West Germanic community found the strength and courage to hear and understand their
spiritual leaders (Adorno, Jaspers, Weiss, Boll, Keppen, Grasse), whose views had a
direct impact on the change of the vector of mass historical consciousness. In the
leading mass media, the debate began to be debated, which had been pushed out of the
consciousness of the past, which eventually led to the formation of the specific political
culture of the Federal Republic of Germany, the most important element of which is
the moral rejection of the Nazi past. First of all, the change of generations actively
contributed to the fact that on the agenda of the "policy of the past" appeared the
requirement of critical comprehension of the past.
By the beginning of the 1980s, the opinion of the German society was that the
crimes of fascism were the essence of the regime itself, and that Hitler's decision was
waged with an invariably aggressive character. Representatives of the conservative
forces who won the parliamentary elections of 1982, called loudly "to get out of the
shadow of the past", "normalize" German history, to liberate the Germans from the
complex of national guilt and self-deception. H. Kol, having identified one of
Germany's first places in an integrative European space, initiated the embedding of
new meanings into the historical past. Planned exhibitions, public appearances, events
devoted to the 50th anniversary of Hitler's coming to power were supposed to show the
greatness of the state. However, the public reaction to these actions was unexpectedly
debatable, the apogee of which was the so-called dispute between historians that broke
out in 1986-1987 in connection with the discussion of the German past and doubts
about the crimes of the Germans. Its initiators were philosopher Yu. Habermas and
historian E. Nolte.
E. Nolte, being a disciple of M. Heidehher, a member of the NSDAP, in the work
"The past, which does not pass," represented the war of Germany against the USSR in
1941-1945, primarily as a preventive defensive measure of the National Socialists
against the threat of an "Asian crime". The idea of setting up concentration camps and
death camps, as a reaction to the Stalinist GULAG and the "positive demographic
policy" of the SS groups in Eastern Europe, was key in the theory of E. Nolte [17, 33].
Y. Habermas, denying the theory of the opponent of the crimes of Nazism, but who
was guilty of these crimes, insisted that the search for the national identity of Germany
should be in "constitutional patriotism" - the only possible form of patriotism that "does
not alienate us from the West" [13, 54]. By that time, the notion of constitutional
patriotism became the main in historical politics in the FRG, and the recognition of the
genocide of European Jews as a historically unprecedented phenomenon was the basis
of political self-consciousness.
After nearly six decades of latent period, which was needed to experience this
psychological trauma, in Germany, increased attention was paid to a topic that was in
the background due to the actions of protective mechanisms. In the press and on
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