Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-2plfb Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-22T06:12:07.477Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

German History Writing and the Holocaust

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2018

Mark Roseman
Mark Roseman*
Affiliation:
Indiana University Bloomington
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

From Central European History’s founding in 1968, Nazism commanded a great deal of attention in the journal, but it was only after many years that this was also true of the Holocaust. A quick search on JSTOR shows that, of the articles and reviews mentioning the Holocaust, less than 10 percent were published in the journal's first twenty years, and over two-thirds were written between 2000 and 2014 (the last year of the JSTOR search). Of course, there is some semantics involved, as other terms such as Final Solution were sometimes used in earlier decades. But there is no doubt about the underlying trend, both in terms of the growing number of books that have come up for review, and the increasing number of important articles. In the 1970s, only one essay, by Lawrence Stokes, was devoted to the Holocaust. The 1980s saw a review article by Richard Breitman and a seminal piece on the ghettos by Christopher Browning. By contrast, since 2000, CEH has published around ten major contributions to Holocaust scholarship.

Type
Part II: Reflections, Reckonings, Revelations
Information
Central European History , Volume 51 , Special Issue 1: Special Commemorative Issue: Central European History at Fifty (1968–2018) , March 2018 , pp. 96 - 101
Copyright
Copyright © Central European History Society of the American Historical Association 2018 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Stokes, Lawrence D., “The German People and the Destruction of the European Jews,” Central European History (CEH) 6, no. 2 (1973): 167–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Breitman, Richard, “Auschwitz and the Archives,” CEH 18, no. 3/4 (1985): 365–83Google Scholar; Browning, Christopher R., “Nazi Ghettoization Policy in Poland: 1939–41,” CEH 19, no. 4 (1986): 343–68Google Scholar.

3 Krieger, Leonard, “Nazism: Highway or Byway?,” CEH 11, no. 1 (1978): 3–22Google Scholar.

4 Ibid., 21; Dawidowicz, Lucy S., The War against the Jews, 1933–1945 (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1975)Google Scholar.

5 Craig, Gordon Alexander, Germany, 1866–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978)Google Scholar.

6 The best recent surveys of Holocaust research include Friedländer, Saul, Nazi Germany and the Jews, Volume 1: The Years of Persecution, 1933–1939 (New York: HarperCollins, 1997)Google Scholar; idem, Nazi Germany and the Jews, Volume 2: The Years of Extermination, 1939–1945 (New York: HarperCollins, 2007)Google Scholar; Cesarani, David, Final Solution: The Fate of the Jews, 1933–1949 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2016)Google Scholar; Bergen, Doris L., War and Genocide: A Concise History of the Holocaust, 3rd ed. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016)Google Scholar.

7 Fitzpatrick, Matthew P., “The Pre-History of the Holocaust? The Sonderweg and Historikerstreit Debates and the Abject Colonial Past,” CEH 41, no. 3 (2008): 477–503Google Scholar; Pegelow, Thomas, “‘German Jews,’ ‘National Jews,’ ‘Jewish Volk,’ or ‘Racial Jews’? The Constitution and Contestation of ‘Jewishness’ in Newspapers of Nazi Germany, 1933–1938,” CEH 35, no. 2 (2002): 195–221Google Scholar; Beorn, Waitman W., “A Calculus of Complicity: The Wehrmacht, the Anti-Partisan War, and the Final Solution in White Russia, 1941–42,” CEH 44, no. 2 (2011): 308–37Google Scholar; Gruner, Wolf and Marcum, Ursula, “The Factory Action and the Events at the Rosenstrasse in Berlin: Facts and Fictions about 27 February 1943: Sixty Years Later,” CEH 36, no. 2 (2003): 179–208Google Scholar; Stoltzfus, Nathan, “Historical Evidence and Plausible History: Interpreting the Berlin Gestapo's Attempted ‘Final Roundup’ of Jews (Also Known as the ‘Factory Action’),” CEH 38, no. 3 (2005): 450–59Google Scholar; Gruner, Wolf, “A Historikerstreit? A Reply to Nathan Stoltzfus's Response,” CEH 38, no. 3 (2005): 460–64Google Scholar; idem, “‘Peregrinations into the Void?’ German Jews and Their Knowledge about the Armenian Genocide during the Third Reich,” CEH 45, no. 1 (2012): 1–26Google Scholar; Herf, Jeffrey, “Nazi Germany's Propaganda Aimed at Arabs and Muslims during World War II and the Holocaust: Old Themes, New Archival Findings,” CEH 42, no. 4 (2009): 709–36Google Scholar; idem, “Nazi Germany and Islam in Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East,” CEH 49, no. 2 (2016): 261–69Google Scholar; Port, Andrew I., ed., “Holocaust Scholarship and Politics in the Public Sphere: Reexamining the Causes, Consequences, and Controversy of the Historikerstreit and the Goldhagen Debate: A Forum with Gerrit Dworok, Richard J. Evans, Mary Fulbrook, Wendy Lower, A. Dirk Moses, Jeffrey K. Olick, and Timothy D. Snyder,” CEH 50, no. 3 (2017): 375–403Google Scholar.

8 “Forum: German History Beyond National Socialism,” German History 29, no. 3 (2011): 470–84CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wiesen, S. Jonathan and Eley, Geoff, “Beyond National Socialism?,” German Studies Review 35, no. 3 (2012): 475–79Google Scholar.

9 See, e.g., the outstanding online contributions to the “New Fascism Syllabus” (http://www.thehistoryinquestion.com/).

10 Timothy Snyder, “Commemorative Causality,” Eurozine, June 6, 2013 (http://www.eurozine.com/commemorative-causality/).

11 On that debate, see Kershaw, Ian, The Nazi Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation, 4th ed. (London: Arnold, 2000)Google Scholar; Roseman, Mark, “Beyond Conviction? Perpetrators, Ideas, and Action in the Holocaust in Historiographical Perspective,” in Conflict, Catastrophe, and Continuity: Essays on Modern German History, ed. Biess, Frank, Roseman, Mark, and Schissler, Hanna (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007)Google Scholar.

12 Cohen, Boaz, “The Children's Voice: Postwar Collection of Testimonies from Child Survivors of the Holocaust,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 21, no. 1 (2007): 73–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, Israeli Holocaust Research: Birth and Evolution (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013)Google Scholar; Jockusch, Laura, Collect and Record! Jewish Holocaust Documentation in Early Postwar Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 Berg, Nicolas, Der Holocaust und die westdeutschen Historiker: Erforschung und Erinnerung (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2003)Google Scholar.

14 For one example among many, see the extraordinary range of sources and voices in Dieckmann, Christoph, Deutsche Besatzungspolitik in Litauen 1941–1944, 2 vols. (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2011)Google Scholar.

15 Browning, Christopher R., The Final Solution and the German Foreign Office (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1978)Google Scholar; idem, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: HarperCollins, 1992)Google Scholar; idem, Collected Memories: Holocaust History and Postwar Testimony (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003)Google Scholar; idem, Remembering Survival: Inside a Nazi Slave-Labor Camp (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2010)Google Scholar; Browning, Christopher R. and Matthäus, Jürgen, The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939-March 1942 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004)Google Scholar; Bartov, Omer, The Eastern Front, 1941–45: German Troops and the Barbarisation of Warfare (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1985)Google Scholar; idem, Germany's War and the Holocaust: Disputed Histories (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003)Google Scholar; idem, Erased: Vanishing Traces of Jewish Galicia in Present-day Ukraine (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007)Google Scholar; idem, Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018)Google Scholar; Matthäus, Jürgen, Ausbildungsziel Judenmord? “Weltanschauliche Erziehung” von SS, Polizei und Waffen-SS im Rahmen der “Endlösung” (Frankfurt/Main: Fischer, 2003)Google Scholar; idem, Approaching an Auschwitz Survivor: Holocaust Testimony and its Transformations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009)Google Scholar; idem, Jewish Responses to Persecution, 5 vols. (Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, 2010)Google Scholar; Matthäus, Jürgen, Böhler, Jochen, and Mallmann, Klaus-Michael, War, Pacification, and Mass Murder, 1939: The Einsatzgruppen in Poland (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014)Google Scholar; Matthäus, Jürgen and Bajohr, Frank, The Political Diary of Alfred Rosenberg and the Onset of the Holocaust (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015)Google Scholar.

16 Kaplan, Marion A., Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998)Google Scholar.

17 Matthäus, Jürgen and Roseman, Mark, Jewish Responses to Persecution, vol 1., 1933–1938 (Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, 2010)Google Scholar.

18 Löw, Andrea, Bergen, Doris L., and Hájková, Anna, Alltag im Holocaust: Jüdisches Leben im Grossdeutschen Reich, 1941–1945 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Among other essays, see Hájková, Anna, “Sexual Barter in Times of Genocide: Negotiating the Sexual Economy of the Theresienstadt Ghetto,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 38, no. 3 (2013): 503–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, “To Terezín and Back: Czech Jews and their Bonds of Belonging between Theresienstadt and Postwar Czechoslovakia,” Dapim 28, no. 1 (2014): 38–55Google Scholar.

19 Simon, Marie Jalowicz, Stratenwerth, Irene, and Simon, Hermann, Untergetaucht: Eine junge Frau überlebt in Berlin 1940–1945 (Bonn: Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, 2014)Google Scholar; Schrafstetter, Susanna, Flucht und Versteck: Untergetauchte Juden in München. Verfolgungserfahrung und Nachkriegsalltag (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2015)Google Scholar. Not on Germany per se, but excellent on the challenges that recent historiography is now posing to older understandings of rescue, see Moore, Bob, Survivors: Jewish Self-Help and Rescue in Nazi-Occupied Western Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010)Google Scholar.

20 Kulka, Otto Dov and Jäckel, Eberhard, Die Juden in den geheimen NS-Stimmungsberichten, 1933–1945 (Düsseldorf: Droste, 2004)Google Scholar; Longerich, Peter, “Davon haben wir nichts gewusst!” Die Deutschen und die Judenverfolgung 1933–1945 (Munich: Siedler, 2006)Google Scholar; Dörner, Bernward, Die Deutschen und der Holocaust: Was niemand wissen wollte, aber jeder wissen konnte (Berlin: Propyläen, 2007)Google Scholar.

21 Nieden, Susanne Zur, Alltag im Ausnahmezustand: Frauentagebücher im zerstörten Deutschland, 1943 bis 1945 (Berlin: Orlanda Frauenverlag, 1993)Google Scholar; Fritzsche, Peter, Life and Death in the Third Reich (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008)Google Scholar; idem, The Turbulent World of Franz Göll: An Ordinary Berliner Writes the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011)Google Scholar; Stargardt, Nicholas, “The Troubled Patriot: German Innerlichkeit in World War Two,” German History 28, no. 3 (2010): 326–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, The German War: A Nation Under Arms, 1939–1945: Citizens and Soldiers (New York: Basic Books, 2015)Google Scholar; Steuwer, Janosch, “Ein Drittes Reich, wie ich es auffasse.” Politik, Gesellschaft und privates Leben in Tagebüchern, 1933–1939 (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2017)Google Scholar.

22 Bloxham, Donald, The Great Game of Genocide: Imperialism, Nationalism, and the Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, Genocide, the World Wars, and the Unweaving of Europe (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2008)Google Scholar; idem, The Final Solution: A Genocide (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009)Google Scholar; Levene, Mark, Genocide in the Age of the Nation State (London: I. B. Tauris, 2005)Google Scholar; idem, The Crisis of Genocide (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013)Google Scholar. Other insightful comparative and/or entangled histories include Gerlach, Christian, Extremely Violent Societies: Mass Violence in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Snyder, Timothy, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books, 2010)Google Scholar.

23 See Levene, Mark, War, Jews, and the New Europe: The Diplomacy of Lucien Wolf, 1914–1919 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992)Google Scholar; idem, The Crisis of Genocide Devastation: The European Rimlands, 1912–1938 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013)Google Scholar.

24 Some recent titles offering essential framing include Tooze, Adam, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy (London: Allen Lane, 2006)Google Scholar; idem, The Deluge: The Great War, America, and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916–1931 (New York: Viking, 2014)Google Scholar; Clavin, Patricia, Securing the World Economy: The Reinvention of the League of Nations, 1920–1946 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Fink, Carole, Defending the Rights of Others: The Great Powers, the Jews, and International Minority Protection, 1878–1938 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004)Google Scholar; Manela, Erez, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007)Google Scholar; Pedersen, Susan, The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sluga, Glenda and Clavin, Patricia, Internationalisms: A Twentieth-Century History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017)Google Scholar; Snyder, Bloodlands..

25 Pendas, Devin O., Roseman, Mark, and Wetzell, Richard F., eds., Beyond the Racial State: Rethinking Nazi Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Grossmann, Atina, Jews, Germans, and Allies: Close Encounters in Occupied Germany (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Confino, Alon, Foundational Pasts: The Holocaust as Historical Understanding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012)Google Scholar.