Germans Want To Put the Holocaust Behind Them. One Citizen Says, ‘Not So Fast.’

Yascha Mounk grew up in Germany in the 1980s and ’90s. As a distinct minority, he gradually came to understand that his presence brought out a mixture of anti-Semitism, philo-Semitism, and profound discomfort in his fellow Germans. All Mounk wanted was a conversation without the fact of his Jewish background casting any special shadow. That such a conversation seemed impossible, he argues, has to do with Germany’s failure to reckon thoroughly with its own history—and it led Mounk to settle, fo...