Schuld, Leid und Erinnerung

Post-war Germany’s attempts to come to terms with the Second World War occurred at a time fraught with tension, during which the debate as to how far the Germans were guilty and responsible for what had happened clashed with the dispute about how much they had suffered and how many had died. As a result, those who had fought against the National Socialists and those who were victims of their crimes were not at the forefront of the official policy on commemorating the dead for a long time. Moreover, despite the stark ideological rivalry between the two states, the approaches of East and West Germany to memory culture overlapped in many significant respects. In this work, whose original Hebrew edition was awarded the Jacob Bahat Prize, the Israeli historian Gilad Margalit, who died in 2014, paints a different picture of commemorating the victims of the war on occasions such as Remembrance Day or the anniversary of the Allied bombings of German cities, and includes historical monuments, journalistic and literary sources, and films in his analysis. At the same time, it becomes clear how much the impact of this collective memory still affects the unified Germany today.