Constructing A Collective Memory Of The Holocaust

This is a gripping cross-generational study that combines personal narrative and sociological analysis to provide an interpretive account of two brothers who survived the Holocaust.

What is the symbolic impact of the Vietnam War Memorial? How does television change our engagement with the past? Can the efforts to wipe out Communist legacies succeed? Should victims of the Holocaust be celebrated as heroes or as martyrs? These questions have a great deal in common, yet they are typically asked separately by people working in distinct research areas in different disciplines. Frames of Remembrance shares ideas and concerns across such divides.

Fathoming the Holocaust represents the culmination of a singular effort to attempt to explain the Final Solution to the "Jewish Problem" in terms of a general theory of social problems construction. The book is comprehensive in scope, covering the origins and emergence of the Final Solution, wartime reaction to it, and the postwar memory of the genocide. It does so within the framework of a social problems construction, a perspective that treats social problems not as a condition but as an activity that identifies and defines problems, persuades others that something must be done about them, and generates practical programs of remedial action. Berger holds that social problems have a "natural history," that is, they evolve through a sequence of stages that entail the development and unfolding of claims about problems and the formulation and implementation of solutions. Fathoming the Holocaust is therefore a book that aims to advance sociological understanding of the Holocaust, not simply to describe its history, but to examine its social construction, that is, to understand it as a consequence of concerted human activity. In doing so, Berger hopes to encourage the teaching of the Holocaust in the social scientific curricula of higher education. In contrast to the extensive historical literature on the Holocaust, Berger offers a distinctly sociological approach that examines how the Holocaust was constructed--first as a social policy designed by the Nazis, implemented by functionaries, and resisted by its victims and opponents; later as several varying layers of historical memory. The scope of this book extends from the prewar through the contemporary periods, focusing on the societal issues governing the interpreting of these events in Israel, the German Federal Republic, and the United States. Berger's is a text with both large general interest and essential material for courses in social problems, European history, and Jewish studies. Ronald J. Berger, professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, has previously published six books and numerous articles and book chapters. His earlier book on the Holocaust was a sociological account of his father and uncle's survival experiences.

Cultural memory and the Construction of Identity brings together scholars of folklore, literature, history, and communication to explore the dynamics of cultural memory in a variety of contexts. Memory is a powerful tool that can transform a piece of earth into a homeland and common objects into symbols. The authors of this volume show how memory is shaped and how it operates in uniting society and creating images that attain the value of truth even if they deviate from fact.

The program of extermination Nazis called the Final Solution took the lives of approximately six million Jews, amounting to roughly 60 percent of European Jewry and a third of the world's Jewish population. Studying the Holocaust from a sociological perspective, Ronald J. Berger explains why the Final Solution happened to a particular people for particular reasons; why the Jews were, for the Nazis, the central enemy. Taking a unique approach in its examination of the devastating event, The Holocaust, Religion, and the Politics of Collective Memory fuses history and sociology in its study of the Holocaust.Berger's book illuminates the Holocaust as a social construction. As historical scholarship on the Holocaust has proliferated, perhaps no other tragedy or event has been as thoroughly documented. Yet sociologists have paid less attention to the Holocaust than historians and have been slower to fully integrate the genocide into their corpus of disciplinary knowledge and realize that this monumental tragedy affords opportunities to examine issues that are central to main themes of sociological inquiry.Berger's aim is to counter sociologists who argue that the genocide should be maintained as an area of study unto itself, as a topic that should be segregated from conventional sociology courses and general concerns of sociological inquiry. The author argues that the issues raised by the Holocaust are central to social science as well as historical studies.

Focusing on the 1980s-90s, examines how Protestants in Germany interpret their self-understanding as part of the community which is defined by its connection to the Nazi past. Analyzes representations of the Holocaust and of the Christian-Jewish relationship in three German Protestant theological texts: the 1980 statement of the Rhineland synod of the Evangelical Church "Zur Erneuerung des Verhältnisses von Christen und Juden"; Marquardt's theological text "Von Elend und Heimsuchung der Theologie: Prolegomena zur Dogmatik" (1992); and Britta Jüngst's dissertation "Auf der Seite des Todes das Leben" (1996). The analysis of these texts is informed by the development of narratives of collective memory of the Holocaust in German society in the 1980s-90s, from the miniseries "Holocaust" to the Goldhagen controversy. All three texts admit the responsibility of Christianity and Christians for the Holocaust and build theologies that do not reject Jews. Contends that, contrary to their stated intentions, most Holocaust theologians do not truly listen to the Jewish perspective. Calls on practitioners of "theology after Auschwitz" to embrace Jews and Judaism in order to restore the credibility of Christian Churches which abandoned the Jews in Auschwitz.

How do collective memories of histories of violence and trauma in war and genocide come to be created? Janet Jacobs offers new understandings of this crucial issue in her examination of the representation of gender in the memorial culture of Holocaust monuments and museums, from synagogue memorials and other historical places of Jewish life, to the geographies of Auschwitz, Majdanek and Ravensbruck. Jacobs travelled to Holocaust sites across Europe to explore representations of women. She reveals how these memorial cultures construct masculinity and femininity, as well as the Holocaust's effect on stereotyping on grounds of race or gender. She also uncovers the wider ways in which images of violence against women have become universal symbols of mass trauma and genocide. This feminist analysis of Holocaust memorialization brings together gender and collective memory with the geographies of genocide to fill a significant gap in our understanding of genocide and national remembrance.