A single word - Auschwitz - is often used to encapsulate the
totality of persecution and suffering involved in what we call the
Holocaust. Yet a focus on a single concentration camp - however
horrific what happened there, however massively catastrophic its
scale - leaves an incomplete story, a truncated history. It cannot
fully communicate the myriad ways in which individuals became
tangled up on the side of the perpetrators, and obscures the
diversity of experiences among a wide range of victims as they
struggled and died, or managed, against all odds, to survive. In
the process, we also miss the continuing legacy of Nazi persecution
across generations, and across continents. Mary Fulbrook's
encompassing book attempts to expand our understanding, exploring
the lives of individuals across a full spectrum of suffering and
guilt, each one capturing one small part of the greater story. At
its heart, Reckonings seeks to expose the disjuncture between
official myths about "dealing with the past," on the one hand, and
the extent to which the vast majority of Nazi perpetrators evaded
justice, on the other. In the successor states to the Third
Reich-East Germany, West Germany, and Austria - the attempts at
justice varied widely in the years and decades after 1945. The
Communist East German state pursued Nazi criminals and handed down
severe sentences; West Germany, seeking to draw a line under the
past, tended toward leniency and tolerance. Austria made nearly no
reckoning at all until the 1980s, when news broke about UN
Secretary General Kurt Waldheim's past. Following the various
periods of trials and testimonials after the war, the shifting
attitudes toward both perpetrators and survivors, this major book
weighs heavily down on the scales of justice. The Holocaust is not
mere "history," and the memorial landscape covering it barely
touches the surface; beneath it churns the maelstrom of
reverberations of the Nazi era. Reckonings uses the stories of
those who remained below the radar of public representations,
outside the media spotlight, while also situating their experiences
in the changing wider contexts and settings in which they sought to
make sense of unprecedented suffering. Fulbrook uses the word
"reckoning" in the widest possible sense, to evoke the consequences
of violence on those directly involved, but also on those affected
indirectly, and how its effects have expanded almost infinitely
across place and time.
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