Abstract: This dissertation seeks to explain ethnographically the emergence of German bioethics around a national debate on stem cell research. In early 2000, German politicians and scientists seized on the stem cell debate as an opportunity to reinvigorate a nation seen as aging, incapable of innovation, and mired in memories of the past. Yet, in spite of efforts to break free of a paralyzing sense of history, German policy on stem cells, at least to start with, virtually stifled research. To examine this paradox in detail, the dissertation is organized into seven chapters that combine ethnographic observation with explorations of Germany as a site of memory and of history in the making. Following a brief prologue, the first chapter reflects on what it means to be a native anthropologist in a culture that, in consequence of its 20th century history, desperately strives to be 'not other'. Two subsequent chapters are based on fieldwork in a parliamentary bioethics commission whose primary mandate was to prepare legislators for regulating the perceived rapid progress in the life sciences. These show how a discourse on the definitions of early life and human dignity became interwoven with questions of who can claim to speak legitimately, i.e., ethically, about matters of national moral significance. Two succeeding chapters analyze the production of a moral dialogue between state and citizens by tracing both ethnographically and historically the tropes of 'transparency' and 'conscience.' There I show just how the state works at making itself publicly visible to its citizens, while at the same time enforcing a similar 'transparency' from its subjects in matters of private moral reasoning. I demonstrate how questions of visibility are inflected through inherited, culturally specific understandings of public and private reason. A chapter on post-reunification Germany describes the nation's attempts to integrate (or, as I argue, erase) divergent East German traditions of transparency, conscience, and bioethics. I close with an assessment of the criteria of ethical research incorporated into current law and policy on German stem cell research. Besides my ethnographic fieldwork as a participant-observer with a bioethics commission, I conducted numerous interviews with physicians, stem cell researchers, bioethicists and philosophers, and I attended several conferences designed to communicate science to the public. I also observed media reporting of relevant scientific and bioethical developments and several other controversies of public conscience that occurred during that period. In writing up my results, however, I became increasingly convinced of the need to supplement these observations with an inquiry into Germany's ongoing struggle to discipline its own past. My dissertation accordingly is in part about bioethics as a culturally specific site of writing, or rewriting, German history.