Germany has a memory problem. For more than four decades western and eastern Germany chewed over the Nazi years in different ways. The initial instinct of the westerners was to black out any detailed analysis of the Third Reich, to pin blame on Hitler, the more zealous Nazis and the SS.

Concentration camps became museums, school classes were taken there on excursions, tributes paid to victims. For the most part, though, it was a lacklustre affair.

The difficulty lay in getting communities to face up to responsibilities. The sealed cattle wagons parked on a railway siding for two days, the prisoners inside calling for water? That was a memory too far.

Under pressure from abroad and from a new generation of politicians impatient with the silence of their fathers, public memory started to return. Better relations with Israel led to Jewish visitors returning and asking awkward questions. Plaques were erected. Grammar school pupils were encouraged to dig into the town archives to explore the neighbourhood history.

But this curiosity was not always welcome. Anna Rosmus, a young woman exploring the use of slave labour in the region around Passau, became the victim of threats and ended up leaving town.

By the time that the two Germanys united in 1989-90, the westerners at least had found a vocabulary for dealing with unpleasant memories. Running scared of class action suits from slave labourers, big German companies started to hire historians to trawl through their records and assess moral responsibility.

Hefty tomes were written, compensation paid, more plaques erected. For the most part the historians have been replaced by theologians commissioned to draw up ethical codes of practice; self-defence at a time when German corporate business is being accused on an almost daily basis of involvement with corruption and sleaze.

The most complicated form of amnesia happened in eastern Germany. The western German model was to repress uncomfortable reminiscence but recover it under external pressure. The Communists, by contrast, virtually wiped memory clean. The Holocaust was pushed to the margins.

True, the Soviet Army had liberated the Nazi death camps in Poland; Hitler had made war on Jewish Bolshevism. Yet for the Communists to mourn murdered Jews was seen as somehow diminishing the suffering of the Russians.

The eastern Germans went a step farther; they essentially proclaimed themselves to be the “good Germans”. It was the westerners, they said, who had inherited Hitler's legacy. Eastern Germans had learnt from the past - and therefore did not need to dwell on it.

Little wonder that no emotional or moral bridge has been established by the inhabitants of Rehmsdorf and the former inhabitants of the camp buildings where they now live. Memory has been blacked out. Now the locals are scared that they will be forced to remember something they never learnt.

Rather than talk through the morality of their strange lives they prefer to let grass grow over history. Gardening, it is said, is good for the nerves.

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