Will I love Reckonings?

In 2019 I published a review of Mary Fulbrook’s Reckonings in the journal History. The review may have been the most laudatory I’ve written. Fulbrook’s study of the Holocaust and its noxious aftereffects lingers with me today. I’ve come to think of Reckonings as the War and Peace of Holocaust histories. Like Tolstoy’s epic, it paints on a sprawling canvas, exhausting the writer’s palette to portray the Holocaust as a searing multi-generational phenomenon. Reckonings does not approach the Shoah as most writers of the Holocaust do, namely, as a monumental but time-limited event. Fulbrook conceives of the… show more.

“Leadership” in Nazi Germany took various forms and happened at different levels. Local party leaders or commanders of individual SS task forces made life-or-death decisions on a daily basis. In order to fully understand the workings of the dictatorship, it is also important to understand the involvement of “ordinary” Germans.

Mary Fulbrook’s Reckonings is an important intervention in the debate about Nazi perpetrators, victims, and the legacies of the Holocaust. In order to understand the horrific events that occurred in Nazi Germany and the ways in which ordinary people participated in it, Fulbrook has gone through mountains of archival material… show more.

How do the perpetrators, victims, and their descendants deal with the mental legacy of the Holocaust? This is sobering, illuminating stuff from one of the world’s leading Holocaust academics.