MOST countries celebrate the best of their pasts. Germany unrelentingly promotes its worst.
Today is the 75th anniversary of the day Hitler took power in Germany, and the occasion has prompted a new round of soul-searching.
The enormous Holocaust memorial in central Berlin was completed only after years of debate. But the building of m
onuments to mark the evils of the Nazi regime continues unabated.
Germany's minister of culture, Bernd Neumann, has announced that construction can begin in Berlin on two monuments, one near the Reichstag, to murdered gypsies, and another, not far from the Brandenburg Gate, to gays and lesbians killed in the Holocaust.
In November, the groundwork started for the Topography of Terror centre at the site of the former Gestapo and SS headquarters. In October, a new exhibition opened at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, while at Dachau, outside Munich, a new visitor centre will open this summer.
The city of Erfurt plans a museum dedicated to the crematoriums, and there are two exhibitions about the role of the German railways in delivering millions to their deaths.
"Where in the world has one ever seen a nation that erects memorials to immortalise its own shame?" asked Avi Primor, the former Israeli ambassador to Germany, at an event in Erfurt on Friday to commemorate the Holocaust and the liberation of Auschwitz.
"Only the Germans had the bravery and the humility."
It is not just in edifices and exhibits that the effort to come to terms with this history marches on. Germany's federal crime office has begun investigating itself, trying to shine a light on the Nazi past of its founders. And this month, the federal prosecutor overturned the guilty verdict on Marinus van der Lubbe, the Dutch communist executed on charges of setting the Reichstag fire.
Since 1969, Berlin has flown some 33,000 former citizens who were exiled during the Nazi tyranny back to the city for all-expenses-paid visits – although the figures drop year by year as the number of survivors falls.
The experience of Nazism is also alive in contemporary public debates over subjects as varied as German troops in Afghanistan, the low birth rate and the country's dealings with foreigners.
Not everyone welcomes the preoccupation with the country's past. "I can't help but feel that some of the continued 'Let's build monuments; let's build Jewish museums', is a fairly ritualised behaviour," Susan Neiman, director of the Einstein Forum in Potsdam, an international public research organisation, said. "I worry terribly that it's going to backfire."
