Lessons and Legacies: New Directions in Holocaust Research and Education (12) (Lessons & Legacies, Band 12) - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0810134497 ISBN 13: 9780810134492

Verlag: Northwestern University Press, 2017

Inhaltsangabe

Lessons and Legacies XII explores new directions in research and teaching in the field of Holocaust studies. The essays in this volume present the most cutting-edge methods and topics shaping Holocaust studies today, from a variety of disciplines: forensics, environmental history, cultural studies, religious studies, labor history, film studies, history of medicine, sociology, pedagogy, and public history. This rich compendium reveals how far Holocaust studies have reached into cultural studies, perpetrator history, and comparative genocide history. Scholars, laypersons, teachers, and the myriad organizations devoted to Holocaust memorialization and education will find these essays useful and illuminating.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

WENDY LOWER is the John K. Roth Professor of History at Claremont McKenna College and director of the Mgrublian Center for Human Rights.

 

LAUREN FAULKNER ROSSI is a professor of history at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada.

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Lessons and Legacies XII

New Directions in Holocaust Research and Education

By Wendy Lower, Lauren Faulkner Rossi

Northwestern University Press

Copyright © 2017 Northwestern University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8101-3449-2

Contents

Foreword Theodore Zev Weiss Wendy Lower and Lauren Faulkner Rossi, 
Introduction Jan T. Gross, 
Opportunistic Killings and Plunder of Jews by Their Neighbors — a Norm or an Exception in German-Occupied Europe? Dagmar Herzog, 
The Obscenity of Objectivity: Post-Holocaust Antisemitism and the Invention of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, 
I. New Cultural Approaches to the Holocaust, 
Rumors in the Ghettos: A Case Study of Cultural History Amos Goldberg, 
I Am (Not) to Blame: Intent and Agency in Personal Accounts of the Holocaust Doris L. Bergen, 
"To Encompass the Unseeable": Foreign Film, Taste Culture, and the American Encounter with the Postwar Holocaust Film Steven Alan Carr, 
A World without Jews: Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide Alon Confino, 
II. Contemporary Controversies and Their Historical Origins, 
Former Ukrainian Policemen in the Ukrainian National Insurgency: Continuing the Holocaust outside German Service John-Paul Himka, 
The SNCF Affair: Cheminots in the Divided Memories of Vichy France Ludivine Broch, 
Keep Your Distance: "Ethical Duplicity" and the Holocaust Mark Joel Webber, 
III. Recovery and Loss, 
Khurbn Yiddish: An Absent Absence Perla Sneh, 
The First Returnees: Holocaust Survivors in Vienna in the Immediate Postwar Period Elizabeth Anthony, 
The Dispersal and Oblivion of the Ashes and Bones of Babi Yar Karel C. Berkhoff, 
IV. The Holocaust and Social History: Gender and the Family, 
Jewish Girls in Catholic Schools in Nazi Germany, 1933–1938 Martina Cucchiara, 
Daily Survival: Social History of Jews in Family Bunkers in Eastern Galicia Natalia Aleksiun, 
Secretaries, Secrets, and Genocide: Evidence from the Postwar Investigations of the Female Secretaries of the RSHA Rachel Century, 
V. Reconsidering Perpetrators, 
Hitler's Ostkrieg and the Indian Wars: Comparing Military Strategies of Conquest and Annihilation Edward B. Westermann, 
Intrigues and Conflicts of Interest as to the Exploitation of Jewish Labor in Radom, 1942–1943 Idit Gil, 
Not "How Was It Possible," but "Who Made It Possible": The Topic of Perpetrators in Holocaust Education in Austria Lukas Meissel, 
Notes on Contributors, 

CHAPTER 1

Rumors in the Ghettos: A Case Study of Cultural History

Amos Goldberg

How should the history of the Jews in the Holocaust be written? From what perspective? How should its main object of research be defined, and what should its focal point be? Historians and scholars have asked these fundamental questions since the very beginning of the field of Holocaust studies and actually already during World War II. In this short essay, I will try to address them by reflecting on the extent to which cultural history can contribute to the field of Holocaust history. In the second part of this essay, I will substantiate my view through an initial analysis of the spread of rumors in Jewish ghettos during the war.

Cultural History and Holocaust History

In a recently published article in Dapim: Studies on the Holocaust, Dan Stone argued that despite the fact that cultural history has proved both a popular and fertile paradigm within the historical discipline, it has not staked much ground for itself in the study of the Holocaust. It is not that "cultural histories" were not written on the Holocaust. One can mention, for example, the writings of Alon Confino, Claudia Koonz, Dominick LaCapra, Thomas Kühne, and Dan Michman as works affiliated with cultural history. However, these scholars and Stone himself mostly relate to the history of the perpetrators. But what about a cultural history of the Jews during the Holocaust?

By "cultural history," I do not mean in this context a history that portrays Jewish cultural institutions during the Holocaust. Moshe Rosman has already reminded us in the context of Jewish history that cultural history is not interested in the products of creative forces within a particular group, but in the meanings these forces and products convey. Or, in other words, cultural history is not concerned with describing cultural and religious institutions or their products, but rather in the mechanism of meaning-making within a society, or in what Peter Burke sees as the common basis of all branches of cultural history: "dealing with the symbolic and its interpretation."

In this field of "the history of the Jews in the Holocaust," one can say that cultural history's impact is even smaller, although not altogether absent. Alexandra Garbarini and Jacek Leociak's books on diaries written by Jews during the Holocaust are good examples. Samuel Kassow's monograph on Emanuel Ringelblum or Debórah Dwork's work on the experiences of Jewish children and youth are yet other good examples. However, even these works, as well as others, do not always fully expose what I consider the radical significance of cultural history to Jewish history during the Holocaust.

I believe that the fundamental challenge of writing the history of the victims in extreme cases such as genocide is to write a history of powerlessness. This is evident in the case of the Holocaust, where the devastating experience of extreme powerlessness dominates all contemporaneous sources, such as diaries and letters, written by the victims. So the questions are, how can a history of powerlessness be written, and what methods of cultural history could help us in this?

These questions are even more acute from a theoretical perspective because history usually depicts what there is, not what is missing. It tends to focus on positive nouns as its objects of research and not on negative ones with the suffix "lessness," as in our case, powerlessness — the feeling and reality of lack of power — of impotence! Not total impotence in the sense of lacking any aspect of selfhood or agency, but still, overwhelming and devastating powerlessness — a sense that one's life is completely dominated by external powerful, vicious and lethal forces, evident in almost every passage of the victims' wartime writings.

Much of Holocaust historiography, which focuses on the Jews and which gained huge achievements in reconstructing Jewish life in that time, seems to have failed in this challenge. For the most part, this historiography tends to portray the victim as an autonomous, reactive, historical, more or less full agent, while avoiding altogether this challenge of powerlessness! To put it in Walter Benjamin's words, it is a historiography that wishes to write the history of the defeated as a history of the victorious. Hence, in many cases, the historical image of the victim is constructed through the stark binary opposition of "inside" and "outside." For example, in many Holocaust narratives, both academic and popular, it is assumed that the victims kept, in one way or another, their "internal" individual, psychological, and communal identity more or less intact while the Holocaust took place only on the "outside" of historical reality, which was totally dominated by the Germans. Such narratives make fundamental use of such keywords as "struggle," "response," "amida" (a Hebrew term that will discussed later), "voices," "dignity," "agency," and at times even "resistance,"...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Northwestern University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2017
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0810134497
• ISBN 13: 9780810134492
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 433
• Herausgeber: Lower Wendy, Rossi Lauren Faulkner
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: GS1 Slovakia; https://www.gs1sk.org; ; Nantersk� 23; Žilina; 010 08; Slowakei