[What can we learn from the past?]

The author sees the present outbreaks of violence as a confirmation of the continued relevance of the diagnosis of the present-day German condition set out in The Inability to Mourn in 1967. In post-war Germany a pall of silence hung over the subject of Nazi atrocities, guilt and shame were negated and no recollection of, or active mourning for, the millions of German and non-German war victims took place. The author sees an exact parallel to this in the present violence on the part of young people towards foreigners, asylum seekers, Jews and gypsies, and the way it is mutely condoned by a silent majority, interpreting this as an identical instance of the denial of shame and guilt and the incapacity for fellow-feeling towards the poor and the underprivileged. The accusations of part responsibility levelled at the post-1968 generation for the outbreaks of violence among young people are in Mitscherlich's view unfounded. This generation, she argues, was the first to break with the conspiracy of silence in connection with Germany's Nazi past, thus making a process of mourning possible in the first place, and goes on the contend that an increasing sensitivity among the German population towards the prevailing inhumanity that foreigners and the underprivileged are subjected to is an opportunity for renewed self-confrontation with the unbroken virulence of the Nazi mentality and for a resumption of the necessary process of mourning. Here she also sees a possibility of actively curbing the present wave of violence, in contrast to the call to be heard from some politicians for greater toughness in education and upbringing, an approach which she regards as representing not a solution to the problem but rather as a relapse into old authoritarian constraints.