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As comprehensively as Hittorf had prepared them, there was one notable gap in their education: modern German history. At a time when the country was only beginning to come to terms with its immediate past, textbooks dismissed the Hitler period with conspicuous brevity. "I can't recall our discussing the dark days," says Giersiepen. "It was a taboo time." Eventually they caught up. Those who attended nearby Munster University remember courses on the Third Reich being so crowded that lectures were broadcast campus-wide on a public address system. "What we heard led us to question parents and relatives about the era," says Freitag. "They said they had not known or had known only toward the end. We knew they should have known."
Poeck recalls angry arguments with his father, who served as a minor functionary in the Gestapo. "I have real problems with our past," Poeck says, "a sense of deep shame." Others speak with equal intensity, though with less personal involvement, about war and Holocaust, about remembrance and guilt. "We may have had nothing to do with it," says Niehues, "but we belong to the people who let it happen."
Clearly, the past colors perception of present and future. "No one hesitates to say he is German," notes Niehues. But it is never mentioned in the context of anything that could even vaguely be read as old-fashioned nationalism. Instead they see themselves and the country embedded in an integrated Europe. Says Priebisch: "I think of myself as a European first, perhaps because I have traveled a lot." He is about to leave for the Soviet Union, where his company is launching a joint venture.
If they are outspokenly proud of anything, it is the evolution of the ; Federal Republic into a mature, confident democracy, a state based on law and social justice, founded on a "constitution worth living for and worth defending," as Freitag puts it. The lessons of the Third Reich and of East Germany under the communists have not been lost. "We have built a society that can defend itself against the state's overstepping its bounds," says Giersiepen.
They have no political heroes, though they recognize what Niehues describes as "some leading figures." President Richard von Weizsacker gets high marks for, as Freitag says, "telling Germans the truth about their past without insulting us." Willy Brandt is praised as the architect of West Germany's Ostpolitik, Helmut Schmidt as a "savvy world politician." Most find kind words for Mikhail Gorbachev, without whom unification would have remained a dream, but they worry about his staying power. Says Giersiepen: "I used to be depressed by so many things; there always seemed to be money for war but not enough for human needs. Now, maybe, we can go on to things that benefit mankind."