IN HER SPEECH AT THE BRANDENBURG GATE on the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Angela Merkel referred to the momentous events of 1989 as “eine wahrhaft glückliche Stunde der deutschen und der europäischen Geschichte” and deemed 9 November a “Tag der Freude für uns alle.” However, she added:

This aspect of the speech was largely unreported in the national and international media, which focused primarily on the story of unification. Nonetheless, its inclusion was indicative of the dilemma surrounding commemoration of 9 November: the heroes of 1989 cannot be celebrated without mourning the victims of 1938. An editorial in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung maintained that it was possible to celebrate the fall of the Berlin Wall without forgetting or repressing the Nazi past. And yet the organizers of an “anti-Fascist demonstration” on 9 November 2009 in Berlin to remember the anti-Jewish pogroms of 1938 indicated that remembrance of the two pasts is not so readily accommodated within a single narrative: “Durch die Behauptung, der Mauerfall 1989 stehe für die Überwindung ‘zweier Diktaturen auf deutschen [sic] Boden’, wird der Nationalsozialismus und seine Verbrechen relativiert.”

The year 2009 not only marked the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall but also the seventieth anniversary of the outbreak of the Second World War and the sixty-fifth anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camps. The subsequent reappraisal of the Nazi and GDR pasts also considered their joint legacy. A group of historians, politicians, and intellectuals put their names to a feature in Die Zeit that discussed the significance of the Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939 under the heading “Das Jahr 1989 feiern, heißt auch, sich an 1939 zu erinnern!,” while Matthias Platzeck, Prime Minister of Brandenburg, sparked controversy by comparing the post-1990 rehabilitation of SED functionaries with that of members of the Waffen-SS in West Germany. The postunification period has seen recurring and unresolved debates on how to remember the Nazi and GDR pasts in the attempt to shape a unified narrative on German history.