from WNYC Studios. I'm Brian Lehrer. This is my daily politics podcast. It's Friday, December 22nd.

It's quite a time to be Masha Gessen. Just this month, Vladimir Putin put the New Yorker

staff writer, an author of 11 books,

on his wanted list, criminal charges against Maser Gessen for allegedly spreading false

information about the Russian military. And then in a bizarre irony, an award ceremony,

honoring Gessen for their political thought was canceled in Germany because of their political thought.

It was the Hannah Arendt Prize for political thought, given out each year by a foundation in Germany

associated with the Green Party there, Arendt having been a scholar of totalitarianism in her day,

something Gessen is today in theirs. Both Jewish, both have had victims

of the Nazis and their families. Gessen's family also left the former Soviet Union in 1981,

if I have my dates right, when Masha was 14. But something Gessen wrote in the New Yorker,

critical of Germany's relationship to free speech about the war in Gaza and conditions in Gaza, caused the ceremony to be canceled. The award was made nonetheless in a different setting, we should say. Gessen has been on this show many times over the last decade, as some of you know, usually to speak about their

writings on Putin and Trump and totalitarianism, today to speak about Putin and Trump and totalitarianism,

but also about Gaza and what Masha calls memory culture in Germany. Masha, always good to have

you. Welcome back to WNYC. Great to be with you, Brian.

Your New York article actually begins with your description of visiting Germany often after the

fall of the Berlin Wall and maybe even before in the 80s, and you found it exhilarating to watch

memory culture take shape. So can you start by defining what you mean by the term memory culture and why you first

found it exhilarating?

Actually, the term memory culture is a German term.

And it's something that post-Berling Wall Germany, the post-unification Germany,

really put a lot of effort into cultivating. It's really the cornerstone of national identity in this post-1989 Germany,

...