Helmut Ortner | Gnadenlos Deutsch. Täter, Helfer, Zuschauer – und die Entsorgung der NS-Zeit

Germany in the post-war years: A "denazified" nation struggled to forget what it concealed: its willingness to participate in a system of barbarism. In the collective repression and forgetting, the horror and uniqueness of the Holocaust and the wars of extermination were lost. National Socialist madness became an interchangeable metaphor for evil, personal guilt was relativized. In this way, all the indifferent, accomplices and helpers disappeared from the historical field of vision - and thus also from co-liability and co-responsibility for a criminal system of rule. A people on the run from its own past. Helmut Ortner's essays and reportages are a plea against any trivialization and relativization of the Nazi past. Because there is an obligation: to remember. At a time when right-wing populists and the AfD want to end the culture of remembrance, Helmut Ortner opposes the disposal of the Nazi era. It is about the present of the past, because the Nazi past is not time-barred.