The guts of ENDPAPERS is set in the aftermath of World War II, as Germans are literally picking up the pieces. From English-language histories by Ian Kershaw, Frederick Taylor, Konrad Jarausch, and Richard Bessel; to the newspaper dispatches of Swedish novelist Stig Dagerman; to the recent contributions of German scholars Andreas Kossert and Harald Jähner, I'm indebted to each for helping me understand that period. None of these books is exonerative of the German people or unreasonably sympathetic; each is, rather, simply trying to explain.