Return to Dresden

Why did the German people tolerate the Nazi madness? Maria Ritter's life is haunted by the ever-painful, never-answerable "German Question." Who knew? What was known? Confronting the profound silence in which most postwar Germans buried pain and shame, she attempts in this memoir to give an answer for herself and for her generation. Sixty years after the defeat of Nazi Germany, she reflects on the nation's oppressive burden and the persecution of the contemporary consciousness. With a determined search for remnants of her past during a visit to her homeland, Ritter retrieves memories and emotions from places, personal stories, and letters. She recalls the odyssey from Poland to Leipzig with refugees in 1943, returns to Dresden to recover her memories of the firebombing in 1945, revisits the remote Saxony countryside where she and her mother fled from the Communists in 1949, and relives the pain of learning that her father would never return from the war.--From publisher description.