You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
What is the role of the survivor testimony in Holocaust remembrance? In this book, a concise, rigorously argued, and provocative work of cultural and intellectual history, the author seeks to answer this surpassingly complex question.
In Aversion and Erasure, Carolyn J. Dean offers a bold account of how the Holocaust's status as humanity's most terrible example of evil has shaped contemporary discourses about victims in the West. Popular and scholarly attention to the Holocaust has led some observers to conclude that a "surfeit of Jewish memory" is obscuring the suffering of other peoples. Dean explores the pervasive idea that suffering and trauma in the United States and Western Europe have become central to identity, with victims competing for recognition by displaying their collective wounds.She argues that this notion has never been examined systematically even though it now possesses the force of self-evidence. It de...
"... stimulating and important anthology..." -- Holocaust and Genocide Studies "... a useful and competent volume that can serve as a good introduction to scholarship on the aftermath of the Holocaust." -- Times Literary Supplement More than 50 years after the end of World War II, how do we look back upon and understand the nature and consequences of that catastrophic event? What kind of historical consciousness has developed over the past half century with respect to the Nazi destruction of European Jewry? These questions are explored by a distinguished international group of scholars who draw on history, literature, memory, memorials, and the representation of the Holocaust in the culture to assess the impact of the Holocaust on postwar consciousness.
How does one broach with a child or young adult a subject like the Holocaust, the full magnitude and horror of which are difficult even for many adults to comprehend? This book, in conversational format, offers an ideal way to present this difficult subject to a young audience. At the book's opening, the author and her daughter Mathilde meet Berthe, a friend of the author's, on the beach, where they see the number that was tattooed on Berthe's arm at Auschwitz. The book, following Wieviorka's answers to her daughter's nearly eighty questions, provides a concise yet unsentimental and unsparing history lesson that explains Hitler's rise to power and the rise of anti-Semitism, the creation of ghettos and concentration camps (not only Auschwitz), the genocide of the Jews, the "Final Solution," Jewish and other resistance, and the guilt of the Germans.
Le 27 janvier 1945, les soldats de l'Armée rouge entrent dans l'immense complexe d'Auschwitz. Le 18 octobre 2002, les ministres européens de l'Education, réunis au Conseil de l'Europe, décident d'établir dans les établissements scolaires des 48 pays signataires de la Convention culturelle européenne, une journée à " la mémoire de l'Holocauste et de la prévention des crimes contre l'humanité ". La plupart des pays - dont la France - ont choisi la date anniversaire de la libération des camps d'Auschwitz. Le nom d'Auschwitz s'est imposé à la conscience universelle comme le symbole de la Shoah et comme celui du mal absolu. Parce que le devoir de mémoire est une coquille vide s'il ne s'accompagne pas du devoir de connaître, cet ouvrage, qui rassemble les articles publiés dans L'Histoire par les plus grands spécialistes - français et étrangers -, présente et analyse les différentes étapes du génocide des Juifs, en s'arrêtant sur les mécanismes de l'extermination, le rôle des bourreaux, celui des complices, celui des spectateurs, et enfin sur la construction de la mémoire du génocide.
Now in English, the authoritative work on ordinary Jews in France during World War II.
Surviving Hitler and Mussolini examines how far everyday life was possible in a situation of total war and brutal occupation. Its theme is the social experience of occupation in German- and Italian-occupied Europe, and in particular the strategies ordinary people developed in order to survive. Survival included meeting the challenges of shortage and hunger, of having to work for the enemy, of women entering into intimate relations with soldiers, of the preservation of culture in a fascist universe, of whether and how to resist, and the reaction of local communities to measures of reprisal taken in response to resistance. What emerges is that ordinary people were less heroes, villains or victims than inventive and resourceful individuals able to maintain courage and dignity despite the conditions they faced.The book adopts a comparative approach from Denmark and the Netherlands to Poland and Greece, and offers a fresh perspective on the Second World War.
This volume, in Studies in the Social and Cultural History of Modern Warfare series, examines how France, Belgium and the Netherlands emerged from the military collapse and humiliating Nazi occupation they suffered during the Second World War. Rather than traditional armed conflict, the human consequences of Nazi policies were resistance, genocide and labour migration to Germany. Pieter Lagrou offers a genuinely comparative approach to these issues, based on extensive archival research; he underlines the divergence between ambiguous experiences of occupation and the univocal post-war patriotic narratives which followed. His book reveals striking differences in political cultures as well as close convergence in the creation of a common Western European discourse, and uncovers disturbing aspects of the aftermath of the war, including post-war antisemitism and the marginalisation of resistance veterans. Brilliantly researched and fluently written, this book will be of central interest to all scholars and students of twentieth-century European history.
Among sources on the Holocaust, survivor testimonies are the least replaceable and most complex, reflecting both the personality of the narrator and the conditions and perceptions prevailing at the time of narration. Scholars, despite their aim to challenge memory and fill its gaps, often use testimonies uncritically or selectively-mining them to support generalizations. This book represents a departure, bringing Holocaust experts Atina Grossmann, Konrad Kwiet, Wendy Lower, J?rgen Matth?us, and Nechama Tec together to analyze the testimony of one Holocaust survivor. Born in Bratislava at the end of World War I, Helen "Zippi" Spitzer Tichauer was sent to Auschwitz in 1942. One of the few earl...
Facing Postmodernity explains French cultural theory by grounding it in the politics of the issues facing France today such as: * the breaking of the city * racism * the crisis of culture * new citizenship. It discusses some of the major responses to postmodernity by contemporary French thinkers, both the very well known -Lyotard, Levinas, Derrida - and those who will be less familiar to a non-French audience. In doing so, it addresses the questions central to the postmodern debate whatever country it takes place in; questions of history, of representation, identity and community.