This is an ambitious and thought-provoking book. It presents a comprehensive overview of the ways Germans have remembered World War II since 1945 and a forceful critique of what Margalit contends is the central narrative that has structured this memory work. Margalit's main argument is that in the late 1940s and 1950s a “reconciliation narrative” emerged in East as well as in West Germany that has shaped the ways that Germans have looked back at the war ever since. This narrative depicted Germans as victims and equated their suffering with that of the Jewish victims of the Holocaust. On each side of the Cold War division of Germany, this “reconciliation narrative” assumed different forms—antifascist in the east, Christian in the west. But on both sides it was meant to serve a similar purpose, reconciling the Germans who had so recently supported Hitler to new political systems that did not initially enjoy significant popular support. The intense ideological rivalry of the early Cold War pushed the new political leaders of East and West Germany to embrace a narrative of the war that allowed Germans, even the millions of soldiers who had fought Hitler's war of annihilation in the east, to see themselves as innocent of the crimes committed by their Nazi leaders.

One of Margalit's most interesting arguments is that the origins of the “reconciliation narrative” can be found in German experiences and Nazi propaganda during the war. He suggests that well before 1945 many Germans were aware of the Holocaust and the atrocities committed by German soldiers in the east (p. 13). As Germany began to lose the war, this guilty knowledge generated intense fear of the terrible revenge that Goebbels's propaganda told Germans the Red Army would exact when it entered Germany. After the war, traces of this guilty knowledge could be found in declarations of guilt by Christian leaders such as Martin Niemöller. Yet now German guilt had been redeemed by German suffering at the end of the war and in the years following 1945. Clearly, the German people felt they had paid the price for the crimes of their leaders; German cities lay in ruins, millions of Germans had fled or been expelled from the east, and millions of German soldiers were POWs in Soviet captivity. In a series of rich and persuasive chapters, Margalit explores the elaboration and development of this “reconciliation narrative” at a number of different sites of postwar German memory, which include novels, works of art, and films as well as monuments and commemorative ceremonies.

In all of this postwar German memory work there was clearly not much room for the Holocaust. From the Germans' perspective, this was a “Jewish narrative” that for many years remained external to the German story. When the Holocaust was mentioned, it was usually to provide a baseline of comparison with the sufferings Germans had experienced. Margalit points to “the abyss between two concepts of national remembrance that grow out of two opposing experiences of the same events” (p. 2). Instead of bridging this divide, the “reconciliation narrative” prevented the Jewish narrative of the Holocaust from finding a significant place in German public memory culture until the 1960s at the earliest.

In a long final chapter, Margalit examines “The Resurgence of the German Sense of Victimization since Reunification” that he finds in the literary works of Günter Grass and W. G. Sebald, the debate on the air war, and in proposals for construction of a Center against Expulsion. Margalit is quite right to suggest that some of the recent developments in the public memory culture of unified Germany are disturbing.

Until recently, for example, any suggestion of a moral equivalence between the Holocaust and the bombing war was the exclusive province of the radical right wing. Now it appears to have gone mainstream. Jörg Friedrich has, for example, appropriated the language that has come to be associated with the Holocaust to describe German suffering in the bombing war. He repeatedly uses the term Vernichtung (annihilation) which will remind many readers of the term Vernichtungskrieg to describe the Nazis' racial war of annihilation in the Soviet Union that claimed the lives of millions of Jews and Slavs. And he challenges the Western Allies' image of themselves as the liberators of Europe by describing the bombing campaign as the willful, militarily unnecessary annihilation of Germany's cultural treasures and architectural heritage.

Margalit warns that “the new preoccupation with German victims has come, explicitly, at the expense of the Nazis' victims” (p. 292). This pessimistic diagnosis runs the risk of presenting the memory work done by Germans since 1990 as a zero-sum enterprise; the more they see themselves as victims, the less they will be concerned with the Holocaust. Yet, as Margalit himself acknowledges, it is simply impossible to speak about “the Germans” as if they constituted a homogeneous, collective, historical actor who speaks with one voice. “One can always hear German voices . . . who emphasize the uniqueness of the Holocaust and the exceptionality of the fate suffered by the Jews under the Nazi yoke, as opposed to that of the Germans” (p. 283). Why then, should these critical voices not continue to exert a significant influence upon the ongoing debates in Germany about the Nazi past?

In recent years, the history of German memory since 1945 has become a vibrant field of research. We now have monographs and collections of essays on a wide range of topics and sites of memory from war-crimes trials to commemorations of the bombing war. This rich and ever-expanding body of work has dispelled any notion that the Germans did not talk about the Hitler years in the 1940s and 1950s, preferring instead to concentrate on the formidable task of rebuilding their devastated cities and societies, east as well as west. Gilad Margalit's book helps us to understand what Germans said when they looked back upon the war and the Nazi past.