So much has been written about the historical disputes of the 1980s – museum exhibitions, film, and television dramas about the Nazi past, Ronald Reagan's visit to the Bitburg war cemetery in 1985, and above all the Historians' Dispute in the middle of the decade – that there is no need to recount their well-known details. The same can be said of similar disputes in the 1990s: the Goldhagen Debate and the controversies about the Exhibition of Crimes of the German Army in World War II, the intellectual assistance rendered by prominent historians to Nazi imperialism, and the Berlin Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. Rather than trace the supposed “development of German memory” – whatever that may mean – the next three chapters highlight the polarized terms of its underlying structure. This short chapter briefly sets out the terms of the debate and relative locations of the contending positions in the intellectual-political field in the 1980s and 1990s.

By early 1982, when the Christian Democrat Helmut Kohl became chancellor of the Federal Republic, leftist and left-liberal intellectuals had gained significant beachheads in the media, universities, school, museums – in other words, in the commanding heights of the public institutions of cultural transmission. Challenging this perceived hegemony of political correctness was a mission of the Kohl government, which had signaled its intention to inaugurate a “spiritual-moral change” (geistig-moralische Wende) in order to repair the cultural damage of “1968.”