I admire the country’s willingness to memorialize its atrocious past and to make sites like Dachau accessible to tourists, especially when compared with Austria’s unwillingness to do the same. But I’m not sure I’ll ever warm up to the idea of concentration camp gift shops, particularly those that sell Woody Allen biographies. (The last time I visited Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust memorial, the gift shop was selling key chains, so this isn’t just about Germany.) In the absence of dispositive answers but knowing a bit about how modern-day German culture objectifies Jews in odd and somewhat disconcerting ways, my best guess is that these biographies are meant to suggest to visitors, especially German ones, that Jews are, in fact, really quite excellent — for one thing, they’re funny! — and therefore the Nazis were idiots for trying to annihilate them.

I’ve tried to call the Dachau shop manager a number of times since leaving the site to better understand the rationale behind the store’s collection of biographies of putatively great Jews (that “putatively” is directed at Allen, not Roth or, God knows, Einstein), but I haven’t been able to reach her yet. I should have asked someone during our visit about the shop’s fascinating selection of merchandise, but my photography and bookrack hijinks caused the gift-shop manager on duty to become upset. Apparently, one thing you don’t want to do as a foreign visitor is upset the order of German concentration camp gift shops. It’s just one of those unspoken taboos, I guess. Kind of like making too big a deal of modern-day massacres while attending an international security conference in a city whose name provokes memories of both fascism and appeasement.