Jeffrey L. Katz’s Unsettled Ground begins as a family history and becomes something more ambitious: a meditation on how memory is made, carried, and tested across generations. Moving between archival reconstruction, personal narrative, and encounters with German “memory activists,” Katz traces the afterlife of a German Jewish past that was both destroyed and — unevenly and often belatedly — reassembled.
The early chapters are firmly anchored in place. Katz reconstructs the lives of his ancestors in villages and cities where Jews were neighbors — economically integrated, socially embedded, and, in many cases, deeply patriotic. This made the rupture of the 1930s all the more jarring. Persecution does not descend on strangers; it unfolds within intimate worlds where customers, classmates, and neighbors become participants in exclusion. Katz’s account of escape underscores how contingent survival was: a fragile chain of timing, resources, and luck, constrained as much by immigration regimes abroad as by danger at home. For those who did not escape, he restores names, routes, and final destinations, rightly insisting that the Holocaust be understood as a chain of particular choices, contingencies, and failures of refuge.
What distinguishes Unsettled Ground is its sustained attention to what came after. Katz follows survivors and their families across England, Latin America, and the United States, showing how displacement reshaped identity without dissolving it. Memory persists in fragments — letters, newsletters, family silences — and becomes an ethical framework: what to preserve, what to transmit, and what can never be adequately passed on. When Katz turns back to Germany, the narrative shifts again. Encounters with local activists, small museums, and projects like the Stolpersteine (stumbling blocks for the feet and the conscience) reveal a grassroots effort to reinsert Jewish lives into the fabric of everyday space. Memory here is decentralized, often improvised, and frequently carried by non-Jews: a memory culture that is expansive and visible, yet often detached from living Jewish presence. The question of whether grassroots German remembrance serves Jewish continuity or German self-reconciliation remains open, never fully pressed.
This gives rise to the book’s central tension. Germany’s culture of remembrance is both real and limited — impressive in its institutional scope, yet vulnerable to what critics have called a “theater of memory,” in which commemoration risks becoming performance. Katz is attentive and fair to both sides: the painstaking work of local historians and the persistence of antisemitism, alongside the fragility of remembrance in the face of contemporary politics. Descendants who return to places like Augsburg negotiate a complicated inheritance. Acts of restitution — a returned object, reclaimed citizenship — carry symbolic weight without resolving loss. Events Katz addresses in his closing pages — the AfD’s electoral rise, the surge in antisemitism following October 7 — expose the instability of memory itself.
Katz’s conclusion is restrained but pointed. Memory, he suggests, is not an achievement but a practice — one that must be renewed, contested, and reinterpreted over time, and one that offers no guarantee against the very forces it was built to resist. Unsettled Ground ultimately asks what it means to inherit a past whose lessons remain unsettled.
Jan Burzlaff is a Postdoctoral Associate in the Jewish Studies Program at Cornell University, specializing in Holocaust, Jewish, and modern European history. His current book project is a victim-centered history of the Holocaust.
