TWENTY YEARS AFTER THE FALL of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, how the Nazi past is discussed, represented, and commemorated in what has come to be known as the Berlin Republic now appears somewhat different from the “memory culture” of the “old” Federal Republic (FRG, or West Germany) and certainly distinct from the state-directed memorialization of the former East Germany. In place of a rather rigid opposition between a West German “official” culture of Holocaust remembrance, modesty in foreign affairs, and ritualized gestures of contrition — at least from the early 1970s — and an uneasiness on the part of many private citizens with repeated proclamations of German guilt and the “repression” of “German suffering,” — most likely vocalized from the early 1980s by conservative challenges to the centrality of the Nazi past to public debate — we now see the emergence of a more fluid, less monolithic, and often more fragmented discourse on the years 1933 to 1945. This is a form of multifaceted engagement with a past that can never be grasped in its totality that accepts gaps in knowledge and understanding and explicitly attempts to capture the complexity of the period — above all, the reality that German perpetrators might also have been victims — as well as the bewilderingly contingent nature of individual motivations, personal circumstances, and the array of opportunities for both cowardice and courage. In a hitherto seldomly encountered fashion, then, much of today's debate on Nazism centers on the effort to reconcile empathy with “real” historical actors, their choices and limitations (individual choices and objectively “given”), with more abstract notions of historical justice, universal ethical imperatives, and personal responsibility.