Until the late 1990S it was quite clear to people in Europe that responsibility for the Holocaust was a purely German matter and that this responsibility determined Germany's status as an “abnormal” nation. The following contribution will explore why and how this attitude has changed in recent years both within Germany and among its European neighbors. First, I will examine the ways in which the two German states tried to come to terms with their past in the period of German division. Second, I will look at the status of the Holocaust in present debates about identity in united Germany. Third, I will examine what can be termed the “Europeanization” of the Holocaust, highlighting how this Europeanization has contributed, however problematically, to the normalization of Germany's status as a modern nation-state.

The Place of the Holocaust in Germany's Memorial Culture

In the aftermath of the Second World War, both German states designed legitimization strategies in order to meet the expectations of the power blocs to which they were respectively affiliated and to convince their neighbors that they had drawn the “correct” lessons from the past. In this context, the concepts of “antifascism” on the one hand and “anti-totalitarianism” on the other became highly emotional, complementary sources of self-identification for the two states. In other words, by making their approach to National Socialism explicit and founding their respective identities on these two concepts, both German states attempted to demonstrate that they were on the “right” side of the ideological divide during the Cold War.