January 28, 2008 - BERLIN - Most countries celebrate the best in their past. Germany unrelentingly promotes its worst.

The enormous Holocaust memorial that dominates a chunk of central Berlin was completed only after years of debate. But the building of monuments to the Nazi disgrace continues unabated. On Monday, the German minister of culture, Bernd Neumann, announced that construction could begin in Berlin on two monuments, one near the Reichstag to slain members of the gypsy groups, known here as the Sinti and Roma, and another not far from the Brandenburg Gate to gays and lesbians killed in the Holocaust.

In November they broke ground on the long-delayed Topography of Terror center at the site of the former Gestapo and SS headquarters. And in October, a huge new exhibition opened at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. At the Dachau camp outside Munich, a new visitor center opens this summer. The city of Erfurt is planning a museum dedicated to the crematoriums. There are currently two competing exhibitions about the role of the German railroads in delivering millions to their deaths.

This Wednesday marks the 75th anniversary of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party taking power in Germany, which remarkably has prompted yet a new round of soul-searching.

"Where in the world has one ever seen a nation that erects memorials to immortalize its own shame?" said Avi Primor, the former Israeli ambassador to Germany, at an event commemorating the Holocaust and the liberation of Auschwitz on Friday in Erfurt. "Only the Germans had the bravery and the humility."

It is not just in edifices and exhibits that the effort to come to terms with this history continues unabated. The Federal Crime Office last year began an investigation into itself: trying to shine a light on the Nazi past of its founders after the end of the war. And earlier this month the federal prosecutor overturned the guilty verdict of the communist Marinus van der Lubbe, the Dutchman executed for allegedly setting the Reichstag fire, the 75th anniversary of which is Feb. 27.

The experience of Nazism is actively alive in contemporary public debates over everything from the country's troops in Afghanistan to the low birth rate to the country's dealings with foreigners. Often it seems to stifle discussion that could proceed more openly in other countries with fewer taboos.

But the force of time also has brought about a necessary shift in Germany's relationship with its graying history of violence. According to government statistics, the average life expectancy of a German man born in 1930 is 64 and for a woman 72. Soon nearly all of the victims - and even sooner the perpetrators - will be dead.

Rüdiger Nemitz first began welcoming back this city's exiled victims of Nazi tyranny, the overwhelming majority of them Jews, in 1969. Berlin flies its former citizens, mostly Jews, back for a week of fully expense-paid visits, complete with a reception by the mayor.

The Invitation Program for Former Persecuted Citizens of Berlin, which has brought roughly 33,000 people for visits to the city, once had 12 full-time staff members. Now it is just Nemitz and another half-time employee.

The program is not, however, winding down due to waning support for commemoration of Germany's difficult past. To the contrary, at a time when the nearly-broke Berlin city government has had to make deep cutbacks in other areas, Nemitz said that every single political party in the city Parliament supported the program and had not pared back its budget of ?550,000, or about $815,000, for flights, hotels and tours since at least 2000.

"When it started, they were grown-ups. Now, it's people with hardly any memory of Berlin," said Nemitz, 61, from his office on the ground floor of the Berlin City Hall. "Those who come today were children then."

The visits will end in either 2010 or 2011, Nemitz estimated, because there are so few victims left.

Easily overlooked next to the poignant fact of the survivors dying out is that Nemitz's generation, those who faced these crimes intimately and were fighting to break the silence of their parents and teachers, is beginning to retire. When the last tour group leaves Berlin, Nemitz, who said he is afraid to take vacation and treats his position more like a mission than a job, will shut the door to his office and become a retiree.

As the contact to the events becomes more remote, less personal, it raises the question of how a society should enshrine its crimes and transgressions over the longer term.

"I can't help but feeling that some of the continued 'Let's build monuments. Let's build Jewish museums,' is a fairly ritualized behavior," said Susan Neiman, director of the Einstein Forums in Potsdam, an international public research organization.

Her own children, she said, are saturated with discussions of the Holocaust and no longer want to hear about it.

"I worry terribly that it's going to backfire," she said.

Germany's relationship with its Nazi history still regularly generates controversy, as in the case of the dueling train exhibits. The first, Train of Commemoration, is a locomotive carrying displays detailing how Jewish children were murdered in the Holocaust.

The train is making its way through German cities, open for visitors along the way, ultimately bound for Auschwitz. Organizers complain that rather than embracing the project, the national railroad, Deutsche Bahn, has hindered it, making the exhibition's organizers pay for using the tracks even as they commemorate the railway's history of misdeeds.

The second exhibition, sponsored by Deutsche Bahn itself, opened in Berlin at the Potsdamer Platz train station last week. Critics have derided the official one as a response to attention from the first to acknowledge its role. But the Deutsche Bahn exhibition does lay out how the company's predecessor, the Reichsbahn, carried about 3 million passengers to their deaths; it is filled with painful statistics, photographs and powerful stories of some of the individuals who perished.

When insufficient care is taken around the history, it immediately grabs national attention. In Munich this past weekend, a traditional carnival season parade overlapped with the International Holocaust Remembrance Day, celebrated every year on Jan. 27. The result was a nationwide flood of negative publicity for the city. Charlotte Knobloch, head of Germany's national Jewish organization, said that it "dishonors and insults the victims."

"There was no conscious affront," said Stefan Hauf, a spokesman for the city. He explained that they would have changed the date of the parade as the smaller city of Regensburg had, but too many participants were flying in from other countries to make the change on such short notice.

"The date has been on the public calendar since last May," Hauf said.

Munich played a special role in Nazi history. It is where the National Socialist party rose to prominence and was the location of the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923, the failed coup attempt enshrined in Nazi myth. Hitler eventually declared the city the "Capital of the Movement." Unlike Berlin, which has developed a reputation as a city with a memorial practically on every street corner, Munich has often been criticized for playing down its history.

"Munich was the capital of the movement. Since 1945 it's been the capital of forgetting," said Wolfram Kastner, an artist who said he has fought the city government over the years for permits and permission to use performance art to keep the memory of the Holocaust alive.

The Munich city government says it has been very active in trying to keep the history of that time alive. A short walk from the city's historic Marienplatz is an entire complex of new buildings devoted to both its Jewish history and present. The synagogue opened in November 2006 on the anniversary of the 1938 Kristallnacht attacks on Jewish people, businesses and places of worship. The Jewish Museum and a new community center opened in Munich last year.

The city is working on a new museum to be built where the Nazi party headquarters once stood, which will be called the Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism, with an expected opening date of 2011. The stated goal, according to the museum's Web site, "is to create a place of learning for the future."

Toward that goal, Angelika Baumann of the city's Department of Arts and Culture has been running workshops with school classes of teenagers between 14 and 18, including children from the college track as well as trade schools, and children of non-German ethnic backgrounds.

"We're planning for people who aren't even born yet," Baumann said.