Self-Portrait, with Parents and Footnotes is a story of movement. Moving from city to city characterized the author's growing up-from Poland to Belgium and from the East Coast to the West Coast of the United States. The book also moves between past and present. The authors' parents, Jews from Eastern Europe, lived through the Spanish Civil War, the Second World War, the post-war Communist world, and much migration in between. How were these events transmitted to their child, and what questions do they give rise to today? The book moves between straightforward story-telling and reflections on memory, on politics and religion, and on literature. It seeks the genesis of intellectual interests in personal story.

This text presents a documented history of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee in the Soviet Union during the Second World War, the Holocaust and the immediate post-war years, up to the end of 1948. It centres upon the fate of Soviet Jewry under both Hitler and Stalin. The text features documents from the newly opening Russian Archives, primarily from the Russian State Archive and the former Archive of the Communist Party with insight of how Soviet and Stalinist policies towards Jews and the JAFC were shaped and the decision-making process involved.

The inaugural title in a collaboration between the Wiener Library and Granta Books. These two pamphlets, 'Prelude to Pogroms? Facts for the Thoughtful' and 'German Judaism in Political, Economic and Cultural Terms' mark the first time that Alfred Wiener, the founder of the Wiener Holocaust Library, has been published in English. Together they offer a vital insight into the antisemitic onslaught Germany's Jews were subjected to as the Nazi Party rose to power, and introduce a sharp and sympathetic thinker and speaker to a contemporary audience. Tackling issues such as the planned rise of antisemitism and the scapegoating of minorities, these pamphlets speak as urgently to the contemporary moment as they provide a window on to the past.

The Children of Atlantis is a collection of statements by a hundred young people who have fled various parts of the former Yugoslavia in the face of war and destruction, nationalism, hatred and ethnic cleansing, the pressure to take sides, and the draft. As refugees, they are seeking to continue or complete their education at universities around the world, all the while confronting the task of making something of their lives amid the catastrophe that has overwhelmed them, their families, and their homeland. Gathered here are extracts from essays written by the students describing the circumstances that drove them to leave their homes, and the different ways (both optimistic and bleak) they envision their futures. It offers a snapshot of virtually a whole generation of young people on the threshold of their working lives, uprooted from the world they grew up in. Their voices are varied, expressing pain, anger, uncertainty, hope, and the positive energy of youth. What they have in common is a sense of disbelief and bewilderment at the forces unleashed in what was their country.
In a way this is a war-report, though not prepared by foreign war-reporters or covered from the frontlines. Rather, it is a diverse chronicle revealing the unseen psychological aspects of war, written by the victims from the depths of their souls.

Half a century after the collapse of the Nazi regime and the Third Reich, scholars from a range of fields continue to examine the causes of Nazi Germany. An increasing number of young Americans are attempting to understand the circumstances that led to the rise of the Nazi party and the subsequent Holocaust, as well as the implication such events may have for today as the world faces a resurgence of neo-Nazism, ethnic warfare, and genocide.
In the months following World War II, extensive psychiatric and psychological testing was performed on over 200 Nazis in an effort to understand the key personalities of the Third Reich and of those individuals who "just followed orders." In addressing these issues, the current volume examines the strange history of over 200 Rorschach Inkblot protocols that were administered to Nazi war criminals and answers such questions as:
* Why the long delay in publishing protocols?
* What caused such jealousies among the principals?
* How should the protocols be interpreted?
* Were the Nazis monsters or ordinary human beings?
This text delivers a definitive and comprehensive study of the psychological functioning of Nazi war criminals -- both the elite and the rank-and-file. In order to apply a fresh perspective to understanding the causes that created such antisocial behavior, these analyses lead to a discussion within the context of previous work done in social and clinical psychology. Subjects discussed include the authoritarian personality, altruism, obedience to authority, diffusion of responsibility, and moral indifference. The implications for current political events are also examined as Neo-Nazism, anti-Semitism, and ethnic hate are once again on the rise. While the book does contain some technical material relating to the psychological interpretations, it is intended to be a scholarly presentation written in a narrative style. No prior knowledge of psychological testing is necessary, but it should be of great benefit for those interested in the Rorschach Inkblot test, or with a special interest in psychological testing, personality assessment, and the history of psychology. It is also intended for readers with a broad interest in Nazi Germany.

The fateful story of Adolf Hitler's transformation from awkward, feckless loner to lethal, charismatic demagogue. The story of the making of Adolf Hitler that we are all familiar with is the one Hitler himself wove in his 1924 trial, and then expanded upon in Mein Kampf. It tells of his rapid emergence as National Socialist leader in 1919, and of how he successfully rallied most of Munich and the majority of Bavaria's establishment to support the famous beer-hall putsch of 1923. It is an account which has largely been taken at face value for over ninety years. Yet, on closer examination, Hitler's account of his experiences in the years immediately following the First World War turns out to be every bit as unreliable as his account of his experiences as a soldier during the war itself. In Becoming Hitler, Thomas Weber continues from where he left off in his previous book, Hitler's First War, stripping away the layers of myth and fabrication in Hitler's own tale to tell the real story of Hitler's politicization and radicalization in post-First World War Munich. It is the gripping account of how an awkward and unemployed loner with virtually no recognizable leadership qualities and fluctuating political ideas turned into the charismatic, self-assured, virulently anti-Semitic leader with an all-or-nothing approach to politics with whom the world was soon to become tragically familiar. As Weber clearly shows, far from the picture of a fully-formed political leader which Hitler wanted to portray in Mein Kampf, his ideas and priorities were still very uncertain and largely undefined in early 1919 - and they continued to shift until 1923. It was the failed Ludendorff putsch of November 1923 - and the subsequent Ludendorff trial - which was to prove the making of Hitler. And he was not slow to spot the opportunity that it offered. As the movers and shakers of Munich's political scene tried to blame everything on him in the course of the trial, Hitler was presented with a golden opportunity to place himself at the centre of attention, turning what had been the 'Ludendorff trial' into the 'Hitler trial'. Henceforth, he would no longer be merely a local Bavarian political leader. From now on, he would present himself as a potential 'national saviour'. In the months after the trial, Hitler cemented this myth by writing Mein Kampf from his comfortable prison cell. His years of metamorphosis were now behind him. His years as Fuhrer were soon to come.

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.

Against All Odds is the first comprehensive look at the 140,000 Jewish Holocaust survivors who came to America and the lives they have made here. William Helmreich writes of their experiences beginning with their first arrival in the United States: the mixed reactions they encountered from American Jews who were not always eager to receive them; their choices about where to live in America; and their efforts in finding marriage partners with whom they felt most comfortable--most often other survivors.

In preparation, Helmreich spent more than six years traveling the United States, listening to the personal stories of hundreds of survivors, and examining more than 15,000 pages of data as well as new material from archives that have never before been available to create this remarkable, groundbreaking work. What emerges is a picture that is sharply different from the stereotypical image of survivors as people who are chronically depressed, anxious, and fearful.

This intimate, enlightening work explores questions about prevailing over hardship and adversity: how people who have gone through such experiences pick up the threads of their lives; where they obtain the strength and spirit to go on; and, finally, what lessdns the rest of us can learn about overcoming tragedy.

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.

In a remarkable deed of original scholarly research and detailed detective work, Anne Weise recreates sketches of a lost life - of one of the millions of forgotten souls whose lives came to a violent end in the Holocaust. Her focus is Alfred Bergel (1902-1944), an artist and teacher from Vienna who was a close associate of Karl Koenig - the founder of the Camphill Movement for people with special needs - who wrote of Bergel in his youthful diaries as his best friend 'Fredi'. After the annexation of Austria, Alfred Bergel found himself unable to escape the horror of the National Socialist regime. Subsequently, in 1942 he was deported to the Theresienstadt camp. Imprisoned there, he produced numerous artistic works of the inmates of the ghetto and taught drawing, art history and art appreciation - sometimes in collaboration with the Bauhaus artist Friedl Dicker-Brandeis. During this period, he was also forced by the Nazis to produce forgeries of classic art works. One of the central figures of cultural life in the Theresienstadt ghetto, Bergel was eventually transported to the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1944 where, tragically, he was murdered. His name and his work are largely forgotten today, even amongst Holocaust researchers, but Weise succeeds in honouring the life of the Jewish artist by lovingly piecing together his biography, based on numerous personal testimonies by friends and contemporaries and supplemented with documents and many dozens of photos and colour reproductions of Bergel's artistic works. This invaluable recreation of a life provides insight not only into the desperate plight of a single individual, but also illustrates the human will and determination to survive in the context of one of the darkest periods of recent history.

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."

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.

The German invasion of the Soviet Union during the Second World War was central to Nazi plans for territorial expansion and genocidal demographic revolution. To create 'living space', Nazi Germany pursued two policies. The first was the systematic murder of millions of Jews, Slavs, Roma, and other groups that the Nazis found undesirable on racial, religious, ethnic, ideological, hereditary, or behavioral grounds. It also pursued a parallel, albeit smaller, program to mobilize supposedly Germanic residents of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union - so-called Volksdeutsche or ethnic Germans - as the vanguard of German expansion. This study recovers the intersection of these two projects in Transnistria, a portion of southern Ukraine that, because of its numerous Volksdeutsche communities, became an epicenter of both Nazi Volksdeutsche policy and the Holocaust in conquered Soviet territory, ultimately asking why local residents, whom German authorities identified as Volksdeutsche, participated in the Holocaust with apparent enthusiasm.

A rediscovered masterpiece by the 16 million copy bestselling author of Man’s Search For Meaning

Just months after his liberation from Auschwitz renowned psychiatrist Viktor E. Frankl delivered a series of talks revealing the foundations of his life-affirming philosophy. The psychologist, who would soon become world famous, explained his central thoughts on meaning, resilience and his conviction that every crisis contains opportunity.

Published here for the very first time in English, Frankl's words resonate as strongly today as they did in 1946. Despite the unspeakable horrors in the camp, Frankl learnt from his fellow inmates that it is always possible to say ‘yes to life’ – a profound and timeless lesson for us all.

With an introduction by Daniel Goleman.

Although there is an immense amount of literature on the "final solution" - the Nazis' attempt to exterminate European Jews during the Second World War - many critical questions about the Holocaust still remain unaddressed. These collected essays set out to clarify the reasons for the attempted genocide of the Jews, and to provide new answers to this period of history which often seems inexplicable. The book draws on important new evidence, much of it from archives in Eastern Europe which have only recently become accessible. Contributors are among the leading experts in the field. The essays focus on the preconditions and antecedents for the "final solution" and the immediate origins of the decision to murder Europe's Jewish population. They consider, too, the impact of the German invasion of Russia in June 1941 on the evolution of a genocidal policy and the response of the peoples and governments in Germany, occupied Europe, the free world and the Jewish communities under the Nazis and in the West. The results of this study are often controversial, and challenge many accepted views.

The story of one man's experiences during the Holocaust of Jews in Hungary in 1944. It provides a compassionate, yet non-judgmental, insight into the daily horrors suffered by all Hungarian Jews during this time.

Of all the controversies facing historians today, few are more divisive or more important than the question of how the Holocaust was possible. What led thousands of Germans - many of them middle-aged reservists with, apparently, little Nazi zeal - to willingly commit acts of genocide? Was it ideology? Was there something rotten in the German soul? Or was it - as Christopher Browning argues in this highly influential book - more a matter of conformity, a response to intolerable social and psychological pressure? Ordinary Men is a microhistory, the detailed study of a single unit in the Nazi killing machine. Browning evaluates a wide range of evidence to seek to explain the actions of the "ordinary men" who made up reserve Police Battalion 101, taking advantage of the wide range of resources prepared in the early 1960s for a proposed war crimes trial. He concludes that his subjects were not "evil;" rather, their actions are best explained by a desire to be part of a team, not to shirk responsibility that would otherwise fall on the shoulders of comrades, and a willingness to obey authority. Browning's ability to explore the strengths and weaknesses of arguments - both the survivors' and other historians' - is what sets his work apart from other studies that have attempted to get to the root of the motivations for the Holocaust, and it is also what marks Ordinary Men as one of the most important works of its generation.

Contemporary scholars in all disciplines have long recognized that the Shoah is a critical challenge to Christianity and Western civilization, as well as a watershed event in Jewish history. Steven L. Jacobs has completed two complementary works dealing with contemporary religious responses to the Shoah, one from the Christian perspective, the other from the Jewish perspective. This work focuses on the Christian responses to the Holocaust. Contents: Revisionism and Theology, Harry James Cargas; Evil and Existence: Karl Barth, Paul Tillich, Reinhold Niebuhr Revisited in Light of the Shoah, Alan Davies; Suffering, Theology, and the Shoah, Alice Lyons Eckardt; Mysterium Tremendum: Catholic Grapplings with the Shoah and its Theological Implications, Eugene J. Fisher; In the Presence of Burning Children: The Reformation of Christianity after the Shoah, Douglas K. Huenke; How the Shoah Affects Christian Belief, Thomas A. Idinopulos; A Contemporary Religious Response to the Shoah: The Crisis of Prayer, Michael McGarry; The Shoah: Continuing Theological Challenge for Christianity, John T. Pawlikowski; Theological and Ethical Reflections on the Shoah: Getting Beyond the Victimizer Relationship, Rosemary Radford Reuther; and Asking and Listening, Understanding and Doing: Some Conditions for Responding to the Shoah Religiously, John K Roth.

From Left to Right: Lucy S. Dawidowicz, the New York Intellectuals, and the Politics of Jewish History is the first comprehensive biography of Dawidowicz (1915-1990), a pioneer historian in the field that is now called Holocaust studies. Dawidowicz was a household name in the postwar years, not only because of her scholarship but also due to her political views. Dawidowicz, like many other New York intellectuals, was a youthful communist, became an FDR democrat midcentury, and later championed neoconservatism. Nancy Sinkoff argues that Dawidowicz's rightward shift emerged out of living in prewar Poland, watching the Holocaust unfold from New York City, and working with displaced persons in postwar Germany. Based on over forty-five archival collections, From Left to Right chronicles Dawidowicz's life as a window into the major events and issues of twentieth-century Jewish life. From Left to Right is structured in four parts. Part 1 tells the story of Dawidowicz's childhood, adolescence, and college years when she was an immigrant daughter living in New York City. Part 2 narrates Dawidowicz's formative European years in Poland, New York City (when she was enclosed in the European-like world of the New York YIVO), and Germany. Part 3 tells how Dawidowicz became an American while Polish Jewish civilization was still inscribed in her heart and also explores when and how Dawidowicz became the voice of East European Jewry for the American Jewish public. Part 4 exposes the fissure between Dawidowicz's European-inflected diaspora nationalist modern Jewish identity and the shifting definition of American liberalism from the late 1960s forward, which also saw the emergence of neoconservatism. The book includes an interpretation of her memoir From that Place and Time, as well as an appendix of thirty-one previously unpublished letters that illustrate the broad reach of her work and person. Dawidowicz's right-wing politics, sex, and unabashed commitment to Jewish particularism in an East European Jewish key have resulted in scholarly neglect. Therefore, this book is strongly recommended for scholars and general readers interested in Jewish and women's studies.

eBook available with sample pages: 0203214803

An exploration of the development of Holocaust research in Israel, this book ranges from the consolidation of Holocaust research as an academic subject in the late 1940s to the establishment of Yad Vashem and beyond. Research on the story of historiography is often a work on books, on the "final products" that fill academic bookshelves yet, in Israeli Holocaust Research, Boaz Cohen illustrates that the evolution of holocaust research in Israel has a more human element to it. Drawing on knowledge gained through seven years of work in ten major archives in Israel, the author reveals a previously unseen picture of the development of Israeli Holocaust research "from below," and of the social and cultural forces influencing its character. In doing so, a new facet to the picture emerges, of the story beyond the archive and the people who see Holocaust research as their mission and responsibility. This book will be a fascinating addition to the study of Holocaust research and will be of particular interest to students of history, historiography and Jewish studies

"Masterful...An indispensable warning for our own time." -Samuel Moyn "Magisterial...Covers this dark history with insight and skill...A major intervention into our understanding of 20th-century Europe and the lessons we ought to take away from its history." -The Nation For much of the last century, Europe was haunted by a threat of its own imagining: Judeo-Bolshevism. The belief that Communism was a Jewish plot to destroy the nations of Europe took hold during the Russian Revolution and quickly spread. During World War II, fears of a Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy were fanned by the fascists and sparked a genocide. But the myth did not die with the end of Nazi Germany. A Specter Haunting Europe shows that this paranoid fantasy persists today in the toxic politics of revitalized right-wing nationalism. "It is both salutary and depressing to be reminded of how enduring the trope of an exploitative global Jewish conspiracy against pure, humble, and selfless nationalists really is...A century after the end of the first world war, we have, it seems, learned very little." -Mark Mazower, Financial Times "From the start, the fantasy held that an alien element-the Jews-aimed to subvert the cultural values and national identities of Western societies...The writers, politicians, and shills whose poisonous ideas he exhumes have many contemporary admirers." -Robert Legvold, Foreign Affairs

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.