When Hannah Arendt accepted the Lessing Prize from the city of Hamburg in 1959, she addressed, among other things, how difficult it was to find a reasonable attitude toward the German past. She took note of the phrase often used in Germany at that time, that “the past is still ‘unmastered,’” and of the conviction held, particularly by men of good will, that the first thing to be done is to set about “mastering” it. “Perhaps”, she said, “that cannot be done with any past, but certainly not with the past of Hitler Germany. The best that can be achieved is to know precisely what it was, and to endure this knowledge,