From Publishers Weekly
The title of this creative, dense book is slightly misleading: in fact, it casts a wider net over the ways in which Germany as a whole, not just Dachau, has dealt with the legacy of Nazism. Marcuse, a professor of history at UC-Santa Barbara, examines Germany's attempts during the past half-century to come to terms with its horrific wartime actions. Using a variety of sources, including interviews with survivors and Nazis, Marcuse shows how historical myths were constructed and how these myths affected the memorials built at places like Dachau, the first Nazi concentration camp; such memorials, says Marcuse, "generally reveal far more about the groups that create them than about the history they purport to represent." Marcuse, grandson of philosopher Herbert Marcuse, posits that the struggle to memorialize the events of the Holocaust is a generational one. The first generation, many of whom were complicit in Nazism, shielded themselves from the past by claiming themselves to have been the victims, and by claiming ignorance and by resisting attempts to memorialize the past. Dachau itself had no memorial for many years. Many in the second generation, who came of age during the tumultuous 1960s, reacted against their parents' denial, he argues, by launching a full-scale political critique of German society, European democracy and even the Vietnam War. Only in the past few decades, Marcuse concludes, has a synthesis been reached that is beginning to allow Germany to create memorials that promote the "experiential learning" he believes is most beneficial for its hundreds of thousands of visitors. What is most striking about Marcuse's complex analysis is his innovative look at history through a culture's acts of memorialization; still, this book will appeal more to those within the scholarly community than to lay readers.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
Dachau was the first concentration camp to be set up. More than 200,000 prisoners were held there, and about 35,000 were documented to have died or been killed there. In the first 50 years since it was liberated, in April 1945, more than 21 million people visited the site. How did the Dachau memorial site come to be? What are the lessons it teaches, and who decided how to convey them? Marcuse wrote this book to provide answers to those questions. Part 1 recounts the history of Dachau, from its beginnings as a market town centuries ago through its repressive and genocidal phase, 1933 to 1945. Part 2 focuses on the decade from 1945 to 1955. Part 3 traces the images of Dachau embraced and propagated by the groups most involved in shaping its postwar history. Part 4 outlines the process of overcoming, since 1970, what Marcuse terms "the mythically distorted collective images of the Nazi era." This massive study is a crucial and definitive account of one important aspect of the Holocaust.
George CohenCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
