ATTITUDES TO GERMANY'S NAZI PAST have been a recurring theme throughout this volume, with reference being made, for example, to the immediate postwar debates around the comments by Thomas Mann about German literature written during the Third Reich, to concerns about “restoration” in the early years of the Federal Republic, and to the worries about democracy at the time of the Grand Coalition when for the first time a former member of the Nazi party became federal chancellor. The overall consensus, at least among writers and intellectuals, was that during the first decades of the existence of the Federal Republic there had been a political failure to face up to the past. This idea found expression in the phrase unbewältigte Vergangenheit (unmastered past), a term that came to be used more widely in society. More recently, it has become normal to speak of Vergangenheitsbewältigung, which implies that the necessary process of coming to terms with the past has at least begun. At the same time, as noted earlier, writers' and intellectuals' efforts (or lack of them) to confront the past have come under scrutiny, with both the Gruppe 47 and the 1968 generation being subject to a reassessment of their roles.

Two works written in the preunification Federal Republic arguably stand out as prime examples of the expression of concern about society's failure to deal with the Nazi past. The first, Die Unfähigkeit zu trauern (The Inability to Mourn), written by the psychologists Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich, dates from 1967.