Thesis: 'Essays in coming to terms with the past: Transitional justice and memory in postwar Germany'

Forgive and forget or punish and remember? In some form, every political transition forces this dilemma upon those who persist. Some dig into their past, others dig a hole and bury it. In my dissertation, I present empirical essays on postwar Germany, which attempt to make progress on this dilemma. The first essay exploits plausibly exogenous variation in the border drawing of the Allied occupation zones to document how differences in denazification led to differences in voting behavior over time. A second essay uses variation in the transmission of a Holocaust documentary in 1979 and shows that the TV-show reduced the trend in far-right votes.