PERHAPS A GIFT VOUCHER FOR MUM?: MOTHER'S DAY
Andrew I. Port is the author of Conflict and Stability in the German Democratic Republic and the recipient of the DAAD Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in German and European Studies. He is Professor of History at Wayne State University and former editor-in-chief of the flagship journal Central European History.
A thrilling accomplishment. Ingeniously conceived and intrepidly executed, Never Again explores how German mastery of the Holocaust past proceeded through reflection on foreign atrocities, first in the postcolonial world and then in Europe itself. This is the most important study of memory, politics, and the ongoing construction of public norms written in a long time. -- Samuel Moyn, author of <i>Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War</i> Germans, in the communist East, the democratic West, and the reunified nation, cannot deal with atrocities in other countries without being haunted by their own dark history. How they have negotiated these dangerous political challenges, sometimes successfully, sometimes not, is the subject of Port’s fascinating, elegant, subtle, and always fair-minded book. -- Ian Buruma, author of <i>The Collaborators: Three Stories of Deception and Survival in World War II</i> A fascinating, carefully crafted look at how the powerful and dynamic factor of German memory of the Second World War and the Holocaust affected German foreign policy on the genocides in Cambodia, Bosnia, and Rwanda. Port’s nuanced and suggestive analysis also contributes in important ways to our understanding of the making of Berlin’s zigzag policies on Ukraine today. -- Norman M. Naimark, author of <i>Stalin and the Fate of Europe: The Postwar Struggle for Sovereignty</i> This deeply researched book tells the story of how, by embracing human rights and engaging in humanitarian actions, Germany rejoined ‘the community of nations as a peaceful member.’ Port illuminates the highly topical question of how Germany’s past both shapes and constrains its responses to contemporary bloodshed. -- M. E. Sarotte, author of <i>Not One Inch: America, Russia, and the Making of Post–Cold War Stalemate</i> A highly original work, sensitive both to domestic debates and to far broader transnational and international considerations. By exploring how a concern with their own genocidal past informed German reactions to later genocides, Port illuminates not only the German responses to events elsewhere in the world but also the ways in which, in an increasingly mobile and globalizing society, German society was and is itself changing. -- Mary Fulbrook, author of <i>Reckonings: Legacies of Nazi Persecution and the Quest for Justice</i> A brilliant new perspective on postwar German history. Even with hundreds of books written on attempts to cope with the Nazi past, the political consequences of shifting memory culture have seldom been discussed. In exploring how the Holocaust became an argument in German foreign policy, humanitarian aid, and military interventions, Port offers a wealth of insight—not only on Germany, but also on its global context. -- Frank Bösch, author of <i>Mass Media and Historical Change: Germany in International Perspective, 1400 to the Present</i>
