By focus­ing on Nurem­berg, the city that is per­haps most close­ly iden­ti­fied with Germany’s Nazi past, Neil Gre­gor sets out to trace how a society’s shared mem­o­ries and self-image changed from the end of World War II to the 1960’s peri­od of recon­struc­tion. He describes how, at war’s end, the major­i­ty of Ger­mans felt them­selves to be the vic­tims of an ​“ordi­nary war” with no regard for the car­nage com­mit­ted in their name on oth­ers. While their shared sense of vic­tim­hood became more nuanced dur­ing the 1950’s and 60’s, Gre­gor found that even after they learned of the Holo­caust and oth­er Nazi atroc­i­ties, the focus of the major­i­ty of Ger­mans con­tin­ued to be on the sac­ri­fices of their elders rather than on the loss­es of their vic­tims. The book is schol­ar­ly and metic­u­lous­ly researched and the author demon­strates a pro­found under­stand­ing of the diver­si­ty and the rifts with­in Ger­man soci­ety. Illus­tra­tions, index.