The proposition that the Federal Republic of Germany has developed a healthy democratic culture centered around memory of the Holocaust has almost become a platitude. Symbolizing the relationship between the Federal Republic's liberal political culture and honest reckoning with the past, an enormous Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe adjacent to the Bundestag (Federal Parliament) and Brandenburg Gate in the national capital was unveiled in 2005. States usually erect monuments to their fallen soldiers, after all, not to the victims of these soldiers. In the eyes of many, the West German and, since 1990, the united German experience has become the model of how post-totalitarian and postgenocidal societies “come to terms with the past.” Germany now seemed no different from the rest of Europe – or, indeed, from the West generally. Jews from Eastern Europe are as happy to settle there as they are to emigrate to Israel, the United States, or Australia.

This rosy picture of the Berlin Republic is explicitly whiggish. Not for nothing was philosopher Jürgen Habermas hailed as the “Hegel of the Federal Republic,” because his articulation of its supposedly “postconventional” identity presented the Berlin Republic as the end point of a successful moral learning process. The Red-Green government of Gerhard Schröder (1998–2005) turned this philosophy into policy. Former minister for culture Michael Naumann justified the Berlin memorial by invoking the political theology of Habermas's friend, the theologian Johann Baptist Metz: the Republic's “anamnestic culture” of remembrance demanded such a commemorative gesture.