The German Trauma

"This is a collection of essays that tells her wonderful story, her extraordinary story, and it gives you an idea of the sheer breadth of the work that she did on Nazi Germany and all of the people she knew and knew really well – the mass murderers who she met after the end of the Second World War , when it was becoming clear what they had done. How could they? All these cultured, educated Germans, how could they? Get the weekly Five Books newsletter And we learn quite a lot through Gitta about those individual Germans and how their acceptance of Hitler and their lies developed. In Why We Lie I’ve written quite a lot about those lies. Gitta’s work is so important because she keeps a record of what those people said and the lies that they told. And to prove, even if it’s only to Gitta, a young woman journalist, that they weren’t the terrible person that everybody says they are. From her book and the book by Robert J Lifton about the Nazi doctors, you can see that when we tell lies to ourselves we get further and further away from reality until we can no longer tell what is real and what is fantasy. This collection covers everything that happened after the war and it is really interesting to see how Germany has changed now. When Mark Mardell left Europe to become the BBC’s North America editor, on his blog on the BBC website he said, ‘Germany is the most mature country I know.’ Now, whatever the Germans were, around Hitler they weren’t mature. But people do change, and peoples change. To appreciate the extent of this change you have to read Gitta – then you can see how they can now produce such reasonable people as Angela Merkel, with her lovely little smile and her jackets. She’s not possessed by a fantasy."