Holocaust
Studies: A Journal of Culture and History
Abstracts of articles in Issue 11.1
- Editors’ Foreword by Tom Lawson
and James Jordan
- A Distant Shore: The Holocaust and Us by Deborah
Dwork and Robert Jan van Pelt
- Is the history of the Holocaust useful to us as we negotiate the world
in which we live today? Many scholars have maintained that the Holocaust
was an extension of modern development. Others hold that the Holocaust
signified an utter rupture in western civilisation. But if the past is
identical to the present, it lacks context and specificity. If the past
is only and solely past, it has nothing to say about the present and future.
In this article, the authors present an alternative to this bipolar scheme,
and they explore questions about the Holocaust and its significance that
their construct lays bare.
- Grey Collar Worker: Organisation Theory in Holocaust
Studies by Michael Thad Allen
- Stereotypes of the banal bureaucrat as fashioned
by Hannah Arendt in Eichmann in Jerusalem have more to do with intellectuals'
anxieties about
modern organisation than they have to do with the Holocaust or
the institutions of genocide. Moreover, the overwhelming influence
of Arendt's interpretation
has paradoxically helped to muzzle the voice of Holocaust survivors.
Institutions like Auschwitz could never have functioned without
countless victims forced to serve in its bureaucracies. Victims toiled
in what
Primo Levi called the grey zone, where the boundaries between the
persecuted and perpetrators shifted endlessly. Thus if Eichmann was
a 'white-collar'
worker, victims were 'grey collar.' This was a labor of hate. Those
who survived it nevertheless provide a neglected source on the bureaucracy
of annihilation. We hear their voices so seldom precisely because
the
cliché of Arendt's banal bureaucrat has made us nearly deaf to
their observations. For what they have to say about bureaucracy
and genocide does not fit her stereotype. Listening to them and enriching
Holocaust
studies with the methods of contemporary organization theory can
potentially bring Holocaust studies closer
to the reality, rather than the banality, of evil.
- Writing ‘Bystanders’ into Holocaust History
in More Active Ways: ‘Non-Jewish’ Engagement with Ghettoisation,
Hungary 1944 by Tim Cole
- Drawing upon case studies of the implementation
of ghettoisation in the Hungarian cities of Budapest and Szeged, this
article calls for renewed
attention to be paid to Holocaust ‘bystanders’. In both cities,
significant numbers of ‘non-Jews’ responded to measures that
they saw directly affecting themselves, and had some influence upon the
final shape of ghettoisation. In short, ‘bystanders’ in these
cities were active agents, whose role needs to be written into Holocaust
history. However, such rewriting does well to jettison the traditional
terminology of ‘bystander’, with its connotations of inaction
and indifference, which fails to do justice to the variety of active responses
by ‘non-Jewish’ neighbours.
- Whither Holocaust Studies in Sweden? Some Thoughts
on Levande Historia and Other Matters Swedish by Paul A. Levine
- This article will argue that an inadequate, even failed attempt to
memorialise Raoul Wallenberg and the victims of the Holocaust represents
and illuminates in some important ways Sweden’s paradoxical, sometimes
controversial history and legacy of confronting the challenges of Nazism
during the war and its memory in Europe afterwards. Not very neutral
at all during the war, the manner in which Swedish society has bearbetet
(‘worked through’) its memory of the event is also of a decidedly
non-neutral character and, not surprisingly, tells us some important
things about Swedish society as a whole and perhaps also part of modern
Europe ’s reaction to genocide conducted in its very midst.
- Trauma, Postmodernism and Descent: Contemporary Holocaust
Criticism in Britain by Sue Vice
- My purpose in this article is to show the distinctiveness of literary-critical
approaches to Holocaust literature in Britain. I argue that, particularly
in the five years since 2000, the North American hegemony in English-language
critical and theoretical analysis has been challenged and questioned,
sometimes explicitly, sometimes by implication. The title of the article
refers to the three critical tropes most central to this work.
- Book Reviews
- Martin Gilbert, The Routledge Atlas of the Holocaust, reviewer Andrew
Charlesworth
- Ruth Gay, Safe Among the Germans: Liberated Jews After World
War II, reviewer Hannah Dalby
- Frank Bajohr, ‘Aryanisation’ in
Hamburg: The Economic Exclusion of Jews and the Confiscation of
their Property in Nazi Germany,
reviewer Daniel Fraenkel
- Eve Garrard and Geoffrey Scarre (eds.), Moral Philosophy and the
Holocaust, reviewer Graham Stevens
- Zvi Gitelman, A Century of Ambivalence: The Jews of Russia and the
Soviet Union, 1881 to the Present, reviewer John D. Klier
- Nathan Stolzfus, Resistance of the Heart: Intermarriage and the
Rosenstrasse Protest in Nazi Germany, reviewer Lisa Pine
- Renée Poznanski, Jews in France during
World War II, reviewer Michael R. Marrus
- Steven E. Aschheim, Scholem, Arendt, Klemperer: Intimate Chronicles
in Turbulent Times, reviewer Dan Stone