ANNUAL LECTURE OF THE GERMAN HISTORY SOCIETY
Speaker: Andreas Wirsching (Munich)
Initiated first by private enterprises, later by federal ministries and other public institutions, contracted research on the history of the Nazi period and its legacies after 1945 is currently experiencing strong growth. The exploration of new archival sources has re-opened the question of Nazi continuities in postwar Germany. The problem of how far former members of the Nazi Party and thus antidemocratic mentalities influenced the policies of the early Federal Republic (but also the German Democratic Republic) has become a dominant research question in current German contemporary history. The paper will discuss the preconditions for this trend, its implications and problems, and will ask what new results are to be expected. Andreas Wirsching is Director of the Institut für Zeitgeschichte München–Berlin and Professor of Modern History at the University of Munich. His recent publications include Dr. Oetker und der Nationalsozialismus: Geschichte eines Familienunternehmens 1933–1945 (with Jürgen Finger and Sven Keller, 2013), and Demokratie und Globalisierung: Europa seit 1989 (2015). With Frank Bösch he is directing a research project on the history of the West and East German Ministries of the Interior from 1949 to 1970.