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modernist as his contemporaries. Yet Dowden significantly concludes the volume with a reprint ofSusan Sontag's moving memoir ofher meeting with the author in Los Angeles after reading his TheMagicMountain in 1 947. The fascination of a teenager for Mann's masterpiece serves as a reminder ofthe deeply human interest in Mann that transcends time and place and even a literary movement, modernism . The essays in A Companion to Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain address issues ofMann's day, but in the process, because Mann is such a profound author, also evoke Mann's deep understandingofhuman life. Sontag'scontribution placed at the end ties together the humanist spirit ofthe volume as a whole, ¿fc Jeffrey Herf. DividedMemory: The Nazi Pastin the Two Germanys. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997. 527p. Michael R. Hayse The Richard Stockton College of New Jersey Jeffrey Herfhaswritten a masterful account oftheways inwhich the political elites in both East and West Germany dealt with the Nazi Past. With the new research that he has uncovered, Herf not only synthesizes much of the existing literature, but also contributes invaluable new material to anyone interested in German Vergangenheitsbewältigung. Now that his book has been available for the past three years, most recently in paperback, Herf's book will serve as a benchmark for future work on postwar political elites' treatment of the Nazi past. In the case ofDividedMemory, it is perhaps best to break convention and begin at the outset with its limitations and weaknesses, since these are so inextricably tied to the book's strengths. Herfconsciously excludes a broad socio-cultural exploration of German guilt, repression, and memorialization and instead concentrates on the more traditional arena ofelite political activity and discourse. His concern lies only fleetingly with the wider German public's reaction to the "unmasterable past" (Charles Maier), but instead with a handful of the most prominent and powerful ofmale political leaders to roughly I960. In the Federal Republic, the cast ofcharacters is principally limited to Konrad Adenauer, Kurt Schumacher, and Theodor Heuss. In the German Democratic Republic, center stage is taken by Walter Ulbricht, Otto Grotewohl, Wilhelm Pieck, and lesserknown Communists such as Paul Merker and Alexander Abusch. By focusing on these political leaders, Herfis able to explore official versions ofthe past as well as challenges from leading political opposition figures. He reconstructs their individual approaches to the troubling legacy of Nazi Germany, as well as real but stifled alternatives. Herf maintains that the bifurcation of official versions of the FALL 2000 * ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW * 129 past in East and West Germany illustrates the "multiple restorations" of the preNazi German traditions after World War II. In order to appreciate fully the service this monograph provides to our understanding of Vergangenheitsbewältigung, the reader should begin with a basic understanding ofGerman history during the ColdWar. In prior historiography, East German approaches to the Nazi past have been portrayed as a disingenuous selfconceptualization of the Communist state as the triumph of the progressive, socialist "other Germany" which bore no responsibility for "German fascism," understood as the outgrowth ofhigh monopoly capitalism's late crisis. However, Herf almost single-handedly uncovers a significant group of German Communists around Paul Merker, who spent the war years in Mexico rather than those around Walter Ulbricht and Wilhelm Pieck, who escaped to the Soviet Union. Merker and others made a forceful case that East Germany should recognize the special victimization oftheJews, and provide reparations for those victims and survivors. In chilling detail, Herfshows how this "faction" fell victim to the anti-cosmopolitan campaign and purges beginning in the late 1940s, ultimately ending in a show trial in 1955. Thereafter, any recognition of the racial component of Nazism in the GDR was treated as a threat to the founding myths that sustained Ulbricht and his successors. In short, a real alternative to evasive self-exculpation existed even within Soviet-dominated east Communism, but it was truncated. Herf also challenges dominant historical interpretations of the Federal Republic's Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung. Rather than viewing the Adenauer's politics ofreparations as simply a sleight ofhand that enabled the mass ofWest German society to sink into a mode of forgetting the crimes of the past, the author argues...

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