The Dutch novelist Harry Mulisch once said something along the lines of the Second World War cannot really be said to be over until parents could innocently name their child “Adolf.” That day seems to be retreating further into the future, in part due to excellent programs such as the BBC’s Auschwitz: The Nazis and ‘The Final Solution’. Such series remain important, partly because of the pernicious endurance of Holocaust deniers, partly because the process of genocide–improvised at first, but proceeding by grisly trial and error to assembly-line slaughter–needs to be delineated to bring home the concrete reality of what happened. Yet I wonder whether such programs–or rather the myriad of lesser documentaries about the events of World War II–underpin some dark stereotypes as well as illuminate the past. For many people in the “Anglophone” world, continental Europe still remains the arena for World War II. A documentary on hooliganism during the Euro 2000 football tournament showed, I recall, an English “supporter” shouting at one of the riot police who was kneeling on his back while attaching handcuffs: “You’d be speaking German if it wasn’t for us.” This was coming from some yob whose father probably wasn’t even born until after World War Two. In such people’s eyes (and in those of many several rungs up the intellectual ladder), contemporary Germany’s (slightly faded) reputation for efficiency and Ordnung is merely a (temporarily) tamed version of the goosestepping ranks of 60 years ago. The clich� that remembering the past is always important holds true but, nevertheless, there are aspects of history many people can’t even recall.To plug the gaps there needs to be more high-profile programs about other eras in Germany’s and Europe’s past. In terms of “sexy” television, it’s of course difficult to beat the telegenic spectacle of the Nazis. (For example, watching the BBC documentary last night, I became momentarily distracted by the skull-and-crossbones insignia on the caps of Waffen SS officers. How did people wearing such symbols of death possibly think they were on the “right” side? George Lucas couldn’t have devised a better villain�s uniform.)However, I think many people my age (especially those with a reasonable background in history) would like the focus to shift slightly from that black decade at the bull’s-eye of the 20th century. We are drenched in the imagery, mythology, and the actual events of that conflict. In contrast, too little is known, for example, about how Germany achieved its Wirtschaftswunder–the economic and political “miracle” that transformed a ruined totalitarian state into a prosperous democratic nation in less than 20 years. In a broader context, the story of the European Union is equally miraculous: a continent riven by centuries of conflict coming together to create a new superpower that exerts its influence through “soft power” rather than through the military force flexed by its transatlantic competitor. (Think, for example, of how the EU demanded and achieved improved human rights in the candidate country Turkey. Then compare this success with the conditions in any of the United States’ quasi-client regimes in the Middle East.) At the heart of all these extraordinary achievements, alongside its prouder and perhaps less altruistic partner, France, stood the Federal Republic of Germany.But instead the masses are drip-fed stories of Eurocrats on the make and barmy rules from Brussels. Of towels on sunbeds and neo-Nazi riots. Yet to expect some wider recognition of these events in the English-speaking media is probably a pipe dream. It’s difficult to imagine the History Channel (AKA the Hitler Channel) weaning itself off fascinating fascism to present, say, the growth of the Greens in Germany, a development future generations might identify either as a false dawn or a pivotal step in saving the Earth. Peace doesn’t sit well in the schedules.But if we can’t balance the crimes of the past with an awareness of the contemporary, we may end up sharing the same the bleak characterisation expressed by a friend of Charlie Citrine in Saul Bellow’s novel, “Humboldt’s Gift.” Examining his vandalised Mercedes parked at a Chicago kerbside, Citrine recalls the adage: “Murder Jews and make machines–that’s what those Germans really know how to do.” *I’m aware that many people would contest that the scale and the perverse ambition of the “Final Solution” places it on a different plane that other events during the Second World War. It doesn’t just deserve a chapter like D-Day or the siege of Stalingrad–its sui generis nature means that it has to be pondered separately. I think, however, that the spectre of the Holocaust is integral to the way succeeding generations understand the war. Although the Allied governments did next to nothing to inform their populace of what was happening in the death camps at the time, people in the countries that “won” the war (in a way, Germany and Japan, too, won) now see the struggle as unfolding against the backcloth of mass extermination–reinforcing the nobility of the Allies and the almost demonic nature of the Nazi regime. To many today the point of World War II was to bring the Holocaust to an end–a way of thinking that probably would have been alien to the societies of Britain, France, and the USA in the 1930s and 1940s, when casual anti-Semitism was rife.