That by the end of the 1990s “normalization” had become the uncontested buzzword of the decade is perhaps surprising, given that its inception was viewed with such suspicion, particularly by many on the left who attributed it to a perceived “desire to play down the centrality of the Nazi past in order to mitigate German guilt and instil national pride,” to quote Stuart Taberner. Nonetheless, by the turn of the millennium Gerhard Schröder's Red-Green coalition had successfully appropriated the term, promoting a view of “normalization” that sought to reincorporate the Nazi past into the sociopolitical consciousness of the Berlin Republic as a grave lesson, yet importantly a lesson that had been learned.

The enthusiasm with which “normalization” was greeted in the latter half of the 1990s had implications for the memory of another, more recent aspect of Germany's problematic past, namely the legacy of the left-wing terrorist group the Red Army Faction (RAF), also known as the Baader- Meinhof Group. The existence of the RAF had always been inextricably linked to the legacy of National Socialism. For the '68er student generation, out of which the RAF developed, the shooting of a student demonstrator, Benno Ohnesorg, at a rally in 1967, which initiated a decade of political unrest, confirmed the FRG as a thinly veiled continuation of the fascist state. Gudrun Ensslin, for example, a student at the time and a founding member of the RAF, immediately decried those in power as “the Auschwitz generation,” for whom violence was the only language that was understood.