Friday, October 7, 2016

Vergangenheitsbewältigung - Coping with the past

23-7-17 Nazis: A Warning from History | BBC Select > .
Downfall Of Nazi Germany | Germany's Fatal Attraction - Timeline > .
2014 Germany continues to grapple with Nazi-era legacy - PBS > .
2020 How German Schools Teach About WW2 - tifo > .
BUT
2019 German Neo-Nazi Party runs for European elections | DW > .

Vergangenheitsbewältigung
 ([fɛɐ̯ˈɡaŋənhaɪtsbəˌvɛltɪɡʊŋ], "struggle to overcome the [negatives of the] past" or "working through the past") is a German term describing processes that since the later 20th century have become key in the study of post-1945 German literature, society, and culture.

The German Duden lexicon defines Vergangenheitsbewältigung as "public debate within a country on a problematic period of its recent history—in Germany on National Socialism, in particular"—where "problematic" refers to traumatic events that raise sensitive questions of collective culpability. In Germany, and originally, the term refers to embarrassment about and often remorse for Germans' complicity in the war crimes of the Wehrmacht, Holocaust, and related events of the early and mid-20th century, including World War II. In this sense, the word can refer to the psychological process of denazification. With the accession of the former German Democratic Republic into the current Federal Republic of Germany in the reunification of 1990 and the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, Vergangenheitsbewältigung can also refer to coming to terms with the excesses and human rights abuses associated with that former one-party state.

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