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German History Writing and the Holocaust

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2018

Mark Roseman
Mark Roseman*
Affiliation:
Indiana University Bloomington
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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 

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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.

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

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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.

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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/).

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