If one substitutes the term “memory” for “history” in the above quotation from Wolfgang Koeppen's 1951 novel Tauben im Gras (Pigeons in the Grass), an accurate description of the intellectual atmosphere in postunification Germany emerges. For at least two decades now almost every public utterance about the Third Reich — political, cultural, or artistic — has ignited fierce and passionate memory contests. The inaugural ceremony of the Neue Wache in Berlin, Martin Walser's speech in the Frankfurter Paulskirche, the erection of a Holocaust memorial in Berlin, the Crimes of the Wehrmacht exhibition, all these are examples of the ferocity of public memory contests. Additionally, publications by Daniel Goldhagen, Jörg Friedrich, and most recently Götz Aly, as well as renegotiations of the National Socialist past in German literature (most recently in the form of autobiographical and family narratives) show that Germany is flooded by a constant stream of contentious memory texts, and that this proliferation has found its echo in the academic world.

Interesting to note, however, is the fact that the abundance of German films about the Third Reich made since 1990 has been all but ignored by academic critics.