Final Verdict by Tobias Buck review – the weight of collective guilt

Reporting on the trial of a former SS camp guard, the author learns that his own grandfather was an early Nazi in this lucid, timely study of Germany’s fraught reckoning with its past

When, as it is now, the talk is all of genocide and the slide to the right, it can be hard to find space amid the heat in which to think properly about these things; to consider meaning and context, if not consequences. But a book is a good place to have a go – for me, it’s the only place at this point – and Tobias Buck’s Final Verdict is both timely and sufficiently involving – on occasion, it’s gripping – to help drown out distracting noise. Outwardly, it appears to tell a straightforward story. Buck is a newspaper journalist, and in this capacity he attended much of the trial of Bruno Dey, who in 2019 stood accused of the murder of at least 5,230 people at Stutthof, a Nazi death camp in present-day Poland.

But Dey’s case, however fascinating, is really only a jumping-off point. This is a narrative that wrestles – calmly and very elegantly – with huge questions. Like many writers before him, Buck worries away at the collective guilt of Germany. However, he looks forward as well as back. What, he wants to know, will happen to that guilt when there are no living survivors left to speak to it?