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Books > Humanities > History > European history > From 1900
This open access book offers a framework for understanding how the
Holocaust has shaped and continues to shape medical ethics, health
policy, and questions related to human rights around the world. The
field of bioethics continues to face questions of social and
medical controversy that have their roots in the lessons of the
Holocaust, such as debates over beginning-of-life and medical
genetics, end-of-life matters such as medical aid in dying, the
development of ethical codes and regulations to guide human subject
research, and human rights abuses in vulnerable populations. As the
only example of medically sanctioned genocide in history, and one
that used medicine and science to fundamentally undermine human
dignity and the moral foundation of society, the Holocaust provides
an invaluable framework for exploring current issues in bioethics
and society today. This book, therefore, is of great value to all
current and future ethicists, medical practitioners and
policymakers - as well as laypeople.
Historians have long noted that Jews often appear at the storm
center of European history. Nowhere is this more true than when
dealing with the tumultuous years between the Nazi seizure of power
in Germany on January 30, 1933 and the proclamation of the State of
Israel on May 14, 1948. Yet, the events of Jewish history must also
be viewed within the broader contexts of European, American, and
global history. Spanning sixteen years of destruction and rebirth,
A World in Turmoil is the first book of its kind, an integrated
chronology which attempts to provide the researcher with clear and
concise data describing the events as they unfolded. From the
murder pits of Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe, to the battlefields in
all the major theatres of operation, to the home fronts of all the
major and minor combatants, A World in Turmoil covers a broad
spectrum of events. Although major events throughout the world are
noted, the volume concentrates on events in Europe, the Middle
East, and the Americas. While the volume deals primarily with
politics, significant social and intellectual trends are woven into
the chronology. Augmented by an introductory essay and postscript
to help place events in their historical context, by a
bibliography, and by name, place, and subject indexes, the volume
provides scholars and researchers alike a basic reference tool on
sixteen of the most important years in modern history.
Mimi Rubin had fond memories of growing up in Novy Bohumin,
Czechoslovakia, a place that ten thousand people called home. It
was a tranquil town until September 1, 1939, when the German army
invaded the city. From that day forward, eighteen-yearold Mimi
would face some of the harshest moments of her life.
This memoir follows Mimi's story-from her idyllic life in Novy
Bohumin before the invasion, to being transported to a Jewish
ghetto, to living in three different German concentration camps,
and finally, to liberation. It tells of the heartbreaking loss of
her parents, grandmother, and countless other friends and
relatives. It tells of the tempered joys of being reunited with her
sister and of finding love, marrying, and raising a family.
A compelling firsthand account, "Mimi of Novy Bohumin,
Czechoslovakia: A Young Woman's Survival of the Holocaust" weaves
the personal, yet horrifying, details of Mimi's experience with
historical facts about this era in history. This story helps keep
alive the memory of the millions of innocent men, women, and
children who died in the German concentration camps during the
1930s and 1940s.
In this riveting real-life thriller, Philippe Sands offers a unique account of the daily life of senior Nazi SS Brigadeführer Otto Freiherr von Wächter and his wife, Charlotte. Drawing on a remarkable archive of family letters and diaries, he unveils a fascinating insight into life before and during the war, as a fugitive on the run in the Alps and then in Rome, and into the Cold War. Eventually the door is unlocked to a mystery that haunts Wächter's youngest son, who continues to believe his father was a good man - what happened to Otto Wächter while he was preparing to travel to Argentina on the 'ratline', assisted by a Vatican bishop, and what was the explanation for his sudden and unexpected death?
Scholarship often presumes that texts written about the Shoah,
either by those directly involved in it or those writing its
history, must always bear witness to the affective aftermath of the
event, the lingering emotional effects of suffering. Drawing on the
History of Emotions and on trauma theory, this monograph offers a
critical study of the ambivalent attributions and expressions of
emotion and "emotionlessness" in the literature and historiography
of the Shoah. It addresses three phenomena: the metaphorical
discourses by which emotionality and the purported lack thereof are
attributed to victims and to perpetrators; the rhetoric of
affective self-control and of affective distancing in fiction,
testimony and historiography; and the poetics of empathy and the
status of emotionality in discourses on the Shoah. Through a close
analysis of a broad corpus centred around the work of W. G. Sebald,
Dieter Schlesak, Ruth Kluger and Raul Hilberg, the book critically
contextualises emotionality and its attributions in the post-war
era, when a scepticism of pathos coincided with demands for factual
rigidity. Ultimately, it invites the reader to reflect on their own
affective stances towards history and its commemoration in the
twenty-first century.
Western Europe is in a strangely neurotic condition of being smug
and terrified at the same time. On the one hand, Europeans believe
they have at last created an ideal social and political system in
which man can live comfortably. In many ways, things have never
been better on the old continent. On the other hand, there is
growing anxiety that Europe is quickly falling behind in an
aggressive, globalized world. Europe is at the forefront of
nothing, its demographics are rapidly transforming in unsettling
ways, and the ancient threat of barbarian invasion has resurfaced
in a fresh manifestation. In The New Vichy Syndrome, Theodore
Dalrymple traces this malaise back to the great conflicts of the
last century and their devastating effects upon the European
psyche. From issues of religion, class, colonialism, and
nationalism, Europeans hold a "miserablist" view of their history,
one that alternates between indifference and outright contempt of
the past. Today's Europeans no longer believe in anything but
personal economic security, an increased standard of living,
shorter working hours, and long vacations in exotic locales. The
result, Dalrymple asserts, is an unwillingness to preserve European
achievements and the dismantling of western culture by Europeans
themselves. As vapid hedonism and aggressive Islamism fill this
cultural void, Europeans have no one else to blame for their
plight.
The Complete Black Book of Russian Jewryis a collection of
eyewitness testimonies, letters, diaries, affidavits, and other
documents on the activities of the Nazis against Jews in the camps,
ghettoes, and towns of Eastern Europe. Arguably, the only apt
comparism is to The Gulag Archipelago of Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
This definitive edition of The Black Book, including for the first
time materials omitted from previous editions, is a major addition
to the literature on the Holocaust. It will be of particular
interest to students, teachers, and scholars of the Holocaust and
those interested in the history of Europe.
By the end of 1942, 1.4 million Jews had been killed by the
Einsatzgruppen that followed the German army eastward; by the end
of the war, nearly two million had been murdered in Russia and
Eastern Europe. Of the six million Jews who perished in the
Holocaust, about one-third fell in the territories of the USSR. The
single most important text documenting that slaughter is The Black
Book, compiled by two renowned Russian authors Ilya Ehrenburg and
Vasily Grossman. Until now, The Black Book was only available in
English in truncated editions. Because of its profound
significance, this new and definitive English translation of The
Complete Black Book of Russian Jewry is a major literary and
intellectual event.
From the time of the outbreak of the war, Ehrenburg and Grossman
collected the eyewitness testimonies that went into The Black Book.
As early as 1943 they were planning its publication; the first
edition appeared in 1944. During the years immediately after the
war, Grossman assisted Ehrenburg in compiling additional materials
for a second edition, which appeared in 1946 (in English as well as
Russian).
Since the fall of the Soviet regime, Irina Ehrenburg, the
daughter of Ilya Ehrenburg, has recovered the lost portions of the
manuscript sent to Yad Vashem. The texts recovered by Ms. Ehrenburg
include numerous documents that had been censored from the original
manuscript, as well as items that had been hidden by the Grossman
family. In addition, she verified and, where appropriate, corrected
the accuracy of documents that had already appeared in earlier
editions of The Black Book.
The history of spatial identities in the Third Reich is best
approached not as the history of a singular ideology of place, but
rather, as a history of interrelated spaces. National Socialists,
it is clear, attached great importance to place: it was at the
heart of their utopian political project, which was about re-making
territories as well as people's relationships with them. But in
this project, Heimat, region and Empire did not constitute separate
realms for political interventions. Rather, in the Third Reich, as
in the preceding periods of German history, Heimat, region and
Empire were constantly imagined, constructed and re-moulded through
their relationship with one another. This collection brings
together an exciting mixture of international scholars who are
currently pursuing cutting-edge research on spatial identities
under National Socialism. They uncover more differentiated spatial
imaginaries at the heart of Nazi ideology than were previously
acknowledged, and will fuel a growing scepticism about generic
national narratives.
The extraordinary experiences of ordinary people-their suffering
and their unimaginable bravery-are the subject of Judy Glickman
Lauder's remarkable photographs. Beyond the Shadows responds to the
world's looking the other way as the Nazis took power and their
hate-fueled nationalism steadily turned to mass murder. In the
context of the horror of the Holocaust, it also tells the uplifting
story of how the citizens and leadership of Denmark, under
occupation and at tremendous risk to themselves, defied the Third
Reich to transport the country's Jews to safety in Sweden. Over the
past thirty years, Glickman Lauder has captured the intensity of
death camps in Germany, Poland, and Czechoslovakia, in dark and
expressive photographs, telling of a world turned upside down, and,
in contrast, the redemptive and uplifting story of the "Danish
exception." Including texts by Holocaust scholars Michael Berenbaum
and Judith S. Goldstein, and a previously unpublished original text
by survivor Elie Wiesel, Beyond the Shadows demonstrates
passionately what hate can lead to, and what can be done to stand
in its path. "This is photography and storytelling for our times,
about what hate leads to, and how we can stand up to it. Beyond the
Shadows is powerful and revealing, and sharply relevant to all of
us who believe in the human family." - Sir Elton John
The Bloomsbury Companion to Holocaust Literature is a comprehensive
reference resource including a wealth of critical material on a
diverse range of topics within the literary study of Holocaust
writing. At its centre is a series of specially commissioned essays
by leading scholars within the field: these address genre-specific
issues such as the question of biographical and historical truth in
Holocaust testimony, as well as broader topics including the
politics of Holocaust representation and the validity of
comparative approaches to the Holocaust in literature and
criticism. These original essays are complemented by a host of
other features designed to benefit scholars and students within
this subject area, including a substantial section detailing new
and emergent trends within the literary study of the Holocaust, a
concise glossary of major critical terminology, and an annotated
bibliography of relevant research material. The volume will be of
interest and value to scholars and students of Holocaust
literature, memorial culture, Jewish Studies, genocide studies, and
twentieth and twenty-first century literature more
broadly.Contributors: Victoria Aarons, Jenni Adams, Michael
Bernard-Donals, Matthew Boswell, Stef Craps, Richard Crownshaw,
Brett Ashley Kaplan and Fernando Herrero-Matoses, Adrienne Kertzer,
Erin McGlothlin, David Miller, and Sue Vice.
Based on never previously explored personal accounts and archival
documentation, this book examines life and death in the
Theresienstadt ghetto, seen through the eyes of the Jewish victims
from Denmark. "How was it in Theresienstadt?" Thus asked Johan Grun
rhetorically when he, in July 1945, published a short text about
his experiences. The successful flight of the majority of Danish
Jewry in October 1943 is a well-known episode of the Holocaust, but
the experience of the 470 men, women, and children that were
deported to the ghetto has seldom been the object of scholarly
interest. Providing an overview of the Judenaktion in Denmark and
the subsequent deportations, the book sheds light on the fate of
those who were arrested. Through a micro-historical analysis of
everyday life, it describes various aspects of social and daily
life in proximity to death. In doing so, the volume illuminates the
diversity of individual situations and conveys the deportees'
perceptions and striving for survival and 'normality'. Offering a
multi-perspective and international approach that places the case
of Denmark into the broader Jewish experience during the Holocaust,
this book is invaluable for researchers of Jewish studies,
Holocaust and genocide studies, and the history of modern Denmark.
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