In the autumn and winter of 2003, the files left behind by the Nazis sparked a lot of German shop-talking about whether Walter Jens and others were aware of having been signed up to the party as teenagers. Today we are watching a remake of this theatre piece. The main acts are identical to those staged in Possen in 2003, only that the newly incriminated intellectuals were younger at the time of their alleged recruitment than the academics named back then.

Jens was 19 when he was registered as a party member, Dieter Hildebrandt was only 16, Martin Walser and Siegfried Lenz were 17. The rest of the ensemble - historians, archivists, journalists – is essentially the same.

And the circumstances are identical as well. In one respect, though, all experts are agreed: the files are too full of holes to clear up this ominous business once and for all. Some see this as an invitation to point the finger at Walser, Hildebrandt and Lenz, saying that they "probably" lied about the past. Oscar Wilde would have adored to see how right he was when he wrote: "There is much to be said in favour of modern journalism. By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, it keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community."

It remains only to ask why the media is interested in the central Nazi file at the Federal Archives. The Germans have a weakness for Nazi stories. This is certainly one reason. Every feuilleton editor knows that few things provoke a letter to the editor more than an article on National Socialism.

The more time that passes between now and the Third Reich, the more garish the spectrum of revelations becomes. From questions surrounding Hitler's generals, Hitler's women or Hitler's Wehrmacht, journalism has long since moved on to other topics. Hitler has been outed as a homosexual and the Nazis have been credited wtih having had the atom bomb. Unfortunately, almost 120 years after his birth, it's impossible to sell stories that "the Führer" is still alive.

So these days things centre around Hitler's party comrades. Walser, Hildebrandt and Lenz may have Günter Grass to thank for the attention they're now getting: not a single journalist researched the young Grass' early years, everyone waited for the Nobel Prize winner to come out himself and declare he'd been in the Waffen SS. This omission could only to be made up for by producing the names of other prominent people. No more could be dug up than a supposition of party membership, but that was better than nothing at all.

In itself, media effort to seek out the black sheep of the Federal Republic of Germany is a welcome thing: opportunists who voluntarily strode through the Nazi dung and then later appeared in pearly white democratic outfits deserve to be shown for who they are. However the three delinquents' age at the time speaks against them being lumped into this category. That goes, by the way, for every citizen of this country. After growing up under the ideological hood pulled over society by the Nazi regime, many teenagers were bound to join the party without being aware of the consequences.

Some of these youths were still practically children, and one can't expect such an awareness of them under those circumstances. For today's society it's irrelevant whether these youths were party members or not. More interesting is the question of how they behaved at the time and what use they made of the freedom they had under the dictatorship. As far as this is concerned, no new knowledge has been uncovered regarding Walser, Hildebrandt and Lenz. Consequently, this whole thing is a storm in a teacup, which once again raises the question of why it was necessary at all.

It's worth noting that all those outed as party comrades in recent years are intellectuals who throughout their lives have represented predominantly left-liberal views. Historian Ulrich Herbert sums up the debate with the pithy phrase: "It's the return match." In holding fast to filing cards from the Federal Archive that in themselves are of little importance, certain strands of the media are echoing the motto circulated years ago by the "New Frankfurt School": "The biggest critics of the elves were previously elves themselves."

The thing now is to show that those who rendered outstanding services establishing a free democracy in the Federal Republic had dirt on the fingers they pointed at others, even if these others, the Filbingers and the Globkes, participated in the Nazi regime as mature adults and continued their careers without interruption after 1945.

What remains is to comprehensively research how many illustrious citizens of the Federal Republic pleaded as children with their stubborn parents to be allowed to join the Hitler Youth or the League of German Girls. And there's a lot of work to be done there.

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The article originally appeared in German in the Süddeutsche Zeitung on June 4, 2007.

Franziska Augstein is journalist and editor at the Süddeutsche Zeitung.

Translation: lp, jab.