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German memory of the Third Reich has been an ongoing obsession among students and scholars of German history, as the titles of such books as The Wages of Guilt (Buruma, 1994) and The Unmasterable Past (Maier, 1988) attest. In the 1980s a major controversy erupted among German historians across the political and philosophical spectrums over whether or not Germany could ever claim pride in its past in the light of the events from 1933 to 1945. Germans in general have been preoccupied—or not—with Vergangenheitsbewältigung, the “overcoming” or “mastering” of a past since 1933 dominated by Hitler and the Holocaust. For the first 20 years after the end of World War II Germans on both sides of the Iron Curtain busied themselves largely with economic and political recovery from the war, energies in part generated by the repression of knowledge of complicity in the crimes of Nazism. Beginning in the 1960s, however, a younger generation in West Germany began challenging—often in problematic and unproductive ways—the silence of their parents. Out of this confrontation with the past came a gradual recapturing of the past's contents and discontents. Historians of the Third Reich in Germany and in the West subsequently started to shift the focus of their research from the actions of the Nazi and military leadership to more complicated questions of social life and morality under Hitler. Parallel to this shift in historical inquiry was the increasing variety of confrontations in German society with the individual consequences of personal involvement with the Nazi regime and its moral and psychological aftermath. Even early on, psychoanalysts in West Germany had seen the traces of such experiences among their patients, although the working through of these experiences remained largely taboo in analytic sessions. In East Germany, such confrontations