The failure to designate November 9 as a German national holiday marked a great act of historical cowardice (especially on the part of the former Kohl government) and constitutes a tremendous lost opportunity. The choice of October 3rd, a date with no historical significance, apparently came as a result of a desire to locate the celebration of German reunification on a date unsullied by historical ambiguity. Since so much of recent German history, however, is fraught with ambiguity, it would have been much more appropriate to have placed the holiday on a date, November 9, that commemorates both the ups (reunification) and the downs (die Pogromnacht) of the collective past.