In this book I propose the thesis that a collective learning process took place after Hitler, bringing the Germans back from perpetrating unspeakable crimes to a sincere commitment to human rights. Unlike the intellectual preoccupation with German efforts to deal with the Nazi past (explored by Charles Maier and Jeffrey Herf), this investigation focuses primarily on the practical lessons that a disoriented people drew from their past misdeeds. My analysis pays particular attention to the relationship between the outside interventions of the United States and the Soviet Union and the inside insights of the minority of anti-Fascist Germans who were ready to make a new start. In an attempt to integrate both postwar histories, I contrast the Western consequences drawn from the catastrophe with the Eastern efforts to learn from disaster. Since the transformation was a drawn-out process, I concentrate here on three different stages of its development, starting with the postwar period, then focusing on the 1960s, and concluding with the 1990s. After exploring the alternative of Westernization, I settled on the concept of “civilization” as a standard for evaluating the metamorphosis of the Germans. While postcolonial critics have correctly condemned its misuse as justification for sexist and racist repression, several reasons support this terminological choice. First, prominent contemporaries, from Hannah Arendt to Franklin D. Roosevelt, used the notion of a German deviation from the values of Western civilization as a key argument. Second, in modifying the Sonderweg thesis, the Israeli-German historian Dan Diner suggested that the Holocaust constituted a rupture of common ethical norms, a veritable Zivilisationsbruch. Third, the surprising resurgence of the concept of “civil society” as a rejection of Communist dictatorship and as a characterization of voluntary social activism links the two dictatorships with each other. Therefore, “civilization” may serve as shorthand for the struggle for human rights.