In the Politics of Memory Jane Kramer surveys the moral and political landscape of today's Germany, where the reunification of East and West has brought into conflict two vastly different memories of what it means to "be" German.

These essays cut straight to the Zeitgeist of Europe's most politically and economically influential country. Self-styled anarchists destroy a filmmaker's Berlin restaurant to protest its "bourgeois" nature, but their ruthless call for freedom is simply German fascism repackaged. A young East German who escapes to the West doesn't know what to do with himself once he gets there - an example of the deep passivity that is perhaps the Communists' most troubling legacy to the "new" Germany.

And the bizarre story of a German holocaust memorial reveals a revisionist desire to portray the country as a victim of World War II by "turning the twelve dark years of Hitler into twelve years of resistance to Hitler and occupation by Hitler; an abandonment, for the sake of settling the past into 'history,' of the very plain historical truth that Germany had chosen Hitler."