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The Holocaust is, without doubt, the defining horror of our era, and the time that has elapsed since the end of World War II has not diminished the intensity with which it haunts our political and social preoccupations. Those 70 years have, however, also been years in which the Germans have sought to come to terms with that past. Their attempts to do so have also informed other attempts to deal with other traumas, other collapsed states and societies in communist Eastern Europe, apartheid South Africa, the legacy of dictatorships in Latin America and elsewhere. The task Karl Figlio has set himself in this important and scholarly work is a sustained reflection on what it means to remember, to memorialize and to try to make reparation. His book is about what Germans call Vergangenheitsbewältigung - overcoming the past. It is sometimes claimed that the Germans have done more, and done better, in seeking to make reparation, than others elsewhere. It is characteristic of Figlio to wonder if this ‘more and better’ does not conceal the very omnipotent triumphalism that was at work in the fantasies that sustained Nazism in the first place, making Germans what Jan-Werner Mueller sarcastically called, ‘world champions in remembrance’ (2010).
Karl Figlio is emeritus Professor of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies at the University of Essex and this book has all the scholarship one might expect from an internationally recognized academic. He has mastered literature on the Holocaust, on post-War Germany, on social theory and on psychoanalytic theory. The learning that has gone into this book is huge. Part of its importance comes from the fact that it is in the Palgrave book series Studies in the Psychosocial. The idea of psychosocial studies has emerged in recent years as an attempt to draw on psychoanalytic ideas to inform social research, including research methods, and, at the same time, to trace the social in the lineaments of the psyche. The development of psychosocial