A past without shadow

Zohar Shavit, a scholar of children's literature at Tel Aviv University, looks at half a century of German books for young readers that deal with the Third Reich, and at how much of its worst cruelty they leave out. Her study covers 345 titles and focuses on the way these works filter and soften the period, so that its darkest and bleakest chapters seldom come into view.

What Shavit uncovers is a repeated storyline that presents Germans as bystanders to the suffering of Jews, rather than as participants in it. She argues that this pattern has taught young readers a distorted lesson: that the German people were, in the end, the true victims of Hitler's crimes. The book traces how that picture was built and maintained across decades of publishing.

First issued in Hebrew, the work is now available in English. It will interest readers of German children's literature, scholars of Holocaust memory, and anyone who wants to understand how the Nazi past has been presented to the young.