Quotes from Alexander Wolff

Germans of Jewish descent accounted for an outsize portion of the culture for which the nation would earn renown.

The reluctance of so many of today's Germans to court pity for their ancestors' suffering, to invoke the allied bombings and postwar expulsions, is a kind of tacit acknowledgment of how many knew of the Nazi atrocities at the time.

It's a sobering fact, the historian Timothy Snyder points out, that 'cultures of memory are organized by round numbers, intervals of ten; but somehow the remembrance of the dead is easier when the numbers are not round, when the final digit is not a zero.

Rightist populism is indeed on the march around Europe and the globe. But as the country most attuned to its dangers, Germany can make a claim as early-warning system.

But when the wheel next turns, it could turn in the devil's own direction. That's why we put our shoulder to it.