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In Rescue and Remembrance, Kobi Kabalek examines how the rescue of Jews during the Holocaust has been understood and represented in Germany from the Nazi period to the present. In many regions outside Germany, a small number of known Holocaust rescuers are often held up as exemplars of broad pro-Jewish sentiment among that country's population during World War II, thereby projecting an image of national moral virtue. Within Germany, by contrast, rescuers are often presented in both scholarship and public commemoration as a small minority; their examples condemn the majority by showing what Germans could have done but did not do. Kabalek argues that such simplistic depictions of the majority versus minority obscure the complex motivations and situations that led people in Nazi Germany to help persecuted Jews. Against the view that the rescuers were “forgotten” after the war, he shows that portrayals and interpretations of helping Jews appeared in various media and social discourses in East, West, and unified Germany and were used to actively debate questions of collective morality. Rescue and Remembrance analyzes the varied and changing depictions of rescue in the distinct German polities from the Nazi period, examining how the very notions of “majority” and “collective” were articulated and reformulated.

In Writing Against Hitler, Daniel Siemens reconstructs the history of the struggles of socialist intellectuals in Germany from the 1920s through the post–World War II era by focusing on the life of one influential member of that group, Hermann Budzislawski (1901–78). In the 1930s, Budzislawski served as the editor in chief of the prominent antifascist journal Die neue Weltbühne. After the German occupation of France, he worked in exile in the United States until 1948, when he moved to East Germany. He became influential in training a new generation of journalists and worked as a politician. Through the twin stories of a highly ambitious figure and the legendary publication he headed, Siemens charts the course of the intellectual Left's rise and decline in power during the decades that shaped the political divides of the mid-twentieth century. Crucially, his account challenges the widely held belief that post-1989 German unification has represented a victory over the traumas of the past. Instead, Siemens shows the complexity of different strains of socialist thought and activity and reveals the contested place of Nazi Germany's exiles at the center of Cold War Germany's cultural history.