Reckonings: Legacies of Nazi Persecution and the Quest for Justice

"There are so many books about the Nazis and the Holocaust . Mary Fulbrook clearly is one of the great names in the period but I opened the book with a gloomy expectation. What new could be said? The first part of the book is wonderfully done, but we’ve heard the story before. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . What makes the book distinctive is the second half: the way that she pursues what happened to victims and perpetrators in the years after 1945. She tells different stories: the story of the Federal Republic of Germany, and the story of the DDR, the German Democratic Republic, and the way in which reactions to the Holocaust contrasted in these settings and the reasons for that—the political configurations after 1945 and the Cold War. All of that is absolutely fascinating and not just at the political level. She pursues individuals into their evasions, their proclamations, their quests for justice, their acceptance of the awfulness of the past, their denials. That makes the book really stand out in a vast literature. It’s a very personal book and it gives the lie to the idea that historians are free of bias and ought to be. We shouldn’t. We have attitudes to things and we make moral judgments. This is a book which emphatically makes moral judgments—perhaps easier to do in circumstances of such horror—but that’s what gives it a compelling quality. How could you tell this story in a neutral fashion? True—that’s another book—but it’s also not true, because there is so much denial, there is so much evasion, even now, alongside much honourable reassessing of the past. You’re also drawn into wondering how it would have been if it had been us. We would have been no better and we might have been worse. Given the present illusions of many British people about World War II in relation to Brexit, I don’t think that Germany comes off too badly in this book."