<P> Historically, Vergangenheitsbewältigung often is seen as the logical "next step" after a denazification driven at first under Allied Occupation and then by the Christian Democratic Union government of Konrad Adenauer . It dates from the late 1950s and early 1960s, roughly the period in which the work of the Wiederaufbau (reconstruction) became less absorbing and urgent . Having replaced the institutions and power structures of Nazism, the aim of liberal Germans was to deal with the guilt of recent history . Vergangenheitsbewältigung is characterised in part by learning from the past . This includes honestly admitting that such a past did indeed exist, attempting to remedy as far as possible the wrongs committed, and attempting to move on from that past . </P> <P> The German churches, of which only a minority played a significant role in the resistance to Nazism, have led the way in this process . They have developed a specifically German post-war theology of repentance . At the regular mass church rallies, the Lutheran Kirchentag and the Catholic Katholikentag, for example, have developed this theme as a leitmotiv of Christian youth . </P> <P> Vergangenheitsbewältigung has been expressed by the society through its schools, where in most German states the centrally - written curriculum provides each child with repeated lessons on different aspects of Nazism in German history, politics and religion classes from the fifth grade onwards, and related to their maturity . Associated school trips may have destinations of concentration camps . Jewish Holocaust survivors are often invited to schools as guest speakers, though the passage of time limits these opportunities as their generation has aged . </P> <P> In philosophy, Theodor Adorno's writings include the lecture "Was bedeutet: Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit?" ("What is meant by' working through the past'?"), a subject related to his thinking of "after Auschwitz" in his later work . He delivered the lecture on November 9, 1959, at a conference on education held in Wiesbaden . Writing in the context of a new wave of anti-Semitic attacks against synagogues and Jewish community institutions occurring in West Germany at that time, Adorno rejected the contemporary catch phrase "working through the past" as misleading . He argued that it masked a denial, rather than signifying the kind of critical self - reflection that Freudian theory called for in order to "come to terms" with the past . </P>

To live in the past is to die in the present meaning