14 Memory, Identity, and a Painful Past Contesting the Former Dachau Concentration Camp Aline Sierp When former prisoner Nico Rost came to visit Dachau concentration camp in the 1950s, he expressed his utter disbelief that so little had been done to ensure and foster remembrance in a place where so many people had sufered so much. On the contrary, steps seemed to have been taken to eradicate most traces of the past (Rost 1956). he prisoner barracks had been turned into habitations for German refugees and expellees; a primary school, a post oice, and various shops provided for the daily needs of the new inhabitants; the disinfection barracks had been rebuilt into a restau- rant. No oicial memorial paid tribute to those who had sufered and died on the same grounds only a few years earlier. With the exception of the cre- matorium area, which was surrounded by a wall, there was almost nothing that recalled the concentration camp and its horrors. Nico Rost’s experience closely mirrors the societal reality in Germany during the 1950s. In the immediate postwar years, there was as good as no public interest in the time period from 1933 to 1945. Attempts to oicially commemorate the victims of the Nazi regime were limited at best. his relected the general wish of the German population to quickly forget the past and look toward the future. here seemed to be a general consensus to render neither guilt nor the experience of sufering public. For some, this communicative silence was the necessary condition that ensured the transformation of Germany into a democratic society (Lübbe 1983). Others argued that the wish to silence the past was initially inherent in the concept