Reckonings

Legacies of Nazi Persecution and the Quest for Justice

By: Mary Fulbrook

Narrated by: Christa Lewis

Mary Fulbrook's encompassing book explores the lives of individuals across a full spectrum of suffering and guilt, each one capturing one small part of the greater story. Using "reckoning" in the widest possible sense to evoke how the consequences of violence have expanded almost infinitely through time. Fulbrook exposes the disjuncture between official myths about "dealing with the past" and the extent to which the vast majority of Nazi perpetrators evaded responsibility.

In the successor states to the Third Reich - East Germany, West Germany, and Austria - prosecution varied widely. Communist East Germany pursued Nazi criminals and handed down severe sentences; West Germany, caught between facing up to the past and seeking to draw a line under it, tended toward selective justice and reintegration of former Nazis; and Austria made nearly no reckoning at all until the mid-1980s, when news broke about Austrian presidential candidate Kurt Waldheim's past. The continuing battle with the legacies of Nazism in the private sphere was often at odds with public remembrance and memorials.

©2018 Mary Fulbrook (P)2020 Tantor

Extraordinary book and brilliant performance

This is an extraordinary book that seeks to “understand not only what happened during the Nazi era and its immediate impact but also the ways in which this past has continued to be of significance among members of subsequent generations” of victims and perpetrators of the Holocaust. In contrast to a multiple of recent books about the Nazi concentration and labor camps, Fulbrook concentrates on individual survivors and perpetrators. Intelligently written, it is emotive and profound. Christa Lewis does an outstanding job narrating.

A bit disappointed

This book was okay, but the author's contempt for the perpetrators resulted in a more one dimensional assessment than I was expecting. It didn't seem like she was very interested in what german civilians who stood by and did nothing had to say for themselves, which is understandable but meant that I didn't get as much perspective as I had hoped for.

Fascinating and thought-provoking

Highly recommended. Appropriate for all listeners regardless of the level of knowledge about Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. I haven't learned as much from one book since I discovered Sarah Helms' Ravensbrück.

Perfect

This thorough study of postwar handling of Holocaust crimes isn’t just a legal proceeding log, but an all encompassing survey of the political, economic, religious, and social differences in how each Holocaust affected region pursued justice, what constituted justice, what constituted a crime, how the proceedings were received by the public, the world, and its repercussions. She discusses how it has all evolved over time…what defines justice, what identifies a perpetrator, or a victim, and how should it all be memorialized? This book answered questions I’ve always had and many I didn’t know I had.
The US could use this as a thought project or study guide for coming to terms with our own violent past of human slavery. This book shows that while opportunities for obtaining justice against individual perpetrators are long gone, a collective reckoning with a violent, unjust and shameful past is, at least, pursuable.