The Breaking of a Taboo? The Musealisation of Adolf Hitler and the Changing Relationship Between the Former Führer and Germany

Since 1945, marked by phases of silence and avoidance, sceptical debate and critical confrontation, „normalisation‟ and painful recollections of German suffering, as well as more recent „personalising‟ or „trivialisation‟ of the past, Germans have been struggling to come to terms with the historical burden of Hitler and the Holocaust. Although most Germans continue to accept collective responsibility for the past, as the „Erlebnisgeneration‟ (those who experienced the Third Reich) pass into history, there has been a perceptible impatience with individual accountability by many of the third post-war generation who seek „normality‟ unburdened by Hitler. With reunification, for example, the propensity for transferring responsibility for the past to the „other‟ Germany diminished, presenting the opportunity for atonement and the addressing of ostensible former silences and evasions which provoked embittered debates concerning the extent and acceptance of collective culpability. Though remaining highly contentious, there is ample evidence of official insistence on a continued adherence to the post-war Kollektivschuldthese (collective guilt thesis) which may well have been counter-productive, prompting Germans to grow impatient with an inherited and excessive guilt