Scholars of postwar Germany are increasingly using the first person in their writing. Especially their second books tend to be more personal, and they reveal in them their own investment in the topic of the Nazi past. Sober, distanced analysis is replaced by the realization that family history matters—that it not only shaped postwar German history and silence about the past, but also shapes the work that scholars are doing today about their grandparents' generation. Katharina von Kellenbach's second book, The Mark of Cain, is a brilliant and brave representative of this development.

The Mark of Cain is “about the hearts and mind of perpetrators and the intimate world of their families” (7). Do they accept guilt? Can they pay back the moral debt that no trial could ever adequately punish? These are questions von Kellenbach feels compelled to ask based on the horrific realization that her uncle was responsible for the murder of over thirty thousand Jews in Pinsk, but had never been brought to justice. What went on in his mind, and in the minds of his family members, after this? How does a family—how does an entire nation—live with the burden of guilt? By examining the personal histories of Nazi perpetrators sentenced to death by the Allies, along with their confessional statements to prison chaplains in Landsberg prison, von Kellenbach exposes the lies and deceptions that formed postwar thinking about Nazi crime. This is not a historical monograph but a theological text with a mission: “In this book I do not merely describe the moral state and spiritual condition of perpetrators but also intend to prescribe appropriate steps towards renewal, restoration, health, or salvation. In other words, I want to combine the descriptive skills of the historian with the normative discourse of the theologian” (24–25). Von Kellenbach proposes the following: “In my reading, the Mark of Cain encapsulated the task incumbent upon perpetrators. Cain's success as a human being is measured by his ability to resist the impulse to bury, forget, and cut off the past.” For Nazi perpetrators, “the Mark of Cain suggests a strategy of open engagement with perpetrators that is separate and distinct from their punishment” (15).

The Mark of Cain is a study about guilt, shame, redemption, and forgiveness, as well as an examination of these terms in their Christian context. Von Kellenbach argues effectively that where guilt was admitted and responsibility taken, it was on the collective level. Shared sin allowed perpetrators to reject the notion of personal responsibility. She is especially critical of prison chaplains for what she considers a campaign to move forward and stop making Germans feel guilty: by pushing for confessions, followed by immediate forgiveness and amnesty. For instance, the Evangelical Church created in October 1945 the Stuttgart Declaration of Guilt (SDG), which was not meant for public consumption and which was designed not to show remorse but rather to ask for forgiveness and amnesty. In her discussion of this document, von Kellenbach argues that the SDG was one in a series of “vague collectivist expressions of contrition” (52) in which everyone is a sinner and no one has to take individual responsibility—but forgiveness is nevertheless necessary and due. The SDG cemented the concept of “solidarity of guilt,” which served to “shield individuals behind veils of collective abstractions” (53).

This and other proclamations made by the church ultimately turned the perpetrators into victims, martyrs sacrificed at the altar of a godless state, and made no mention of the actual victim groups, the scale of the atrocity, or the grotesque methods of murder. Von Kellenbach cuts to the heart of the problem: “Collective culpability mitigated individual responsibility, and the solidarity of guilt erased personal accountability” (61). Moreover, this erasure of personal guilt had a profound and devastating effect on the next generation; for many, the impossible choice between betraying familial loyalty and engaging in similar deceptions produced an enormous moral dilemma.

Von Kellenbach also examines the counterproductive nature of the executions held at Landsberg. There were over four hundred of them, and according to von Kellenbach, they provided the comforting perception that Nazi crime was being dealt with. Using evidence such as the last rites administered to these defendants, von Kellenbach shows that pastors advocated a “false sense of manly courage” as preferable to bitter tears of remorse, and correlated “dignity with denial.” She writes: “The performance of dignity (by people like [Adolf] Eichmann and Robert Ley, who died calmly and at peace) was possible because Eichmann protected his sense of integrity and self-worth by shoring up his ideological principles and putting up protective shields against the possibility of remorse. . . . Executions promise quick solutions to the punishment of the guilty, but they do little to change ideologies” (85–86). Moreover, former Nazis turned their own crimes into a form of suffering; the language of purification—“guilt as a stain, an imaginary blot on the soul that can and must be cleansed” (87)—was the norm, and the cleansing occurred by way of suffering. Von Kellenbach's investigation into the offensive self–exonerations of Oswald Pohl (former head of slave labor) here is brilliant: Pohl and the prison chaplains who coached him insisted that, in retrospect, Nazi ideology was morally bankrupt not because of its murderous ideology but because its adherents were so quick to turn upon each other after 1945. The real crimes were largely erased.

In one of her chapters, von Kellenbach examines the role of women in the afterlife of Nazi mass murder, both as perpetrators who were generally treated much more harshly by the law and by public perception, and as wives who both understood and supported the criminal activities of their husbands. In this way, she counters prevailing arguments about the ignorance and innocence of Nazi wives and shows them to have been as active on the home front as they often were in the camps themselves. In another chapter, the author engages in a provocative and convincing assessment of German trials; she is much less critical of the proceedings than this reviewer has been (Beyond Justice: The Auschwitz Trial, 2005), arguing that defendants could not hide behind the collective—at least under the German penal code and the charge of individual murder. Rather, their individual crimes were laid bare in horrifying but necessary detail.

The Mark of Cain shows remarkable breadth as well as depth, a difficult achievement for any book, especially one dealing with a subject as explosive as this. As von Kellenbach states in her introduction, “If the perpetrator is one's own uncle or grandfather . . . the mind and heart desperately want to shut such knowledge out. . . . Therein lies the root of denial, exoneration, and historical revisionism” (6). Scholars have tended to stay away from the first person, fearing the perception that their work is not objective. Scholars who set out to investigate the Nazi past because of personal connections are beginning to admit to this lack of objectivity, and von Kellenbach's powerful, moving, and important book proves that their own work and the field more generally are the richer for it.