After 1945, both parts of Germany found it difficult to come to terms with their own responsibility for Nazi crimes. They were concealed and trivialised. It was not until the 1990s that a self-critical view began to prevail. Today, the culture of remembrance is under massive attack from right-wing extremists.

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About the speaker
Jens-Christian Wagner, born in 1966, studied history and Romance philology in Göttingen and Santiago de Chile. After completing his doctorate at the University of Göttingen and working on the permanent exhibition at the Peenemünde Historical Technical Museum (1996/97), he was a visiting scholar at the research programme ‘History of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society in National Socialism’ (Berlin). From 2001 to 2014 he was director of the Mittelbau-Dora Concentration Camp Memorial (Nordhausen) and subsequently director of the Lower Saxony Memorials Foundation and the Bergen-Belsen Memorial. Since 2020, he is director of the Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorials Foundation and professor for history in the public and in the media at the University of Jena. Main areas of research: History of National Socialism and its consequences (especially concentration camps and forced labour), cultures of remembrance after 1945, historical revisionism, anti-Semitism.