Whether Germans have come to terms with their past has been answered in diverse ways. Some historians maintain that the process was slow and is incomplete. Indeed, some assert, as does the editor of this fine collection of essays, that “the existence of two Germanies worked against, rather than in the interest of, coming to terms with National Socialism” (p. 1). Hence Niven positions the decisive changes as coming after 1990, when debates about victimhood resurfaced.

Some authors still want to hear nothing of Germans as victims and insist that whatever happened to Germans in fire bombings of cities or postwar expulsions from eastern Europe was their own fault. A recent review posted to the electronic network for diplomatic history by an historian of World War II, for example, emotively dismissed Jörg Friedrich's book The Fire as full of errors and then argued that Germans had initiated every transgression of the rules of warfare during the twentieth century. Simple approaches are avoided in this well-edited and easy-to-read collection, though the term “perpetrator nation” is often employed, and sometimes people and perspectives are lumped into a few categories, such as Left and Right. But none goes so far as to deny the right to discuss victim status for Germans. Indeed, Robert Moeller argues in one of his two contributions that “calls for Germans to mourn their dead do not involve ‘breaking the silence,’ but do possibly offer new perspectives from which we might begin to write a history of National Socialism in which some Germans were victims, some Germans were perpetrators, and some Germans were both” (p. 42). In that spirit, this set of essays makes many important contributions as it reviews the debates and examines the factual information about victimization as well as the response to public debates by the populace, intellectuals, media, and politicians. A common thread is that the subject of German victimhood has never been taboo and that the continuing public and academic discussion has taken various forms since 1945.

Although one or two of the authors reveal a British bias, especially in setting standards for atonement and contrition by Germans that Britain has yet to meet, most provide nuanced accounts. Many of the essays focus on the cultural realm, using evidence from literature and cinema, and do not always resolve the related issues of reception and impact on their audiences. For instance, Robert Moeller repeats his previous findings that the German search for a useable past began soon after the war. Hence, he and others assert that the theme of victimization is neither new nor taboo. He does acknowledge that the movies he analyzed comprised only ten percent of the immediate postwar production. Yet he illustrates well the emergence of the victimization approach employed by postwar Germans. In a very reasoned fashion he demonstrates how memory can block historical understanding, and he thinks that the present version of the victimization debate within an international scholarly community and a more open-minded German public is to be welcomed. Ruth Wittlinger reinforces that the theme of victimhood has a tradition since the 1950s, always changing in relation to the discourse about German guilt which she thinks was mainly established during the 1960s and institutionalized during the 1970s (p. 67). Though primarily reviewing secondary literature, she notes the extensive publication of Heimat books by the expellee organizations, some twenty percent of all regional histories published between 1945 and 2000. She finds that the “Germans as victims” theme had continuously been kept alive in such publications and reinforced within family memory. Paul Cooke compares some postwar and recent films to suggest that it would be better “to view contemporary representations of German victimhood not as breaking previously held taboos, but as simply showing that attitudes have come full circle” (p. 77). When examining “Representations of German Wartime Suffering in Recent Fiction,” Stuart Taberner places works under provocative subtitles such as “Political Correctness” and “Ordinary Germans.” In the end, he illustrates that the victim theme in recent treatments has been integrated with other contemporary and universal narratives.

In reviewing various debates about German history (the so-called “Historians' Dispute,” the Broszat-Friedlander exchange, the Walser-Bubis debate), Helmut Schmitz's generalizations seem rigid and derived from a few elite exchanges. For instance, the claim that “the Holocaust attains the status of a foundational narrative for the present” (p. 95) is not illustrated by reference to specific persons, groups, time, or place. Similarly, no examples are provided for such sweeping assertions that “the demand for and necessity of working through the perpetrator past appears incompatible with the memory of German suffering” (p. 96) and surely does not apply to one of the initiators of the present discussions, W. G. Sebald. Schmitz thinks he sees the emergence of a new form of “emotional identification with the collective suffering” of German ancestors: “The problem is not so much that this happens … but rather that it largely happens at the expense of, and in competition with, the remembrance of Nazi victims” (p. 108). The latter assertion is left undemonstrated. By contrast Bill Niven shows with detailed information how the bombing of Dresden had been used as a commemorative theme in the German Democratic Republic as an important and well-orchestrated aspect of state memory politics. He demonstrates the anti-Western intent, the fashion in which the theme appeared in literature and visual arts, and then ties it to the present debate, especially about continuity to Friedrich's The Fire. Similarly built on detailed historical information is Pertti Ahonen's account of victims of the Berlin Wall. The use made of the Wall, especially for political propaganda by both sides, is set in the context of both the Cold War and the post-Wall trials.

The impact of unification on the politics of commemoration is commented upon by Andrew Beattie who finds much continuity. In discussing the Commission of Inquiry “Overcoming the Consequences of the SED Dictatorship in the Process of German Unity” established in 1995, he asserts, “there had never been such explicit political support and high-level consideration of appropriate and desirable efforts to remember the Nazi past” (p. 157). That leaves aside, for instance, the extensive efforts of the Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung and the Landeszentralen für politsche Bildung in each western state before 1990, all of which were supported by their respective parliaments and political leaders. The essay does outline the efforts by various eastern states to deal with Soviet “special camps” and the conflicts among diverse victim groups about what they considered appropriate commemoration.

The fire bombing of German cities and Friedrich's book about the victims cuts across a number of contributions. Andreas Huyssen discusses “Air War Legacies: From Dresden to Baghdad.” This essay seeks to relate the intensified debates about destruction of German cities from the air to the Balkan and Iraq wars. He provides much background to the situation in which Friedrich's study gained attention and offers solid context for the debates, relating them to German political trends. Karoline von Oppen and Stefan Wolff, too, suggest that the political climate at each stage of the victim debate helped to move the discourse on expellees from the margins to the center. Like Huyssen, they find that the Kosovo conflict served to highlight refugees and questionable military engagements. By contrast, Stephen Berger, well known for his historiographic commentaries, claims that “It is revealing to compare the more critical reception of Friedrich's book with the far more positive reception of Frederick Taylor's book on the bombing of Dresden” (p. 220). That claim is not illustrated. It becomes questionable if he is comparing public reception in Germany with academic reception elsewhere. Ironically, since Berger's own work has rarely been based in archival research, he asserts “Taylor's book is archive-based rather than memory-based.” If “memory-based” is meant to denigrate Friedrich's study, then the claim is misplaced, as Friedrich's earlier studies, on which The Fire is partly based, emerged from many regional archives. In general Berger echoes the findings of most contributors that discussions of victimhood had never ceased nor been repressed, but adds appropriately, in contrast to some of his fellow contributors, “Many of the younger historians researching German victimhood in the 1990s and early 2000s were not concerned with somehow offsetting German suffering against German guilt” (p. 218). This, perhaps, is a fitting interim conclusion about an ongoing debate.