Holocaust
Studies: A Journal of Culture and History
Abstracts of
articles in Issue 14.1
- Mark Ward, Sr., The Banality of Culture?
Reassessing the Social Science of the Goldhagen Thesis on its own Terms
- Though historians have parsed the historical
chapters of Hitler’s Willing Executioners, a close examination
of the book’s key social science theoretical passages is also crucial
to understanding Goldhagen’s thesis. To establish his case for
a uniquely German ‘eliminationist antisemitism’ driven by ‘culturally
shared cognitive models’ Goldhagen relies on a single 1987 volume
about cognitive anthropology, as well as works grounded in the
theory of symbolic interactionism. Surprisingly, these writings have
received
little attention. This article describes cognitive anthropology
and symbolic interactionism; examines whether Goldhagen’s thesis
and its methodology stand up to the theories and scholars he himself
cites; and concludes
that, while his thesis reduces culture from a complex cognitive
phenomenon to a monolithic banality, the tools of cognitive science and
communication
theory can be profitably applied to problems of Holocaust perpetrator
and victim behaviour.
- Suzanne Weiner Weber, The Forest as a Liminal Space: A Transformation
of Culture and Norms during the Holocaust
- As the Holocaust unfolded, approximately 50,000
to 80,000 Jews, predominantly from Eastern Poland, sought refuge
in nearby forests. Thus, the forest became another Holocaust ‘space
and place’ – an
important socio-spatial arena for agency and power relations between
various agents including partisans (both non-Jewish and Jewish), peasants,
small
Jewish groups-in-hiding, and Nazis. This article explores the forest
as a liminal space where pre-war norms and cultural boundaries were challenged,
reversed and reworked to increase chances for survival. The article
is
based largely on interviews with surviving ‘forest fugitives’ conducted
by the author.
- Aimée
Bunting, ‘My Question Applies to this Country’: British
Identities and the Holocaust Since 1933
- Britain has been engaged in a relationship
with the destruction of European Jewry that has forged a complex
connection between the Holocaust and constructions of British national
identity.
In 1945 with the liberation of the western concentration camps,
Britain became a liberating nation. That perceived role, it is argued,
has shaped
British responses to the Holocaust ever since. During the liberation
year, three remarkable British individuals encountered Bergen
Belsen, the concentration camp at the heart of Britain’s relationship
with the Holocaust. This article explores the responses of war correspondent
Alan Moorehead, journalist Richard Dimbleby and actor/writer
Dirk Bogarde
to Belsen. The richness and depth of their discourse on Belsen
and the Holocaust reveals both the diversity of constructions of Britishness
and Englishness and a continuing connection between Britain
and the Holocaust
that cannot be constrained by the term ‘bystander’.
- David Kaposi, To Judge or Not to
Judge: The Clash of Perspectives in the Scholem–Arendt Exchange
- The article revisits the fabled exchange
of letters between Hannah Arendt and Gershom Scholem in the
wake of the Eichmann trial. The main focus is on the respective arguments
with regard
to Jewish responsibility and the question of the possibility
of judgement. The paper attempts to recover and contrast the basic frameworks
and sets
of assumptions that underlie these arguments. Doing this, it
eventually identifies the fundamentally differing political and moral
consequences
of both Arendt’s and Scholem’s perspectives with regard to
both the Holocaust and Jewish identity.