SOURCE: Mousavizadeh, Nader. “States of Denial.” New Republic 212, no. 25 (19 June 1995): 40-3.

In the following review, Mousavizadeh praises The Wages of Guilt, though he expresses reservations over Buruma's ironic tone and detached approach to Nazi atrocities.

For the Germans and the Japanese of the generations after the Second World War, the memories of war and defeat have been internalized as burdens of identity. But they have not been internalized in the same way. And this difference has had as much to do with how the world has projected that burden as with how those societies themselves have sought to cope with it. For the world, as well as for the vanquished in that war, the object of overcoming remains elusive, and the questions of closure as difficult to resolve as ever. When has a nation paid the price for aggression? What is the historical limit of historical guilt? Can...