Journey through a haunted land

de Amos Elon

Twenty-two ordinary Germans, among them a doctor, a druggist, an accountant, a small businessman, and a dentist, have been accused of Nazi mass murders and experts from a Frankfurt court in the year 1965 have come to Auschwitz, Poland to verify the testimony of the accused. From this starting point Amos Elon, a young Israeli journalist, goes on to crisscross Germany. He describes Cologne, Munich, Hamburg, Berlin, Dresden, the new press lords, the new industrialists, the new universities, the new politics of Bonn, the new establishment, and the "still, small voices" of protest of such writers and intellectuals as Gunther Grass, Henrich Boll, Alexander Kluge, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, and Ingeborg Bachmann.