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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: Blackwell Companions to World History
- Sprache: Englisch
Provides a cutting-edge, nuanced, and multi-disciplinary picture of the Holocaust from local, transnational, continental, and global perspectives
Holocaust Studies is a dynamic field that encompasses discussions on human behavior, extremity, and moral action. A diverse range of disciplines – history, philosophy, literature, social psychology, anthropology, geography, amongst others – continue to make important contributions to its scholarship.
A Companion to the Holocaust provides exciting commentaries on current and emerging debates and identifies new connections for research. The text incorporates new language, geographies, and approaches to address the precursors of the Holocaust and examine its global consequences. A team of international contributors provides insightful and sophisticated analyses of current trends in Holocaust research that go far beyond common conceptions of the Holocaust’s causes, unfolding and impact.
Scholars draw on their original research to interpret current, agenda-setting historical and historiographical debates on the Holocaust. Six broad sections cover wide-ranging topics such as new debates about Nazi perpetrators, arguments about the causes and places of persecution of Jews in Germany and Europe, and Jewish and non-Jewish responses to it, the use of forced labor in the German war economy, representations of the Holocaust witness, and many others. A masterful framing chapter sets the direction and tone of each section’s themes. Comprising over thirty essays, this important addition to Holocaust studies:
- Offers a remarkable compendium of systematic, comparative, and precise analyses
- Covers areas and topics not included in any other companion of its type
- Examines the ongoing cultural, social, and political legacies of the Holocaust
- Includes discussions on non-European and non-Western geographies, inter-ethnic tensions, and violence
A Companion to the Holocaust is an essential resource for students and scholars of European, German, genocide, colonial and Jewish history, as well as those in the general humanities.
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Table of Contents
Cover
Notes on Editors and Contributors
Co‐editors
Contributors
Introduction
Theme 1: New Orientations and Topical Integrations
Chapter One: “Final Solution,” Holocaust, Shoah, or Genocide? From Separate to Integrated Histories
The First Histories
The
Khurbn‐Forshung
Tradition
The History of the Holocaust as Jewish History
The History of the “Final Solution” as Perpetrator History
The History of the Shoah as Integrated History
The History of Nazi Genocide as World History
Conclusion
Recommended Reading
Chapter Two: Raphael Lemkin and Genocide before the Holocaust: Ethnic and Religious Minorities under Attack
The Genocides of World War I
Political and National Instability after 1918
Conclusions: Raphael Lemkin and Genocide before the Holocaust
Recommended Reading
Chapter Three: Ideologies of Race: The Construction and Suppression of Otherness in Nazi Germany
Historiography
Spaces of Exclusion
Conclusion
Recommended Reading
Chapter Four: Queering Holocaust Studies: New Frameworks for Understanding Nazi Homophobia and the Politics of Sexuality under National Socialism
Historical Context
The Weimar Republic
Nazi Germany
Persecutions against Lesbians
Postwar and Contemporary Effects of Nazi Homophobia
Recommended Reading
Chapter Five: The Holocaust as Genocide: Milestones in the Historiographical Discourse
The Survivor’s Insight
The Search for a Narrative
Comparative Conceptualization
Towards a New Integrated History?
Conclusion
Recommended Reading
Theme 2: Plunder, Extermination, and Prosecution
Chapter Six: Old Nazis, Ordinary Men, and New Killers: Synthetic and Divergent Histories of Perpetrators
“Ordinary Men” or “Willing Executioners”?
The German Army and Genocide
Agents of Annihilation: The SS and Police Complex
The Center and Periphery and the Geography of Genocide
Gender, the
Volksgemeinschaft
, and Genocide
Conclusion
Recommended Reading
Chapter Seven: The Nazi War Economy, the Forced Labor System, and the Murder of Jewish and Non‐Jewish Workers
The Forced Labor System in and for the German
Reich
Jewish Forced Labor and the Holocaust
13
“Useless Eaters”: East European Forced Laborers Labeled asMentally Ill or “Durably Unable to Work”
27
Conclusion
Recommended Reading
Chapter Eight: All the Other Neighbors: Communal Genocide in Eastern Europe
Communal Genocide
Communal Violence and Genocide – All Violence Is Local
Communal Genocide in Lwów
Explaining Communal Genocide in the Holocaust
Remembering Communal Genocide: A Time to Forget, No Time to Remember
Recommended Reading
Chapter Nine: War Crimes Trials, the Holocaust, and Historiography, 1943–2011
Terminology, Numbers, Research Questions
Allied Retribution in Occupied Germany
Liberated Europe
Perpetrator and Victim Nations
Conclusion
Recommended Reading
Chapter Ten: Crimes against Culture: From Plunder to Postwar Restitution Politics
Vandalism and Plunder, 1933–45
Restitution as “Second Expropriation,”? 1945–56
Conclusion
Recommended Reading
Theme 3: Reframing Jewish Histories
Chapter Eleven: Characteristics of Holocaust Historiography and Their Contexts since 1990: Emphases, Perceptions, Developments, Debates
Processes
Impacts
Conclusion
Recommended Reading
Chapter Twelve: A Sustained Civilian Struggle: Rethinking Jewish Responses to the Nazi Regime
Resistance: Definition and Historiography
Alternative Frameworks
Conclusion
Recommended Reading
Chapter Thirteen: Ghettos and Ghettoization – History and Historiography
Anti‐Jewish Ghettoization Policy
Ghettos from the Bottom Up: Basic Features and Regional Versions
Ghettos from within
Conclusion: Future Research Challenges
Recommended Reading
Chapter Fourteen: Survivors of the Holocaust within the Nazi Universe of Camps
The Murder of the Jews and the Concentration Camps
Segregated Labor Deployment and Informal Camps for Jews inside the Reich
Forced Labor Camps for Jews in the Occupied East
Tracing the Paths of Jewish Survivors through the Nazi Camp Universe
Decentralized Camps for Jews and “Half‐Jews” in 1944–45
Conclusion
Recommended Reading
Chapter Fifteen: Social Networks of Support: Trajectories of Escape, Rescue and Survival
Statistics
Individuals
Familial, Political, and Religious Networks
Underground Organizations
Jews Rescuing Jews
Conclusion
Recommended Reading
Chapter Sixteen: A Young Person’s War: The Disrupted Lives of Children and Youth
Children in the World of Ghettos and on the “Aryan” Side
Disabled Jewish Children during the Holocaust
Children in the Universe of Concentration and Death Camps
Hidden Children
Children’s Testimonies as a Historical Source and Narrative Voice
Recommended Reading
Chapter Seventeen: Anything But Silent: Jewish Responses to the Holocaust in the Aftermath of World War II
Initiating Transitional Justice: Jewish Legal Responses to the Holocaust
Documenting Nazi Crimes: Historiographical Responses to the Holocaust
Creating Spaces of Memory: Jewish Practices of Commemoration after the Holocaust
Conclusion
Recommended Reading
Theme 4: Local, Mobile, and Transnational Holocausts
Chapter Eighteen: Geographies of the Holocaust
Pioneers
Scale
Space and Place
Spatial Experience
Future Directions
Recommended Reading
Chapter Nineteen: The Global “Final Solution” and Nazi Imperialism
The Racial Worldview
Paths to Destruction
War and Genocide
The Future Holocaust in North Africa and the Middle East
Recommended Reading
Chapter Twenty: Refugees’ Routes: Emigration, Resettlement, and Transmigration
The Development of the Refugee Crisis
The Spread of Anti‐Jewish Policies
The Evian Conference
Driving Jews out of the Country
Countries of Refuge or of Refusal?
British Immigration Policy
Recommended Reading
Chapter Twenty–One: The Geopolitics of Neutrality: Diplomacy, Refuge, and Rescue during the Holocaust
Recommended Reading
Chapter Twenty–Two: Spain and the Holocaust: Contested Past, Contested Present
The Holocaust in Spain’s History: So Distant, Yet So Near
The Holocaust in Spanish Memory (1945–2000)
Holocaust Remembrance and Memory Conflicts (2000–15)
Recommended Reading
Chapter Twenty–Three: Contesting the “Zionist” Narrative: Arab Responses to the Holocaust
Dissociation and Intensive Preoccupation
Contemporary Discourse on the Holocaust
Fascination with the Nazi Leader
Responses to the Death of Elie Wiesel
Egyptian Writers on the Holocaust
Palestinian President Mahmud ʻAbbas’s Statement on the Holocaust
Early Representation of the Holocaust: The Reparations Agreement between Germany and Israel
Recommended Reading
Chapter Twenty‐Four: Redrawing Holocaust Geographies: A Cartography of Vichy and Nazi Reach into North Africa
Un‐silencing History and the Challenge of Modern Politics
Jews, Muslims and the Threat of Antisemites in North Africa during the 1930s
North African Jews and Vichy France and Nazi Occupation
Post‐World War II Narratives and Challenges of Remembrance
Recommended Reading
Theme 5: Witnessing in Dialogue: Testifiers, Readers, and Viewers
Chapter Twenty‐Five: The Holocaust Witness: Wartime and Postwar Voices
Wartime
Postwar
Testimony and Literature
Recommended Reading
Chapter Twenty‐Six: Sexual Violence: Recovering a Suppressed History
Defining Our Terms
Rape as the Exception to the Rule: The
Rassenschande
Laws
The Source Debate
What Do We Know?: Victims and Perpetrators
“
Choiceless Choice” or Agency
Recommended Reading
Chapter Twenty‐Seven: Ethical Grey Zones: On Coercion and Complicity in the Concentration Camp and Beyond
Historical Background
Summary and Discussion of the Essay
Disputed Matters of Interpretation
Innovative Applications and Future Research
Conclusion
Recommended Reading
Chapter Twenty‐Eight: Holocaust Photography and the Challenge of the Visual
History of the Pictures
Postwar Evidence
Holocaust Photographs: Moral and Ethical Response
Museums and the Ethics of Display
Recommended Reading
Chapter Twenty‐Nine: Holocaust Memory in a Post‐Survivor World: Bearing Lasting Witness
Recommended Reading
Chapter Thirty: Postmemory: Digital Testimony and the Future of Witnessing
Frames of Interpretation
Exemplary and Unexemplary Witnesses
Olga K.: A Case Study of an Exemplary Witness
Richard K.: A Case Study of an Unexemplary Witness
Testimonies beyond the Shoah
Recommended Reading
Theme 6: Human Rights and Visual Culture: Pivots and Disruptions
Chapter Thirty‐One: The Problem of Human Rights after the Holocaust
The Long History of Human Rights in the West
The Holocaust and the Evolution of Human Rights Law
The Holocaust and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
Refugees without Rights
Human Rights without the Holocaust
Recommended Reading
Chapter Thirty‐Two: Indigenous Genocide and Perceptions of the Holocaust in Canada
Indigenous Genocide in Canada
Legacies of Genocide and Engagement with the Holocaust
The TRC and the Genocide Question
Indigenous Genocide Scholarship during the TRC Mandate
Recommended Reading
Chapter Thirty‐Three: Lessons from History? The Future of Holocaust Education
Holocaust Education: A Field Emerged?
Holocaust Museums and Holocaust Education: Comparative Perspectives
The Anne Frank House
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
The South African Holocaust and Genocide Foundation
Conclusion
Recommended Reading
Chapter Thirty‐Four: The Changing Landscape of Holocaust Memorialization in Poland
“Broken Tablets” and the Remnants of Jewish Memory in Poland
The Six Extermination Camps
Holocaust Tourism after Communism and Contemporary Memorial Projects
Recommended Reading
Chapter Thirty‐Five: #Holocaust #Auschwitz: Performing Holocaust Memory on Social Media
Holocaust Memory 2.0? Visual, Spatial, and Digital
“A Virtual Community of Remembrance”: #Auschwitz and the Instagram Archive
“A place everyone should see”. Auschwitz and Digital Place‐Making
#NoFilter or #BlackandWhite? The Imagined Aesthetics of Auschwitz on Instagram
#sad #emotional #shock #heartbreaking: Hashtagging Affect at Auschwitz
Conclusion
Recommended Reading
Chapter Thirty‐Six: Contemporary Holocaust Film Beyond Mimetic Imperatives
Jewish Agency in the Revenge Fantasy
Documentary, Mediated Trauma, and the Epistemology of Film
Normalized Memory and Viral Videos
Revisiting German Suffering
Recommended Reading
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Tables
Chapter 7
Table 7.1 Labor Market in the Third Reich during the War (million persons)
Table 7.2 German‐Occupied Countries and Their Role in the Forced Labor System
Table 7.3 The Nazis’ Racial Scale and the Mortality of Foreign Civilian and P...
Table 7.4 Total Foreign Labor Force in Germany, 1939–45, and Survivors in mid...
Table 7.5 Active Euthanasia Measures against Forced Civilian Laborers: Places...
List of Illustrations
Chapter 8
Figure 8.1 Lithuanians murder Jews at the Lietūkis garage, June 27, 1941. (N...
Figure 8.2 Suspected victims of the pogrom on June 30 and July 1, 1941, in L...
Figure 8.3 Ukrainians assault Jewish women in Lwów.
Figure 8.4 Lietūkis Garage Massacre Memorial, 2015.
Chapter 14
Map 14.1
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia of Camps a
...
Chapter 28
Figure 28.1 A pile of starved bodies, Buchenwald, Germany 1945 by Lee Miller...
Figure 28.2 Alberto Errera, “Women being pushed toward the gas chambers at c...
Chapter 29
Figure 29.1 Women being forced to the gas chamber of Crematorium 4 [V] at Au...
Figure 29.2 Birch trees near Crematorium 2 [III] at Auschwitz‐Birkenau.
Chapter 34
Figure 34.1 A broken tablet memorial constructed at the Jewish cemetery in I...
Figure 34.2 Recently recovered Jewish headstones returned the Jewish cemeter...
Figure 34.3 Everyday objects plundered from Jewish prisoners still emerge fr...
Figure 34.4 The memorial at Bełżec, established in 2004, is dominated by sla...
Figure 34.5 Grodzka Gate – NN Theatre: Grodzka Gate is an ambitious and crea...
Guide
Cover
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BLACKWELL COMPANIONS TO HISTORY
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A COMPANION TO THE HOLOCAUST
Edited by
Simone GigliottiHilary Earl
This edition first published 2020© 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
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Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication DataNames: Gigliotti, Simone, editor. | Earl, Hilary Camille, 1963– editor.Title: A companion to the Holocaust / edited by Simone Gigliotti, Hilary Earl.Description: Hoboken, NJ : Wiley, 2020. | Series: Blackwell companions to world history | Includes bibliographical references and index.Identifiers: LCCN 2020000440 (print) | LCCN 2020000441 (ebook) | ISBN 9781118970522 (hardback) | ISBN 9781118970515 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9781118970508 (epub)Subjects: LCSH: Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945)–Historiography.Classification: LCC D804.348 .C66 2020 (print) | LCC D804.348 (ebook) | DDC 940.53/18–dc23LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020000440LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020000441
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Notes on Editors and Contributors
Co‐editors
Simone Gigliotti teaches Holocaust studies in the Department of History, Royal Holloway, University of London, United Kingdom. She is the author or co‐editor of five books, including The Train Journey: Transit, Captivity and Witnessing in the Holocaust (2009), and has published articles and chapters on the representation of spatial concepts and journeys in a range of Jewish refugee and Holocaust survivor texts. In‐progress works include a monograph on the Holocaust and the cinema of the displaced.
Hilary Earl is professor of European history and genocide studies at Nipissing University, North Bay, Ontario, Canada. Her research and teaching interests include war crimes trials, perpetrator testimony and behavior, the reintegration of Nazi perpetrators into German society, and the cultural impact of the Holocaust and genocide in the twenty‐first century. She has published in a variety of journals and essay collections and is the author of The Nuremberg SS‐Einsatzgruppen Trial, 1945–1958: Atrocity, Law, and History, published by Cambridge University Press, which won the Hans Rosenberg book prize for best book in Central European history. In 2014 she co‐edited with Karl Schleunes Lessons and Legacies XI: Expanding Perspectives on the Holocaust in a Changing World published by Northwestern University Press. In‐progress work includes a documentary film on Nazi perpetrators and a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council funded project that examines the 1941 massacre in Liepaja, Latvia that uses film, photographs, and testimony.
Contributors
Avril Alba is a senior lecturer in Holocaust studies and Jewish civilization in the Department of Hebrew, Biblical and Jewish Studies at the University of Sydney, Australia. She publishes in the areas of Holocaust memory and representation and has also curated several major exhibitions on these topics. Her most recent publication is a co‐edited collection with Shirli Gilbert, Holocaust Memory and Racism in the Postwar World (2019).
Natalia Aleksiun is professor of Modern Jewish History at Touro College, Graduate School of Jewish Studies in New York. She published Where to? Zionist Movement in Poland (1944–1950) (2002) and co‐edited volumes 20 and 29 of Polin. Studies in Polish Jewry. Her book Communal History. Polish Jewish Historians before the Holocaust is being published by Littman in 2020. She is completing a monograph on the Jews in hiding in Eastern Galicia during the Holocaust.
Alejandro Baer is associate professor of sociology, and director and Stephen C. Feinstein Chair of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Minnesota. He is the coauthor (with Natan Sznaider) of Memory and Forgetting in the Post‐Holocaust Era: The Ethics of Never Again (2017) and articles and chapters on Holocaust memory in Spain, visual sociology and memory, and Holocaust testimony.
Waitman Wade Beorn is a senior lecturer in history at Northumbria University in Newcastle. He is a scholar of the Holocaust and genocide as well as a digital humanist. His books include Marching into Darkness: The Wehrmacht and the Holocaust in Belarus and The Holocaust in Eastern Europe: At the Epicenter of the Final Solution. His next project explores the Janowska concentration camp outside of L'viv, Ukraine.
Daniel Blatman is the Max and Rita Haber Professor in Contemporary Jewry and Holocaust Studies at the department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is the head of the Research Institute of Contemporary Jewry and the chief historian of the Warsaw Ghetto Museum in Warsaw. He has published articles and books on the Holocaust of Polish Jewry, the Jewish labour movement in Eastern Europe, Polish Jewish‐relations, Nazi extermination policy, the death marches, and Holocaust historiography.
Aomar Boum is an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is interested in the place of religious minorities such as Jews, Baha’is, Shias, and Christians in post‐independence Middle Eastern and North African nation states. He is the author of Memories of Absence: How Muslims Remember Jews in Morocco (2013) and coauthor of The Holocaust and North Africa (2019).
Cathie Carmichael is professor of European history at the University of East Anglia, Norwich and is the author of Ethnic Cleansing in the Balkans (2002) and Genocide before the Holocaust (2009) and co‐edited the Routledge History of Genocide (2015). Her current research focuses on borders, boundaries, national identity, and violence in South East Europe.
Nicholas Chare is associate professor in the Department of History of Art and Film Studies at the University of Montreal, Canada. In 2018 he was the Diane and Howard Wohl Fellow in the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, in Washington, DC. He is the author of Auschwitz and Afterimages (2011) and The Auschwitz‐Sonderkommando (2019) and coauthor (with Dominic Williams) of Matters of Testimony (2016).
Tim Cole is professor of social history and director of the Brigstow Institute at the University of Bristol, United Kingdom. His publications include Traces of the Holocaust (2011), Holocaust Geographies (co‐edited, 2014), and Holocaust Landscapes (2016).
Pedro Correa Martín‐Arroyo is currently a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow at the Holocaust Research Institute, Royal Holloway, University of London, United Kingdom. He is the author of several publications on World War II refugees and humanitarianism in Southwestern Europe.
Martin C. Dean received a PhD in European history from Queens’ College, Cambridge. He has worked for the Australian Special Investigations Unit and London’s Metropolitan Police War Crimes Unit. He was an applied research scholar at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and was a volume editor for The Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos. His publications include Collaboration in the Holocaust and Robbing the Jews, which won a National Jewish Book Award. Currently he works as a historical consultant for the Babi Yar Holocaust Memorial Center.
Jonathan Druker is professor of Italian at Illinois State University. In 2014, he was a fellow at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC, where he began research on his current book project, an analysis of Holocaust literature focusing on trauma, history, memory, and time. With Scott Lerner, he edited The New Italy and the Jews: From Massimo D’Azeglio to Primo Levi (2018).
David Engel is Greenberg Professor of Holocaust studies, professor of Hebrew and Judaic studies, and professor of history at New York University. A member of the Academic Committee of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, he is the author of seven books and upwards of one hundred articles on aspects of the Holocaust and modern Jewish history.
Monika J. Flaschka is a visiting lecturer at Georgia State University, Atlanta. Her research focuses primarily on sex crimes committed by German soldiers during World War II, and she has published analyses of rape in German‐run concentration camps and rape as a weapon of war and genocide.
Elisabeth Gallas is senior research associate at the Leibniz Institute for Jewish History and Culture – Simon Dubnow in Leipzig, Germany. From 2012 to 2015 she held postdoctoral research fellowships at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute of Holocaust‐Studies after receiving her PhD in modern history from the Universität Leipzig in 2011. Her research focuses on Holocaust studies, Aftermath studies, and Jewish legal history.
Bianca Gaudenzi is research fellow at the German Historical Institute, Rome, and at the Zukunftskolleg, University of Konstanz, as well as research associate at Wolfson College, Cambridge. Her publications include a study of consumer culture in Fascist Italy, Comprare per credere (second printing, 2016) and a special section of the Journal of Contemporary History titled The Restitution of Looted Art in the Twentieth Century: Transnational and Global Perspectives (2017).
Amanda F. Grzyb is associate professor of information and media studies at Western University, Canada. Her research focuses on genocide and state violence, including the Holocaust, Rwanda, Sudan, and El Salvador. She is currently the coordinator of “Surviving Memory in Postwar El Salvador,” an international collaborative research network of survivors, scholars, architects, and artists focused on the documentation and commemoration of massacres during the Salvadoran Civil War.
Valerie Hébert is associate professor of history and interdisciplinary studies at Lakehead University Orillia in Ontario, Canada. She is the author of Hitler’s Generals on Trial: The Last War Crimes Tribunal at Nuremberg (2010), as well as essays and articles on Rwanda’s Gacaca Tribunals, the resistance figure Kurt Gerstein, teaching the Holocaust with postwar trials, and Holocaust photography.
Susanne Heim is the principal editor of the sixteen‐volume document edition, The Persecution and Extermination of European Jews by Nazi Germany 1933–1945 (VEJ) at the Leibniz Institut für Zeitgeschichte in Berlin, Germany. Her research topics include the history Jewish emigration from Nazi Germany and migration and population policy in the twentieth century. Volume 6 of the VEJ series on The German Reich and the Protectorate Bohemia and Moravia October 1941–March 1943 was published in 2019.
Laura Jockusch is Albert Abramson Associate Professor of Holocaust Studies at Brandeis University. She wrote Collect and Record! Jewish Holocaust Documentation in Early Postwar Europe (2012) and co‐edited (with Gabriel Finder) Jewish Honor Courts: Revenge, Retribution and Reconciliation in Europe and Israel after the Holocaust (2015). Her current research projects explore Jewish conceptions of post‐Holocaust justice and the trials of Stella Goldschlag (aka Kübler‐Isaaksohn) in postwar Germany.
Meghan Lundrigan received her PhD in 2019 from Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. She researches the intersection of Holocaust memory, visual culture, and social media. She is currently co‐writing a book, Holocaust Memory in the Digital Mediascape, with Jennifer Evans and Erica Fagen, and is currently a historical research associate for Know History Inc., in Ottawa, Canada. See knowhistory.ca.
David B. MacDonald is a professor and research leadership chair at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada. He works on comparative Indigenous politics, international relations, and genocide studies. His most recent books are The Sleeping Giant Awakens: Genocide, Indian Residential Schools, and the Challenge of Conciliation (2019) and Populism and World Politics: Exploring Inter‐ and Transnational Dimensions, co‐edited with F.A. Stengel and D. Nabers (2019).
Daniel H. Magilow is professor of German in the Department of Modern Foreign Languages and Literatures at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. His research centers on photography and film and their intersections with Holocaust Studies, Weimar Germany, and postwar memory. He is the author, coauthor, editor, or translator of five books, most recently Holocaust Representations in History: An Introduction (coauthored with Lisa Silverman, second edition, 2019).
David A. Messenger is professor of history and chair of the Department of History at the University of South Alabama in Mobile. He studies the role of Spain during and after World War II and is interested in the history of both the era and the memory of the war in contemporary society. His publications include Hunting Nazis in Franco’s Spain (2014), and War and Public Memory: Case Studies in Twentieth‐Century Europe (2020).
Joanna Beata Michlic is a social and cultural historian specializing in social history of East European Jews and the memory of the Holocaust. She is founder of HBI (Hadassah‐Brandeis Institute) Project on Families, Children and the Holocaust at Brandeis University. Her latest book Jewish Family 1939–Present: History, Representation, and Memory, Brandeis University Press/NEUP, named to the Ethical Inquiry list of the best books published in 2017 at Brandeis University.
Dan Michman is head of the International Institute of Holocaust Research and Incumbent of the John Najmann Chair in Holocaust Studies, Yad Vashem; and emeritus professor of modern Jewish history and former chair of the Arnold and Leona Finkler Institute of Holocaust Research, Bar‐Ilan University. His publications cover a broad array of topics regarding the Holocaust, its impact and memory, with a special focus on historiography, conceptualizations, and methodologies.
Guy Miron is the vice president for academic affairs at the Open University of Israel and the director of the research center for the study of the Holocaust in Germany at Yad Vashem. His research focuses on modern German and Central European Jewish history. His book The Waning of the Emancipation was published in 2011. He also served as the editor of Yad Vashem Encyclopedia of the Ghetto During the Holocaust
Devin O. Pendas is professor of history at Boston College. He received his PhD from the University of Chicago in 2000. In addition to the history of the Holocaust, his research interests include the history of global war crimes trials and the history of mass violence. His publications include The Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial, 1963–1965: Genocide, History, and the Limits of the Law and Law, Democracy, and Transitional Justice in Germany, 1945–‐1950. He has also co‐edited a number of volumes, including Beyond the Racial State: Rethinking Nazi Germany and Political Trials in History and Theory.
Kim Christian Priemel is professor of contemporary European history at the University of Oslo. Among his publications are The Betrayal. The Nuremberg Trials and German Divergence (2016) and, jointly edited with Alexa Stiller, Reassessing the Nuremberg Military Tribunals. Transitional Justice, Trial Narratives, and Historiography (2012).
Avraham (Alan) Rosen is the author or editor of fourteen books. He is most recently the author of The Holocaust’s Jewish Calendars: Keeping Time Sacred, Making Time Holy (2019). His edition of Elie Wiesel’s unpublished lectures, Filled with Fire and Light, is due to appear in 2020. He lectures regularly on Holocaust Literature and Testimony at Yad Vashem’s International School for Holocaust Studies and other Holocaust study centers.
Noah Shenker is the 6a Foundation and N. Milgrom Senior Lecturer in Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. He is the author of Reframing Holocaust Testimony (2015), and several articles and chapters on topics addressing representations of the Holocaust and other genocides through film, testimony, and new media.
Mark Spoerer is chair of economic and social history at the Institut für Geschichte Universität Regensburg. He researches economic and business history. His current project is on the economic growth and living standards in premodern Germany.
William J. Spurlin, professor of English and vice‐dean/education in the College of Business, Arts & Social Sciences at Brunel University London, publishes widely in queer studies, comparative literature, postcolonial studies, and translation studies. His recent books include Imperialism within the Margins: Queer Representation and the Politics of Culture in Southern Africa (2006); Lost Intimacies: Rethinking Homosexuality under National Socialism (2009); and Contested Borders: Queer Politics and Cultural Translation in Contemporary Francophone Writing from the Maghreb (forthcoming).
Dan Stone is professor of modern history and director of the Holocaust Research Institute at Royal Holloway, University of London. His books include Histories of the Holocaust (2010) and The Liberation of the Camps (2015). He is currently completing a book on the International Tracing Service, titled Fate Unknown (forthcoming in 2021, and writing a book on the Holocaust for Penguin’s revived Pelican series.
Esther Webman is a senior research fellow at the Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies at Tel Aviv University, Israel. Her research focuses on Arab discourse analysis, particularly Arab antisemitism and Arab perceptions of the Holocaust. Her book, From Empathy to Denial: Arab Responses to the Holocaust, coauthored with Professor Meir Litvak, won the Washington Institute for Near East Policy's Gold book prize for 2010, and was published in Hebrew in 2015.
Gerhard L. Weinberg is emeritus professor of history of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The most recently published of his eleven books is World War II: A Very Short Introduction published by Oxford University Press. He continues to lecture internationally on Nazi Germany, the Holocaust, and World War II.
Edward B. Westermann received his PhD from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and is a professor of history at Texas A&M‐San Antonio. His books include Hitler’s Police Battalions: Enforcing Racial War in the East (2005) and Hitler’s Ostkrieg and the Indian Wars: Comparing Genocide and Conquest (2011). His forthcoming work, Drunk on Genocide: Alcohol, Masculinity, and the Intoxication of Mass Murder, will be published by Cornell University Press.
Carol Zemel is professor emerita of art history and visual culture at York University, Toronto, Canada. She is the author of Looking Jewish: Visual Culture and Modern Diaspora (2012). Her recent work focuses on Jewish and diasporic issues and the ethics of visuality in modern and contemporary art. Her current project is Art in Extremis, a study of images made by prisoners in ghettos and camps during the Holocaust.
Introduction
Simone Gigliotti and Hilary Earl
In the congested field of Holocaust studies, is there room for yet another collection of essays claiming to offer new directions in research and pedagogy? The event that has come to be termed “the Holocaust” has a long and multilingual history that has been expressed in testimonies, documents, and visual culture. The historian Philip Friedman lamented the early postwar work of amateur historians whose impulse was to record the minutiae of everyday life as a type of “graphomania.”1 The poor quality of these works, as he believed them to be, may yet find enduring if not unfortunate resonance in the current plethora of books, materials, and films that profess new findings and reinterpretations of the works and words of established and globally iconic survivors. While not advocating the “forced disappearance” of today’s “amateur scholars,” as was Friedman’s ambition, it is time to reflect on eight decades of knowledge and inquiry. If the events that we now call the Holocaust have been diluted into generality, abstraction, and clichés, divested of their local geographies and foundations in European history and politics, what is there “left” for scholars to do? What tools do scholars have to reenergize a field of scholarship that moves beyond stereotype and sentiment in public culture and discourse, and furthermore, encourages local conversations in countries with their own difficult relationships to histories of refuge, rescue, and persecution of Jewish and non‐Jewish groups?
A Companion to the Holocaust is a decidedly noncompliant and idiosyncratic attempt to reenergize and re‐“place” a field of scholarship that is highly prolific, diverse, and increasingly disrupted through popular culture and digital technology. Yet this field of scholarship is still dominated by narrative models such as that first offered by Raul Hilberg, in The Destruction of the European Jews (1961). Hilberg, widely described as one of the “founding fathers” of Holocaust scholarship, provided a model by which to understand the complexities of state‐sponsored violence and totalitarianism. While the perpetrator, victim, and bystander model continues to influence how scholars think and discuss causation, criminality, and complicity, Hilberg, it must be said, was not the only scholar to think about these categories and, indeed, there were forebears in this far‐reaching interpretative effort.
As a way to work through the psychological trauma of the one hundred or so persons he interviewed in Displaced Persons’ camps across Europe in the summer of 1946, David Boder set about to create a list of terms that he referred to as a “traumatic inventory.” If a similar method is applied to the vast inventory of Holocaust studies scholarship, Boder’s method may be diagnostic, even instructive. In examining the vocabulary of the Holocaust’s interpretative landscape, we find a core register of tropes and phrases that reflect the evolution, if not fatigue, about how the events, processes, and perpetration of the Holocaust have been rhetorically freighted, gendered, and located: the banality of evil, ordinary men, Hitler’s willing executioners, the Muselmann, the grey zone, the drowned and the saved, machinery of destruction, bloodlands, the Holocaust by Bullets, and never again. These phrases find currency in scholars’ ongoing efforts to understand and narrate the Holocaust, providing audiences with an ostensibly secure knowledge about judgment, responsibility, and choice. They bring us no closer, however, to the challenges of scholarship in this area, not simply in terms of motivation and inheritance, but also in terms of the financial and intellectual infrastructure that produces it: archival research and access, publication strategies with university presses and journals, funding for research, the surge in precarious faculty appointments alongside tenure‐track and endowed faculty positions, language competency, methodological approaches, and intellectual influences and limitations. How can current and future intellectual practices be conducted and funded in ethical and engaged ways that achieve the ambition that rigorous scholarship on the Holocaust demands – to minimize cliché and embrace individual, historical, political, and social context, contingency, and ambiguity?
Hilberg’s enduring model of the entanglement of protagonists – (perpetrator), targeted group (victim), and observer (bystander) – rarely practised the integrated method of inquiry that Saul Friedländer would later utilize in his award‐winning two‐volume work, Nazi Germany and the Jews.2 Indeed, Hilberg’s vision of the “Final Solution” was an early statement of state‐sponsored genocide as implementation, paralysis, and observation. It kept perpetrators, victims, and bystanders together, yet apart. It was this superficial togetherness that foregrounded “perpetrator history,” and with it began the dominance of the most “objective” field of Holocaust‐related inquiry for four decades. It was not until the early 2000s when much overdue attention to fashioning a “Jewish history” of the Holocaust emerged. Such histories utilized Yiddish and Eastern European‐language sources (such as Polish, Russian, Ukrainian, and Lithuanian) and revived attention to early histories of documenting the destruction, or Khurbn, during wartime and in the early postwar years. These document collections included extensive and contemporaneous ghetto chronicles such as the Oneg Shabbes archive from the Warsaw Ghetto.3 Other ghetto documentation initiatives include those pioneered and evaluated by Jewish historical commissions in Lublin under the direction of Philip Friedman,4 the United Nations War Crimes Commission,5 those across Eastern and Central Europe, those in Displaced Persons camps, and those across Europe, more generally.6 The coexistence of these parallel but profoundly varying versions of the Nazi regime’s impact has recently produced rewritings of the Holocaust as restorative ethno‐history and as multidirectional pivots. These examples include Dan Michman’s Holocaust Historiography: A Jewish Perspective (2003), Norman Goda’s edited collections, Jewish Histories of the Holocaust: New Transnational Approaches (2014), and Rethinking Holocaust Justice: Essays across Disciplines (2017) as well as new geographies, as in Aomar Boum and Sarah A. Stein’s edited collection, The Holocaust and North Africa (2018). These books, and the chapters in A Companion to the Holocaust, do not altogether abandon the rhetorical convenience of “perpetrators, victims, and bystanders.” Rather, they encourage readers to chase and define new terms and understandings that are “fit for purpose” and speak to emerging trends and disruptions from a multitude of disciplines, archives, and scholarly influences.
The chapters assembled in A Companion to the Holocaust orient new places, introduce new protagonists, and reappraise the historical contexts and locations that produced the events we now call the Holocaust. They also address the difficulties in stretching the utility of “the Holocaust” to local and global impacts of the Nazi regime: for example, the micro‐contexts and shifting localities of the places of persecution, refugees’ multiple displacements, from the local to the transnational and colonial, from Jewish to Muslim, and from sexual to public ritualized violence. The forty contributors to this Companion demonstrate how scholarship in the field commonly known as “Holocaust studies” can develop beyond clichéd models of evil, goodness, and righteous individuals. Doubtless, many of the chapters tackle these clichés head‐on, embracing and questioning their relevance, if not providing a granular microhistory of concepts (such as “the grey zone”), before they became moral and seemingly universal motifs.
In the philosophy of its curation A Companion to the Holocaust represents a nonteleological approach that resists the notion that one guidebook, reference work, or field survey can reflect or represent the state of the field. For example, A Companion to the Holocaust acknowledges the contributions of The Columbia Guide to the Holocaust (2003) and Peter Hayes and John K. Roth (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Holocaust Studies (2010) in forging a metanarrative statement on Holocaust research and teaching directions. The Columbia Guide, for example, addresses the Holocaust through a structure that reinforces chronology over geography. Its content includes longstanding historiographical themes structured around the Hilbergian paradigm (perpetrators, victims, bystanders), which many scholars have not essentially challenged as a principal model to guide inquiry and writing. The Oxford Handbook follows a similar model of chronological unfolding to the Columbia Guide although it does insert themes, structure, and agency into the narrative. The Oxford Handbook is perhaps the closest in ambition to A Companion to the Holocaust but its publication year unsurprisingly renders it outdated. Intense and recent debates about bloodlands, borderlands, and communal and mass violence, for example, have reshaped how the unfolding of the Nazi genocide must be explained in relation to local violence and occupation policies in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Additionally, the multitude of geographical rims and transnational routes covered in A Companion to the Holocaust suggest that even the new subfield of Holocaust geographies has some distance to travel beyond Western, Central, Eastern, southern and northern Europe to consider Nazi‐induced migrations and displacement in global locations and connect with scholarship that has long considered these migrations as part of Jewish refugee and exile studies, but not essentially, as Holocaust “history.” These interpretive tensions, of where to “place,” and how to “write,” the Holocaust’s dispersed global and narrative impacts, flow through A Companion to the Holocaust.
The main point of difference of A Companion to the Holocaust is its innovation in geographical coverage, topical range, and contributor profile. It injects new language, geographies, and approaches into the study of the field, focusing on the local antecedents of the Holocaust and the event’s global ramifications from the time of the event through to the present. It also has a distinctly global ambition in its attention to non‐European and non‐western geographies, interethnic tensions and violence, and a nontokenistic approach to “other victims.” We anticipate some dissatisfaction, however, because readers are not provided with custom chapters on histories of antisemitism,7 religion and Christianity,8 Sinti and Roma,9 the disabled, and victims of medical experiments,10 and many other victim groups of the Nazis. Nor does A Companion include dedicated chapters on global diasporas, rescue schemes, or refugees’ pathways to South‐East Asia, Latin America, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, or Africa.11 There are also omissions on topics such as forensic archaeology,12 virtual realities, memoryscapes and survivors,13 and digital methods.14 A genuine appreciation of these digitally related topics requires a heavily geo‐visual, cartographic, and sensory experience through new media platforms, GIS software, and artificial and virtual reality environments to maximize their appreciation. While the technological advent of these research areas is foregrounded in some chapters of A Companion to the Holocaust, their deep and richly diverse “meta‐immersive” exploration cannot be presented and fully appreciated in text form without a supporting interactive, web‐based platform or product.
These foregoing omissions were the outcome, therefore, of a variety of factors: editorial choice, scholars’ availability, and a nonconformist attitude we adopted to what a scoping work such as this volume might do and achieve in relation to other titles that sufficiently cover these topics in monographs, journal articles, and indeed, in emerging research areas that are disrupting “traditional” modes of Holocaust scholarship and delivering its future learning into the world of cultural industry, artificial intelligence, and virtual reality experience products.15
The remit to our contributors was as follows: to provide an up‐to‐date and synthetic contribution of their particular research fields, integrating historiographical discussion, drawing on archival evidence (however that archive was defined in relation to their topic), and provide a recommended reading list at the end of their chapters. The resulting structural division of the book into six themes with thirty‐six chapters represents the concept of disaggregated knowledge. This concept pulls out, from the prolific activity in current scholarship, key moments and orientations that are shaping research agendas, authored by PhD students, early career researchers, established and esteemed scholars in European, Jewish, and German history, and scholars from anthropology, art history, cultural studies, economic history, geography, international relations, law, literature, and political science in many countries of the world (Australia, Canada, Israel, Germany, Italy, Norway, the United Kingdom, and the United States). These chapters are testaments to the global contours of Holocaust studies’ scholarship in this present moment and its predicted condition: they are research preoccupations and collaborations, conversations and disagreements between authors, they deliver multidisciplinary integrations and rebuttals, and combine multilingual and transnational efforts to disrupt the Eurocentrism and gendered models of writing violence and impact in Holocaust studies. Taken collectively, these chapters suggest, and unsettlingly so (for historians such as the editors), that disciplines such as history are no longer privileged or prioritized as the learning public’s primary custodian or emissary of truths about the Holocaust. Our aims, therefore, for what we wanted to achieve with the volume for students, teachers, faculty, and scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds, was not so much as to keep up with current scholarship but rather to identify the most important interventions and innovations of the last two decades, many of which are becoming cemented as subfields in their own right (Holocaust geographies, digital cultures, witnessing histories and futures, and comparative genocide).
A Companion to the Holocaust is organized according to themes that represent topical interventions. Historical chronology has not been a guiding principle in organization; rather, present and co‐situated histories that argue for transnationalism, marginality, and multidisciplinary scholarship as the future of Holocaust studies are prioritized. Each of the book’s themes starts with a framing chapter that establishes the theoretical and conceptual context for subsequent chapters. Readers will notice considerable attention to Jewish histories, genocide, regional geographies beyond Europe (North Africa, the Arab world, South Africa, Australia, and Canada), Holocaust witnessing, human rights, gendered and “queer” violence, and visual culture. Synergies are to be found within and across the six themes and associated chapters, and we recommend readers to extract chapters as relevant to their research and teaching.
Theme 1: New Orientations and Topical Integrations contains five chapters that demonstrate new possibilities for thinking alternatively (with new questions, locations, temporal focuses), comparatively (with other genocides, nations, and ethnicities), and inclusively (with multiple ethnic voices and historical sources). Devin O. Pendas’s “‘Final Solution,’ Holocaust, Shoah, or Genocide? From Separate to Integrated Histories” (Chapter 1) provides an overview of the trajectories of Holocaust scholarship from its earliest incarnation as a Jewish struggle for survival to persistent debates about Holocaust uniqueness. The chapter explores the challenges and tensions of writing about the “Final Solution” and Holocaust within the fields of Jewish history, German history, and comparative genocide studies. It also illustrates how different sources and methodological approaches have been used by scholars to explain Nazi criminality, Jewish victimization, and state‐sponsored violence. After almost eight decades of competing narratives, focus, and methods, Pendas concludes that Saul Friedländer’s approach of integrated histories has succeeded in resolving some – but not all – major historiographical debates and methodological problems.
In “Raphael Lemkin and Genocide before the Holocaust: Ethnic and Religious Minorities under Attack” (Chapter 2), Cathie Carmichael shifts the geography and time frame to the border regions (or “rimlands” as Mark Levene now calls the most unstable places) of Soviet territory in the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first third of the twentieth century. It is here – before the horrors of World War II and the “Final Solution” were known or experienced by Europe’s Jews – where Raphael Lemkin, the pioneer scholar‐activist, learned about the possibilities, purpose, and techniques of state sponsored violence against a myriad of ethnic minorities. Carmichael compels readers to reorient their thinking about “origins” and the history of organized and systemic state violence against European ethnic minorities and the interconnectedness of victims’ experiences.
Not to diminish the particular experience of Europe’s Jews, but rather to contextualize the origins of state‐sponsored violence against ethnic and religious minorities, Carmichael highlights Lemkin’s biographical and intellectual migrations, and his emerging solidarity with Armenians, Assyrians, and other ethnic minorities. As she notes, he witnessed violence against civilians in the tumultuous world of Eastern Europe where he lived until his forced migration, and it was persistent state‐sponsored violence that led him to his ideas about group violence and ultimately the novel classification of genocide.
From Carmichael’s biographical orientation to a close reading of the early years of the Third Reich, Dan Stone’s “Ideologies of Race: The Construction and Suppression of Otherness in Nazi Germany” (Chapter 3) explores the scientific antecedents that contributed to Nazi genocidal violence. Stone’s chapter analyzes the ways in which Nazism expanded nineteenth‐century constructions of racial difference and adapted them to the persecution of Jews in Germany and Europe. He locates his discussion during the 1920s and 1930s when the practices of exclusion of different groups (Jews, political opponents, foreigners, ethnic minorities, immigrants, the disabled, sexual outsiders), as well as on the institutional and medicalized responses to containing dissent and punishing deviance among German and non‐German populations was initiated. Stone suggests that historians are now moving beyond the concept of the “racial state” as the only category of analysis, not because race is irrelevant as he concludes, but rather because it is not, in and of itself, a pure and singular category of analysis.
Whereas Stone explores race as a singular category for understanding Nazi policy, the aim of William J. Spurlin’s “Queering Holocaust Studies: New Frameworks for Understanding Nazi Homophobia and the Politics of Sexuality under National Socialism” (Chapter 4) is to rethink dominant categories of historical understanding and relocate and integrate “the submerged voices of lesbian and gay victims of the Nazi Holocaust.” Spurlin deepens our historical understanding of violence and the broader category of genocide by focusing on the experiences of gay men and lesbians under National Socialism. The chapter places Nazi homophobia within the context of social constructions of racial and sexual deviancy. It argues that Nazi homophobia, rather than being a separate axis of power, was part of a larger system of social and cultural organization and was an effect of specific historical, material, and ideological conditions. Spurlin concludes by addressing the postwar criminalization of homosexuality in the former West Germany until 1968, a range of efforts to recognize in Germany and elsewhere the crimes perpetrated against gay men and lesbians, and ongoing struggles to have this persecution history acknowledged officially in compensation claims, museums, and memorialization practices.
Daniel Blatman’s “The Holocaust as Genocide: Milestones in the Historiographical Discourse” (Chapter 5) explores one of the most contentious debates in the field – the Holocaust’s ostensible uniqueness and comparability. Like Carmichael, Blatman positions the Holocaust in the realm of genocide studies. It is from that context that he critically examines the “placements” of the Holocaust over time, noting its most important movements from Jewish history to its contentious location in comparative genocide studies. Blatman notes that scholarly efforts to push the origins of the Holocaust to its current place in colonial and imperial European history began in the 1980s and 1990s with the efforts of sociologists and political scientists such as Robert Melson and Helen Fein. To some extent, although certainly not easily or across the board, comparative genocide research has had a methodological influence on Holocaust studies, bringing together the historian’s craft with the social scientists’ generalist theories as can be seen in the innovative and integrated work of scholars such as Mark Levene.16
Theme 2: Plunder, Extermination, and Prosecution contains five chapters that explore three distinct but related fields that coalesce historically (and in terms of this volume) in the mistreatment, exploitation, humiliation, and ultimate death of millions of victims (non‐Jews and Jews), the reasons for their murder, and how they are dealt with after the war. Edward B. Westermann’s “Old Nazis, Ordinary Men, New Killers: Synthetic and Divergent Histories of Perpetrators” (Chapter 6), illustrates the one‐dimensionality of the enduringly popular, but dated stereotype of the jack‐booted, sadistic, and brainwashed SS man. The chapter surveys debates about the motivations and behavior of perpetrators in Nazi Germany, occupied Eastern Europe, and collaborationist Western and Southern Europe, as well as the structures and systems that nurtured violence and persecution, including the German army (Wehrmacht) and the Security Service or SD (Sicherheitsdienst
