Buruma's only serious deficiency is his apparent ambition to be more than a writer of political travelogues. The most revealing segments of this travelogue deal with memories of Auschwitz, Hiroshima, and Nanking. Fear of moral contamination or, conversely, dishonoring Jewish victims, overshadows every attempt by historians, writers, and artists to come to grips with the Holocaust. Buruma examines the almost neurotic scrupulosity of tone and style among German writers on the Holocaust. Fearful that kitsch might violate the memory of the Holocaust, writers tend to avoid the subject entirely.
Death is a master from Germany . . .
The author shows how the Holocaust has cast a shadow over the entire Nazi era, subverting every attempt to approach that time with objectivity. Over the decades, museums were transformed into memorials and political discourse adopted a religious tone, as the 1968 generation struggled to sort through the jumble of memory, history, and guilt. The generation that embraced the left as a refuge from anti-Semitism still cannot make even basic political distinctions. Germans who have spent their lives in the East know little of the war against the Jews and have not participated in a nationwide effort of moral reeducation. Yet, during the war, Hiroshima had been a bustling military center, not an isolated province.