Holocaust Studies without the Holocaust: Review Essay

2003 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 115-123
Author(s):  
David (David A.) Patterson
Keyword(s):  
Review Essay ◽  
Holocaust Studies ◽  
The Holocaust

Obecny stan badań nad Zagładą na Ukrainie

2014 ◽  
pp. 889-915
Author(s):  
Anna Abakunkova
Keyword(s):  
Future Development ◽  
The State ◽  
Significant Part ◽  
Educational Organizations ◽  
Major Research ◽  
Holocaust Studies ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The Future

The article examines the state of the Holocaust historiography in Ukraine for the period of 2010 – beginning of 2014. The review analyzes activities of major research and educational organizations in Ukraine which have significant part of projects devoted to the Holocaust; main publications and discussions on the Holocaust in Ukraine, including publications of Ukrainian authors in academic European and American journals. The article illustrates contemporary tendencies and conditions of the Holocaust Studies in Ukraine, defines major problems and shows perspectives of the future development of the Holocaust historiography in Ukraine.

CONFRONTING THE COMMUNAL GRAVE: A REASSESSMENT OF SOCIAL RELATIONS DURING THE HOLOCAUST IN EASTERN EUROPE

2019 ◽  
Vol 63 (4) ◽  
pp. 1054-1077
Author(s):  
JAN BURZLAFF
Keyword(s):  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Social History ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Theoretical Frameworks ◽  
Mass Violence ◽  
Holocaust Studies ◽  
East European ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The Baltic ◽  
Modern Mass

AbstractThis historiographical review focuses on the complex interactions between Nazi Germany, local populations, and east European Jews during the Holocaust. Braving fierce historical revisionism in eastern Europe and the Baltic states, recent studies have shifted the spotlight from Germans to Poles, Ukrainians, Russians, Lithuanians, and other ethnicities. As a result, the analytic categories with which most historians still work – notably ‘perpetrator/victim/bystander’ and ‘collaboration/resistance’ – have outlived their usefulness. A more complex picture of the Nazi-occupied territories in eastern Europe has emerged and now awaits new theoretical frameworks. This article argues that past paradigms blinded scholars to a range of groups lost in the cracks and to behaviours remaining outside the political sphere. Through four criteria that shed light on the social history of the Holocaust in eastern Europe, it draws connections between central and east European, German, Jewish, and Soviet histories, in order to engage with other fields and disciplines that examine modern mass violence and genocide. As Holocaust studies stands at a crossroads, only a transnational history including all ethnicities and deeper continuities, both temporal and geographical, will enhance our knowledge of how social relations shaped the very evolution of the Holocaust.

scholarly journals Holocaust and its Legacy in the Light of the Contemporary Humanitarian Issues

2015 ◽  
pp. 74-85
Author(s):  
E. S. Gromoglasova
Keyword(s):  
Grey Zone ◽  
Holocaust Studies ◽  
Contemporary World ◽  
Humanitarian Action ◽  
Global Responsibility ◽  
The People ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Occupied Territories ◽  
Spatial Imagination ◽  
Nazi Camps

Abstract: The paper discusses in-depth new perspectives in the Holocaust studies. It pays special attention to the spatiality of the Nazi camps and analyzes the Holocaust geographies more in general. It conceptualizes the camp as a ‘space of lawlessness’ that was created by political means of terror and exclusion. The specific spatiality of the Nazi camp was constructed by perpetrators with intentions to neglect both juridical law and moral laws of humanity. To prove this point the author analyzes P. Levi, the survivor of Auschwitz, witness and his prominent books “The Drowned and the Saved” and “If This Is a Man”. After reading his witness one can conclude that two spatial characteristics of the camp have been the most fundamental. The first one were the borders that cut the camp’s inmates from the people lived in the outside world and made impossible all human relations like providing help, solidarity, empathy. The second one was ‘the grey zone’ - a spatial metaphor that P. Levi used to explain all forms of collaboration with the camp authorities. The presence of the ‘grey zone’ as a main characteristic of the Nazi camp allows us to conceptualize it as a ‘space’ where ‘the starry heavens and internal moral law’ were no more present. So, the Nazi camp is a ‘place of indistinction’, a ‘spatial threshold’ where ‘moral’ and ‘immoral’, ‘human’ and ‘animal’, ‘drowned’ and ‘saved’ were no more distinguishable. The author analyzes more broaden Holocaust geographies outside the camp. Nazis used extensively occupied territories in Eastern Europe to perpetrate their crimes. The author concludes that the geographical localization of the Holocaust was an expression of Nazi irrational genocidal intentions and spatial imaginations. Eastern territories have been constructed by Nazis as ‘broaden spaces of exception and lawlessness’. That spatial imagination and planning allowed the perpetrators to neglect juridical and moral laws in reality. The paper concludes by insisting on the importance of the Holocaust legacy for modern humanitarian action and thinking. The Holocaust legacy helps us to conceptualize more precisely ‘new spaces of lawlessness’. It provides a base for the concepts of human security and ‘global responsibility’ for saving humanity in the contemporary world.

Dangerous Parallels

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruno Chaouat
Keyword(s):  
Postcolonial Studies ◽  
Algerian War ◽  
Collective Memories ◽  
History And Memory ◽  
Holocaust Studies ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Islamic Terrorism ◽  
Multidirectional Memory ◽  
Shed Light ◽  
The U.S

In Chapter 3, I probe the theory of multidirectional memory propounded by literary scholars in Europe and the U.S. The multidirectional-memory hypothesis was born from what those scholars call “the colonial turn” in literary and Holocaust studies. Scholars in postcolonial studies are increasingly turning to the Holocaust to approach the history and memory of colonialism, slavery, and more specifically, the events of the Algerian war. Their stated goal is to use the history and memory of the Holocaust to shed light on colonialism, especially in its French incarnation, or rather, to trigger a dialogue among collective memories. I argue that despite a praiseworthy attempt at rejecting the paradigm of competition among victims, that paradigm returns to haunt multidirectional memory. In order to legitimate its effort at finding consensus by uniting collective memories of suffering and persecution, multidirectional memory tones down the specificity of the Holocaust, and ends up neutralizing complex aspects of the Algerian war (notably, conflicting narratives of victimized groups) and more recent manifestations of Islamic terrorism and Islamic antisemitism. Not only do those blind spots prevent vigorous confrontation with resurgent antisemitism, they utterly obliterate that resurgence.

Literature of the Personal Document as a Source in Holocaust Research (a Methodological Reconnaissance).

2008 ◽  
pp. 31-52
Author(s):  
Jacek Leociak
Keyword(s):  
Personal Narratives ◽  
General Context ◽  
Specific Character ◽  
Methodological Challenge ◽  
Historical Source ◽  
Historical Discourse ◽  
Holocaust Studies ◽  
The Holocaust

In this article I focus on two areas: first – the genre typology of texts that belong to the sphere of the so-called personal document, their specific character as a historical source for Holocaust studies; second –the methodological challenge this type of sources posits for the historiography (not only) of the Holocaust. I raise the following questions: what is the value of personal documents for Holocaust historians, being a formally diverse record of experiences; how are they used in their research; how do they read those personal narratives? A more general context for these considerations is the debate on the conditions for Holocaust historiography going on among contemporary theoreticians of history. One one form of this debate could be described as a conflict between “historical discourse” and ”memory discourse”.

Transcending Dystopia

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tina Frühauf
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Wide Spectrum ◽  
Traumatic Experience ◽  
German Studies ◽  
Jewish Communities ◽  
Holocaust Studies ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Musical Practices

Transcending Dystopia features pioneering research on the role music played in its various connections to and contexts of Jewish communal life and cultural activity in Germany from 1945 to 1989. As the first history of the Jewish communities’ musical practices during the postwar and Cold War eras, it tells the story of how the traumatic experience of the Holocaust led to transitions and transformations, and the significance of music in these processes. As such, it relies on music to draw together three areas of inquiry: the Jewish community, the postwar Germanys and their politics after the Holocaust (occupied Germany, the Federal Republic, the Democratic Republic, and divided Berlin), and the concept of cultural mobility. Indeed, the musical practices of the Jewish communities in the postwar Germanys cannot be divorced from politics, as can be observed in their relations to Israel and United States. On the grounds of these conceptual concerns, selective communities serve as case studies to provide a kaleidoscopic panorama of musical practices in worship and in social life. Within these pillars, the chapters in this volume cover a wide spectrum of topics, from music during commemorations, on the radio and in Jewish newspapers, to synagogue concerts and community events; from the absence and presence of cantor and organ to the resurgence of choral music. What binds these topics tightly together is the specific theoretical inquiry of mobility. Interdisciplinary in scope and method, the book builds on recent scholarship in Cold War studies, cultural history, German studies, Holocaust studies, and Jewish studies.

Holocaust Research in Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Serbia. An Inventory

Südosteuropa ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 65 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Marija Vulesica
Keyword(s):  
Bosnia And Herzegovina ◽  
Significant Role ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Holocaust Studies ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Public Debates ◽  
History Of ◽  
Mass Killings ◽  
Second World

AbstractThe Holocaust and other mass killings committed during the Second World War in the Yugoslav territories play a more significant role in current public debates than they do in education and research. 85% of Yugoslavia’s Jews were annihilated in the period between 1941 and 1945. In socialist Yugoslavia, it was Holocaust survivors in particular who collected materials that documented the execution of exterminist policies. How has the examination of the Holocaust changed since the dissolution of Yugoslavia; and how have the newly established states of Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, as well as Serbia coped with this part of their history? The author asks whether an exclusive exploration of Jewish suffering is possible—or even desirable—in today’s post-Yugoslav societies. She gives an overview of the evolution of a specific ‘Yugoslav’ approach to the history of the Holocaust, and depicts recent Croatian, Bosnian, and Serbian efforts in this field. Furthermore, she looks at what kind of attention the Holocaust in Yugoslavia has received in international Holocaust Studies.

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