Nineteenth-Century French Philosopher Ernest Renan suggested that the violence and traumatic events upon which nations are formed must be forgotten if unity is ever to take hold among competing factions that make up the whole. Forgetting past transgressions constitutes a logical step for bringing former adversaries together. Such willful amnesia allows rival groups to establish a clean slate from which to build a common future. Such a simple agenda, however, is fraught with difficulties. At stake is not merely what should be forgotten, but who chooses, and what criteria the past will be judged by. If social accord requires the mindful elimination of past conflict, what happens to the principles of justice, responsibility, and Wiedergutmachung, the straightforward German word for reparations that literally means making things good again? Can a nation afford to forget past crimes and wrongs, and won’t they simply return in symbolic forms and in very concrete disputes that demand attention? Nation building, like writing history, requires equal parts of remembering and forgetting, but acknowledging this truism does little to solve the inherent problems of dealing with a collective past. Part of the quandary is that amnesia and anamnesis are solutions to competing agendas; the former works toward unanimity by erasing all evidence of conflict (hence its related term, amnesty ), and the latter strives for truth and reconciliation by exposing areas of dispute.

During the Wende, the transitional period between the collapse of the GDR in 1989 and the beginning of a unified FRG in 1990, the task of forgetting was not undertaken equally by the former East and former West.