Legacies of Dachau

Book excerpt: Auschwitz, Belsen, Dachau. These names still evoke the horrors of Nazi Germany around the world. This 2001 book takes one of these sites, Dachau, and traces its history from the beginning of the twentieth century, through its twelve years as Nazi Germany's premier concentration camp, to the camp's postwar uses as prison, residential neighborhood, and, finally, museum and memorial site. With superbly chosen examples and an eye for telling detail, Legacies of Dachau documents how Nazi perpetrators were quietly rehabilitated to become powerful elites, while survivors of the concentration camps were once again marginalized, criminalized and silenced. Combining meticulous archival research with an encyclopedic knowledge of the extensive literatures on Germany, the Holocaust, and historical memory, Marcuse unravels the intriguing relationship between historical events, individual memory, and political culture, to offer a unified interpretation of their interaction from the Nazi era to the twenty-first century.