Unsettled Ground

Germany once felt the world’s wrath for crimes committed during the Nazi regime. More recently, it received extravagant praise for facing up to the atrocities. The country now boasts of new Jewish museums, Holocaust memorials, restored synagogues, and classroom lessons designed to honor its Jewish heritage and teach tolerance.

This effort was led not by politicians or historians, but by local citizen activists, few of them Jewish, almost all of them born after World War II. They could have shrugged off responsibility for evils done before they were born. Instead, they pushed past denials and threats to get at the truth, pressing their parents, grandparents, and neighbors—many of them perpetrators, collaborators, or bystanders to genocide—to find out what really happened in their hometowns during the Nazi era.

The activists’ work connected them with descendants of Germany’s former Jewish communities, now scattered around the globe. One of those descendants, American author Jeffrey L. Katz, provides perspectives on the emotional journey of returning to his ancestral homeland with Germans as his guides.

Much of what’s been written about the remembrance movement focuses on the memorials and museums as acts of contrition, as if these alone could heal old wounds. Unsettled Ground goes deeper. It explores the background and motives of memory activists, recognizes that some of their actions are performative, and points out the movement’s limitations. The country still contends with antisemitism, xenophobia, and racism.

Unsettled Ground considers the place that the Holocaust holds in our memories as successive generations grapple with an appropriate response, tolerating differences among peoples becomes more tenuous, and the U.S. struggles to fully address its own painful past.