How do nations reinvent themselves after cataclysmic events? Who gets to decide what happened yesterday, then to propagate the tale, and what are the consequences of their choices? These are some of the questions author and historian Erna Paris carried with her through the United States, with its long-buried memory of slavery; to South Africa, to sit in on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's attempts to heal the divisions of apartheid; to Japan, France and Germany and the unresolved pain of Hiroshima and the Holocaust; and to the former Yugoslavia where she exposes the cynical shaping of historical memory, and the way the world community responded to the lethal outcome of that half-imagined history.
Combining gripping storytelling with insight and sharp observation, Paris takes us to the places of reckoning-be they courtrooms or concentration camps-and finds hope in the way ordinary people grapple with the defining events of their lives. Evocatively written, her journey illuminates a crucial subject that straddles the 20th and 21st centuries.
Germany
A stench of sewage pollutes the streets of East Berlin; exposed wires dangle ominously; uncollected garbage spills into sunless, dilapidated courtyards. The graffiti scrawled across walls speaks of uneasy transition layer upon layer of a still-stratified past. "Nazi lives here!" accuses one notice painted on an apartment building. "Attack fascism!" orders another. "Defend squatters' rights!" commands a third. The developers from the West are moving in, juxtaposing restored nineteenth-century facades and modern cubes of steel and glass with the decrepit cinderblock construction of the German Democratic Republic. Some of the residents are angry.
But the development frenzy cannot silence the airy whisperings of unquiet ghosts that can be heard, should one care to listen, in the hundreds of empty spaces that pockmark the city: in memory holes that have never been plugged, either by choice, in order to mark the terror of the Nazi era, or by default, as in the East, where the continuing presence of bombed-out structures and vacant lots was for decades useful anti-fascist propaganda.
