What happens when a group of direct descendants of Holocaust survivors meets another group, composed instead of children or grandchildren of Nazi SS members? Is it possible to develop an authentic dialogue, in which moral feelings such as fear, shame and guilt gradually fade away, and listening to the other becomes an active gesture, materializing in a "restorative empathy", or even in a willingness to reconcile and to forgive? The recent volume History, Trauma and Shame. Engaging the Past through Second Generation Dialogue, edited by psychologist Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, a former member of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, answers these questions.

The book consists of six chapters, each of which is an articulate account, both scientific and autobiographical (the authors are psychologists and/or psychiatrists, but also direct descendants of one of the two groups in question) of these meeting sessions, organized by the "Psychotherapeutic Working Group for Victims of the Holocaust" [Psychotherapheutischer Arbeitskreis für Betroffene des Holocaust (PAKH)]. The volume is framed by a preface we owe to Vamik Volkan, a Cypriot psychiatrist, expert on social conflicts, author of fundamental studies on group identity in reference to "chosen traumas and glories", and by Bjorn Krondorfer’s epilogue, who is since almost thirty years a towering scholar and facilitator of "impossible" encounter groups, such as those between Jews and Germans, or between Israelis and Palestinians.

Significantly, the testimony of the second generation of those who have a "perpetrator" in their family finds space here along with the narrative of those who constitute the second generation of the "victims." The volume challenges social attitudes such as the demonization of the group of perpetrators, which often continues in a diachronic sense, or competitive victimhood, peculiar expression of societies that shape and impose suffering as an identity. The book shows that both parties involved (families of "victims" and "perpetrators") have the right to express the intergenerational trauma in which they are entangled, and that the healing of the social fabric, its reconciliation, cannot be sustainable without addressing the collective memories and their narratives, giving right to speak and offering an empathic listening, in a perspective of agency, to all: both "victims" and "executioners" of the second generation.

Human rights violations can attest their atrocity in many ways. A particularly significant one is its propagation beyond the social groups (victims, perpetrators, bystanders, beneficiaries...) directly involved in it. This happens in space, when such an event takes on the psychosocial characteristics of a "collective trauma" (according to Jeffrey Alexander's expression), which can be perceived as highly relevant not only by the parties involved, but even by the entire humankind. This happens nevertheless in time, when the narratives, with which members of social groups attribute meaning to such violations suffered (or done), convey the event to subsequent generations. The various contributions in this volume are precious testimonies of a "multidirectional memory" (Michael Rothberg), which time and again opposes the master narrative with which the first generation, direct witness of the event, addresses its descendants not only by describing what to remember, but more subtly by prescribing how to remember.

Memories and narratives of the event, feelings and moral judgments (above all: guilt and shame), social group identity (legacies, with their inherent bonds of loyalty), collective traumata, often become inextricable elements. It is Gobodo-Madikizela's thesis that the conflict between groups lasts over time also because of memories and narratives that do not facilitate, and even openly hinder, reconciliation. It is not only for a detached love of science, but also for eminently practical purposes, peculiar to those who care about the healing of the social fabric through its "empathic repair", that the studies collected here by the South African psychologist intend to shed light on the webs in which the complex plots of intergenerational trauma are entangled.