Description: Bringing his book up to date with reflections since its first publication a decade ago, Charles Maier writes that the historians' controversy gave Germany a chance to air the issues immediately before unification and, in effect, the controversy substituted for the constitutional debate that a united Germany never got around to holding.
Brief description: Charles S. Maier is Leverett Saltonstall Research Professor of History at Harvard University. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the Council on Foreign Relations, he has written a number of award-winning books, including Recasting Bourgeois Europe, The Unmasterable Past, Dissolution: The Crisis of Communism and the End of East Germany, and Once Within Borders.
Review Quotes: A full depiction of the continuing controversy within the Federal German Republic about the nation's murderous past and haunted present... For the very large segment of the American public that does not read German, the book is a discreet Baedeker to very unfamiliar--and often ugly--territory.--Norman Birnbaum "The Nation"