Similarly, clichés may be used in multiple ways, reflecting a variety of vested interests. Let us consider three purposes of the stereotype that will be developed in the following chapter – the cliché that Luther was somehow responsible for the Germans’ subservience to Hitler:
 
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3. Thomas Mann’s reasons may have resembled those of certain contemporary Americans castigating the United States: By pointing to the dark side in the national character of their own people, they appear to shoulder that burden; yet in reality, in recognizing those faults, they absolve themselves and become good guys.

Ulbricht’s barbaric act (destroying the church containing Bach’s favourite organ) , committed before the eyes of tens of thousands of weeping Leipzigers, had almost immediate consequences.  Twenty days later, an international Bach festival took place in the Congress Hall next to Leipzig’s famed zoo.  Suddenly, in the presence of hundreds of musicians and music lovers from all over the world, an automatic mechanism unrolled a huge yellow banner showing the contours of the murdered church flanked by the dates of its consecration and its death (1240–1968) plus the inscription Wir fordern Wiederaufbau (“We demand reconstruction”).  The authors of this act of defiance were five young physicists and physics students.  They were captured and imprisoned.  But many of their sympathizers throughout Leipzig and the GDR formed the nucleus of a protest movement that slowly snowballed into the avalanche that swept away Communism two decades later.