Books: Art of Denial

Postwar German writers still had big blind spots

What Ernestine Schlant remembers about her childhood in Nazi Germany is, oddly, the freedom. She lived in the Bavarian city of Passau, where most mothers were working and fathers were away in the military. "We six- and seven-year-olds used to sneak into the movies to see old Shirley Temple films," says Schlant, a professor of German at Montclair State University in New Jersey and the wife of Bill Bradley, former U.S. Senator and current challenger for the White House. Later Schlant learned that less than two miles from Passau, hundreds of civilian prisoners were being worked to death at a slave-labor...

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