Holocaust Research Research Articles

O nadużyciach w badaniach nad doświadczeniem Zagłady

Abuses in art, film and literature portraying the Holocaust have finally been discussed in modern human studies. The analyses show, among others, the phenomenon of the McDonaldization of the Holocaust, its political intrumentalization,ideological manipulation and commercialization. The article tries to look critically at a different dimension of the phenomenon, hitherto undiscussed, namely the abuses in Holocaust research. The author identifies several dangers which appearin academic discourse about the Holocaust – from “the myth of sources” to narcissistic temptations.

Memories of Jewish Child Refugees in Australia

Located in the city of Melbourne, Australia, the Jewish Holocaust Museum and Research Centre (JHC) is an important repository of memories of Jews subjected to Nazi persecution who subsequently migrated to Australia. Among those who found refuge in Melbourne were a small number of children who came under organised schemes. These included 20 teenagers who sailed on the Jervis Bay in May 1939 under the auspices of the Welfare Guardian Society and the Save the Children Fund, and 17 children sailing on the Orama in June 1939. Some of the Kindertransport children and adolescents also later migrated to Australia from Great Britain. The JHC has documented their Holocaust experiences, especially the aftermath, through its ever-expanding videotestimony collection and the ‘Shelter from the Storm’ exhibition. It becomes clear through their testimonies that these now elderly survivors were highly traumatised through the separations and displacements forced upon them as children.

On the Abuses in Research of the Holocaust Experience

The abuses in the presentation of the Holocaust in art, film, and literature have been extensively studied in contemporary humanist studies. The analyses point to the phenomenon of the Holocaust’s McDonaldization, its political instrumentalization, ideological manipulation and commercialization. The article is an attempt at a critical examination of a different dimension of the phenomenon in question, hitherto overlooked, namely the abuses in Holocaust research. The author points at a number of dangers which appear in the academic Holocaust discourse – from the “source myth” to narcissistic temptations

Confronting ‘choiceless choices’ in Holocaust videotestimonies: Judgement, ‘privileged’ Jews, and the role of the interviewer

‘Privileged’ Jews include those prisoners in the camps and ghettos who held positions which gave them access to material and other benefits. Subject to extreme levels of coercion, these victims were compelled to act in ways that have been judged as both self-serving and harmful to fellow inmates. Such situations, which exemplify what influential theorist Lawrence Langer terms ‘choiceless choices’, are the chief concern of Primo Levi's paradigmatic essay on the ‘grey zone’. In light of these key conceptualizations of the ethical dilemmas of Holocaust victims, the paper analyses the representation of ‘privileged’ Jews in several videotestimonies recorded at the Jewish Holocaust Museum and Research Centre (JHMRC) in Melbourne, Australia. It will be shown that judgements of victims in extremis cause considerable problems for attempts to testify to the complex situations and experiences of ‘privileged’ Jews. The role of the interviewer is a crucial factor in this, particularly when interviewers are themselves Holocaust survivors. The paper reveals that while it might be argued that moral evaluations of ‘privileged’ Jews should be suspended, judgements are often imposed on Holocaust testimonies in various ways and have a significant impact on their content.

The Past that Does Not Pass: Israelis and “Holocaust Memory”

The article raises issues that relate to the centrality of the Holocaust in the lives and imagination of many Israelis, and as a pivotal event that shapes their Jewish-Israeli identity. It examines the positions held by Israelis on the meaning of the Holocaust and the shaping of its memory, and asks whether the presence of the Holocaust in our lives represents an honest, unwavering effort to understand the Holocaust and its place in our world as human beings, Jews, and Israelis, or is a result of manipulating forces that use and abuse the memory of the Holocaust to advance unrelated political or social causes. The article presents a profusion of voices in Holocaust discourse and asks whether these are complementary or conflicting messages. It discusses the groups for whom the Holocaust was a personal experience, their offspring, who experienced the Holocaust as a family memory, and others whose memory of the Holocaust was shaped by survivors' testimonies, social processes, and the internalization of cultural messages. It focuses on the contribution of these groups in Holocaust research and artistic representation centering on literature, film, and music.

Literature of the Personal Document as a Source in Holocaust Research (a Methodological Reconnaissance).

In this article I focus on two areas: first – the genre typology of texts that belong to the sphere of the so-called personal document, their specific character as a historical source for Holocaust studies; second –the methodological challenge this type of sources posits for the historiography (not only) of the Holocaust. I raise the following questions: what is the value of personal documents for Holocaust historians, being a formally diverse record of experiences; how are they used in their research; how do they read those personal narratives? A more general context for these considerations is the debate on the conditions for Holocaust historiography going on among contemporary theoreticians of history. One one form of this debate could be described as a conflict between “historical discourse” and ”memory discourse”.

L’historiographie orthodoxe et la Shoah

The article is dealing with different aspects of the orthodox historiography and the Holocaust research. It first exposes the principles of orthodox writing that fundamentally differ from the academic principles. This text aims at exposing an alternative narrative in order to establish the heritage of the past as an ideal and a model when it does not have to stand up to the level of authentication required by the standards of the modern research. In light of the formal and content-related elements inherent to this genre, the main texts written by the orthodox researchers about the Holocaust are presented according to the principal issues that interested them in the past, such as the guilt and responsibility of the Zionist leadership for the failure of rescuing the European Jews during the Holocaust and the recognition of keeping a religious Jewish life as an act of alternative heroism more important than the Ghettos’ uprisings. At the same time, both the major development that started to affect these writings these last years and their limitations are exposed. Alongside these writings are also introduced texts that were written by Israeli scholars on the Orthodox Jewish life during the Holocaust, taking into consideration the sparse publications on the religious life during the Holocaust. In conclusion, the article emphasizes the potential possibilities for the research of orthodox historiography and the Holocaust as well as the importance of authentication, confrontation and cooperation among the researchers belonging to different circles.

Gospodarka wyzysku: „warunki życia” w gettach na kresach wschodnich

W niniejszym szkicu podejmę trzy tematy: tworzenia gett, robotników żydowskich i warunków życia, odwołując się do przykładów pochodzących przede wszystkich z małych gett. Od samego początku traumatyczny wpływ getta wiązał się utratą majątku, prywatności i autonomii. Analiza metod organizacji pracy przymusowej Żydów ujawnia znaczne rozwarstwienie i wśród żydowskich robotników przymusowych. We wszystkich gettach sprawą podstawową była żywność. Aspekty gospodarcze pokazują zasadniczą rolę stosunków między Żydami a miejscową ludnością nieżydowską – temat często pomijany przez badaczy Zagłady, skupiających się przede wszystkim na kształtowaniu polityki niemieckiej i jej niszczących następstw

Review Article: Knowledge, Memory and Justice: Some Grey Areas in Contemporary Holocaust Research

Review Article: Knowledge, Memory and Justice: Some Grey Areas in Contemporary Holocaust Research

Memory-Work: Video Testimony, Holocaust Remembrance and the Third Generation

This article investigates the responses of grandchildren of Holocaust survivors to Holocaust video testimonies archived at the Jewish Holocaust Museum and Research Centre, Melbourne, Australia. Interviews with the grandchildren show that many have begun to question the existing communal obligations surrounding Holocaust remembrance. As significant sources for Holocaust remembrance, video testimonies have important roles to play in facilitating ‘memory-work’ for the third generation. Watching video testimony allows viewers to move beyond existing formulaic approaches towards Holocaust remembrance and form their own personal responses. The voices of the third generation emphasise that Holocaust memory in Australia will be shaped by each generation in ways that are meaningful for them

What role do metaphors play in racial prejudice? The function of antisemitic imagery in Hitler's Mein Kampf

ABSTRACT Musolff's study applies methods of cognitive metaphor analysis to Hitler's antisemitic imagery in Mein Kampf, especially to the conceptualization of the German nation as a (human) body that had to be cured from a deadly disease caused by Jewish parasites. The relevant expressions from the conceptual domains of biological and medical categories form a partly narrative, partly inferential-argumentative source ‘scenario’, which centred on a notion of blood poisoning that was understood in three ways: a) as a supposedly real act of blood defilement, i.e. rape; b) as a part of the source scenario of illness-cure; and c) as an allegorical element of an apocalyptic narrative of a devilish conspiracy against the ‘grand design of the creator’. The conceptual differences of source and target levels were thus short-circuited to form a belief-system that was no longer open to criticism. The results cast new light on central topics of Holocaust research, such as the debates between more ‘intentionalist’ and more ‘functionalist’ explanations of the origins of the Holocaust, and the question of how the Nazi metaphor system helped gradually to ‘initiate’ wider parts of the German populace into the implications of the illness-cure scenario as a blueprint for genocide. The Nazi antisemitic metaphor system thus provides a unique example of the cognitive forces that can be unleashed in the service of racist stigmatization and dehumanization.

Lessons and Legacies: New Currents in Holocaust Research, vol. 6, Jeffry M. Diefendorf, ed. (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2004), xxxiv + 547 pp., cloth $89.95; pbk. $34.95.

In this compilation of papers presented at the sixth Lessons and Legacies conference, held at Northwestern University in 2000, editor Jeffry Diefendorf has arranged twenty-five essays into six thematic sections: rethinking Nazi policies; resistance and rescue; German scholars and the Holocaust; historiography and challenges to historians; trials, compensation, and Jewish assets; and (the concluding section) confronting the past. Diefendorf deserves credit for clearly articulating a host of complex issues in Holocaust research in his concise and informative introduction. The greatest contribution of the volume is, in the words of Paul Jaskot, “to clarify the complicated road that led to Auschwitz” (p. 6). Clarification often means opening intellectual discourse on the legacies of the Third Reich; while we cannot summarize all twenty-five authors’ contributions to this volume, a number deserve specific note. In an opening section on rethinking Nazi policies, Sybille Steinbacher convincingly argues that Auschwitz symbolized the essential unity between mass murder and German reconstruction. Paul Jaskot casts light on the formation of SS forced-labor policies, arguing that concepts of efficiency, productivity and oppression in the camps are inextricably linked to Nazi cultural policy. In an essay on the Jews of Italy and the Nazis, Richard Breitman elucidates the role of Gestapo officer Herbert Kappler, citing newly declassified intelligence sources in the U.S. National Archives; just as important in Breitman’s account is his clarification of the involvement of SS Chief-of-Staff Karl Wolff.

:Lessons and Legacies VI: New Currents in Holocaust Research

:Lessons and Legacies VI: New Currents in Holocaust Research

Networks of Nazi persecution: bureaucracy, business, and the organization of the Holocaust

List of Figures List of Abbreviations Introduction: The Holocaust as Division-of-Labor-Based Crime-Evidence and Analytical Challenges Gerald D. Feldman and Wolfgang Seibel PART I: RIVALRY AND COMPETITION Chapter 1. Introduction to Rivalry and Competition Christian Gerlach Chapter 2. The SS Security Service and the Gestapo in the National Socialist Persecution of the Jews 1933-1939 Wolfgang Dierker Chapter 3. Aryanization and the Role of the German Banks, 1933-1938 Dieter Ziegler Chapter 4. The Looting of Jewish Property and Franco-German Rivalry, 1940-1944 Philippe Verheyde Chapter 5. Seizure of Jewish Property and Inter-Agency Rivalry in the Reich and in the Occupied Soviet Territories Martin C. Dean Chapter 6. The Polycratic Nature of Art Looting: The Dynamic Balance of the Third Reich Jonathan Petropoulos Chapter 7. The Holocaust and Corruption Frank Bajohr Part II: SMOOTH COOPERATION Chapter 8. Introduction to Smooth Gerhard Hirschfeld and Wolfgang Seibel Chapter 9. The Looting of Jewish Property and the German Financial Administration Alfons Kenkmann Chapter 10. Organized Looting: The Nazi Seizure of Jewish Property in the Netherlands, 1940-1945 Gerard Aalders Chapter 11. Perpetrator Networks and the Holocaust. The Spoliation of Jewish Property in France, 1940-1944 Marc Olivier Baruch Chapter 12. Ethnic Resettlement and Inter-Agency Cooperation in the Occupied Eastern Territories Isabel Heinemann Chapter 13. Der reibungslose Holocaust? The German Military and Civilian Implementation of the Final Solution in Ukraine, 1941-1944 Wendy Lower PART III: DECENTRAL INITIATIVE AND VERTICAL INTEGRATION Chapter 14. A Bureaucratic Holocaust: Toward a New Consensus Micheal Thad Allen Chapter 15. Local Initiatives, Central Coordination: German Municipal Administration and the Holocaust Wolf Gruner Chapter 16. The Reichskristallnacht and the Insurance Industry: The Politics of Damage Control Gerald D. Feldman PART IV: STRUCTURE, AGENCY, AND THE LOGIC OF RADICALIZATION Chapter 17. More than Just a Metaphor: the Network Concept and Its Potential in Holocaust Research Joerg Raab Chapter 18. Restraining or Radicalizing? Division of Labor and Persecution Effectiveness Wolfgang Seibel Notes on Contributors Index

The Holocaust: History and Metahistory in Three Recent Works

Steven E. Aschheim, ed. Hannah Arendt in Jerusalem. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Pp. xii + 428. Yehuda Bauer. Rethinking the Holocaust. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001. Pp. xvi + 335. Raul Hilberg. Sources of Holocaust Research: An Analysis. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2001. Pp. 218. Even though the three volumes assigned here for collective review all bear some connection, in whole or in part, to the broad central theme of the Holocaust, the connection in each is manifested quite differently, to the point where at first glance the volumes seem entirely incommensurable. The first, cast largely in the language of contemporary cultural studies, consists of twenty-one papers by scholars from various disciplines presented at a 1997 Jerusalem conference devoted to the full range of the work of Hannah Arendt, including but not limited to her controversial interpretation of the career and trial of Adolf Eichmann. The second is a set of eleven essays analyzing broad interpretive problems in the encounter between the Third Reich and the Jews, using the conventional tools of an academic historian. The third is a brief but densely written handbook outlining types of source material encountered by students of the Holocaust and illustrating some technical difficulties in their explication. Nonetheless, there does appear to be a basis for discussing all three together, although the reason has less to do with the books' specific content than with the identities of their authors and the roles they have played in the development of the scholarly field of Holocaust studies. That basis is adumbrated (no doubt unknowingly) in an autobiographical aside at the beginning of the second of the three volumes, Rethinking the Holocaust, in which the author, Yehuda Bauer, one of the field's primary [End Page 685] architects, observes that he "came to the study of the Holocaust because [he] wanted to be a historian of Jews," and he understood that "the Holocaust was unfortunately . . . the central event in modern or perhaps all Jewish history" (pp. xv–xvi). Indeed, Bauer received his academic training in the department of Jewish history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem during the 1950s and early 1960s, when the Nazi period was not taught as a distinct unit, and before turning unequivocally to the matters that have become his dominant scholarly concern he had already established himself as a historian of Palestinian, European, and American Jewry in the first half of the twentieth century.1 Implicit in his turn to the Holocaust was thus the thought that by studying what befell the Jews of Europe under Nazi impact he might learn something of importance about the history of the Jews more broadly, certainly in the modern period, perhaps even in earlier eras as well. On the surface that thought seems sensible enough: since the end of the Second World War it had been widely assumed, not only in Israel but in Europe and the United States as well, that the Holocaust would be a subject of particular interest to Jews and that historians of the Jewish people or of individual Jewish communities would naturally lead the way in laying the foundations for its historical study. For a time, in fact, they actually appear to have done so.2 How strange, then, that in the years since he committed himself fully to Holocaust studies, only a handful of academics, mostly from Israel, has followed Bauer into the field from the direction of Jewish history. As it happens, his principal interlocutors in Rethinking the Holocaust are overwhelmingly contemporary historians of Germany or of modern Europe, whose findings and interpretations regarding questions such as the comparability of the Holocaust with other [End Page 686] genocides, the modernity of the Holocaust, and the relative merits of ideological and psychological explanations for mass killing he reports and analyzes, disputes or affirms, in a straightforward style that makes the book a valuable and accessible guide to Holocaust historiography and the controversies that animate...

The reception of Holocaust research in the world of psychology

After having spoken to lay and professional audiences in Germany, Switzerland, Austria, England, France and in the United States on the effects of the Shoah on people in psychotherapy today and found varying reactions, I decided to pursue the question in a more consequential way. I devised a questionnaire which I sent to a large number of international psychoanalytic societies. My initial impressions were confirmed: Freudian societies generally devote more work to the topic. Some Jungian societies with especially interested individuals have also devoted a substantial amount of work to the Shoah and its aftermaths. The Jungian hesitancy has to do with our often more archetypal approach and with shame about Jung's statements on the Jewish archetype. On the collective level, the presence of a survivor population seems to make research on the topic more difficult. A certain amount of time must evolve before a society (be it professional, individual or political) deals with collective trauma, be it the Shoah or political oppression. On the personal level, intimacy (also in future, adult relationships) seems blocked when fantasies about parents' implications in the Shoah prevail. The bottom line of both phenomena is taboo, a prohibition against touching tameh. I propose that the IAAP supports research projects on the Shoah. They could also, as the Freudians do, offer a special prize at each international conference for the best piece of research on the topic of collective trauma.

No reconciliation, but self‐searching in the sense of rapprochement: Hillel Klein's Holocaust research in Germany 40 years after

The paper is written from a personal perspective and in conjunction with the author's participation in editing Hillel Klein's book Überleben und Versuche der Wiederbelebung‐Psychoanalytische Studien mit Überlebenden der Shoah und mit ihren Familien in Israel und in der Diaspora [Survival and trials of revival‐ Psychodynamic studies of Holocaust survivors and their families in Israel and the diaspora] which appeared posthumously in 2003. The manuscript was originally written in English during the fi rst half of the 1980s. It consists of a revised version of his contributions to psychoanalytic Holocaust research, as well as further observations and a number of autobiographical features. It suggests that we see the symptom which relates to the traumatic past less as the sign of a pathology, and instead, through the linking of drives and objects, more as a sign of hope. The hope is that revival begins in recovering the world that was lost in the Holocaust, the world from before, which, as torn as it was, he still referred to as the ‘intact world’. He regarded rapprochement as one of the main therapeutic tools. Rapprochement does not build up absolutes, but leaves from the quantitative point of view room for encounter.

No reconciliation, but self-searching in the sense of rapprochement: Hillel Klein’s Holocaust research in Germany 40 years after

The paper is written from a personal perspective and in conjunction with the author's participation in editing Hillel Klein's book Uberleben und Versuche der Wiederbelebung-Psychoanalytische Studien mit Uberlebenden der Shoah und mit ihren Familien in Israel und in der Diaspora [Survival and trials of revival--Psychodynamic studies of Holocaust survivors and their families in Israel and the diaspora] which appeared posthumously in 2003. The manuscript was originally written in English during the first half of the 1980s. It consists of a revised version of his contributions to psychoanalytic Holocaust research, as well as further observations and a number of autobiographical features. It suggests that we see the symptom which relates to the traumatic past less as the sign of a pathology, and instead, through the linking of drives and objects, more as a sign of hope. The hope is that revival begins in recovering the world that was lost in the Holocaust, the world from before, which, as torn as it was, he still referred to as the 'intact world'. He regarded rapprochement as one of the main therapeutic tools. Rapprochement does not build up absolutes, but leaves from the quantitative point of view room for encounter.

Der Holocaust und die westdeutschen Historiker: Erforschung und Erinnerung, Nicolas Berg (Gottingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2003), 766 pp., 46.

The debate over the role of postwar German historians continues to generate bitter controversy. Nicolas Berg has been described as “a provocateur whose account of the shortcomings of German Holocaust research has created a furor.”1 His work immediately generated a veritable flood of reviews, including an Internet anthology of responses by nine prominent historians (and Berg’s response to them) made available by the Historisches Forum in Berlin. Indeed, the book under review here is not a traditional historiographical study. Berg is less interested in the historians’ ideological convictions than in their life experience and generational affiliation; his subtitle “Research and Memory” suggests that each influences the other, that the first is not purely objective and the second not purely subjective. His approach, Berg insists, is Gedächtnisgeschichte, which conveys less “the past” and more the “remembered past,” including “that which was forgotten” (p. 42). Berg addresses the following questions: “When was it possible to reflect on the Shoah and what limits were imposed on that process? Where and how were these limitations overcome and why did the breakthrough not come from the historical profession?” (p. 26). In order to address them Berg quotes both from the major works of selected historians and from their private correspondence.

Current Perspectives on the Holocaust

Holocaust: A History, by Deborah Dwork and Robert Jan van Pelt. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2002. 444 pp. $27.95. Holocaust and History: Known, the Unknown, the Disputed, and the edited by Michael Berenbaum and Abraham J. Peck. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998. Paperback edition 2002. 836 pp. $35.00. Far more than just another survey of the Holocaust, the recent publication, Holocaust: A History, by Deborah Dwork and Robert Jan van Pelt, is an important contribution Holocaust studies for at least two reasons: first, as a new, insightful, comprehensive approach the Holocaust; second, because it has incorporated many of the most recent interpretations and information on the topic and has included much new material developed by its authors. very comprehensiveness of its approach makes this work somewhat less precisely focused than earlier important general interpretations, such as War Against the Jews, 1933-45 (1975, 1986) by Lucy Dawidowicz, Raul Hilberg's Destruction of the European Jews (originally published in 1961 and subsequently revised and expanded) and others. One of the major reasons for the inclusion in Holocaust: A History of the multiplicity of issues and perspectives is that the Dwork and van Pelt book reflects a broadening of recent interpretations of the Holocaust, as was described and documented in the numerous and varied essay collection ably edited by Michael Berenbaum and Abraham J. Peck and entitled, Holocaust and History: Known, the Unknown, the Disputed, and the Reexamined (1998, 2002). A paperback version of the 1998 publication, the 2002 edition of the Berenbaum and Peck collection, published by Indiana University Press in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, has increased the availability of this free selection of interpretive and historiographical essays. essays were originally presented as a part of the effort of the United States Holocaust Research Institute, affiliated with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, to take stock of the field, consider where it had been and where it must go (p. xii). title of the effort was The Holocaust: Known, the Unknown, the Disputed, and the Reexamined, which has been made a part of the title employed by Berenbaum and Peck for the publication of the collection of essays. Organized under eleven headings, the essays that make up Holocaust and History surveyed major issues, themes, and topics relating study of the Holocaust. purpose of the collection was to present the state of Holocaust studies on the brink of the twenty-first As the editors indicated, the book examines what has been understood from the ashes, what cannot be understood -- or is not yet understood. It considers what has been misunderstood, where our insights have taken us, and where they have failed (p. xii). book has effectively done that, for the essays are well developed, well written, thoughtful, interesting, and based on current analyses of the field. Collectively, they are an excellent summary of the status of Holocaust studies at the end of the twentieth century. lead essays by Raul Hilberg, Yehuda Bauer, Eberhard Jackel, and Michael Marrus that make up the first section of the book set a tone of assessment, critical evaluation, and projection of future directions that were elaborated in the other sections of the book. Sections of the book included essays on antisemitism, science and racial policy, deciding on and implementing the Holocaust, the behavior of ordinary men, Nazi mistreatment of non-Jews, the concentration camp experience, world response the plight of the Jews, Jewish resistance, rescuers, and survivors. breadth and scope of the book, along with the quality of the essays, is be commended and speaks well for the book's comprehensiveness and authoritativeness. This volume is strongly recommended for scholars and laypersons alike, and the paperback edition should make more likely a broader audience for this important volume. …