end of the Second World War, fifty since the first waves of immigration, forty since the student movement, and twenty since the fall of the Wall, time alone guarantees new generations who look back on these events with distance. The result is not necessarily a tabula rasa regarding former values and viewpoints, but it certainly provides a critical review from the vantage point of the present. In a world where national boundaries have drastically changed and globalization makes its mark on peoples worldwide, once-rigid categories of East and West or native and immigrant have outlived the history that initiated their use.