The Debatable Land #4: Tales from the Rubble

The making of Germany and the unmaking of women

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The fierce urgency and moral horror of forgetting

Travelling through postwar Germany Hannah Arendt noted that the Germans she spoke to were oddly candid about their experiences under - and with - Nazism until, that is, she told them she was a Jew:

There generally followed a brief awkward pause; and after that came - not a personal question, such as ‘Where did you go after you left Germany?’; no sign of sympathy such as ‘What happened to your family’ - but a deluge of stories about how Germans have suffered.

For Arendt this was both personally painful and a sign of Germany’s inability to reckon with its own actions. It was easier for Germans to reimagine themselves as Hitler’s first victims than to confront the reality of its own criminality. If this was, morally, at best dubious it might also be considered the kind of …