Rescue and Remembrance intervenes in two adjacent yet not fully integrated bodies of scholarship: studies of Holocaust memory and the expanding literature on rescue and assistance to Jews during World War II. Over the past decade, scholars have increasingly examined the “politics of the righteous,” prompting some to speak of a broader rescuing turn in Holocaust commemoration.Footnote ¹

This literature has explored a wide range of geographical contexts, with rich literatures emerging on both Western Europe, including France for instance, where the debate has collided with broader questions on collaboration and resistance under the Vichy regime, and on Eastern European cases such as Poland. In this context, scholars have traced how narratives of rescue were mobilized especially by the right-wing Law and Justice (Prawo i Sprawiedliwość) governmet (2015–23), which promoted a state-driven historical policy centered on a “pedagogy of pride.”Footnote ²

Germany, however, has occupied a more ambiguous position in this historiography. Long framed as a society that by the late 1960s had come to accept a discourse of collective guilt, it has been studied far less systematically through the prism of rescuers and their commemoration. Until recently, one might plausibly have concluded that Holocaust rescue has been less systematically integrated into analyses of German memory culture. Certainly, I would have concluded that until reading Kobi Kabalek's book.

Kabalek's book unsettles such assumptions. He shifts attention away from stories of rescue and rescuers as such toward their place in postwar German debates about morality and collective identity. Rather than treating rescue as a silenced or socially rejected phenomenon in either Germany, he demonstrates how diverse actors – Jewish and non-Jewish, individuals and institutions, across shifting political contexts – invoked rescuers, even fleetingly, and how such references, scattered across trials, books, newspapers, films, and public controversies, nonetheless served to negotiate moral assessments of German behavior under Nazism and of German collective self-understanding. In this reading, rescue becomes less an empirical question of numbers than a symbolic and moral resource through which Germans of different generations articulated competing images of themselves.

While the book resists a rigid East–West dichotomy, it remains attentive to political context. As Kabalek shows, in the German Democratic Republic the official antifascist narrative retroactively cast East Germans as resisters and rescuers, encouraging collective rather than individual framings, particularly in commemorations connected to sites such as Buchenwald. West German discussions developed differently and, from the late 1950s onward, increasingly avoided deploying rescuers in ways that might echo socialist state narratives. Across both states, however, Kabalek demonstrates that debates repeatedly revolved around the same core problem: what rescuers were taken to reveal about the German collective.

The book unfolds chronologically. After an opening chapter reconstructing the wartime conditions under which assistance to Jews was possible – and the Nazi regime's efforts to discourage it through legal ambiguity, moral pressure, and the policing of public conduct, including the cultivation of a specifically Nazi “moral” framework – subsequent chapters trace postwar engagements with rescue from 1945 to the present. Kabalek examines the early postwar years and their supposedly “silent” public sphere; the efforts from the late 1950s to the 1970s to institutionalize the remembrance of rescue; and the debates surrounding popular culture in the late Cold War, particularly responses to televised Holocaust representations. The final fifth chapter focuses on reunified Germany, situating controversies surrounding Schindler's List, the Wehrmacht exhibitions, and disputes over collective guilt within broader ongoing struggles over “normalizing” history, victimhood, and national self-description.

Kabalek adopts an explicitly emotional approach to history and memory. Throughout the book, he treats morality not simply as doctrine or political rhetoric but as an affective field shaped by indignation, defensiveness, compassion, and identification. He suggests that condemnatory histories emphasizing the rarity of rescue were driven less by abstract moral reasoning than by emotions such as anger or even indignation, while revisionist or “normalizing” narratives sought to loosen what some perceived as an inherited burden of guilt.

Like any strong monograph, Kabalek's contribution leaves the reader wanting the conversation with the author to continue. He makes a persuasive case that debates about rescuers were not primarily arguments over numbers, but over minority and majority, exception and rule. Yet one is left wondering how far these affective frameworks were shaped not only domestically but also by transnational actors and institutions, including emerging European norms about how complicity in the wartime period should be confronted.

When Kabalek writes the role of rescue in arguments for and against the totality of German guilt, this also raises the question of the extent to which such debates were embedded in wider emotional regimes structured by pride but also shame and shaming – by perceptions not only of how Germans viewed themselves, but also of how they were viewed by others. Might rescue narratives therefore be understood not simply as counters to guilt, but as tools through which emotional communities negotiated belonging, Europeanness, and what IR scholars describe as ontological security: stable narratives about who a society believes itself to be?Footnote ³

Overall, Rescue and Remembrance offers a convincing account of how narratives of Holocaust rescue functioned in postwar Germany as sites of moral reflection, political contestation, and emotional negotiation within a broader European moral landscape. By bringing together memory studies and the historiography of rescue, and by tracing debates across regimes and generations, Kabalek makes an important contribution to both fields.