German identity, the Holocaust and the year 2000

From the perspective of the year 2000, the author contemplates contemporary Germans and their attitudes towards the Holocaust. One problem is that the perpetrators and their victims have all but disappeared. Another is that the guilty parents of the current younger generation concealed their crimes from their children. Nevertheless, a few courageous theologians and writers have confronted "the darkness within the German soul." The impact of Daniel Goldhagen's "Hitler's Willing Executioners" and Spielberg's film "Schindler's List" is examined, together with the important speech delivered by the author Martin Walser on receiving the 1998 Frankfurt Peace Prize.