Abstract
In my essay, I argue that because German public remembrance, which has a selfserving and instrumental undercurrent to it, is mostly concerned with perpetrators and victims, the questions of how German society played its part in Nazi crimes and why there was nobody among German diplomats who acted like the Polish diplomat Jan Karski have not been sufficiently addressed. I demonstrate why Karski represents a model for an ethical engagement with the Holocaust that the Germans could never aspire to. In contrast to Karski, Germans were not able to treat the past as if it was present. After the war, the majority of Germans behaved as if the Zivilisationsbruch (rupture in civilisation) had nothing to do with them.
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