The leftist intellectuals and many left-liberals were by no means overjoyed by German (re)unification. Some were offended by “capitalist” triumphalism and dismayed that a democratic socialist “third way” was not given a chance after November 1989. Others were more perturbed by what they saw as the one-sided nature of the unification process in which the East Germans were treated more as objects of West German policy than as equal partners in a common project. A shared fear of all left-of-center intellectuals in the Federal Republic was that the new order would provide an impetus for a revision of the nascent Non-German German consensus that they and others had forged in the 1980s. The fear of a resurgent conservatism after 1990 led redemptive republicans to emphasize continuities with the political culture of the old Federal Republic while confirming their distrust of large sections of the population – in particular, East Germans who had not been exposed to West Germany's postnational culture. The attempt to produce a population of Non-German Germans was redoubled. But what kind of relationship with the memory of the Holocaust's victims did such an identity imply? This question is taken up in the last section of this chapter.

Reinscribing stigma

Twenty years after it had started as the critical revisionism of the 1960s, the Non-German German interpretation of nineteenth- and twentieth-century German history had gained substantial ground, at least in public discourse.