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Books > History > European history > From 1900
From the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War until the end of World War II, many poets around the world felt an obligation to write about the wars of their time. Famed poets like Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Isaac Rosenberg, and Ivor Gurney had earned their literary authority because of their experience fighting in the trenches during World War I, but civilian poets who wished to write about warfare doubted their own authority to write about the battles from afar. In News of War, Professor Rachel Galvin argues that this standard is a strongly gendered norm that is problematic for women writers, who were much less likely to have firsthand experience with war. Galvin indicates that the predicament of writing war without witnessing war is exemplified by six of the most prominent poets of the time: a Spanish-language poet, Cesar Vallejo; a French-language poet, Raymond Queneau; and four English-language poets, W. H. Auden, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, and Gertrude Stein. Although scholars have previously observed the anxieties of civilian poets writing about war, especially in the literature of World War I, Galvin gives the topic a new emphasis by developing the idea that the poets are in dialogue with journalism of the time and developing a framework within which to see their formal patterns for grappling with war at a distance. Expanding on the work of previous scholars who have written on poetry's relation to the news, News of War develops the idea of a strong tendency toward aesthetic self-reflexivity and ethical self-scrutiny in the poetry of the war.
The powerful and bestselling memoir of a young Jewish pianist who survived the war in Warsaw against all odds. Made into a Bafta and Oscar-winning film. 'You can learn more about human nature from this brief account of the survival of one man throughout the war years in the devastated city of Warsaw than from several volumes of the average encyclopaedia' Independent on Sunday 'We are drawn in to share his surprise and then disbelief at the horrifying progress of events, all conveyed with an understated intimacy and dailiness that render them painfully close - riveting' Observer 'A book so fresh and vivid, so heartbreaking, and so simply and beautifully written, that it manages to tell us the story of horrendous events as if for the first time' Daily Telegraph
In recent news coverage of the dramatic political events in Eastern Europe, Gypsies have been a favourite sidebar topic. Some of the stories have been truly horrifying, others are written condescendingly and to amuse; but what has become clear is how little we really know about this people. In a concerted effort to uncover the modern history of the Rom in Eastern Europe, the authors examine the Gypsy experience in Albania, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and Yugoslavia, with special attention to the Nazi Holocaust as well as to the record of the forced settlement and education programmes instituted by communist regimes.
In recent news coverage of the dramatic political events in Eastern Europe, Gypsies have been a favourite sidebar topic. Some of the stories have been truly horrifying, others are written condescendingly and to amuse; but what has become clear is how little we really know about this people. In a concerted effort to uncover the modern history of the Rom in Eastern Europe, the authors examine the Gypsy experience in Albania, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and Yugoslavia, with special attention to the Nazi Holocaust as well as to the record of the forced settlement and education programmes instituted by communist regimes.
Between 1941 and 1945, in one of the more curious episodes of racial politics during the Second World War, a small number of Jews were granted the rights of Aryan citizens in the Independent State of Croatia by the pro-Nazi Utasha regime. This study seeks to explain how these exemptions from Ustasha racial laws came to be, and in particular how they were justified by the race theory of the time. Author Nevenko Bartulin explores these questions within the broader histories of anti-Semitism, nationalism, and race in Croatia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, tracing Croatian Jews' troubled journey from "Croats of the Mosaic faith" before World War II to their eventual rejection as racial aliens by the Utasha movement.
Jewish armed resistance during the Holocaust has been amply documented, debunking the stereotypical view of the Jews as passive victims of Hitler and the Nazis. The stories of the revolts in a number of ghettos and camps have been told and retold. Jewish participation in partisan activities has been fully recorded. There is another form of resistance, spiritual in nature, which has yet to be fully documented. Spiritual resistance was expressed on an organized communal level, maintained to thwart the Nazi intention of dehumanizing their Jewish victims. The victims responded by initiating religious, educational, and cultural activities in an organized manner. These activities were both open and clandestine. In addition, many individuals expressed themselves through their writings. To Live with Hope, To Die with Dignity, based principally on materials created and activities conducted in the ghettos of Warsaw, Vilna, Lodz, Kovno, during the Holocaust, concerns itself with this particular aspect of the Holocaust tragedy.
Of the many medical specializations to transform themselves during the rise of National Socialism, anatomy has received relatively little attention from historians. While politics and racial laws drove many anatomists from the profession, most who remained joined the Nazi party, and some helped to develop the scientific basis for its racialist dogma. As historian and anatomist Sabine Hildebrandt reveals, however, their complicity with the Nazi state went beyond the merely ideological. They progressed through gradual stages of ethical transgression, turning increasingly to victims of the regime for body procurement, as the traditional model of working with bodies of the deceased gave way, in some cases, to a new paradigm of experimentation with the "future dead."
"Testimony" examines the nature and function of testimony, witnessing and memory, both in their general relation to the acts of writing and of reading, and in their particular relation to the Holocaust. This book takes in the texts of Dostoevsky, Freud, Mallarme, Camus and de Man, videotaped testimonial life accounts of Holocaust survivors and also the film "Shoah" by Claude Lanzmann. "Testimony" defines the uniquely devastating aspect of the Holocaust as a radical crisis of witnessing an "unprecendented historical occurrence of ...an event eliminating its own witness". Drawing on their personal experience of receiving survivors' accounts, Felman and Laub present the first "theory of testimony": a radically new conception of the relationship between art and culture and the witnessing of historical events. This book should be of interest to undergraduates and academics of literary criticism, literary theory, film theory, psychoanalysis and modern history.
When the Allies stormed Berlin in 1945, Adolf Eichmann, the
operational manager of the Final Solution, shed his SS uniform and
vanished. Bringing him to justice would require a harrowing
fifteen-year chase stretching from war-ravaged Europe to the shores
of Argentina. "Hunting Eichmann" follows the Nazi as he escapes two
American POW camps, hides out in the mountains, slips out of Europe
on the ratlines, and builds an anonymous life in Buenos
Aires.
In February 1945, Israele Zolli, chief rabbi of Rome's ancient Jewish community, shocked his co-religionists in Italy and throughout the Jewish world by converting to Catholicism and taking as his baptismal name, Eugenio, to honor Pope Pius XII (Eugenio Pacelli) for what Zolli saw as his great humanitarianism toward the Jews during the Holocaust. Almost a half a century after his conversion, Zolli still evokes anger and embarrassment in Italy's Jewish community. This book is the first authoritative treatment of this astonishing story. What induced Zolli to embrace Catholicism will probably never be known. Nonetheless, by painstaking scholarly detective work, through interviews in Italy and elsewhere, through the unearthing of private papers not previous known to exist, and through the study of previous inaccessible archival materials, the authors have succeeded in explaining why Zolli left the Jewish fold and joined the Catholic Church. Like Zolli's rabbinical career, Pius XII's long pontificate tells us much about the Church of Rome and its relationship to the Jewish people, particularly with reference to the issue of conversion. The authors focus on the pontiff's World War II policies vis-a-vis the Jews, a subject that has been heatedly debated since Rolf Hochhuth's "The Deputy" was performed in the early 1960s. What Pacelli knew abut the extermination of the Jews and when he knew it, what he said and failed to say, are given special attention in this book. Through the examination of previous scholarship and primary materials (including Pius XI's encyclical on race and anti-Semitism, Pacelli's behavior is evaluated to determine if Zolli accurately gauged the Holy Father's efforts to save Jews. This saga of the two Eugenios will interest historians of the Second World War and the Holocaust and students of history alike.
This volume is part of a comprehensive effort by Professor Rummel to understand and place in historical perspective the entire subject of genocide and mass murder-what is herein called Democide. It is the third in a series of volumes published by Transaction, in which Rummel offers a comprehensive analysis of the 120,000,000 people killed as a result of government action or direct intervention. Curiously, while we have a considerable body of literature on the Nazi Holocaust, we do not have a total accounting-at least not until now with the issuance of Democide. In addition to the quantitative lacunae, there remains a paucity of theoretical information distinguishing the historical descriptive and the anecdotal accounts. This study of Nazi killings in cold blood is a path-finding effort in political psychology. While Rummel does not claim to give a definitive accounting, his explanation for the numbers reached-and they are high-is compelling. In addition, we now have a correlation of information on the murder of diverse groups: Jews, Gypsies, Poles, Ukranians, and even Germans themselves. It is now possible to fathom the Nazi genocidal poiicies-which were collective and which were selective. Rummel's volume is a clear guide to a murky past. It offers the first systematic effort to ascertain the nature and the extent of the Nazi genocide from the point of view of the perpetrator's aims rather than the victims' consequences. This is not a pretty picture, but it is not a partisan one either. The materials are presented in a clinical as well as a systemic fashion. Rummel has a deep sense of the life-saving instincts of individuals and the life-taking propensities of impersonal state machinery. It is thus, a humanistic effort, one that plumbs the effects of the Nazi war-machine on innocents in order to better understand present conditions. Professionals ranging from social scientists to demographers will find this a quintessential effort at political reconstruction.
History Flows through Us introduces a new dialogue between leading historians and psychoanalysts and provides essential insights into the nature of historical trauma. The contributors - German historians, historians of the Holocaust and psychoanalysts of different disciplinary backgrounds - address the synergy between history and psychoanalysis in an engaging and accessible manner. Together they develop a response to German history and the Holocaust that is future-oriented and timely in the presence of today's ethnic hatreds. In the process, they help us to appreciate the emotional and political legacy of history's collective crimes. This book illustrates how history and the psyche shape one another and the degree to which history flows through all of us as human beings. Its innovative cross-disciplinary approach draws on the work of the historian and psychoanalyst Thomas Kohut. The volume includes an extended dialogue with Kohut in which he reflects on the study of German history and the Holocaust at the intersection of history and psychoanalysis. This book demonstrates that the fields of history and psychoanalysis are each concerned with the role of empathy and with the study of memory and narrative. History Flows through Us will appeal to general readers, students and professionals in cultural history, Holocaust and trauma studies, sociology, psychoanalysis, psychotherapy and psychology.
This book deals with the work of fifteen young Jewish poets who were killed, died of wounds, or were executed in captivity while serving in the Red Army in the Second World War. All were young, all were poets, most were thoroughly assimilated into Soviet society whilst at the same time being rooted in Jewish culture and traditions. Their poetry, written mostly in Russian, Yiddish, and Ukrainian, was coloured by their backgrounds, by the literary and cultural climate that prevailed in the Soviet Union, and was deeply concerned with their expectation of impending death at the hands of the Nazis. The book examines the poets' backgrounds, their lives, their poetry and their deaths. Like the experiences and poetry of the British First World War poets, the lives and poems of these young Jewish poets are extremely interesting and deeply moving.
Born in 1904, Brandt played a major role in the first mass killing programme of the Third Reich, the so called 'euthanasia' programme. As Reich Commissioner for Health and Sanitation, Karl Brandt became the highest medical authority in the Nazi regime; he initiated experiments on concentration camps inmates and was eventually put in charge of biological and chemical warfare. How was it that a rational, highly cultured, literate, young professional could come to be responsible for mass murder and criminal human experiments on a previously unimaginable scale? In this riveting biography, Ulf Schmidt explores in detail that Brandt belonged to a generation of a young 'expert elite', who in the 1930s and 1940s were willing, and empowered, to support and conceive an oppressive, militarist, and racist government policy, and ultimately turn its exterminatory potential into reality. Through a critical biography of Brandt, Schmidt re-evaluates the system of communication at the centre of Hitler's regime. The book extends our understanding of the culture of detachment between a regime that was geared towards total destruction, and a government that was almost totally removed from its people.
To forget after Auschwitz is considered barbaric. Baer and Sznaider question this assumption not only in regard to the Holocaust but to other political crimes as well. The duties of memory surrounding the Holocaust have spread around the globe and interacted with other narratives of victimization that demand equal treatment. Are there crimes that must be forgotten and others that should be remembered? In this book the authors examine the effects of a globalized Holocaust culture on the ways in which individuals and groups understand the moral and political significance of their respective histories of extreme political violence. Do such transnational memories facilitate or hamper the task of coming to terms with and overcoming divisive pasts? Taking Argentina, Spain and a number of sites in post-communist Europe as test cases, this book illustrates the transformation from a nationally oriented ethics to a trans-national one. The authors look at media, scholarly discourse, NGOs dealing with human rights and memory, museums and memorial sites, and examine how a new generation of memory activists revisits the past to construct a new future. Baer and Sznaider follow these attempts to manoeuvre between the duties of remembrance and the benefits of forgetting. This, the authors argue, is the "ethics of Never Again."
Daniel Goldhagen's study of the Holocaust offers conclusions that run directly counter to those reached by Christopher Browning, whose book Ordinary Men is also the subject of a Macat analysis. As such, the two analyses make possible some interesting critical thinking exercises focused on evaluation of the evidence used by the two historians. For Goldhagen, a chief reason for German actions was not the mundane good comradeship stressed by Browning, but a longstanding hatred of Jews and Judaism specific to Germany that dated back well into the previous century. Debating which historian is right, which has made better use of the available evidence, which has most successfully written objectively - and which advances the most secure interpretation of contested documents - forces students to think critically about one of the most important and (on the surface at least) incomprehensible events of the past century.
The Hollandsche Schouwburg is a former theatre in Amsterdam where, during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, tens of thousands of Jews were assembled before being deported to transit and concentration camps. Before the war, the theatre had been an example of Jewish integration in the Netherlands, and after the war it became a memorial for the Jewish victims of Nazi persecution. This book is the first international publication to address all the historical aspects of the site, putting it in a broader European and historical context.
In recent years, a lively debate has developed in Poland on the question of what responsibility the Poles share for the mass murder of the Jews, which took place largely on Polish soil. This debate was sparked off by the showing in Poland of Claude Lanzmann's film, Shoah , which revealed how deeply-rooted anti-Jewish prejudice could still be found in the Polish countryside. Anti-semitism is something which Poland has preferred to forget. But before the Second World War hostility to the Jews was widespread and this climate of pervasive anti-semitism may have facilitated the Nazis' murderous plans. But Poles now, with great courage, are facing this dark side of their past. This book, translated and edited by a leading British historian of Poland, Antony Polonsky, is a major contribution to the history of the Holocaust. It gathers together the most important contribution to the current debate, revealing the agony many Poles feel about their lack of action during the war.
Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1933-1945 is an abridged edition of Saul Friedlander's definitive Pulitzer Prize-winning two-volume history of the Holocaust: Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution, 1933-1939 and The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945. The book's first part, dealing with the National Socialist campaign of oppression, restores the voices of Jews who were engulfed in an increasingly horrifying reality following the Nazi accession to power. Friedlander also provides the accounts of the persecutors themselves--and, perhaps most telling of all, the testimonies of ordinary German citizens who, in general, stood silent and unmoved by the increasing waves of segregation, humiliation, impoverishment, and violence. The second part covers the German extermination policies that resulted in the murder of six million European Jews--an official program that depended upon the cooperation of local authorities and police departments, the passivity of the populations, and the willingness of the victims to submit in desperate hope of surviving long enough to escape the German vise. A monumental, multifaceted study now contained in a single volume, Saul Friedlander's Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1933-1945 is an essential study of a dark and complex history.
Winner of the Booker Prize and international bestseller, made into the award-winning film Schindler's List. In the shadow of Auschwitz, a flamboyant German industrialist grew into a living legend to the Jews of Cracow. He was a womaniser, a heavy drinker and a bon viveur, but to them he became a saviour. This is the extraordinary story of Oskar Schindler, who risked his life to protect Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland and who was transformed by the war into a man with a mission, a compassionate angel of mercy.
In 1944, at the age of fifteen, Marceline Loridan-Ivens was arrested in occupied France, along with her father. They were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau, and forcibly separated. Though he managed to smuggle one last note to her, Marceline never spoke to her father again. But You Did Not Come Back is Marceline's letter to the father she would never know as an adult. This is a breath-taking memoir by an extraordinary woman, and a deeply moving message from a daughter to a father.
This volume brings together new interdisciplinary perspectives on the Spanish Civil War, its victims, its contentious ending, and its aftermath. In exploring the slow demise of the Spanish Republic and the course of the Civil War, the authors have chosen to range in turn over cinematic, literary and historical depictions of the era. In addition, reactions elsewhere in Europe to the Spanish conflict are examined; the role of the International Brigades is looked at afresh; the fate of children displaced during the Civil War is explored; and the Spanish anarcho-syndicalist movement is revisited. The volume shows that to be any kind of soldier in the armies of the Republic, or even to be seen as a Republican sympathiser, was to become a "non-person" in the new order in Spain under Franco, and sets what supporters of the Republic had to endure within the wider European and international context of the period. This book offers timely fresh insights into the failure of the Spanish Republic and into a society that tried in vain to unite its divided people during what was a seismic era in Spain's history. This book was originally published as a special issue of Bulletin of Spanish Studies.
This book brings together different and interdisciplinary perspectives on the Spanish Civil War, its victims, its contentious ending, and its aftermath. In exploring the slow demise of republican ideals, contributors range over many diverse historical and cultural topics - discussing, for instance, the attitudes of both Left and Right to the poet Federico Garcia Lorca and to his assassination, examining the documentary evidence offered in surviving memoirs of the Civil War, and assessing the major characteristics of the new order in Spain under Franco. Cinematic and literary depictions of the Civil War and its consequences are also studied. Other topics investigated include: contemporary French reactions to the Spanish conflict, Stalinist policies towards Spain, the activities and motives of the anarcho-syndicalists and the role of the International Brigades. This collection of essays published on the 75th anniversary of the end of the Civil War, not only places the events and experiences studied within the context of the 'new state' of Franco's Spain, but also offers timely fresh insights into wider European and international issues during what was a period of seismic change in world history. This book was originally published as a special issue of Bulletin of Spanish Studies. |
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