If it is true that film and television have become the primary means to help a nation grasp its history and identity, then a look at West German cinema during the 1960s and 1970s might prove productive. This was the time when a group of filmmakers, loosely defined as Der junge deutsche Film (Young German Film), later renamed Das neue deutsche Kino (New German Cinema), took it upon itself to remind West Germans of the continued presence of their tarnished past. These filmmakers translated political and social commentary into fictional stories and circulated images that were meant to signify Germanness. As they tried to bring national identity and national history into representation, they created a view of Germany as a nation that did not live up to its radically democratic ideals. In this way, Young German Film continued the critical tradition generally associated with the Gruppe 47, whose influence began to decline by the mid-1960s, around the time when a new German cinema emerged. Like the venerated group of intellectuals and writers of the Gruppe 47, the young filmmakers, too, wanted to be “conscience of the nation.” Although less unified than their critical forebears, the group of young filmmakers had more in common than a strong dissatisfaction with the cinema of the 1950s. Fueled by the student protest movement and a general mood of transition in the wake of Konrad Adenauer's resignation in 1963, they saw themselves as intellectuals who wanted to use cinema as a forum for a fundamentally new vision of Germany. In addition, the rebellious West German filmmakers wished to demonstrate to foreign audiences - and to American audiences in particular - their commitment to extirpating traces of Germany's past and to reconstituting its national identity along newlines.