Coming Feb. 3rd, 2026
UNSETTLED GROUND is a personal take on Germany’s belated efforts to come to grips with the Holocaust--a tale of remembrance, responsibility and reconciliation.
— Peter Hayes, author of the bestselling Why? Explaining the Holocaust
"...a remarkably balanced and human portrait of the benefits and limits of reconciliation."
Available for pre-order
November 2025
The activists’ work connected them with descendants of Germany’s former Jewish communities, now scattered around the globe. One of those descendants, American author Jeffrey L. Katz, provides perspectives on the emotional journey of returning to his ancestral homeland with Germans as his guides.
Much of what’s been written about the remembrance movement focuses on the memorials and museums as acts of contrition, as if these alone could heal old wounds. Unsettled Ground goes deeper. It explores the background and motives of memory activists, recognizes that some of their actions are performative and points out the movement’s limitations. The country still contends with antisemitism, xenophobia, and racism.
Unsettled Ground considers the place that Holocaust holds in our memories as successive generations grapple with an appropriate response, tolerating differences among peoples becomes more tenuous, and the U.S. struggles to fully address its own painful past.
These Stolpersteine, or stumbling stones, memorialize Katz's grandparents and uncles on the street where they lived and were deported from in Essen.
(Author's photo)
A crowd gathered outside the synagogue in Essen, Germany, on November 10, 1938, after it was set ablaze during the violent attacks against Jews known as Kristallnacht.
(Photo credit: Fotoarchiv Ruhr Museum)
Germany once felt the world’s wrath for crimes committed during the Nazi regime. More recently, it received extravagant praise for facing up to the atrocities. The country boasts of new Jewish museums, Holocaust memorials, restored synagogues, and classroom lessons designed to honor its Jewish heritage and teach tolerance.
This effort was led not by politicians or historians, but by local citizen activists, few of them Jewish, almost all of them born after World War II. They could have shrugged off responsibility for evils done before they were born. Instead, they pushed past denials and threats to get at the truth, pressing their parents, grandparents, and neighbors—many of them perpetrators, collaborators, or bystanders to genocide—to find out what really happened in their hometowns during the Nazi era.
Unsettled Ground
Genre
Fiction
Release Date
Coming Soon
Pages
300
ISBN
123-4567890123
About Jeffrey L. Katz
Veteran journalist Jeffrey L. Katz traveled to Germany several times to explore his family’s roots and meet with local members of the country’s remembrance movement. He has written and spoken frequently about Germany’s reconciliation efforts and his connections to a new generation there. His stories about these experiences have been featured by NPR, Moment Magazine, and various newspapers.
For more than four decades, Katz reported, edited and managed at local and national news organizations in print, broadcast and online. His editing experience included 15 years at NPR. He also worked as a reporter and staff writer at Congressional Quarterly and Governing magazines, and The Milwaukee Journal and The (Memphis) Commercial Appeal newspapers. More recently, Katz has indulged his love of books by working as a part-time bookseller. He is a graduate of the University of Illinois. He and his wife Mollie have two grown children.
“
Jeffrey Katz has found a way to add something revelatory and powerful to the vast literature of the Holocaust. In the endless battle between the quest to remember and the human need to forget, Katz pushes to find what really drives people to dig among the shadows of a past that still hides so much pain.”
”
—
Marc Fisher
Author of After the Wall: Germany, the Germans and the Burdens of History
“
An engaging and sensitive account of two worlds moving hesitantly toward each other via the past. This is a remarkably balanced and human portrait of the benefits and limits of reconciliation over time and space.”
”
—
Peter Hayes
Author of the bestselling Why? Explaining the Holocaust
“
Katz deftly takes up larger, knottier questions of public history and collective remembrance in this courageous, nuanced, and generous book. And he shares enough of himself to deliver that richest of hybrids—a reported memoir with the sweep of historical saga.
”
—
Alexander Wolff
Author of Endpapers: A Family Story of Books, War, Escape, and Home
“
Jeffrey Katz tells his family’s story with detail and passion and eloquently celebrates the efforts of many Germans who are helping Jews recover the stories of our ancestors and labor to make sure that Germany never forgets.
”
—
David Wessel
Senior Fellow at The Brookings Institution
“
A fascinating glimpse of what it was like to live in small towns in Germany as a Jew before and during World War II and put Holocaust history into perspective in our tumultuous present day. Bravo! I could not put it down.
”
—
Joan Nathan
Author of My Life in Recipes: Food, Family, and Memories
“
This moving journey to discover how generations of German citizens have tried to accept and make sense of the lasting damage done to their country by the dozen years of National Socialism is both timely and timeless.
”
—
Martin Goldsmith
Author of The Inextinguishable Symphony: A True Story of Music and Love in Nazi Germany
Words of Praise
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