Why did the German people tolerate the Nazi madness? Maria Ritter's life is haunted by the ever-painful, never-answerable -German Question.- Who knew? What was known?

Confronting the profound silence in which most postwar Germans buried pain and shame, she attempts in this memoir to give an answer for herself and for her generation. Sixty years after the defeat of Nazi Germany, she reflects on the nation's oppressive burden and the persecution of the contemporary consciousness.

-'We received what we deserved, ' my grandfather said after the war, and I...