Nick Cohen Nick Cohen

Meeting the Nazi parents – my political book of 2013

Utopia or Auschwitz: Germany’s 1968 Generation and the Holocaust
By Hans Kundnani

The best political book I read in 2013 actually came out in 2009 – I am afraid my finger is a long way from the pulse of contemporary publishing. Hans Kudnani history of Germany’s 1968 generation tells an extraordinary story: the revolt of the children of the Nazi generation against a world where Hitler’s willing and unwilling executioners were all around them.

On first reading, the West German left of 1968 should have been anti-fascist. But it was not so simple. Although Kundnami has some sympathy with students confronting a brutal police force and unpunished war criminals, he rightly sees their belief that fascism grew out of capitalism as dangerously idiotic. The ideology had two consequences. First it downplayed the responsibility of the German people for Nazism and ignored the specifically German features of the European fascist movement – most notably anti-semitism and Auschwitz.

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