For several decades, Germany appeared to be beholden to an “unmasterable past” where the Nazi period and the Holocaust were omnipresent in German politics, culture, and policy. Social scientists and others have provided substantial qualitative evidence of this impact (e.g., Kansteiner, Confino, Lind) especially at the elite level, but quantitative assessments looking especially at the impact of elite level discourses on mass publics have been rare (e.g. Lutz, Art). Moreover, the constancy of this impact often is assumed, but recent years have witnessed the rise of other competing memories concerning, for example, the legacy of German suffering at the end and in the aftermath of WWII or the German Democratic Republic. In this paper, I address some of these lacunae. First, I look at findings from a rigorous keyword search of the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek (the library of record), which reinforce the qualitative trends identified by others. Second, I present statistical analyses from two original nationally representative surveys conducted by FORSA (Berlin) in 2000 and 2008. The strength of competing memories are assessed and the impact of these memories on a political values battery tests for the actual impact of elite memory discourses on average Germans. A comparison of the 2000 and 2008 data represents a quasi-natural experiment, given the rise of competing memories in the interim (since 2002) – this is a rare opportunity to test for the effects of such discursive and memory shifts. Indeed, the contrasts between the two points in time are marked. In 2000, virtually all Germans thought memory of the Holocaust was important and those who more vociferously supported Holocaust consciousness were more progressive in their values. These relationships had weakened (though support for progressive values had not) by 2008. Such findings point to an overall decline in the salience of collective memory in German political culture and may be a harbinger that a quarter-century of intensive memory work is coming to an end – not because Germans are trying to evade historical responsibility, but precisely because of the successful process of working through the now-mastered past. This analysis of the completion of working-through processes in Germany illuminates on-going processes in a variety of other cases, such as Spain, Chile, Argentina, China and Japan.