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Based on four testimonies, the author shows that the fall of the Berlin Wall was traumatic for the German people because they were faced with a difficult existential crisis in the light of their Nazi past, whose imprint regulates and influences the background of political, cultural and social life. Memory has been refound, but nothing any longer can be repressed, denied or rejected on the other side of the wall, which had been the guardian of censorship and splitting, in their collective history as well as in individual histories. The individual solution is either decompensation or elaboration. The collective solution requires the creation of mass bonds which at first relies more on guilt, which is more accessible than shame, and then on a more unusual mass bonding, football, which plays a part in the transition from guilt to shame and to the work of civilisation along a retrogressive path. Finally, the author shows how Germany acquired a constitution, and now sometimes requires a certain tension to keep awake the fierce force within each person, including his duty to think, for the work of civilization and the demands imposed by that work.