Heimat Discourse and the Politics of Memory

IN ONE OF THE UNTIMELY MEDITATIONS, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” Nietzsche warns that history may become a “hypertrophied virtue” or “consuming fever.” It can sometimes seem that Germany is afflicted by historical overload. Since unification, the political aspiration to build a common national identity has, if anything, intensified reflection on the meaning for the future of how the German past is perceived. Competing political and ethical perspectives fuel debate and different media shape different messages. As a recent study puts it, “memory contests are highly dynamic public engagements with the past that are triggered by an event that is perceived as a massive disturbance of a community's self-understanding.” The historians' dispute of the mid-1980s centered on the large-scale explanatory models of academic historiography. Over the last decade or so, however, the dwindling number of firsthand witnesses has added urgency to the wish to document personal experience. Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners (1996) and the Crimes of the Wehrmacht exhibition, touring major cities between 1995 and 1999, intensified the focus on ordinary Germans as perpetrators, but toward the end of the 1990s German suffering during the war and its aftermath also moved toward the center ground of debate.