BERLIN — Germans felt the push and pull of their history again on Tuesday, when Nov. 9 came up on the calendar. That is the day in 1938 when Hitler’s gangs attacked Jewish property in a prelude to the Holocaust, and the very same day 51 years later when the wall dividing East and West was breached, signaling the end of the cold war.

Germans take the business of remembering very seriously, and so Nov. 9 has always presented a bit of a challenge — how to celebrate the joy of the wall’s coming down while at the same time commemorating the night of terror known as Kristallnacht, or the night of broken glass.

Initially, remembrance trumped celebration. But that seems to be changing.

“I think it’s the beginning in the shift in narrative, and that is a concern,” said Deidre Berger, director of the American Jewish Committee’s Berlin office. “It’s a concern of what young people know about this day.”

The nightly news seemed to prove her view of shifting narratives. The top report talked about Germany’s celebrating the wall’s coming down, followed by a report on the “Jewish community” marking Kristallnacht.

“A circle is closing,” said Cilly Kugelmann, deputy director of the Jewish Museum in Berlin, who said she took note of the change in the way the events were reported. “For the first time in 20 or 30 years, the Jewish congregations commemorate Kristallnacht for themselves.”

Germans are not forgetting the Holocaust. It is too much a part of their everyday lives, embedded not only in the collective memory but also in the decentralized system of governance that was designed specifically to prevent the rise of another Hitler. Even now, the Nazi past often seems a topic of daily news reports, as Germans unearth new secrets about their parents and grandparents. For example, one recent report proved the Foreign Ministry’s deep involvement in the Third Reich, something it had covered up for decades.

But even the best efforts at preservation can be worn down by the effects of time and the eclipsing shadow of an event that, like the wall’s coming down, is relevant to many more people who are alive today.

Priorities have shifted.

“It’s a change that indicates that specific period of coming to terms with the criminal deeds of a forerunner government in Germany is itself becoming history,” Ms. Kugelmann said. “It will not be forgotten, but it is not anymore an issue of major emotional importance for the population.”

Berlin’s mayor, Klaus Wowereit, tried like many of his elected colleagues to straddle the challenge of celebration and remembrance. In the afternoon he stood beside a tent where Champagne and cakes were set up to open an outdoor photo exhibit at the Bornholmer Strasse border crossing, where the first East Germans crossed into the West.

“Here is where all dams broke, where the postwar order broke down and Berlin experienced its happiest moment,” Mr. Wowereit said as he addressed a group gathered around him, huddled against the cold. “Not the mighty made history here, but regular people from East and West Germany.”

Just before the Champagne was served in fluted glasses, the mayor made sure to tell the crowd he would be attending events to commemorate the “Pogrom Night” in the evening.

Years ago, Germany decided to sidestep the awkward historical coincidence by emphasizing Oct. 3, 1990, as the day of unification, and playing down Nov. 9, 1989. But that effort seems to have lost steam. “Memory is about self-interest,” said Maxim Biller, a prominent writer and commentator who is Jewish. “The Germans wanted to reconcile with history, to have a better corporate identity for society, in a way, yes.”

Indeed, Germany’s desire to repent coincided with the Jewish interest in remembering. So what started as a Jewish-only observance of Kristallnacht grew over the years into a large national observance peaking in 1988, on the 50th anniversary, with the opening of the Jewish Museum in Frankfurt, Ms. Kugelmann said. Then on Monday, as the nightly news reported, “It has moved back into the Jewish community,” she said.

Indeed, there were events marking Kristallnacht around the nation, and politicians did attend. “Nonetheless, there is a danger that with the passage of time that the more recent memory, the fall of the wall, will supersede the memory of the Holocaust,” Ms. Berger said.

If there is one way that Nov. 9 unites these two narratives, it is in the fear that time is slowly diminishing the memories of both events. At the gathering hosted by the mayor to commemorate the wall’s coming down, several people who lived in Berlin when it was divided said they were worried that the next generation would forget what they lived through.

“What was the price of freedom from the G.D.R.?” said Tatjana Sterneberg, a former resident of the German Democratic Republic, or East Germany, who attended the opening of the outdoor exhibit. “How many people died? How many political prisoners suffered? These are the things being forgotten. This is the problem.”

Ms. Sterneberg spent three years in an East German jail for plotting to flee, and wants — needs — her countrymen to remember.

Then there was Thierry Noir, a painter who lived by the wall in West Berlin and has defined his own life by paintings he did along a stretch of it. “If you forget your past, it will come back to you again quickly,” he said. “There are young people who do not even know there was a wall.”

Mr. Noir’s friend Erich Stahnke paused for a minute, scratched his head and said, “There were other historic things, that happened on this day,” then seemed to forget the specifics.

But he was right: On Nov. 9, 1918, Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicated the throne, sending Germany into its turbulent experiment with democracy.

And on Nov. 9, 1923, Hitler was arrested after trying to stage a coup, the farcical “Beer Hall Putsch,” in his first bid to take power.