Unmasterable Past

Bringing his book up to date with reflections since its first publication a decade ago, Charles S. Maier writes that the historians’ controversy gave Germany a chance to air the issues immediately before unification and, in effect, the controversy substituted for the constitutional debate that a united Germany never got around to holding. The premises of national community, whether formulated in terms of legal culture, inherited collective responsibilities, or patriotic habits of the heart, had already been subjects for vigorous discussion.

Maier has written what is the best book available on the tangled and acrimonious debate among the German historians. It is incisive in its analysis of the arguments on all sides of the debate and admirably objective in its assessment of them., A thorough and sensitive reflection on the ‘historians’ conflict’ about the character and significance of Nazism that erupted in West Germany in 1986… [Maier contributes] to the understanding of how Germans are still trying to integrate the Third Reich into a vision of a democratic future, and into a cohesive national identity for Germany., A full depiction of the continuing controversy within the Federal German Republic about the nation’s murderous past and haunted present… For the very large segment of the American public that does not read German, the book is a discreet Baedeker to very unfamiliar—and often ugly—territory., A major piece of intellectual history, rich in both methodological and philosophical insights… It is the most compelling examination of the writing about the Holocaust that I have encountered.

Charles S. Maier is Leverett Saltonstall Research Professor of History at Harvard University. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the Council on Foreign Relations, he has written a number of award-winning books, including Recasting Bourgeois Europe, The Unmasterable Past, Dissolution: The Crisis of Communism and the End of East Germany, and Once Within Borders.