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Psychoanalyst and family therapist Charlotte Kahn was forced to leave her hometown of Duisburg, Germany in . She went back to Germany in 1988 when the city of Karlsruhe, her husband's hometown, invited former Jewish citizens to return to mark the fiftieth anniversary of Nazi pogrom on the “Night of Broken Glass” in November 1938. Kahn took this opportunity to interview “representatives of my age group” (viii) about their lives under and after Hitler. A subsequent trip to East Berlin in 1990 allowed Kahn to interview East Germans about similar experiences and attitudes before and after 1945. Not surprisingly, East Germans in 1990 were less interested in discussing the Nazi past than the suddenly surprising German present in the wake of the crumbling of the Berlin Wall. Kahn correctly observes that this hesitancy was also an outcome of the taboo placed by the East German regime on discussion of the Nazi regime. But over the next couple of years the focus and purpose of Kahn's interviews themselves changed from a concentration on the impact of Nazi Germany on her own generational and social cohort to a concern for the reactions of East and West Germans of various ages to the collapse of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and the reunification of Germany on October 3, 1990.
Thus what began as a journey into the cruelly ruptured history of German Jewry during the first half of the twentieth century became a less personally traumatic confrontation with the fall of the “second German dictatorship” at the end of the century's second half. Kahn assures the reader that her own experience with the brutality of Nazism did not destroy her objectivity. Presumably her training as a psychoanalyst allowed her to be a good listener. The aims of her book, however, are—perhaps appropriately but also disappointingly—modest: an “oral history” that is neither “psychohistory … nor … a series of clinical analyses” but only an attempt “to record and illuminate the personal aspects of living