Jeffrey Katz — Unsettled Ground
Journalist reflects on Germany's multigenerational effort to confront, memorialize, and make partial amends for the crimes of the Nazi era.
Why we picked this
Germany's reckoning with Nazism is the most sustained national confrontation with historical crime in modern history. Katz examines what that process actually looks like across generations.
Jeffrey Katz’s book examines Germany’s decades-long, still-unfinished effort to reckon with the Nazi period — through memorials, legal proceedings, restitution programs, and the lived experiences of families on all sides. The result is an account that is neither triumphalist nor despairing, but genuinely unsettled, as the title suggests.
Katz brings a journalist’s eye for the specific: particular memorials and what they contain or conceal, specific legal cases and what they resolved or left open, individual Germans — descendants of perpetrators and bystanders — grappling with inherited responsibility. The book asks what it means for a society to truly confront its worst history, and whether Germany has succeeded.
The conversation will be open to audience questions, which at events like this often become the most searching part of the evening. Relevant to anyone thinking about how democracies deal with their own historical crimes.