"I believe that this well-written and well-researched volume will be of interest not just to scholars of Seghers's work (although they will profit from it) but also to students of history, psychology, and memory and to all those wrestling with a sense of personal responsibilty for the many problematic historical events currently taking place in our global environment. In fact, this book seems to me more important as a contribution to our thinking about human rights and individual responsibilities than as a study of a major German woman writer. By using the experience of the generations that struggled with its involvement in the Nazi era and by analyzing the complications for the generations that followed their resolute silence on the topic, Maier-Katkin can focus on a model far enough removed in time to give us critical distance but uncomfortably close enough in the behavior of individual people in a public discourse of propaganda to make her readers genuinely think through their own political positions. This book is well worth reading and pondering."
Kathleen L. Komar
University Of California At Los Angeles, Pacific Coast Philology: Journal of the Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association, Vol. 43, 2008
"The topic of this book is timely and by no means relevant only for literary scholarship, given wide-reaching debates in recent decades on issues of silence, culpability, and complicity (whether active or passive) of civilian Germans during Hitler's reign. The arguments presented here contribute to a growing understanding of how the humanities, in particular literary studies and works of art themselves, can further historical inquiry in a way that other types of documentation simply cannot."
Jennifer Marston William, Monatshefte, 100. 3, 2008
Purdue University