lack of conscious engagement with the reality of the Holocaust or: on the non-reception of Jan Karski in the Federal Republic of Germany

Argues that because German public remembrance is mostly concerned with perpetrators and victims, the questions of how German society played its part in Nazi crimes and why there was no-one among German diplomats who acted like the Polish diplomat, Jan Karski, have not been sufficiently addressed. The author demonstrates why Karski represents a model for an ethical engagement with the Holocaust that the Germans could never aspire to. In contrast to Karski, Germans were not able to treat the past as if it was present. After the war, the majority of Germans behaved as if the rupture in civilisation had nothing to do with them.