Overview

Germany one felt the world's wrath for crimes committed during the Nazi regime. More recently, it received extravagant praise for facing up to the atrocities. The country now boasts of new Jewish museums, Holocaust memorials, restored synagogues, and classroom lessons designed to honor its Jewish heritage and teach tolerance. This effort was led not by politicians or historians, but by local citizen activists, few of them Jewish, almost all of them born after World War II. They could have shrugged off responsibility for evils done before they were born. Instead, they pushed past denials and threats to get at the truth, pressing their parents, grandparents, and neighbors--many of them perpetrators, collaborators, or bystanders to genocide--to find out what really happened in their hometowns during the Nazi era. The activists' work connected them with descendants of Germany's former Jewish communities, now scattered around the globe. One of those descendants, American author Jeffrey L. Katz, provides perspectives on the emotional journey of returning to his ancestral homeland with Germans as his guides. Much of what's been written about the remembrance movement focuses on the memorials and museums as acts of contrition, as if these alone could heal old wounds. Unsettled Ground goes deeper. It explores the background and motives of memory activists, recognizes that some of their actions are performative, and points out the movement's limitations. The country still contends with antisemitism, xenophobia, and racism. Unsettled Ground considers the place that the Holocaust holds in our memories as successive generations grapple with an appropriate response, tolerating differences among peoples becomes more tenuous, and the U.S. struggles to fully address its own painful past.

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Reviews

""Jeffrey Katz has found a way to add something revelatory and powerful to the vast literature of the Holocaust: With a reporter's eye for detail and a passionate drive for stories that tell larger truths, he has produced a heartrending history of his Jewish family's journey in and out of acceptance in pre-war Germany. He has returned to the homeland that rejected--and murdered--so many of his kinsmen, not so much to revisit the scars of genocide, but to understand those who have dedicated themselves to breaking their fellow Germans' silence about the Shoah. In the endless battle between the quest to remember and the human need to forget, Katz pushes to find what really drives people to dig among the shadows of a past that still hides so much pain."" --MARC FISHER, author of After the Wall: Germany, the Germans and the Burdens of History ""Jeffrey Katz has given us an engaging and sensitive account of two worlds moving hesitantly toward each other via the past of his Jewish ancestors from two villages and two cities in Germany. As he belatedly uncovers their history, descendants of their persecutors try to face up to it, too. This is a remarkably balanced and human portrait of the benefits and limits of reconciliation over time and space."" --PETER HAYES, author of the bestselling Why? Explaining the Holocaust ""Who are the German 'memory activists' who resurrect the stories of Jews the Nazis murdered, and do so not out of collective guilt, but a kind of righteous shame? Jeffrey Katz finds in the unsettled ground of the book's title a common ground with these truth-tellers, who just might reclaim the phrase 'ordinary Germans.' At the same time, Katz deftly takes up larger, knottier questions of public history and collective remembrance in this courageous, nuanced, and generous book. And he shares enough of himself to deliver that richest of hybrids--a reported memoir with the sweep of historical saga."" --ALEXANDER WOLFF, author of Endpapers: A Family Story of Books, War, Escape, and Home ""If we mean it when we say, 'Never again!' we have to remember what happened to German Jews. The numbers--6 million--convey the enormity of the slaughter, but only the stories of individuals move us. They remind us that we offspring of German Jews who survived have a particular obligation to stand up today when tyrants threaten other peoples. Jeffrey Katz tells his family's story with detail and passion and eloquently celebrates the efforts of many Germans who are helping Jews recover the stories of our ancestors and labor to make sure that Germany never forgets."" --DAVID WESSEL, senior fellow at The Brookings Institution ""Jeffrey Katz has used his journalistic skills of digging into the past to write Unsettled Ground. He's created a fascinating glimpse of what it was like to live in small towns in Germany as a Jew before and during World War II and put Holocaust history into perspective in our tumultuous present day. Bravo! I could not put it down."" --JOAN NATHAN, author of My Life in Recipes: Food, Family, and Memories ""This is a moving journey to discover how generations of German citizens have tried to accept and make sense of the lasting damage done to their country by the dozen years of National Socialism that is both timely and timeless. The term Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung (coming to terms with the past) may not rip off the tongue, but it holds badly needed lessons for us all."" --MARTIN GOLDSMITH, author of The Inextinguishable Symphony: A True Story of Music and Love in Nazi Germany

Author Information

Veteran journalist Jeffrey L. Katz has traveled to Germany several times to explore his family's roots and meet with local members of the country's remembrance movement. He has written and spoken frequently about Germany's reconciliation efforts and his connections to a new generation there. His stories about these experiences have been featured by NPR, Moment Magazine, and various newspapers. For more than four decades, Katz reported, edited, and managed at local and national news organizations in print, broadcast, and online. His editing experience included fifteen years at NPR. He also worked as a reporter and staff writer at Congressional Quarterly and Governing magazines and The Milwaukee Journal and The (Memphis) Commercial Appeal newspapers. More recently, Katz has indulged his love of books by working as a part-time bookseller. He's a graduate of the University of Illinois. He and his wife, Mollie, have two grown children.

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