cannot imagine that anyone is earnestly striving for that. Reminiscences of good cooperation between the Germans and Slavic peoples in the middle of Europe before the First World War, and in part also still between the wars, are awakened whenever journalists or historians travel to Poland, Czechoslovakia, or Hungary. In that atmosphere it seems imperative to express how closely one feels connected to representatives of these nations. This is understandable, but it cannot all merge into a notion of "Central Europe" that could be misunderstood as taking up the old concept again, which is, as I have said, no longer realizable. In a word, I think the effort to latch on to the connections torn apart in 1945, because of the outcome of the war, and then in turn because of the Cold War, is a sensible political task, especially for West Germans. "On the Public Use of History" In another essay first published in the Die Zeit newspaper on 7 November 1986, Habermas wrote the central question about the memory of the Nazi past was :"In which way is the Nazi period going to be understood in the public consciousness?" Habermas wrote the Bitburg ceremony was meant to create nationalist feelings and a certain rehabilitation of the Nazi era with President Reagan and Chancellor Kohl laying wreaths at the cemetery to honor the Waffen-SS men buried there, but that for Nolte "Bitburg did not open the floodgates widely enough". Habermas wrote that: "This longing for the unframed memories from the perspective of the veterans can now be satisfied by reading Andreas Hillgruber's presentation of the events on the Eastern Front in 1944-45. The 'problem of identification', something that is unusual for an historian, poses itself to the author only because he wants to incorporate the perspective of the fighting troops and the affected civilian population". Habermas argued that "we in Germany...must, undisguisedly and not simply intellectually, keep awake the memory of the suffering of those murdered at German hands". Habermas accused Nolte, Hildebrand and Fest of engaging in personal attacks instead of debating him. About Nolte's criticism over the line "expulsion of the kulaks", Habermas wrote: "I accept the criticism that, "annihilation", not "expulsion" of the kulaks is the appropriate description of this barbaric event. Enlightenment is a mutual undertaking. But the public settling of accounts by Nolte and Fest does not serve the end of enlightenment. They affect