Simply put, the question today was this: How does the country that carried out the Holocaust commemorate it? The answer was not so easy.
In a Communist-era building here, 70 eminent German historians, artists, public figures, architects and politicians gathered today to renew a debate over a projected Holocaust memorial that has raised troubling questions for years.
But as speaker followed speaker, it became clear that for all the discussions, for all the competitions to choose a design for the monument, those most closely involved are as far from consensus as ever.
Indeed, the divisions led to a broader conclusion: Half a century after World War II, and the killing of six million Jews by the Nazis, many Germans still cannot confront the defining horror of their modern history without anguished debate over how they should relate to it.
At issue is a contentious project to place a Holocaust memorial near the Brandenburg Gate in a part of Berlin that evokes Germany's past as much as its future.
Years of lobbying by an advocacy group led to a competition in 1995 that drew more than 500 entrants competing for a chance to design what is officially the Monument to the Murdered Jews of Europe.
The winner was a proposal for a huge gravestone-shaped slab bearing the names of millions of Jews who were killed. But Chancellor Helmut Kohl rejected the idea as overly gigantic. Now, in three sessions like today's between now and April, public discussions are to be held to shape a final decision to be made by the Government in Bonn, by Berlin city authorities and by the advocacy group that first promoted the idea.
''The monument will be built,'' said Peter Radunski, a Berlin official responsible for cultural affairs, maintaining that neither the cost ($10 million), nor the location nor the date for a foundation stone to be laid in 1999 (Jan. 27, the date of the liberation of Auschwitz in 1945) would be changed.
''Our question is not whether the monument will happen, but only how,'' he said.
Immediately, though, several speakers challenged Mr. Radunski on all three assertions, insisting that the debate be opened anew on the design and location of the monument.
''This monument needs broad public agreement, and it doesn't have that yet,'' said Peter Conradi, a legislator from the opposition Social Democratic Party in Bonn.
That in turn inspired a protest from Ignatz Bubis, the head of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, who argued that 10 years of debate had given everyone a chance to express a view and that further debate would ''turn the clock back to zero.''
Despite the rawness of the emotion, Jurgen Kocka, a historian, maintained that 52 years after World War II, Germans had largely come to terms with their past. ''The readiness to accept is strong; the urge to silence is weak,'' he said.
Nonetheless, the debate revived many old issues: Should the memorial commemorate only Jews, or all victims of Nazi persecution? Should it be monumental, or a more modest place of reflection? Was its function to recall the past or merely provide what one participant called ''an alibi of atonement'' as Germany enters a new century seeking freedom from its past?
''It must be smaller, more still, more contemplative than the previous designs,'' Professor Kocka said.
Another historian, Michael Sturmer, said, ''Monumental regret cannot be the answer to a monumental crime.''
Many insisted that the monument should not stand as an icon of collective guilt. ''Guilt is always individual, but responsibility is universal,'' Professor Sturmer said.
One of the many contentious issues is how future generations should be reminded of the Holocaust.
''We are living through a change of generation after which there'll be no more living contact with the Nazi period,'' one speaker said. ''Already three-quarters of the people in this country were born after the Second World War.'' The monument thus was depicted as an indispensable antidote to collective amnesia.
But some questioned whether a central monument in Berlin would not detract from other Holocaust memorial sites, like the many camps in Germany and elsewhere where the mass killing of Jews was conceived and carried out.
''We have to ask ourselves what purpose can be served by a memorial 50 years later,'' as Germany's Government moves from Bonn to the new capital in Berlin to start a new era, said Kathrin Hoffmann-Curtius, a member of the group that met today. ''Do we need a monument to remember, or does the new republic need a monument as a political insurance policy?''