WITH THE FIFTIETH anniversary of Hitler's seizure of power approaching, West Germany faced numerous commemorations in the early 1980s. At memorial sites and former concentration camps, but also on television and radio, people were reminded of the disastrous years of National Socialist terror, its origins and its consequences. Television series, such as Claude Lanzmann's Shoah, sparked off new and old debates about the Holocaust.

As the aim of the newly elected Kohl government was to revive the conservative spirit of the 1950s, the so-called Adenauer-Ära, named after the first chancellor of the FRG, it clearly signaled a neoconservative turn in politics. Speaking of a new “Stunde Null,” Kohl maintained that the conservatives' success in the parliamentary elections of 1983 was the beginning of a new era of wealth and prosperity. In the same vein, the fact of being German was expected to become “natural” and “normal,” and Germany's past freed from its “criminal” undertones. During a speech in Israel on 25 January 1984, Kohl employed the phrase “Gnade der späten Geburt,” thereby absolving the younger generation from any responsibility for the Nazi past. In the Express, Alfred Dregger maintained that Germany ought finally to emerge from the shadow of Hitler and Auschwitz, and according to Franz Josef Strauß, the Germans should practice the “aufrechte Gang.”