In a TV appearance around the time of German reunification, the filmmaker Wim Wenders stood among the weeds on open ground near the Brandenburg Gate to make his remarks about the triumph of capitalism. The moment the Cold War was over, he pointed out with restrained German irony, Sony and Mercedes had already stepped into the wasteland which he had used as a set for his remarkable film Wings of Desire.
Within months, the earth began to shift and Berlin became the world's largest building site. With few reference points left after the second World War, architects had the freedom to redesign the heart of the city with audacity. The Kaiser Suite where Wenders filmed a Nick Cave punk concert was literally put on wheels and moved some hundred yards to make room for the new Sony Tower. Not a facelift, but a whole new image for the German capital.
A shopping mecca now replaces what was once the front line between two superpowers and all that remains of the Berlin Wall in many places is a ghostly red stripe. In the former East section, the prestigious new Maratim Art Hotel watches over the famous Friederich Strasse railway station, the first stop in the Soviet zone. And everywhere, government offices, apartment blocks and consulates have sprung up in preparation for the first plenary session of the Bundestag in Berlin this week. Even Wim Wenders himself seems to have capitulated gracefully by making a series of classy TV commercials for the German ICE trains.
At times there is a feeling that Germany is rushing into the next millennium with great haste. Who could blame them? After what is often referred to as "this terrible century", perhaps it is appropriate to mark the passage of time with new architecture. Among the most impressive of these is the new Jewish Museum, designed in a zig-zag shape with a skin of zinc, and left entirely empty at present as a monument to the loss of Jewish culture in Berlin. Inside, the sloping floors and broken Star of David fenestration serve as a constant reminder of dislocation and dispossession. A 24-metre tower where the visitor can reflect on the Holocaust remains dark and unheated. Elsewhere in Berlin, a vibrant nightlife culture seems in the process of recapturing the liberalism of the Weimar years with brash new bars, restaurants and techno-temples, all-leather clubs and transvestite shows.
The Love Parade takes place in Berlin every summer. And one of the bars along the Jewish quarter of Oranienburger Strasse welcomes the ultimate freedom of speech of stand-up rappers, while the barman sporadically throws out flames of fire towards the stage in appreciation, and outside on the street prostitutes under large golf-umbrellas coexist in perfect counterpoint. As ever in Berlin, the eccentric is most welcome. For Germans, however, it is still impossible to forget. No matter how confidently their advanced democracy strides into the future, at the helm of the new Europe it seems, the burden of guilt continues to place inescapable obligations on them, both individually and collectively. More than ever before, the concerns of history or what Primo Levi called Europe's "dozing conscience", have come to the forefront, helped no doubt by a highly controversial speech on the Holocaust by one of Germany's most senior literary figures, Martin Walser.
At a ceremony in which Walser was awarded one of Germany's top literary prizes last year, he referred to the strain of Germany's "shame" or "disgrace". As a writer whose work has focused on the nature of individual freedom versus the constraints of public morality - notably in his novel The Runaway Horse - he has dared to voice the uncomfortable notion that the Holocaust is being used as a kind of "moral baseball bat". His words sparked a heated debate on the quality of memory and methodology of Holocaust studies in schools. Many of those you talk to in Berlin are disturbed by the subject. There was little in the form of an official educational programme on Nazi genocide until the revolutionary generation of sixty-niners (1969) took over the responsibility for passing on a key awareness to younger pupils in schools. For some, however, the idea of bringing classes of 12-year-olds to see concentration camps was too severe an adjustment. It triggered a kind of switch-off valve, I was told by 17-year-old students on a visit from Baden Wurtemburg.
Others feel rural Germany should become more engaged with the subject. And former East Germany has a particular problem in that its citizens always perceived themselves to have been anti-fascist and innocent. In Berlin, the debate has never gone away. Perhaps the current controversy over memory is part of an impossible longing for closure, made even more difficult by new forms of racism. German law still makes it virtually impossible to become a citizen other than by blood relation. Acceptance of the past is sometimes easier than the present and some politicians are loud on anti-Semitism, but silent on anti-Turkish sentiments.
Memorials become an essential means of moving on without forgetting. In addition to the new Jewish Museum, a site has now been earmarked in the former "death strip" to commemorate Holocaust victims in a permanent way. On a square outside the Humboldt Library where the Nazis burned their pyre of books, the loss to German society is marked by a simple memorial in the shape of empty white bookshelves underground.
If the prime motive is to prevent another Holocaust, then resistance to Nazism is equally important. Even if opposition to Hitler was too little too late, it makes sense to honour the courage of journalists such as those at the Munich Post who had their stories torn off the presses and paid with their lives in the fight against Hitler.
Such dignified acknowledgements are vital against the background of the racist killing of an Algerian immigrant in Berlin recently. Even more so against last year's discovery by Der Spiegel magazine of one of Joseph Mengele's key Nazi doctors of Auschwitz - Dr Hans Munsch - still living happily with his unpurged anti-Semitism in the Allgau region. His defence was to say that he conducted human experiments and killed some in order to save others.
Then there was the discovery of so-called SS banks such as the Dresdner Bank who profited by confiscating Jewish gold, as well as the entire subject of reparations for slave labour in the Reich.
The problem of guilt and atonement is sometimes one of degree. Collectively, Chancellor Gerhard Schroder is now attempting a form of closure by capping reparation demands from forced labour victims in the US.
For individuals it is often more difficult, as one young woman pointed out when she told me how her parents had availed of a Polish slave worker on their farm in Bavaria. They treated him well and her mother continued to trade with Jewish people in the area against Nazi decrees. "This is unfinished business in Germany. I think it's correct that the subject is continually examined on all levels, the big crimes and the small crimes," she said.
Konrad Adenauer's famous phrase "the luck of late birth" seems no consolation to younger generations of Germans. A man who grew up after the war in the industrial Ruhr told me how his own father held a key position in the railroads and administered deportation in the Reich. Like many others, his father always regarded himself as a victim of Nazism, forced to obey orders. "But I was his son. How could I disown my own father?"
THE problem for young Germans is that anything other than absolute remorse seems like belated complicity in genocide. Unlike the famous historikerstreit in the 1980s in which revisionist historians tried to minimise German guilt by focusing on a continuum of atrocities and pointing out that Hitler was no worse than Stalin or Ghengis Khan, the latest controversy is not an attempt at exculpation. Walser is not a Holocaust denier, though his remarks may have been interpreted as such. Perhaps he is questioning a kind of silence imposed on the German psyche along the lines of Adorno's edict that there could be "no poetry after Auschwitz".
Are Germans fed up being sorry? Are emotions such as guilt and disgrace psycho logically counterproductive? These are provocative questions which many Germans now wish to avoid by finding more positive ways of honouring their victims. Many have reached a maturity that does not compromise their own personal welfare.
At the same time, there is no doubt that Germans have been denied access to a kind of cultural expression that now seems easy to the Irish, for instance. The link to German folk heritage was destroyed in the service of Nazi ideology. I met people who could not even bring themselves to sing old nursery rhymes to their children.
Writers in the 1970s talked about rebuilding the German language from scratch. In many ways German history can only be properly represented in the arts, now that survivors of Nazi atrocities have all but disappeared. The writer Jurek Becker, himself a survivor of Auschwitz, once remarked that people get "bored" with eyewitness accounts and that artists have the obligation to go a step further into fiction.
Nor is Walser the only writer with concerns for the well-being of the German psyche. Hans Magnus Enzensberger has also recently approached the national soul with new questions. And in the light of the current Hollywood fetish of war movies, Thomas Schuely, one of Germany's leading film producers, pointed to a vacuum in Germany's popular culture on the subject.
Where the British have made four films about Rommel, the Germans made none, he remarks. Should Germans not begin to re-create their own heroes and villains? This year's Berlin Film Festival devoted a core section to new films relating to the Holocaust, such as The Last Days produced by Steven Spielberg's Shoah Foundation and the German film Aimee and Jaguar, about a lesbian love affair during the Nazi period.
The unfinished business of the Holocaust may now be increasingly addressed through a medium which German critics often refer to as sentimental, guided by emotion rather than understanding. Germans are uneasy about demonising the cult of Nazism. Der Spiegel magazine criticised Schindler's List as a "Holocaust with a happy end". And the problem with recent films like Life is Beautiful, a comical interpretation of the concentration camp, is that people with no other access to information on the Holocaust might believe this benign view of events. In the meantime, Germany continues to examine its own soul with last year's Wehrmacht exhibition which brought home the true role of ordinary German soldiers in genocide. Up to then it was always possible to push the blame away on SS Einsatz commandos. And this month, a new exhibition of photographs in Berlin concentrates on the sites of former "killing fields" in Poland and Russia under Nazi occupation. Germans can only benefit by telling their own story. Emotion is no substitute for understanding.