The Sins of the Fathers ─ Germany, Memory, Method

Sins of the Fathers is nothing less than the definitive book on official Nazi-era memories in Germany” (Andreas Glaeser). Olick opens up new ways to understand postwar Germany that will surprise experts (and Germans themselves) as well as offering a comprehensive model of what is best called the politics of regret.” And Olick is masterful in showing how politicians in postwar Germany, and in the face of what we all know happened during the War, found support for new institutions among a complex stew of murderers, robbers, and rapists, plus those who abetted such crimes. At the same time, Germany was mourning 10 million deathsthe effects of carpet bombings, mass-expulsion from their homelands, and repeated rape. Along the way, Olick gives us a short history of the Federal Republic of Germany, told in a riveting, flowing narrative. This account of the founding and early years of the FRG is in a sense a sequel to In the House of the Hangman, which dealt with the years (late 1943 to 1949) between the War and the founding of the West German state. The Sins of the Fathers takes up the history from 1949 to the 2000s. At the same time, Olick has supplied a brilliant treatise on collective memory, on the role of memory in the state and a diagnosis of memory in the contemporary era.

Jeffrey K. Olick is professor of sociology and history at the University of Virginia. He is the author ofThe Politics of Regret: On Collective Memory and Historical Responsibility andIn the House of the Hangman: The Agonies of German Defeat, 1943–49, the latter published by the University of Chicago Press.