Germany is often credited for its success in reckoning with the Nazi era — with some observers even labeling the country “world champion in remembrance.” Scholars like Susan Neiman have intelligently drawn on the German example to reflect on how the United States could think about its own racial reckoning in the twenty-first century. In other former Axis powers like Italy — today a hotbed of historical revisionism — many anti-fascists bewail the absence of a moment like the Nuremberg Trials in which the regime could be brought before the court of history.

Yet claims about German society’s success dealing with the past also deserve scrutiny. In postwar decades, the Federal Republic was slow to purge Nazis from its ranks, and there was no quick or general recognition of the monstrous, genocidal crimes of the Shoah. Even in the 1980s, with countless criminals still walking free, the famous “Historians’ Dispute” among leading scholars tended to banalize the Nazis’ actions by equating them with their communist enemies. In both East and West Germany, the different groups targeted by Nazism often struggled to make themselves heard; in many formerly occupied countries, they never had any chance of bringing the perpetrators to justice.

Tommaso Speccher is a researcher at Berlin historical institutions including the Jewish Museum, the Topography of Terror, and the Wannsee Conference House. His recent study La Germania sì che ha fatto i conti con il nazismo questions triumphalist accounts of postwar German memory culture. He explains the conflicts within Germans’ way of talking about the Nazi era — while also highlighting the initiatives by victims’ groups, political movements, and activist judges who did seek a reckoning with the past.