Remembering The Holocaust And The Impact On Societies Today

The Holocaust is the most researched and written about genocide in history. Known facts should be beyond dispute. Yet Holocaust memory is often formed and dictated by governments and others with an agenda to fulfil, or by deniers who seek to rewrite the past due to vested interests and avowed prejudices. Legislation can be used to prosecute hate crime and genocide denial, but it has also been created to protect the reputation of nation states and the inhabitants of countries previously occupied and oppressed by the regime of Nazi Germany. The crimes of the Holocaust are, of course, rightly seen mainly as the work of the Nazi regime, but there is a reality that some citizens of subjugated lands participated in, colluded and collaborated with those crimes, and on occasion committed crimes and atrocities against Jews independently of the Nazis. Others facilitated and enabled the Nazis by allowing industries to work with the Germans; some showed hostility, indifference and reluctance to assist Jewish refugees, or, due to antipathy, apathy, greed, self-interest or out-and-out anti-Semitism they allowed or even encouraged barbaric and cruel crimes to take place. Survivors of the Holocaust often express a primary desire that lessons of the past must be learned in order to reduce the risk of similar crimes reoccurring. Yet anti-Semitism is still a toxin in the modern world, and racism and hostility to other communities – including those who suffer in or have fled war and oppression – can at times appear normalised and socially acceptable. This book seeks to explore aspects of the Holocaust as it is remembered and reflect ultimately on parallels with the world we live in today.

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

Despite the Holocaust’s profound impact on the history of Eastern Europe, the communist regimes successfully repressed public discourse about and memory of this tragedy. Since the collapse of communism in 1989, however, this has changed. Not only has a wealth of archival sources become available, but there have also been oral history projects and interviews recording the testimonies of eyewitnesses who experienced the Holocaust as children and young adults. Recent political, social, and cultural developments have facilitated a more nuanced and complex understanding of the continuities and discontinuities in representations of the Holocaust. People are beginning to realize the significant role that memory of Holocaust plays in contemporary discussions of national identity in Eastern Europe. This volume of original essays explores the memory of the Holocaust and the Jewish past in postcommunist Eastern Europe. Devoting space to every postcommunist country, the essays in Bringing the Dark Past to Light explore how the memory of the “dark pasts” of Eastern European nations is being recollected and reworked. In addition, it examines how this memory shapes the collective identities and the social identity of ethnic and national minorities. Memory of the Holocaust has practical implications regarding the current development of national cultures and international relationships.

Remembering the Holocaust explains why the Holocaust has come to be considered the central event of the 20th century, and what this means. Presenting Jeffrey Alexander's controversial essay that, in the words of Geoffrey Hartman, has already become a classic in the Holocaust literature, and following up with challenging and equally provocative responses to it, this book offers a sweeping historical reconstruction of the Jewish mass murder as it evolved in the popular imagination of Western peoples, as well as an examination of its consequences. Alexander's inquiry points to a broad cultural transition that took place in Western societies after World War II: from confidence in moving past the most terrible of Nazi wartime atrocities to pessimism about the possibility for overcoming violence, ethnic conflict, and war. The Holocaust has become the central tragedy of modern times, an event which can no longer be overcome, but one that offers possibilities to extend its moral lessons beyond Jews to victims of other types of secular and religious strife. Following Alexander's controversial thesis is a series of responses by distinguished scholars in the humanities and social sciences--Martin Jay, Bernhard Giesen, Michael Rothberg, Robert Manne, Nathan Glazer, and Elihu & Ruth Katz--considering the implications of the universal moral relevance of the Holocaust. A final response from Alexander in a postscript focusing on the repercussions of the Holocaust in Israel concludes this forthright and engaging discussion. Remembering the Holocaust is an all-too-rare debate on our conception of the Holocaust, how it has evolved over the years, and the profound effects it will have on the way we envision the future.

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.

This book brings together a wide range of leading historians, social scientists, and literary scholars to explore the controversy surrounding the legacy of the Holocaust. Jeffrey Alexander's essay traces how the Holocaust gradually became the dominant representation of evil, and what the consequences have been for the development of its moral relevance for all nations and peoples. His inquiry is joined by essays from Martin Jay, Nathan Glazer, Elihu and Ruth Katz, Michael Rothberg, Robert Manne, and Bernhard Giesen, who further debate the geopolitical, national, and cultural limits and dangers of extending the tragic lessons of the Holocaust.

Multidirectional Memory brings together Holocaust studies and postcolonial studies for the first time to put forward a new theory of cultural memory and uncover an unacknowledged tradition of exchange between the legacies of genocide and colonialism.

Remembering the Holocaust in Educational Settings brings together a group of international experts to investigate the relationship between Holocaust remembrance and different types of educational activity through consideration of how education has become charged with preserving and perpetuating Holocaust memory and an examination of the challenges and opportunities this presents. The book is divided into two key parts. The first part considers the issues of and approaches to the remembrance of the Holocaust within an educational setting, with essays covering topics such as historical culture, genocide education, familial narratives, the survivor generation, and memory spaces in the United States, United Kingdom, and Germany. In the second part, contributors explore a wide range of case studies within which education and Holocaust remembrance interact, including young people’s understanding of the Holocaust in Germany, Polish identity narratives, Shoah remembrance and education in Israel, the Holocaust and Genocide Centre of Education and Memory in South Africa, and teaching at Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia. An international and interdisciplinary exploration of how and why the Holocaust is remembered through educational activity, Remembering the Holocaust in Educational Settings is the ideal book for all students, scholars, and researchers of the history and memory of the Holocaust as well as those studying and working within Holocaust education.

Using the framework of genocide, this volume analyzes the patterns of persecution of the Roma in Nazi-dominated Europe. Detailed case studies of France, Austria, Romania, Croatia, Ukraine, and Russia generate a critical mass of evidence that indicates criminal intent on the part of the Nazi regime to destroy the Roma as a distinct group. Other chapters examine the failure of the West German State to deliver justice, the Romani collective memory of the genocide, and the current political and historical debates. As this revealing volume shows, however inconsistent or geographically limited, over time, the mass murder acquired a systematic character and came to include ever larger segments of the Romani population regardless of the social status of individual members of the community.