The German Trauma

This text gathers together the best of Gitta Sereny's writing on Germany since the 1940s. It amounts to a portrait of the country and its people, and how they have come to terms with their Nazi past, both collectvely and in terms of specific instances.

---

IN 1945, Germany underwent a radical political transformation, moving certainty and irreversibility from dictatorship to freedom under a model federal constitution. But despite this remarkable public success, and the economic revival that accompanied it, the experience of war remains current in the imagination of Germans. Indeed, so total was their defeat, so complete was their culpability, that Germany's obvious dynamism has coexisted with the always open wound of their history. The fact that this wound exists and has been felt so deeply for more than half a century, has altered what has usually been thought of as "the German character". This book gathers together the best of Gitta Sereny's writing on Germany from over sixty years. She writers about key individuals - Stangl, Speer, and the questions that their lives raise. She addresses the questions of war guilt, both among children of the high Nazis and more generally. She also deals fiercely with the Holocaust deniers.