Knittel's “diffractive” analysis of two memorial sites links two geographically distant and seemingly unconnected localities of Nazi atrocity: Schloß Grafeneck in Swabia, where patients were killed in the Nazi euthanasia program, and the concentration camp Risieria di San Sabba in Trieste, where Slovene, Croat, Jewish, and Italian antifascists were detained, deported, and killed between 1943 and 1945. Knittel reminds readers that the Nazis began to implement their vision of racial purity with the systematic murder of the weak, sick, and disabled before continuing with campaigns to cleanse entire regions of ethnic, political, and religious minorities. She recalibrates the margins and center of Holocaust memory and criticizes simplified narratives of a history that remains “extremely complex, contentious, and resistant to resolution” (293). The book is divided into two parts, each focused on one museum site, linked by a chapter titled “lethal trajectories,” which traces fifteen perpetrators who were trained in Grafeneck, transferred to kill Jews in the East, and then redeployed to the Adriatic coast to staff the Risiera camp.

Because Knittel defines “sites of memory” as more than mere physical structures, she includes their historical interpretation and cultural mediation in literature, education, the arts, and politics. She trains her critical eye on the question of whether a visit to these sites serves to humanize the victims and “foster critical thinking or civic engagement” (286) with the perpetrators and their ideologies. The emotional identification with the victims and the presentation of the perpetrators is significantly different in the German and the Italian sites. The Gedenkstätte Grafeneck is located in buildings that continue to operate as a medical institution, a circumstance that invites critical reflection about society's ambivalence about, and Nazi contempt for, the weak, sick, and disabled. The exhibit, Knittel argues, is effective in challenging the motivations and ideology of perpetrators, whose ideas continue to shape policies that isolate and dehumanize people living with disabilities. But, she says, the exhibit retains emotional distance to the victims, with whom visitors cannot identify by virtue of their illness and mental or physical handicaps. There is no survivor literature that could have humanized the experience; there were very few criminal trials to hold perpetrators accountable; and there has been no political movement to demand compensation. The memory of euthanasia has long been wrapped in silence because of the invisibility and lack of political mobilization on the part of the victims' families.

The reverse is true in Trieste, where the exhibit at Risieria di San Sabba focuses on emotional and political identification with the victims. Knittel criticizes Grafeneck for maintaining emotional distance to victims, and the museum in Trieste for being “at least as preoccupied with commemorating the victims as [it is] … with displacing the blame for these crimes onto an externalized other, which in turn can only hinder an honest and thorough engagement with the crimes of the past” (290). The perpetrators are shown in SS-uniform without much information about their ideological motivation or their function within the local political context. Knittel warns that this lack of attention invites false memories that serve to obscure local collaboration and to whitewash Italian fascism. Trieste is, of course, a border town with a long history of multiethnic and multilingual tensions and conflicts. The Nazi camp served Italian fascist efforts to marginalize Slovene and Croat minorities while fighting the advance of Tito's communist partisans. Furthermore, a new site and the introduction of a National Memorial Day in 2005 commemorate the executions of Italian fascists at the hands of Yugoslav communist partisans and the ensuing mass emigration of Italians from Istria and Dalmatia after 1945. A cave system, called Foibe, was declared a national monument in 1992 and now draws larger crowds of Italian tourists than the Risieria di San Sabba camp. Knittel attributes this to the desire of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's center-right government to solidify Italian nationalism and embrace an auto-exculpatory version of history—one that bypasses Italian fascism and celebrates heroic myths of resistance and persecution at the hands of German Nazis and “Balkan” communists. In Trieste, Knittel fears, historical memory serves to create a narrative of victimhood that intensifies national identity rather than engaging critically with the history of Italian fascism, local collaboration, and the attraction at the time to nationalism, racism, and antisemitism.

Knittel injects a clear normative voice that criticizes particular commemorations for enshrining narratives of victimization that shore up particular political or national interests. Her personal experience and German identity, which are interwoven throughout the book, are both central to the study—and problematic. Vergangenheitsbewältigung became firmly inculcated into postwar German political culture once Germany was forced to give up its early myths of victimhood, which emphasized air raids and expulsion, victor's justice and occupation. It took decades of painful scandals and embarrassing struggles with the crimes of National Socialism before Germany developed a political identity based on open acceptance of the legacy of perpetration. It is possible that the admiration lavished on Germany's cultural expertise in dealing with guilt is beginning to foster a sense of self-satisfaction and feelings of moral supremacy. Knittel's careful historical and cultural analysis is far too committed to complexity and to the complication of historical memorialization to allow for such crass conclusions. But in less careful hands, a comparative framework that contrasts a German with an Italian site—and finds the Italian one lacking—could be used to rebuke others for failing to live up to Germany's standards.