[Anne Sa'adah] provides us with a thought-provoking survey of political and cultural controversies about the former German Democratic Republic since unification.
   --A. J. Nicholls, Times Literary Supplement

This rich and complex study dissects the problem of political trials by bringing in novels, individual cases, and comparative French, Czech, and German perspectives, contrasting the 'institutional' with the 'cultural' approach...A provocative and brilliant work.
   --Foreign Affairs

Anne Sa'adah's ambitious book addresses issues of justice and reconciliation with the kind of comparative-historical sweep and muscular intellectual engagement readers will find refreshing, no matter what their interest in contemporary Germany...Germany's Second Chance...is a fine piece of work about issues of fundamental importance to the vitality of democratic governance...[A]n enormously stimulating read.
   --Carl Cavanagh Hodge, Ethics and International Affairs

Anne Sa'adah's book is a searching meditation on political justice and reconciliation; it is also a highly informed account of reckoning with the GDR past in post-unification Germany. Sa'adah's comparative knowledge, her intelligence, and her moral engagement make Germany's Second Chance a compelling work of philosophical history.
   --Charles S. Maier, author of Dissolution: The Crisis of Communism and the End of East Germany and The Unmasterable Past (Harvard)

Germany's Second Chance is a poignant and penetrating assessment of the tough choices faced by new democracies struggling to forgive without forgetting, to come to terms with their recent fratricidal and genocidal pasts in ways that are morally defensible yet politically viable. The author reconstructs recent debates over the terms of political inclusion with a close ear to the ground for historical echoes of earlier conflicts. In so doing, she discloses how the question of whom to exclude from a new constitutional regime, rising from the ashes of dictatorial terror, is inescapable, recurrently vexing, and always the subject of both heated disagreement and cold, strategic negotiation.
   --Mark Osiel, author of Mass Atrocity, Collective Memory, and the Law

Anne Sa'adah is Professor of Government at Dartmouth College.