Vergangenheitsbewältigung (, "struggle of overcoming the past" or "work of coping with the past") is a German compound noun describing processes that since the later 20th century have become key in the study of post-1945 German literature, society, and culture.
The German Duden lexicon defines Vergangenheitsbewältigung as "public debate within a country on a problematic period of its recent history—in Germany on National Socialism, in particular"—where "problematic" refers to traumatic events that raise sensitive questions of collective culpability. In Germany, the word originally referred to anger and remorse about the war crimes of the Wehrmacht, the Holocaust, and related events of the early and mid-20th century, including World War II. In the sense of a quest for a new German identity, the word can refer to the psychological process of denazification.
After the reunification of 1990 (the accession of the former German Democratic Republic into the current Federal Republic of Germany) and the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, Vergangenheitsbewältigung also referred to coming to terms with East German Communism.
Historical development
Vergangenheitsbewältigung describes the attempt to analyze, digest and learn to live with the past, in particular the Holocaust. The focus on learning is much in the spirit of philosopher George Santayana's oft-quoted observation that "those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it". It is a technical term also used in English that was coined after 1945 in West Germany, relating specifically to the atrocities committed in Nazi Germany, and to both historical and contemporary concerns about the extensive degree to which Nazism compromised and co-opted many German cultural, religious, and political institutions. The term therefore deals at once with the concrete responsibility of the German state (West Germany assumed the legal obligations of the Reich) and of individual Germans for what took place "under Hitler", and with questions about the roots of legitimacy in a society whose development of the Enlightenment collapsed in the face of Nazi ideology.
After denazification
Historically, Vergangenheitsbewältigung often is seen as the logical "next step" after a denazification drive under both the Allied Occupation and by the Christian Democratic Union government of Konrad Adenauer, and began in the late 1950s and early 1960s, roughly the period in which the work of the Wiederaufbau (reconstruction) became less absorbing and urgent. Having replaced the institutions and power structures of Nazism, the aim of liberal Germans was to deal with the guilt of recent history. Vergangenheitsbewältigung is marked by learning from the past in ways such as honestly admitting that such a past did indeed exist, attempting to remedy as far as possible the wrongs committed, and attempting to move on from that past.
Religion and education
The German churches, of which only a minority played a significant role in the resistance to Nazism, have led the way in this process. They have notably developed a unique German postwar theology of repentance. At the regular mass church rallies, the Lutheran Kirchentag and the Catholic Katholikentag, for example, have developed this theme as a leitmotiv of Christian youth.
Vergangenheitsbewältigung has been expressed by the society through its schools, where in most German states the centrally-written curriculum provides each child with repeated lessons on different aspects of Nazism in German history, politics and religion classes from the fifth grade onwards, related to their maturity. Associated school trips may have destinations of concentration camps. Jewish Holocaust survivors are often invited to schools as guest speakers, though the passage of time limits these opportunities as their generation has aged.
Philosophy
In philosophy, Theodor Adorno's writings include the lecture "Was bedeutet: Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit?" ("What is meant by 'working through the past'?"), a subject related to his thinking of "after Auschwitz" in his later work. He delivered the lecture on 9 November 1959 at a conference on education held in Wiesbaden. Writing in the context of a new wave of antisemitic attacks against synagogues and Jewish community institutions occurring in West Germany at that time, Adorno rejected the contemporary catch phrase "working through the past" as misleading. He argued that it masked a denial, rather than signifying the kind of critical self-reflection that Freudian theory called for in order to "come to terms" with the past.