Facing mounting international embarrassment and pressure, Turkey yesterday dropped the criminal charges it had brought against novelist Orhan Pamuk for daring to challenge 90 years of Turkish denials about the Turkish genocide of Armenians. Mr. Pamuk, in saying candidly last February to a Swiss magazine (so not even in Turkey) that “one million Armenians and 30,000 Kurds were killed in these lands and nobody but me dares talk about it,” broke the Turkish social and political proscription backed up by a grotesque anti-democratic law criminalizing criticism of “Turkishness.” The law is used to prevent Turks from speaking truthfully about the Turkish genocide of more than 1 million Armenian men, women, and children in 1915 under the cover of war and the pretext of national security. His crime is to have “publicly denigrated Turkish identity.”

While this historical and legal farce surrounding Mr. Pamuk has now ended, the suppression of basic historical truths by the Turkish government, people, and cowed or nationalist intellectuals continues, remaining a blight against Turkey, and impeding its attempt to enter the European Union and leave its non-democratic past behind. As the European Union enlargement commissioner, Olli Rehn, overseeing discussions with Turkey about membership, rightly said, and perhaps as the Turkish court dismissing the case came to recognize, “it is not Orhan Pamuk who will stand trial … but Turkey.”

The Turkish government and people should use the Pamuk affair as a spur to rethinking the wisdom of their historical cover-up of the Armenian genocide. And to do that, they should look for guidance to the center of Europe itself, to Germany.

Since 1945, Germans, including German political leaders, have had to struggle with how to confront their country’s and countrymen’s crimes, chiefly the slaughter of 6 million Jews. This confrontation with historical truth, with their own country’s and their own people’s souls, with survivors, and with the need to perform repair, has been immensely complex and variable, with substantial successes and continuing failures.

To be sure, there was for decades no great willingness on the part of Germans and their leaders to come clean about what so many of them had willingly done, namely to slaughter Jews and non-Jews in the cause of creating a European Nazi imperium. But they could not deny these truths or completely ignore them: The victorious allies made some semblance of an honest acknowledgment of the past and some considerable reparations to the victims a condition for Germany’s re-entry into the community of nations. So German historians and newspapers began writing about the Holocaust, the German government in 1952 signed a reparations agreement with Israel, and the German courts, albeit reluctantly, began to try and convict the murderers.

During the 1950s, 1960s, and even to some considerable extent to this day, these measures have been either extremely unpopular or have at least dissatisfied considerable minorities within Germany. It is not easy to confront the horrific part of one’s past, to make good on material and moral debts, and to bend a knee in contrition – as German Chancellor Willy Brandt literally did in 1970, falling to his knees at the site of the destroyed Jewish ghetto in Warsaw.

Yet as many in Germany, particularly its political leaders, slowly and in the 1990s finally came to understand, being truthful about the past and acting to make amends with the victims as best one can – always principally done for pragmatic reasons – neither shames nor weakens Germany, but strengthens it and enhances its standing in the world.

I know this firsthand. In 1996, I published “Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust,” causing a furor and a sensation in Germany, causing the entire country to undergo – for many an unwanted, for virtually everyone an unpleasant – soul searching about the one central aspect of the Holocaust that had been buried by German scholars, namely that ordinary Germans were not coerced by the Nazi regime to kill Jews but they by and large willingly did so because of their own anti-Semitism. There was an unprecedented and as yet unequalled flood of attention for this. There were national debates. There was much agonizing. Germany’s apologists did not want the truths to be discussed, so many attacked my book viciously. But more Germans insisted that the truths had to be known, and the issues had to be worked through. This was all closely watched and reported in the media around the world, sometimes with surprise at how well Germans were accepting the difficult truths, and always with admiration at this aspect of the reaction.

Discussing and being truthful about the past crimes of one’s countrymen, and carrying out the duties of repair, while difficult, only brings credit to a people and their country. Can anyone honestly say that Germany, the leading country of Europe, a member of the European and international community in good standing, seen in many ways as a model for others, has suffered for its truthfulness? Has Germany’s relations with other countries ever been harmed because of Germany’s willingness to acknowledge the crimes of its past? Has the German economy been weakened? Has German culture ceased to flourish?

Had postwar Germany, however, tried to deny and cover up the basic truth that the Nazi regime and many Germans undertook a program of annihilation against the Jews, it is likely that the European project and Germany’s standing in the world would never have advanced as each has. Had Germany engaged in systematic denial, there would have been continuing conflict over the past with Germany’s neighbors and the world, and ongoing suspicion about how much Germans had reformed themselves. It is also likely that without an honest confrontation with the past, German democracy would not have developed as democratically and tolerantly as it has, and would continue to be seen with wariness by its neighbors.

Germans, by carrying out their duties of repair have, whatever their ongoing failures (German historians and commentators while never denying the basic historical facts, have always tended to make excuses for the ordinary Germans who willfully committed crimes, and anti-Semitism still is widespread in Germany), mainly cleansed themselves and their national community. Chief among those duties is to tell the truth, and by doing so, to avoid committing a second offense of false denial against the survivors and their relatives. What Germans have come to understand is that by telling the truth they indicate to the world that they have utterly broken with their country’s criminal past. That is why truth does not shame but wins friends and goodwill.

I often lecture in synagogues and to Jewish communities about the Holocaust. During the discussion, I almost always say two things about Germans today. No country, no people has ever confronted the horrors of their country’s past perfectly, but Germans, for all their considerable failings, have done this more fully and more honestly than any other people I know. I also insist that collective guilt, including and especially intergenerationally collective guilt, is conceptually and morally indefensible. Indeed, no one has said this more publicly, repeatedly, and forcefully in Germany, in America, and around the world than I have. When I tell this to Jewish audiences, the individual and communal heirs of the victims, invariably there is applause, agreement, and appreciation.

No one born after the deeds can be held culpable for those deeds. But they can and ought to be held morally blameworthy for the suppression of the truth about those deeds. And they should be told as many times as necessary that, in the end, their denials only injure themselves.

Isn’t it time Turkey ends its historical charade that imperils its standing in Europe and the world?

Mr. Goldhagen, a member of Harvard’s Center for European Studies, won Germany’s triennial Democracy Prize in 1997 for his contributions to German democracy for having written “Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust.”