Mary Fulbrook - Reckonings: Legacies of Nazi Persecution and the Quest for Justice

The enormity of the Holocaust is often summarized in one word: Auschwitz. Yet a focus primarily on this iconic site of evil tends to deflect attention from the myriad ways in which individuals became tangled up on the side of the perpetrators, as well as the diversity of experiences among a wide range of victims as they struggled and died, or managed to survive against all the odds. It also misses the continuing significance of Nazi persecution over time and across continents. The selective memorial landscape of Europe today, and the well-known cultural and public representations of this past, cannot do justice to the variety of subjective experiences and personal legacies of involvement in violence under Nazi rule. Reckoning with a still disturbing past entails a myriad of attempts to rectify continuing imbalances or to address a persisting sense of injustice, whether such attempts take place in courts of law or in personal accounts.

This was not an easy book to write. It addresses the distinctive character of involvement in the collective violence unleashed under Nazi rule and explores routes out of and beyond this period of terroron both sides of the chasm between perpetrators and persecuted. Reckonings tells the stories not only of well-known people and places but also of those who remained largely below the radar of public representations, outside the media spotlight. It explores how people were transformed by their experiences and how, under different later circumstances, they sought to reckon with the continuing implications of this past that refused to pass awayeven as states and judicial systems failed to bring many of the guilty to justice.

This is a perilous undertaking. The topic is enormous, the material potentially infinite. I have selected a range of examples, case studies illuminating a variety of themes, groups, and places, in order to convey both the broad patterning and varying individual responses to this deeply significant past. I have foregrounded these examples and explored the subjective experiences of those involved while only lightly sketching in the wider historical background, the policy decisions, strategies, and events on which there is a huge and ever-expanding literature. Periodically I have given pointers to relevant secondary sources but have nowhere sought to be exhaustive or comprehensive.

Reckonings paints a vast canvas. I am more than well aware of both the scale of the undertaking and the inevitable insufficiencies of the outcome. Any discussion of these issues will be inadequate to the immensity of the almost inexplicable cruelty and suffering with which it is concerned, and the difficulties of dealing with the long aftermath. It is virtually impossible to do justice to this pastnot only in the courts of law or in personal and cultural narratives but also in historical analyses. Nevertheless, it is important to understand the parameters of the persecution and collective violence that affected so many people and the lingering consequences that continue to affect us today.

Scholars at the time of the Hebrew Bible had already noted that of making many books there is no end, and much study is a weariness of the flesh (Ecclesiastes 12:12). This, of all books, feels like one that cannot ever, in principle, be finished; no analysis of this topic can be exhaustive or final. But there comes a point when it is important simply to stop, and to pass on the interim outcome of the exploration. It is my hope that, despite the selectivity and omissions that are inevitable in such a vast area, the book serves to map some of the contours of the tip of an incredibly significant iceberg. We are far from finished with these questions; there is far more to be explored.