Until 1957 the West German Ministry of the Interior banned any screenings of Wolfgang Staudte's (East German) film of Heinrich Mann's Der Untertan ('Man of Straw', 1951)--objecting to its suggestion that authoritarianism in Germany had deep historical roots. This might seem to confirm the view that post-war Germany was suffering from a massive dose of collective amnesia; but the reality was more complex. Germans did not so much forget as selectively remember. Throughout the fifties West German officialdom encouraged a comfortable view of the German past in which the Wehrmacht was heroic, while Nazis were in a minority and had been properly punished.