Probing The Limits Of Categorization

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.

"The Oxford Handbook on Atrocity Crimes consolidates and further develops the evolving field of atrocity studies by combining major mono-, inter-, and multi-disciplinary research on atrocity crimes in one volume encompassing contributions of leading scholars. Atrocity crimes-war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide-are manifestations of large scale and systematic criminality committed within specific political, ideological, and societal contexts. These crimes are committed by a multiplicity of actors against a large number of victims who suffer far-reaching consequences. Scholars studying mass atrocities are scattered not only across disciplines-such as international (criminal) law, international relations, criminology, political science, psychology, sociology, history, anthropology, or demography-but also across the topic-related fields, which are by definition multi- and interdisciplinary but are typically limited to a particular category or aspect of atrocity crimes. This Handbook brings together these strands of scholarship on (mass) atrocities and interrogates atrocity crimes as an overarching category of criminality, while simultaneously keeping an eye on differences among the individual constitutive categories. The Handbook covers topics related to the etiology and causes of atrocities, the actors involved, the harm and victims of atrocity crimes, the reactions to mass atrocities, and in-depth case studies of understudied situations of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide"--

Perpetration and Complicity under Nazism and Beyond analyses perpetration and complicity under National Socialism and beyond. Contributors based in the UK, the USA, Canada, Germany, Israel and Chile reflect on self-understandings, representations and narratives of involvement in collective violence both at the time and later – a topic that remains highly relevant today. Using the notion of 'compromised identities' to think about contentious questions relating to empathy and complicity, this inter-disciplinary collection addresses the complex relationships between people's behaviours and self-understandings through and beyond periods of collective violence. Contributors explore the compromises that individuals, states and societies enter into both during and after such violence. Case studies highlight patterns of complicity and involvement in perpetration, and analyse how people's stories evolve under changing circumstances and through social interaction, using varying strategies of justification, denial and rationalisation. Each chapter also considers the ways in which contemporary responses and scholarly practices may be affected by engagement with perpetrator representations.

Violence against Jews, Roma, and other persecuted minorities in the multiethnic borderlands of Eastern, Central, and Southeastern Europe. Includes: Anca Filipovici: The Rise of Antisemitism in the Multiethnic Borderland of Bukovina: Student Movements and Interethnic Clashes at the University of Cernăuți (1922-1938) Doris Bergen: Saving Christianity, Killing Jews: German Religious Campaigns and the Holocaust in the Borderlands Linda Margittai: Hungarians, Germans, Serbs, and Jews in Wartime Vojvodina: Patterns of Attitudes and Behaviors towards Jews in a Multiethnic Border Region of Hungary Goran Miljan: The "Ideal Nation-State" for the "Ideal New Croat": The Ustasha Youth and the Aryanization of Jewish Property in the Independent State of Croatia, 1941-1945 Svetlana Suveica: Appropriation of Jewish Property in the Borderlands: Local Public Employees in Bessarabia during the Romanian Holocaust Anna Wylegała: Listening to Contradictory Voices: Jewish, Polish, and Ukrainian Narratives on Jewish Property in Nazi-Occupied Eastern Galicia Miriam Schulz: Gornisht oyser verter?!: The Yiddish Language as a Mirror of Interethnic Relations and Dynamics of Violence in German-Occupied Eastern Europe

This book offers a unique perspective on contemporary Polish cinema’s engagement with histories of Polish violence against their Jewish neighbours during the Holocaust. Moving beyond conventional studies of historical representation on screen, the book considers how cinema reframes the unwanted knowledge of violence in its aftermaths. The book draws on Derridean hauntology, Didi-Huberman’s confrontations with art images, Levinasian ethics and anamorphosis to examine cinematic reconfigurations of histories and memories that are vulnerable to evasion and formlessness. Innovative analyses of Birthplace (Łoziński, 1992), It Looks Pretty From a Distance (Sasnal, 2011), Aftermath (Pasikowski, 2012), and Ida (Pawlikowski, 2013) explore how their rural filmic landscapes are predicated on the radical exclusion of Jewish neighbours, prompting archaeological processes of exhumation. Arguing that the distressing materiality of decomposition disturbs cinematic composition, the book examines how Poland’s aftermath cinema attempts to recompose itself through form and narrative as it faces Polish complicity in Jewish death.

Remembering Histories of Trauma compares and links Native American, First Nation and Jewish histories of traumatic memory. Using source material from both sides of the Atlantic, it examines the differences between ancestral experiences of genocide and the representation of those histories in public sites in the United States, Canada and Europe. Challenging the ways public bodies have used those histories to frame the cultural and political identity of regions, states, and nations, it considers the effects of those representations on internal group memory, external public memory and cultural assimilation. Offering new ways to understand the Native-Jewish encounter by highlighting shared critiques of public historical representation, Mailer seeks to transcend historical tensions between Native American studies and Holocaust studies. In linking and comparing European and American contexts of historical trauma and their representation in public memory, this book brings Native American studies, Jewish studies, early American history, Holocaust studies, and museum studies into conversation with each other. In revealing similarities in the public representation of Indigenous genocide and the Holocaust it offers common ground for Jewish and Indigenous histories, and provides a new framework to better understand the divergence between traumatic histories and the ways they are memorialized.

This book promotes a historically and culturally sensitive understanding of trauma during and after World War II. Focusing especially on Eastern and Central Europe, its contributors take a fresh look at the experiences of violence and loss in 1939–45 and their long-term effects in different cultures and societies. The chapters analyze traumatic experiences among soldiers and civilians alike and expand the study of traumatic violence beyond psychiatric discourses and treatments. While acknowledging the problems of applying a present-day medical concept to the past, this book makes a case for a cultural, social and historical study of trauma. Moving the focus of historical trauma studies from World War I to World War II and from Western Europe to the east, it breaks new ground and helps to explain the troublesome politics of memory and trauma in post-1945 Europe all the way to the present day. This book is an outcome of a workshop project ‘Historical Trauma Studies,’ funded by the Joint Committee for the Nordic Research Councils in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NOS-HS) in 2018–20. Chapters 4, 5 and 6 are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

Perverse Memory and the Holocaust presents a new theoretical approach to the study of Polish memory bystanders of the Holocaust. Drawing on psychoanalytic theory, it examines representations of the Holocaust in order to explore the perverse mechanisms of memory at work, in which surface a series of phenomena difficult to remember: the pleasure derived from witnessing scenes of violence, identification with the German perpetrators of violence, the powerful fear of revenge at the hands of Jewish victims, and the adoption of the position of genocide victims. Moving away from the focus of previous psychoanalytic studies of memory on questions of mourning, melancholy, repressed memory, and loss, this volume considers the transformation of the collective identity of those who remained in the space of past Holocaust events: bystanders, who partook in the events and benefited from the extermination of the Jews. A critique of ‘perverse memory’ that hampers attempts to work through what is remembered, this book will be of interest to scholars across the social sciences working in the fields of Holocaust studies, memory studies, psychoanalytic studies, and cultural studies.