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[...] While the West German says, "After all, I earned this with hard work," the visitor from the East holds out his hand expectantly, with the reply, "You were just lucky," and hopes for a private contribution to the "balanced burden." The conceit of the first is that his success is due solely to …

[...] the government's need to legitimize its own educational dictates coincided completely with the citizens' need for exoneration from historical responsibility. Add to this a kind of "Hiroshima effect." The genocidal bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had transformed the Japanese into victims, an…

One cannot quibble with the fact that the East German government managed to completely recast the old apparatus, often at great cost, since many of those dismissed were far more skilled than their replacements. What is problematic, however, is that from the outset, this housecleaning was performed …

As far as public trials are concerned, all parties are in complete agreement: don't hold them. No one is qualified, they say to pass judgment on the East Germans, for no one knows with absolute certainty how he himself might have behaved under similar circumstances.

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Apart from the publi…