One might think the perspective gained from the passage of 40 years since the National Socialist era would make it easier to have a productive confrontation with all that happened then.1 What has appeared instead is a tendency for inherited latencies to become increasingly manifest in the form of continuities, as is evident in the public's responses to the case of Kurt Waldheim, the death of Rudolf Hess, the West German ‘Historians’ Quarrel’, the new nationalist longings, and a series of anti-Semitic ‘gaffes’ by public figures. This is also the context for growing calls finally to put an end to the ‘German guilt-obsession’, as Michael Stürmer put it. While the Christian Social Union politician Franz Josef Strauss declares that ‘no people can stand to live with a criminalized history over the long run’, apparently living with an actually criminal history can be managed well indeed.