Reckonings: Legacies of Nazi Persecution and the Quest for Justice

by Mary Fulbrook, Christa Lewis (Read by)

Overview

Mary Fulbrook's encompassing book explores the lives of individuals across a full spectrum of suffering and guilt, each one capturing one small part of the greater story. Using "reckoning" in the widest possible sense to evoke how the consequences of violence have expanded almost infinitely through time. Fulbrook exposes the disjuncture between official myths about "dealing with the past" and the extent to which the vast majority of Nazi perpetrators evaded responsibility. In the successor states to the Third Reich—East Germany, West Germany, and Austria—prosecution varied widely. Communist East Germany pursued Nazi criminals and handed down severe sentences; West Germany, caught between facing up to the past and seeking to draw a line under it, tended toward selective justice and reintegration of former Nazis; and Austria made nearly no reckoning at all until the mid-1980s, when news broke about Austrian presidential candidate Kurt Waldheim's past. The continuing battle with the legacies of Nazism in the private sphere was often at odds with public remembrance and memorials.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9798200308262
Publisher:	Tantor Audio
Publication date:	03/01/2021
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 7.50(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

Mary Fulbrook is Professor of German History at University College London and the author of the Fraenkel Prize-winning A Small Town near Auschwitz: Ordinary Nazis and the Holocaust.

Christa Lewis, winner of several AudioFile Earphones Awards, is a classically trained actress and a graduate of Boston University’s four-year conservatory training program. She has worked full time at the microphone since getting her start as a newsreader for an international news broadcaster and now narrates audiobooks full time.

Table of Contents

Preface
Acknowledgments

1. The Significance of the Nazi Past

Part One Chasms: Patterns of Persecution
2. The Explosion of State-Sponsored Violence
3. Institutionalised Murder
4. Microcosms of Violence: Polish Prisms
5. Endpoints: The Machinery of Extermination
6. Defining Experiences
7. Silence and Communication

Part Two Confrontations: Landscapes of the Law
8. Transitional Justice
9. Judging Their Own: Selective Justice in the Successor States
10. From Euthanasia to Genocide
11. Major Concentration Camp Trials: Auschwitz and Beyond
12. The Diffraction of Guilt
13. Late, Too Late

Part Three Connections: Memories and Explorations
14. Hearing the Voices of Victims
15. Making Sense of the Past, Living for the Present
16. Discomfort Zones
17. The Sins of the Fathers
18. The Long Shadows of Persecution
19. Oblivion and Memorialisation

Conclusions:
20. A Resonant Past

Editorial Reviews

"A capacious book that covers survivor experiences, perpetrator narratives, trials, and memorialization... Fulbrook's book ultimately seeks to offer an overarching assessment of Germany's legal pursuit-or lack thereof-of Nazi criminals." — Michael Meng, Journal of Modern History

"Perhaps now, generations after the atrocities committed under the Nazi regime, it's time to take measure of what has happened to the perpetrators, the victims, and the few survivors. Fulbrook does just that. The author effectively describes the brutal Germanic efficiency in the industrialized murder of homosexuals, "asocials," and, overwhelmingly, Jews. Throughout her substantial text, Fulbrook movingly vivifies her outstanding research with individual histories... As they read this important contribution to Holocaust studies, especially now in the time of neo-Nazis, readers may wonder, is it all in the past? An astute, significant academic study of how civilization can go horribly wrong." — Kirkus

"This book is required reading for anyone wishing to understand not why the Holocaust happened by how it happened, and how the vast majority of the perpetrators got away with it. Fulbrook's research on Nazi crimes on the local level and on family strategies of silence and selective remembering adds a delicacy and sensitivity to a subject so dark as to be almost unbearable to contemplate. This is humane scholarship at the highest level." — Jay Winter, Yale University

"Across the world, West Germany is frequently extolled as a model of 'confronting the past'. Fulbrook's contention is that it largely failed during the lifetimes of the victims and their persecutors, and only began to alter the whole culture of discussion over the following two generations. What makes Fulbrook's achievement so extraordinary is her ability to balance the individual voices against the conditioning effects of state power and a social ethos, in which German judges in the 1960s and 70s frequently doubted the reliability of Jewish witnesses, while taking former SS men at their word. This is a magisterial book, the culmination of a lifetime of scholarly endeavor-not just in the sense of the knowledge and framing which Fulbrook has to offer, but also in that deeper and more profound sense of her historical judgment. Essential reading." — Nicholas Stargardt, author of The German War: A Nation under Arms

"Fulbrook's remarkable achievement is to weave together the history of mass murder with the woeful story of selective post-war justice, an exploration of the painful legacies of Nazi crimes for survivors and a dissection of individual perpetrators' strategies of avoidance. In the process, she vividly evokes overlooked locations and episodes in the history of the Holocaust and unearths extraordinary personal stories. In highlighting the disjunctures between different dimensions of 'reckoning' in the decades since 1945, she offers a powerfully-argued critique of current commemorative practices and poses challenging questions for the future." — Elizabeth Harvey, University of Nottingham

"Evocative and engaging, Britain's foremost scholar of post-1945 German history offers us a pioneering study of memory, identity, and representation, one that moves innovatively beyond stone monuments and pure politics, beyond facile dichotomies of victim and perpetrator." — Andrew I. Port, author of Conflict and Stability in the German Democratic Republic and editor of Central European History

"Reckonings is a work of expert scholarship and profound moral energy from of one of Britain's most distinguished historians of Nazi Germany. It is not just another history of the Holocaust or the long shadows it has cast, but a complex alloy of history and memory, experience, testimony and denial, and is shot through with deep compassion as well as unsparing historical judgment." — Jane Caplan, Professor Emeritus of Modern European History, University of Oxford

Extraordinary well-researched, filled with heartbreaking, heroic and harrowing life stories, "Reckonings is comprehensive, cogent and compelling. Fulbrook's book is a must-read for anyone interested in the realities - and the legacies - of the Nazi Past." — Glenn C. Altschuler, The Jerusalem Post

"This is an important book for those readers interested in the Holocaust or genocides more generally, and, its many pages of extensive research offer information and insights to readers with varying degrees of knowledge of the Nazi extermination programme and the prosecution of its perpetrators in the post-war period." — Paul Bookbinder, European History Quarterly

From the Publisher

★ 2018-07-31

Perhaps now, generations after the atrocities committed under the Nazi regime, it's time to take measure of what has happened to the perpetrators, the victims, and the few survivors. Fulbrook (German History/Univ. Coll. London, A Small Town Near Auschwitz: Ordinary Nazis and the Holocaust, 2012, etc.) does just that.

The author effectively describes the brutal Germanic efficiency in the industrialized murder of homosexuals, "asocials," and, overwhelmingly, Jews. Throughout her substantial text, Fulbrook movingly vivifies her outstanding research with individual histories. The methodological murders by the Third Reich began with the elimination of disabled, "useless" adults and children in the name of eugenic cleansing. Torture, dehumanization, and killing followed, and a considerable portion of the German population knew about the atrocities. Thousands were employed in the death camps, soldiers sent home snapshots of mass shootings, roundups were openly conducted in villages and cities, major industries worked expendable slave labor, and smoke filled the air in neighborhoods near the ovens. "The ‘it' about which people allegedly ‘knew nothing' was raging all around them," writes Fulbrook. Nevertheless, the killers professed ignorance: " ‘Forgetting' seemed to be a privilege of the persecutors." There were some postwar trials. The Russians were assiduous in meting out punishment, the Western allies less so, but few perpetrators were punished or even tried. The capture and trial of Adolf Eichmann brought fresh attention to Nazi crimes, but with the passage of time, it grew late for punishment of the culpable or compensation for anyone. Despite the increasing availability of memoirs, Anne Frank's narrative, recovery of stolen artworks, film and TV presentations of Holocaust stories, and museums and monuments, through the decades and the passing of the afflicted survivors and their affected progeny, more persecutors evaded justice. "This continuing imbalance," writes the author, "can only be recognized, and no longer rectified," As they read this important contribution to Holocaust studies, especially now in the time of neo-Nazis, readers may wonder, is it all in the past?

An astute, significant academic study of how civilization can go horribly wrong. Never again?

Kirkus Reviews

2019 Cundill History Prize Finalist