The lines cited above, the first set taken from Die Ermittlung, Peter Weiss's 1965 play about the Auschwitz trials in Frankfurt in the early 1960s, and the second from a 1999 essay by the Austrian-Jewish author Robert Schindel, attempt to give voice to the experience of the victims of Nazism. Each of the quotations also highlights the difficulties inherent in a German wish for “normality.” Weiss, then, warns us that a confrontation with the everyday normality of the victim experience might undercut the very concept of normality, if normality comes to be seen as the destruction of civilization in Auschwitz. Schindel suspects that the hidden desire in the memory discourse of the “perpetrator countries” is to neutralize mass extermination at the expense of the memory of the murdered. Both of these perspectives, of course, depend on a reading of the Holocaust as the essence of the Nazi period.