Winner of the Bahat prize sponsored by the University of Haifa Press

Unresolved tensions in German postwar memorials

Germany's changing historical memory of World War II and its aftermath, as reflected in the official and public remembrance of the German war dead, exposes an unresolved tension between a discourse of guilt and a discourse of national suffering and victimization. In Germany, under the auspices of the Allied occupation, remembrance honored the victims of the Nazis and those who had fought against the regime. After the partition of Germany, a new culture emerged, memorializing the civilian dead and fallen German soldiers. Despite the fierce ideological rivalry between East and West Germany, however, certain similarities existed. The political leaderships who shaped these cultures ceased to confront their citizens with the question of guilt and instead depicted the German people as victims. In Guilt, Suffering, and Memory—whose Israeli edition was awarded the Jacob Bahat Prize for best original book—Gilad Margalit discusses the official remembrance ceremonies for the German war dead, the memorials erected to commemorate them, the public discussions of these disparate cultures, and their treatment in postwar German literature and film.

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. . . the best book of the year . . . .

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In 1985 Elie Wesel was featured on a television event during which he tried unsuccessfully as it happened, to persuade President Ronald Reagan not to visit the cemetery at Bitburg Germanv, because SS soldiers were also buried there alongwith members of the Whermacht.'The words die on my lips,' said Wiesel, in his impassioned plea,'your place is not there.' Gilad Margalit, a senior lecturer at Haifa University, reminds us in an essay, which I recommend unequivocally as the best book of the year, that President Reagan's dilemma began not in 1985 but 40 years before that in 1945 at the end of World War II. The author has reached this conclusion by a thorough study of German reactions to their loss as they were reflected over six decades to this day in the words of political leaders, memoirists, novelists clergymen, government spokesmen, propagandists and just plain folk. The author notes that in the immediate aftermath of defeat Germans experienced a culture of guilt, which they readily exhibited when the full story of the concentration camps, the murder of civilians, the annihilation of six million Jews and the atrocities visited upon 20 million Russians became known. . .

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. . . this marvellous book . . . .

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. . . this finely calibrated study . . . .

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[Provides] extensive coverage of the evolving treatment of this wide-ranging subject. March 2015

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This is an ambitious and thought-provoking book. It presents a comprehensive overview of the ways Germans have remembered WorldWar II since 1945 and a forceful critique of what Margalit contends is the central narrative that has structured this memory work.Sept 2012

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Gilad Margalit's comprehensive exploration of how Germany viewed its own wartime dead provides new evidence about German attitudes and stresses Germans' primary focus on their own suffering and their repeated failure to come to terms with the past appropriately.

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[This book] make[s] important, original contributions. . . . Margalit's monograph is a useful and frequently insightful contribution.

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Gilad Margalit's new book offers a comprehensive, forcefully argued, and insightful analysis of German memories of the Second World War after 1945.

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Margalit bases his arguments on an impressive amount of original archival research, as well as analyses of relevant fiction, memorials, public debates, and the pivotal secondary literature. March 2012

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This well-translated book will be invaluable to scholars and students of German history and memory studies and is accessible to nonspecialists. Summing Up: Essential.October 2010, Vol. 48 No. 2

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A . . . perspective on the consequences of empire building comes from Israeli historian Gilad Margalit's meticulously documented Guilt, Suffering, and Memory.July/August 2010