Of course, Germany s eagerness to discharge the burden of history is not new. Back in 1998, the renowned intellectual Martin Walser publicly attacked the pervasiveness of Auschwitz in Germany s remembrance culture, declaring that the Holocaust had become a moral cudgel with which to intimidate all Germans and keep them in a perpetual state of guilt.

Why would our judgments, and our emotions, vary in this way? For most of our evolutionary history, human beings and our primate ancestors have lived in small groups, in which violence could be inflicted only in an up close and personal way, by hitting, pushing, strangling, or using a stick or stone as a club.