Search results
stumbled into genocide, as the strategy of asserting power by exterminating the Tutsi developed even as it was being implemented. The discussion carries echoes of the debate between intentionalists and structuralists in Holocaust studies, a disagreement over whether the genocide of Jews was the direct result of a master plan or grew out of the logic and structures of the Nazi state ( Mason, 1981 : 21–40; Browning, 2004 ). I discussed this issue with Des Forges shortly before her death, and she was inclined to agree with Guichaoua’s perspective, though in practice it
This is a comprehensive and definitive study of the Man Booker Prize-winning novelist Howard Jacobson. It offers lucid, detailed and nuanced readings of each of Jacobson’s novels, and makes a powerful case for the importance of his work in the landscape of contemporary fiction. Focusing on the themes of comedy, masculinity and Jewishness, the book emphasises the richness and diversity of Jacobson’s work. Often described by others as ‘the English Philip Roth’ and by himself as ‘the Jewish Jane Austen’, Jacobson emerges here as a complex and often contradictory figure: a fearless novelist; a combative public intellectual; a polemical journalist; an unapologetic elitist and an irreverent outsider; an exuberant iconoclast and a sombre satirist. Never afraid of controversy, Jacobson tends to polarise readers; but, love him or hate him, he is difficult to ignore. This book gives him the thorough consideration and the balanced evaluation that he deserves.
in the New Yorker magazine. According to Peter Novick the trial and the cultural noise which surrounded it broke the ‘silence’ shrouding the Holocaust, and for some it even represents the ‘birth of Holocaust studies itself’.4 But historical change can rarely be convincingly simplified to a series of turning points, and the intellectual history of Holocaust historiography is no different. Both the narratives of the ‘Final Solution’ presented by Eichmann’s prosecution, and the alternative versions constructed in the media and elsewhere, drew on the significant
invention of the bystander in Holocaust studies is telling. The concept is inherently theological, concerned with the obligations of witness. Pius XII should have reacted differently because he was representative of a moral and theological tradition that required intervention on behalf of the suffering, and prioritised charity. The historiography under review in this chapter consistently follows this lead and for example, employs the image of the Good Samaritan as a common trope.6 The contemporaries of genocide themselves at times evaluated their response to Nazi anti
perspective of political history, foreign policy, international relations, and similar perspectives. In university history departments it is passed by in favour of the student demand for Holocaust studies and the fascist dictatorships of twentieth-century Europe. It still inhabits a world of voluntary societies and some surviving adult education classes where it can be safely sidelined by professional historians, who 212—writing local history can rest assured that their study of contexts, issues and concepts, published by academic presses after a rigorous process of peer
This study applies the concept of postmemory, developed in Holocaust studies, to novels by contemporary British writers. The first monograph-length study of postmemory in British fiction, it focuses on a group of texts about the World Wars. Building upon current work on historical fiction, specifically historiographical metafiction and memory studies, this work extends this field by exploring the ways in which the use of historical research within fiction illuminates the ways in which we remember and recreate the past.
Using the framework of postmemory to consider the evolutionary development of historiographical metafiction, Alden provides a ground-breaking analysis of the nature and potential of contemporary historical fiction, and the relationship between postmemory and ‘the real’. As well as asking how postmemory can unlock the significance of the transgenerational aspects of these novels, this study also analyses how authors use historical research in their work and demonstrates, on a very concrete level, the ways in which we remember and recreate the past. Tracing the ‘translation’ of source material as it moves from historical record to historical fiction, Alden offers a taxonomy of the uses of the past in contemporary historical fiction, analysing the ways in which authors adopt, adapt, appropriate, elide, augment, edit and transpose elements found such material. Asking to what extent such writing is, necessarily metafictional, and what motivates the decisions these novelists make about their use of the past, the study offers an updated answer to the question historical fiction has always posed: what can fiction do with history that history cannot?
the peculiar trauma of the Holocaust and the urgency of understanding its relationship with modern state and society in general. It is an urgency that has not departed, and that central question of where the persecution of the Jews fits into an understanding of modernity has remained at the forefront of Holocaust studies. Holocaust historiography from the late 1950s onwards is in many ways the story of an attempt to escape those original contexts, and to assert the persecution of the Jews as a subject in and 305 Lawson 09_Lawson 08/09/2010 14:01 Page 306 DEBATES
This work demonstrates that resistance to occupation by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy during the Second World War has to be seen through a transnational, not a national, lens. It explores how people often resisted outside their country of origin because they were migrants, refugees or exiles who were already on the move. It traces their trajectories and encounters with other resisters and explores their experiences, including changes of beliefs, practices and identities. The book is a powerful, subtle and thought-provoking alternative to works on the Second World War that focus on single countries or on grand strategy. It is a ‘bottom up’ story of extraordinary individuals and groups who resisted oppression from Spain to the Soviet Union and the Balkans. It challenges the standard chronology of the war, beginning with the formation of the International Brigades in Spain and following through to the onset of the Cold War and the foundation of the state of Israel. This is a collective project by a team of international historians led by Robert Gildea, author of Fighters in the Shadows: A New History of the French Resistance (Faber & Faber, 2015). These have explored archives across Europe, the USA, Russia and Israel in order to unearth scores of fascinating individual stories which are woven together into themed chapters and a powerful new interpretation. The book is aimed at undergraduates and graduates working on twentieth-century Europe and the Second World War or interested in the possibilities of transnational history.
deliberate mass murder of history’.4 Although there were persistent calls to widen the social history of 195 Lawson 06_Lawson 08/09/2010 13:39 Page 196 DEBATES ON THE HOLOCAUST the Holocaust, it seems that this usually envisaged the history of the victims being added, not the further investigation of the perpetrators.5 The use of psycho-historical approaches did spawn some limited considerations of the motivations of individual perpetrators, perhaps harking back to the Freudian origins of Holocaust studies. Gitta Sereny’s investigation of Franz Stangl, who was
in the British media, 1945’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 21, 3 (2001), 205–53; Ellen Ben-Sefer, ‘Surviving survival: Nursing care at Bergen-Belsen 1945’, Australian Journal of Advanced Nursing 26, 3 (2009), 101–10; P. L. Mollison (Captain RAMC), ‘Observations of cases of starvation at Belsen’, British Medical Journal (5 January 1946), 4. 8 Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, ‘A survivor’s memories of liberation’, Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History 12 (2006), 1–2, 23. 9 Lasker-Wallfisch, ‘A survivor’s memories of liberation’, 24. 10