Johannes Reitter's meticulous study focuses on silence and intergenerational Holocaust memory in perpetrator and victim families in Austria and Germany. The book follows in the footsteps of Dan Bar-On, who, working with German families, identified “a double wall of silence” (15) built by both the wartime generation and their children. Taking oral histories of descendants of the wartime generation as a vantage point, Reitter fills the void left behind by untold stories. Irrespective of their background in victim or perpetrator families, interview partners uniformly used phrases such as “He took that into his grave” (18), “Like a cloth draped over [the past]” (202), or “The silence remains until today” (384) to describe the failed transmission of memory in their families. In addition to unearthing these stories through interviews and painstaking archival research, Reitter also seeks to explain why families began weaving the “cloak of silence” mentioned in the book's title.

Reitter's research is especially valuable in exploring how guilt and shame caused intergenerational silence. A gripping example is the story of Herbert Kaar, who only after the death of his mother went on a ten-year quest to investigate the biography of his Jewish father. Archival evidence shows that he and his siblings were conceived out of wedlock, while his father maintained a relationship with another non-Jewish woman with whom he also had a child. It was this woman who filed charges against Kaar's father in 1941, alleging that he had approached her for money. During his arrest, Kaar's father attempted suicide. In a publicized show trail, he explained that he had sought out the woman to discuss child support payments, but having violated the infamous Nazi race laws, “he thought he was in for it anyway” (107). Kaar's mother also had to appear before the court and confess her relationship with Kaar's father while maintaining that he was a caring father. Sentenced to five years, he died in the Emsland concentration camp system. In 1949, the verdict against Kaar's father was rescinded and Kaar's mother received a modest pension. After years of resentment based on vague notions of the family's alleged shame, Kaar finally reconciled himself with his unknown father after writing several books about his family's story.

Analyzing stories such as Kaar's, the book offers explanations for intergenerational silence. Reitter cites fear of re-traumatization, a desire to shield descendants from trauma, taboo topics such as Jewish or homosexual family members, or – as in the case of Kaar – relationships out of wedlock, and sometimes also the descendants’ lack of interest to learn about what they sensed was a difficult past. Silence in perpetrator families often stemmed from feelings of shame and guilt, a sense of loyalty towards one's family, the potential for an indictment or having to return stolen Jewish property, as well as the attempt to protect descendants from the past.

While the book's painstaking work in oral history and archival research are much appreciated, the book would have benefitted from engaging literature that suggests that survivors and perpetrators were far from silent. Annette Wieviorka labelled our time the “era of the witness,” in which survivor accounts are freely given and preserved for research and education (The Era of the Witness [2006]). The transmission of trauma within families even gave birth to the concept of postmemory as developed by Marianne Hirsch. Perpetrators, too, did not uniformly remain silent, sometimes giving apologetic interviews, like Frantz Stangl's infamous justification that as a subordinate he lacked free will to be responsible for the crimes he committed. With respect to family memory, however, most lower-level perpetrators succeeded in hiding their crimes, although they became very vocal turning their stories into narratives of victimization. As the work of Harald Welzer, Sabine Moller and Karoline Tschuggnall shows, younger family members accepted such narratives or actively transformed them into more “usable pasts,” even if they knew or suspected these to be untrue.

Reading this literature on the transmission of memory against the silence encountered in Reitter's research could have triggered questions on the nature and longevity of silence. Are there perhaps different kinds of silence, just as there are different kinds of testimony, for example court testimony, oral histories, diaries, letters, etc.? After all, the silence Reitter encountered was never complete and always selective. Many interview partners had already begun to research their past based on veiled remarks, documents they found, or outside influences such as books or documentaries. Thinking about different kinds of silence might have also allowed for questions on the impact of public memory, societal debates, justice, and compensation on intergenerational silence or dialogue. Lastly, a longer discussion of the oral history methods used and the composition of the research sample would have helped to place this work in the context of others and gauge how common silence in family memory was.

Given the ubiquity of testimony and postmemory as well as our insights into apologetic perpetrator narratives, Johannes Reitter's study is a welcome intervention reminding us of failed transmission of intergenerational memory that can lead to silence. The book rests on the painstaking preservation of the stories behind silence as well as the diverse explanations for silence in both victim and perpetrator families. That silence is never absolute, but permeated in different ways – more attention to this would have made this work an even more important contribution to postmemory.