Probing The Ethics Of Holocaust Culture

Probing the Ethics of Holocaust Culture is a reappraisal of the controversies that have shaped Holocaust studies since the 1980s. Historians, artists, and writers question if and why the Holocaust should remain the ultimate test case for ethics and a unique reference point for how we understand genocide and crimes against humanity.

Probing the Ethics of Holocaust Culture is a reappraisal of the controversies that have shaped Holocaust studies since the 1980s. Historians, artists, and writers question if and why the Holocaust should remain the ultimate test case for ethics and a unique reference point for how we understand genocide and crimes against humanity.

Of the three categories that Raul Hilberg developed in his analysis of the Holocaust—perpetrators, victims, and bystanders—it is the last that is the broadest and most difficult to pinpoint. Described by Hilberg as those who were “once a part of this history,” bystanders present unique challenges for those seeking to understand the decisions, attitudes, and self-understanding of historical actors who were neither obviously the instigators nor the targets of Nazi crimes. Combining historiographical, conceptual, and empirical perspectives on the bystander, the case studies in this book provide powerful insights into the complex social processes that accompany state-sponsored genocidal violence.

German memory, judicial interrogation, and historical reconstruction : writing perpetrator history from postwar testimony / Christopher R. Browning -- Historical emplotment and the problem of truth / Hayden White -- On emplotment : two kinds of ruin / Perry Anderson -- History, counterhistory, and narrative / Amos Funkenstein -- Just one witness / Carlo Ginzburg -- Of plots, witnesses, and judgments / Martin Jay -- Representing the Holocaust : reflections on the historians' debate / Dominick LaCapra -- Historical understanding and counterrationality : the Judenrat as epistemological vantage / Dan Diner -- History beyond the pleasure principle : some thoughts on the representation of trauma / Eric L. Santner -- Habermas, enlightenment, and antisemitism / Vincent P. Pecora -- Between image and phrase : progressive history and the "final solution" as dispossession / Sande Cohen.; Science, modernity, and the "final solution" / Mario Biagioli -- Holocaust and the end of history : postmodern historiography in cinema / Anton Kaes -- Whose story is it, anyway? : ideology and psychology in the representation of the Shoah in Israeli literature / Yael S. Feldman -- Translating Paul Celan's "Todesfuge" : rhythm and repetition as metaphor / John Felstiner -- "The grave in the air" : unbound metaphors in post-Holocaust poetry / Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi -- The dialectics of unspeakability : language, silence, and the narratives of desubjectification / Peter Haidu -- The representation of limits / Berel Lang -- The book of the destruction / Geoffrey H. Hartman.

Beginning in 1950, the state of Israel prosecuted and jailed dozens of Holocaust survivors who had served as camp kapos or ghetto police under the Nazis. At last comes the first full account of the kapo trials, based on records newly declassified after forty years. In December 1945, a Polish-born commuter on a Tel Aviv bus recognized a fellow rider as the former head of a town council the Nazis had established to manage the Jews. When he denounced the man as a collaborator, the rider leapt off the bus, pursued by passengers intent on beating him to death. Five years later, to address ongoing tensions within Holocaust survivor communities, the State of Israel instituted the criminal prosecution of Jews who had served as ghetto administrators or kapos in concentration camps. Dan Porat brings to light more than three dozen little-known trials, held over the following two decades, of survivors charged with Nazi collaboration. Scouring police investigation files and trial records, he found accounts of Jewish policemen and camp functionaries who harassed, beat, robbed, and even murdered their brethren. But as the trials exposed the tragic experiences of the kapos, over time the courts and the public shifted from seeing them as evil collaborators to victims themselves, and the fervor to prosecute them abated. Porat shows how these trials changed Israel’s understanding of the Holocaust and explores how the suppression of the trial records—long classified by the state—affected history and memory. Sensitive to the devastating options confronting those who chose to collaborate, yet rigorous in its analysis, Bitter Reckoning invites us to rethink our ideas of complicity and justice and to consider what it means to be a victim in extraordinary circumstances.

To forget after Auschwitz is considered barbaric. Baer and Sznaider question this assumption not only in regard to the Holocaust but to other political crimes as well. The duties of memory surrounding the Holocaust have spread around the globe and interacted with other narratives of victimization that demand equal treatment. Are there crimes that must be forgotten and others that should be remembered? In this book the authors examine the effects of a globalized Holocaust culture on the ways in which individuals and groups understand the moral and political significance of their respective histories of extreme political violence. Do such transnational memories facilitate or hamper the task of coming to terms with and overcoming divisive pasts? Taking Argentina, Spain and a number of sites in post-communist Europe as test cases, this book illustrates the transformation from a nationally oriented ethics to a trans-national one. The authors look at media, scholarly discourse, NGOs dealing with human rights and memory, museums and memorial sites, and examine how a new generation of memory activists revisits the past to construct a new future. Baer and Sznaider follow these attempts to manoeuvre between the duties of remembrance and the benefits of forgetting. This, the authors argue, is the "ethics of Never Again."

Discusses the question of the moral responsibility of individuals involved in the Holocaust: perpetrators, collaborators, victims, and bystanders. Rejects the view that an individual's need to establish his place in a society with a bad political culture (such as Nazi Germany) absolves him of guilt for participation in genocide. The individual can adapt flexibly and selectively to the majority political culture. No political culture diminishes a person's capacity to know right from wrong. Reflects on the blameworthiness of Hitler and of rank-and-file perpetrators for the Holocaust. Contesting Hilberg's views, contends that the victims cannot be blamed for passivity or collaboration. Discusses the moral aspects of the help or lack of help given by non-Jews to Jewish victims. Believes that study of the Holocaust can lead to political and moral lessons that could prevent future holocausts.

The Palgrave Handbook of Holocaust Literature and Culture reflects current approaches to Holocaust literature that open up future thinking on Holocaust representation. The chapters consider diverse generational perspectives—survivor writing, second and third generation—and genres—memoirs, poetry, novels, graphic narratives, films, video-testimonies, and other forms of literary and cultural expression. In turn, these perspectives create interactions among generations, genres, temporalities, and cultural contexts. The volume also participates in the ongoing project of responding to and talking through moments of rupture and incompletion that represent an opportunity to contribute to the making of meaning through the continuation of narratives of the past. As such, the chapters in this volume pose options for reading Holocaust texts, offering openings for further discussion and exploration. The inquiring body of interpretive scholarship responding to the Shoah becomes itself a story, a narrative that materially extends our inquiry into that history.