Introduction

The momentous events of 1989 and the ensuing German unification, as we all know, were veritable historical turning points which, necessarily, changed historians' view of twentieth-century Germany. They changed, most obviously, the ending of the story. A century that was marked by World War I, the demise of Weimar democracy, Nazi and communist dictatorships, the Holocaust, and national division ended up in peaceful national unification. As the outcome of the story changes, so does our understanding of the story itself: of the Third Reich and the Holocaust, which remains at the center of German history in the previous century, and of the century as a whole which—the thought itself may be jarring—can now be narrated as having a (relatively) happy ending.

The aim of this volume is to articulate this historical problem and narrative challenge, and to offer some methodological reflections: how are we to think of twentieth-century Germany, or parts thereof, now that the century is over? Sixteen years after the fall of the Wall, it is time to reflect on Germany's twentieth century in light of the new interpretative possibilities and directions that have been opened as well as closed.¹ The period has seen the emergence of new bodies of work on East and West Germany, of continued interest in National Socialism, and of new subject matters such as leisure and consumption. This volume is an attempt at taking stock in light of these and other developments.²

I invited several scholars to reflect on a topic each considered important to illuminate an aspect of Germany's twentieth century. The underlying assumption is that we are dealing with a historical topic and period that demand a certain global approach and a reflective, imaginative set of mind. A certain chutzpah is called for, determined by a spirit of interpretative experimentation and iconoclasm. The results are essays that refreshingly avoid the usual mode of historiographical discussions and customary scholarly overviews of a specific historical topic. They are quite different one from the other, showcasing the richness of current historical studies.

Part I, "Narratives," opens with an essay on how personal and institutional archives in Germany's changing political regimes shaped self and collective identities, and continues with discussions of the narratives of justice, Europe, and empire in the twentieth century, all of which were thoroughly recast by the events of 1989/90. Part II investigates the problem raised by the volume from the point of view of four German sensibilities: victimhood, hate, music, and sexuality. The essays explore, in various ways and styles, implicitly and explicitly, how social conditions, political actions, and values were linked to a set of emotions and sensibilities. They give us a measure of "the configuration of what is experienced and what cannot be experienced within a culture at a given moment"—as Alain Corbain, the French historian of the senses, once put it—although we realize that sensibilities cannot be dissociated from the contingencies of social and political conditions and ideologies.³ Part III concerns the permanent past in twentieth-century German history, namely, the Third Reich and the Holocaust. The first essay discusses the particular perspectives of the century generated by the Nazi seizure of power and the extermination of the Jews; the second reflects on the Holocaust as a problem of culture; and the third recounts German history through the biography of two young girls who had to leave Prague for England on the Kindertransport of June 1939.

What emerges is that the essays are framed by two intellectual trends: one is more specifically related to German history and historiography, the other is more generally related to changes in contemporary culture and historical consciousness. Before 1990 German historiography was largely preoccupied with the origins of National Socialism. This is not the case anymore. A broader question that comes into view in the volume is, what is it that we want to know, if it is not the origins of the Third Reich? Several important topics appear. We are now interested in the...