The Holocaust And Historical Methodology

This book is timely and necessary and often extremely challenging. It brings together an impressive cast of scholars, spanning several academic generations. Anyone interested in writing about the Holocaust should read this book and consider the implications of what is written here for their own work. There seems to me little doubt that Holocaust history writing stands at something of a cross roads, and the ways forward that this volume points to are extremely thought provoking. -- Tom Lawson, University of Winchester.

This collection of essays by leading scholars in their fields provides the most comprehensive and up-to-date survey of Holocaust historiography available. Covering both long-established historical disputes as well as research questions and methodologies that have developed in the last decade's massive growth in Holocaust Studies, this collection will be of enormous benefit to students and scholars alike.

The Historiography of Genocide is an indispensable guide to the development of the emerging discipline of genocide studies and the only available assessment of the historical literature pertaining to genocides.

How does scale affect our understanding of the Holocaust? In the vastness of its implementation and the sheer amount of death and suffering it produced, the genocide of Europe’s Jews presents special challenges for historians, who have responded with work ranging in scope from the world-historical to the intimate. In particular, recent scholarship has demonstrated a willingness to study the Holocaust at scales as focused as a single neighborhood, family, or perpetrator. This volume brings together an international cast of scholars to reflect on the ongoing microhistorical turn in Holocaust studies, assessing its historiographical pitfalls as well as the distinctive opportunities it affords researchers.

"On the one hand, then, this is traditional historiography: the history of history writing. On the other hand, the problem is approached via recent work in the philosophy of history, closely analysing historical works as texts. This is an interdisciplinary study that brings to bear on historiography the kind of textual analysis usually reserved for fiction, testimony, or film." "The Holocaust, precisely because it throws into doubt older methodologies, demands the search for new ones. Showing how Holocaust historians inadvertently and paradoxically reinscribe into the wider culture patterns of thought that the Holocaust repudiated, Constructing the Holocaust tries to respond to the Holocaust in a way that recognises its potential impact on usually unquestioned beliefs and unspoken methodological assumptions."--BOOK JACKET.

Alon Confino seeks to rethink dominant interpretations of the Holocaust by examining it as a problem in cultural history. As the main research interests of Holocaust scholars are frequently covered terrain – the anti-Semitic ideological campaign, the machinery of killing, the brutal massacres during the war – Confino's research goes in a new direction. He analyzes the culture and sensibilities that made it possible for the Nazis and other Germans to imagine the making of a world without Jews. Confino seeks these insights from the ways historians interpreted another short, violent and foundational event in modern European history – the French Revolution. The comparison of the ways we understand the Holocaust with scholars' interpretations of the French Revolution allows Confino to question some of the basic assumptions of present-day historians concerning historical narration, explanation and understanding.

This ePaper, History and Memory: lessons from the Holocaust, presents the original text of the Leçon inaugurale delivered by Professor Saul Friedländer on 23 September 2014 at the Maison de la Paix, which marked the opening of the academic year of the Graduate Institute, Geneva. The lecture highlights an original analysis of the evolution of German memory since the end of World War II and its consequences on the writing of history. Generations of historians have been particularly marked in a differentiated manner, depending on their personal proximity to the war, but also on collective representations conveyed by film and television in a globalised world. Saul Friedländer is Emeritus Professor at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA). He won numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize in 2008 for his book The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945. In 1963, he received his PhD from the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva, where he taught until 1988.

Holocaust and Human Behavior uses readings, primary source material, and short documentary films to examine the challenging history of the Holocaust and prompt reflection on our world today