Helmut Walser Smith is the Martha Rivers Ingram Professor of History at Vanderbilt University. His books, which have appeared in five languages, include German Nationalism and Religious Conflict, 1870-1914 (Princeton UP, 1995); The Butcher’s Tale: Murder and Antisemitism in a German Town (W.W. Norton, 2002); The Continuities of German History (Cambridge UP, 2008), and Germany: A Nation in its Time: Before, During, and After Nationalism, 1500-2000 (Liveright, 2020). He is also the editor of The Oxford Handbook of Modern German History (Oxford, 2011), among other works of collaboration. Over the years, his research has been supported by the NEH, the DAAD, the Volkswagen Foundation, the Humboldt Foundation, the American Academy in Berlin, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. In 2023/24, he was an NEH Fellow at the Center for Jewish History in New York. Currently, he is writing a book whose tentative title is “Hometowns: Local Truth and Jewish Return in postwar Germany.” It is about the myriad ways in which non-Jewish Germans and Jewish Germans in the diaspora worked on local memory, with the emphasis on the experience of a series of small towns and villages in southwest Germany.
Some Small-Town Reflections on Catechism 2.0
When it came to German memory, the language of Dirk Moses’s initial contribution to what subsequently became the so-called Catechism debate was replete with references to a priestly cast, priestly …
