It seems that wherever one turns these days questions of how to deal with difficult pasts have risen to the top of national and international agendas. The general premise of this chapter is that the United States has not yet adequately dealt with the many forms of racial injustice endemic to its national past; and its general approach is that our thinking about this failure, its consequences, and possible remedies can be sharpened by drawing upon the German case, particularly Germany's renewed efforts in the 1980s and 1990s to face the painful truth of the National Socialist past of the 1930s and 1940s. In that situation, the forum in which public memory was exercised and consciousness raised was a debate among historians – a Historikerstreit – that spilled over into public awareness. That peculiar circumstance allowed the links between changing public memory and changing political culture and collective identity to appear in sharp relief. One key issue in that debate concerned the role that anti-Semitism, as a racialized mode of perception and interaction, played in the Holocaust.