| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Europe: Early Modern and Modern

Norbert Frei. Adenauer's Germany and the Nazi Past: The Politics of Amnesty and Integration. Translated by Joel Golb. New York: Columbia University Press. 2002. Pp. xv, 479. $35.00.

I have been granted the dubious honor of reviewing a work already hailed as "groundbreaking" and "major." The German edition has been cited extensively in the literature since 1996, and its conclusions are essentially unchallenged. Even the more recent English translation under consideration here has already been extensively, and prominently, reviewed. Norbert Frei's work is important because it seeks to explain how the Federal Republic of Germany made the transition from the National Socialist dictatorship to a stable, pluralistic society and polity. What Frei terms a "policy for the past" (Vergangenheitspolitik) played a crucial role in that transition. "Policy for the past" refers in the German context to "amnestying and integrating former supporters of the Third Reich on the one hand, [and] completing a normative separation from Nazism on the other." For five years, from 1949 to 1954, the legislative, judicial, and executive activity of the Federal Republic was devoted to this process that was "undisputed in its premises [by Germans, at least], generous in its accomplishments, and lasting in its effects" (p. 303).

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