Unsettled Ground: Reflections on Germany’s Attempts to Make Amends
Germany once felt the world’s wrath for crimes its people committed during the Nazi regime. More recently, it received extravagant praise for facing up to the atrocities. The country now boasts of new Jewish museums, Holocaust memorials, restored synagogues, and classroom lessons designed to honor its Jewish heritage and teach tolerance.
This effort was spearheaded not by politicians or historians, but by local citizen activists, few of them Jewish, almost all born after World War II. They could have shrugged off responsibility for evils committed before they were born. Instead, they pushed past denials and threats to get at the truth, pressing their parents, grandparents, and neighbors—many of them perpetrators, collaborators, or bystanders to genocide—to find out what actually happened in their hometowns during the Nazi era.
The activists’ work connected them with descendants of Germany’s former Jewish communities, now scattered around the globe. One of those descendants, American author Jeffrey L. Katz, provides perspectives on the emotional journey of returning to his ancestral homeland with Germans as his guides.
Peter Hayes, author of Why? Explaining the Holocaust, calls it “a remarkably balanced and human portrait of the benefits and limits of reconciliation over time and space.” Mark Fisher, author of After the Wall, says, “In the endless battle between the quest to remember and the human need to forget, Katz pushes to find what really drives people to dig among the shadows of a past that still hides so much pain.” And Alexander Wolff, author of Endpapers, adds, “Katz deftly takes up larger, knottier questions of public history and collective remembrance in this courageous, nuanced, and generous book.”
Much of what has been written about the remembrance movement focuses on the memorials and museums as acts of contrition, as if these alone could heal old wounds. Unsettled Ground goes deeper. It explores the background and motives of memory activists, recognizes that some of their actions are performative, and points out the movement’s limitations. For example, the country still contends with antisemitism, xenophobia, and racism. Unsettled Ground considers the place that the Holocaust holds in our memories as successive generations grapple with an appropriate response, tolerating differences among peoples becomes more tenuous, and the U.S. struggles to fully address its own painful past.
About the Author
Veteran journalist Jeffrey L. Katz traveled to Germany several times to explore his family’s roots and meet with local members of the country’s remembrance movement. He has written and spoken frequently about Germany’s reconciliation efforts and his connections to a new generation there. His stories about these experiences have been featured by NPR, Moment Magazine, and various newspapers.
For more than four decades, Katz reported, edited and managed at local and national news organizations in print, broadcast and online. His editing experience included 15 years at NPR. He also worked as a reporter and staff writer at Congressional Quarterly and Governing magazines, and The Milwaukee Journal and The (Memphis) Commercial Appeal newspapers. More recently, Katz has indulged his love of books by working as a part-time bookseller.
Visit jeffreykatzauthor.com to learn more.
“[Katz] shares enough of himself to deliver that richest of hybrids—a reported memoir with the sweep of historical saga.”
