Will Free Us" (Frankfurter Rundschau, 1 December 1986), argued that the debate about the planned German Historical Museum in West Berlin—which was to cover German history from antiquity to the present—and the planned House of History in Bonn—which was to cover the Federal Republic from 1949 to the present—showed the German people were deeply interested in their history. In Mommsen's view, the decisive issue was whether the Federal Republic was a continuation of the Reich that had existed from 1871 to 1945 or not. He argued that at first the continuity thesis dominated, as shown by the lavish celebrations of the 150th anniversary of Bismarck's birthday in 1965, but as a younger generation came of age, a more critical attitude towards the past emerged. He wrote further that German reunification "would presume the collapse of the Soviet empire, a premise unthinkable at the time". As a result, since German reunification was impossible in the 1950s-60s, together with the resumption of Germany as a great power, led West Germans to embrace the idea of integration into the European Economic Community and NATO as the best substitutes. Adenauer's policies of integration into the EEC and NATO suggested that the only role possible for the Federal Republic was at best as a middle-size world power whose influence stemmed from working with other Western powers. The policies of Western integration caused the idea of a continuity of German history to lose its appeal to the younger generation of West Germans, he wrote, leading to the idea popular by the late 1960s that the state founded in 1949 represented discontinuity. Finally, Mommsen maintained that the discontinuity thesis led to the younger generation of West Germans to become more critical of the old Reich that had existed from 1871 to 1945. Mommsen argued that for those nationalists still attached to the idea of national continuity, these were painful developments, noting that an article by Nolte in Die Zeit had its title "Against Negative Nationalism in Interpreting History" where Nolte lashed out against historians critical of the German past. Mommsen argued much of the writing by Nolte, Hildebrand, and Stürmer was clearly aiming to provide for a version of history that celebrated the continuities of German history while trying to get around the more unpleasant aspects of the German Empire and even more so Nazi Germany. Mommsen wrote that Nolte, Hildebrand, Stürmer and Hillgruber were in different