Stated Memory: East Germany and the Holocaust investigates communist Germany's attempt to explain the Holocaust within a framework that was at once German and Marxist. The book probes the contradictions and self-deceptions arising from East Germany's official self-understanding as an enlightened, modern society in which Jewishness did not constitute -difference- or otherness. The study examines East German historiography of the Holocaust, including its reflection in schoolbooks; analyzes East German concentration camp memorials; discusses the situation of Jews who remained in East Germany;...

One of the most independent thinkers in German intellectual history, the Enlightenment author Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-1781) contributed in decisive and lasting fashion to literature, philosophy, theology, criticism, and drama theory. Lessing invented the burgerliches Trauerspiel (bourgeois tragedy) and wrote one of the first successful German tragedies as well as one of the finest German comedies. In his final dramatic masterpiece, Nathan der Weise, he writes of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, of religious tolerance and intolerance and the clash of civilizations. Lessing's dramas are...