Gitta Sereny has spent her life looking into the minds of those such as Franz Stangl, commandant of the extermination camp Treblinka, and Albert Speer. This volume is a collection of her writings on Germany and Austria, Germans and Austrians, the responses to war crimes and the individuals accused of them. It is - for her - surprisingly personal, with glimpses into Sereny's own motivation, her own world-view. And it is both powerful and moving.
For she is painfully honest. In one section, recording her work as a young woman looking after displaced children in Villandry in occupied France, she recounts how she behaved offensively to two German officers who took "an immediate interest in our children and helped us obtain medical supplies and food". She continues: "They were - though I refused to see it at the time - good men and, I suppose because of that very fact, allowed themselves to be targets of my fury". In fact, they had "both been devout Christians and opponents of the regime". One - the doctor - was sent to the Russian front, where he died within weeks. The other, a former teacher, "older and not very fit", was sent to a concentration camp. "Indulging in our own feelings, we had abused their kindness. We had never sensed their pain and their dilemma, or that they desperately wanted to be - and indeed were - our friends."
This is typical of Sereny's approach. She tackles complexities, nuances, and the good she finds in unlikely places. Good German officers; seeing Kurt Waldheim as other than the war criminal he was so widely alleged to have been; dealing compassionately with Benjamin Wilkomirski, who wrote fraudulently about his "recovered memory" of concentration camp life as a child - all emerge with subtlety, somehow more whole than the pastiche horror figures we allow them to become.
That willingness to confront generalisations, to investigate people's background and motivation, brings her to an optimistic verdict on Germany's future. Germans have largely confronted their history - and are the stronger for it. She is by no means sentimental; she sees the high level of racist violence, especially in the east, as a legacy and a sign of great discontent. But Germans are examining their history; there is hope.
Alongside that hope sit her real worries about what people can do - and what they can and cannot admit. Richard Glazar, a Czech who survived Treblinka, told her the story of how he and his friends were employed to pack and send to Germany the possessions of exterminated Jews. The transports stopped coming - and the group feared for their own future. It was the possessions of those who were exterminated that justified them being kept alive. One day the deputy commandant came in to announce that the transports would start rolling again. And the group cheered. "It seems impossible now. Every time I think of it, I die a small death . . . "
Sereny confronts horror. But she ends with the theme that suffuses this whole volume. "Everybody has the right to say no." In the SS, one was not punished for refusing. Young Richard would have been killed for refusing. The two German officers may have met their deaths for their doubts. But anyone can say "No". The German trauma was, and is, the "Yes", the celebration of the categorisation of human beings.
That categorisation is being dealt with in Germany. Sereny questions whether it is being dealt with elsewhere. She suspects not - asylum seekers, black Africans perishing by the hundreds of thousands of AIDS for want of drugs, racially motivated violence. If the Germans have faced their past, she asks in her sub-text, have the rest of us faced our present and our future? Julia Neuberger is chief executive of the King's Fund, and is working on a book about "the moral state we're in".