Architectural design can play a role in helping make the past present in meaningful ways when applied to preexisting buildings and places that carry notable and troubling pasts. In this comparative analysis, Rumiko Handa establishes the critical role architectural designs play in presenting difficult pasts by examining documentation centers on National Socialism in Germany. Presenting Difficult Pasts Through Architecture analyzes four centers - Cologne, Nuremberg, Berlin, and Munich - from the point of view of their shared intent to make the past present at National Socialists' perpetrator sites. Applying original frameworks, Handa considers what more architectural design could do toward meaningful representations and interpretations of difficult pasts. This book is a must-read for students, practitioners, and academics interested in how architectural design can participate in presenting the difficult pasts of historical places in meaningful ways.

Over the past decades, the memory of the Holocaust has not only become a common cultural consciousness but also a cultural property shared by people all over the world. This collection brings together academics, critics and creative practitioners from the fields of Holocaust Studies, Literature, History, Media Studies, Creative Writing and German Studies to discuss contemporary trends in Holocaust commemoration and representation in literature, film, TV, the entertainment industry and social media. The essays in this trans-disciplinary collection debate how contemporary culture engages with the legacy of the Holocaust now that, 75 years on from the end of the Second World War, the number of actual survivors is dwindling. It engages with ongoing cultural debates in Holocaust Studies that have seen a development from, largely, testimonial presentations of the Holocaust to more fictional narratives both in literature and film. In addition to a number of chapters focusing in particular on literary trends in Holocaust representation, the collection also assesses other forms of cultural production surrounding the Holocaust, ranging from recent official memorialisation in Germany to Holocaust presentation in film, computer games and social media. The collection also highlights the contributions by creative practitioners such as writers and performers who use drama and the traditional art of storytelling in order to keep memories alive and pass them on to new generations. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History.

The first English-language monograph on Hermann Broch's literary and theoretical work on mass hysteria. Austrian Jewish author Hermann Broch (1886-1951), a leading figure of European Modernism, spent decades attempting to understand the phenomenon of mass hysteria. With his work, he hoped to help protect society from the allure of mass hysteria, embodied in the fanatical appeal of National Socialism. He was torn between two approaches to the problem: using literature to diagnose and expose the irrational knowledge that underpins mass hysteria, and employing theory as a more precise and effective means of doing the same. In this first English-language monograph on the topic, Brett E. Sterling traces the development of Broch's understanding of the mass from an initial confrontation in 1918 to a recurring theme in his fiction and ultimately to the monumental but incomplete Massenwahntheorie (Theory of Mass Hysteria, 1939-48). In thorough readings of Broch's major fictional and theoretical works, the analysis centers on the question of how his literature and theory provide distinct but complementary approaches to conceiving and representing the elusive figure of the mass and the attendant experience of mass hysteria. With political extremism and conspiratorial thinking on the rise, Sterling makes the case that Broch's insights into mass hysteria - literary as well as theoretical - are of renewed relevance to a contemporary audience.

Rachel Meller was never close to her aunt Lisbeth, a cool, unemotional woman with a drawling Viennese-Californian accent, a cigarette in her hand. But when Lisbeth died, she left Rachel an intricately carved Chinese box with a sunflower clasp. Inside the box were photographs, letters and documents that led Rachel to uncover a story she had never known: that of a passionate Jewish teenager growing up in elegant Vienna, who was caught up by war, and forced to flee to Shanghai. Far from home, in a strange city, Lisbeth and her parents build a new life - a life of small joys and great hardship, surrounded by many others who, like them, have fled Hitler and the Nazis. 1930s Shanghai is a metropolis where the old rules do not apply - a city of fabulous wealth and crushing poverty, where disease is rife, and gangsters rub shoulders with rich emigres; where summer brings unspeakable heat, and winter is bitterly cold; and where European refugees build community and, maybe, a young woman can find love. Set against a backdrop of the war in the Far East, The Box with the Sunflower Clasp is a sweeping family memoir that tells the hidden history of the Jews of Shanghai. Rachel Meller writes with elegance and insight as she examines what it means to survive, and what the legacy of displacement and war might mean for the generation that comes afterwards.

More than fifty years after its first publication, Doubleday's definitive edition of Anne Frank's famous diary generated an extraordinary amount of excitement when it was published in early 1995. Enthusiastically received by critics and readers alike, it reigned for nine weeks on The New York Times bestseller list and will remain for all time the version that millions of readers will cherish.In a handsome package with flaps, rough front, and printed endpapers, this Anchor trade paperback will be the perfect gift for anyone who seeks insight into the indestructible nature of the human spirit.

An extraordinary story about a Jewish woman who pretended to be Catholic to survive the Holocaust. Catholics believed she was one of them. A devoted Nazi family took her in. She fell in love with a German engineer who built aeroplanes for the Luftwaffe. But no one knew that Mala Rivka Kizel had been born into a large Orthodox Jewish family. She survived World War II using her charm, intelligence, blonde hair, and blue eyes to assume different identities. Journalist Pieter van Os retraces Mala's footsteps through Europe to uncover her extraordinary journey and the stories of those who helped her. This poignant, rich book is an engrossing meditation on what drives us to fear the Other, and what in turn might allow us to feel compassion for them.

In Conquest and Redemption, Gregg J. Rickman explains how the Nazis stole the possessions of their Jewish victims and obtained the cooperation of institutions across Europe in these crimes of convenience. He also describes how those institutions are being brought to justice, sixty years later, for their retention of their ill-gotten gains.

Rickman not only explains how the robbery was accomplished, tracked, stalled, and then finally reversed, but also clearly shows the ways in which robbery was inextricably connected to the murder of the Jews. The Nazis took everything from Jews--their families, their possessions, and even their names. As with the murder of Jews, the Nazis' robbery was an organized, institutionalized effort. Jews were isolated, robbed, and left homeless, regarded as parasites in the Nazis' eyes, and thus fair game. In short, the organized robbery of the Jews facilitated their slaughter.

How did the German people come to believe that it was permissible to isolate, outlaw, rob, and murder Jews? A partial explanation can be found in the Nazis' creation of a virtual religion of German nationalism and homogeneity that delegitimized Jews as a people and as individuals. This belief system was expressed through a complex structure of religious rules, practices, and institutions. While Nazi ideology was the guiding principle, how that ideology was formed and how it was applied is important to understand if one is to fully grasp the Holocaust.

Rickman painstakingly describes the structural composition and motivation for the plundering of Jewish assets. The Holocaust will always remain a memory of unequalled pain and suffering, but, as Rickman shows, the return of stolen goods to their survivors is a partial victory for the long aggrieved. Conquest and Redemption will be of interest to students and scholars in the history of the Holocaust and its aftermath.

This book deals with the Second World War in Southeastern Europe from the perspective of conditions on the ground during the conflict. The focus is on the reshaping of ethnic and religious groups in wartime, on the "top-down" and "bottom-up" dynamics of mass violence, and on the local dimensions of the Holocaust. The approach breaks with the national narratives and "top-down" political and military histories that continue to be the predominant paradigms for the Second World War in this part of Europe.

Salvage Poetics: Post-Holocaust American Jewish Folk Ethnographies explores how American Jewish post-Holocaust writers, scholars, and editors adapted pre-Holocaust works, such as Yiddish fiction and documentary photography, for popular consumption by American Jews in the post-Holocaust decades. These texts, Jelen argues, served to help clarify the role of East European Jewish identity in the construction of a post-Holocaust American one. In her analysis of a variety of "hybrid" texts-those that exist on the border between ethnography and art-Jelen traces the gradual shift from verbal to visual Jewish literacy among Jewish Americans after the Holocaust. S. Ansky's ethnographic expedition (1912-1914) and Martin Buber's adaptation and compilation of Hasidic tales (1906-1935) are presented as a means of contextualizing the role of an ethnographic consciousness in modern Jewish experience and the way in which literary adaptations and mediations create opportunities for the creation of folk ethnographic hybrid texts. Salvage Poetics looks at classical texts of the American Jewish experience in the second half of the twentieth century, such as Maurice Samuel's The World of Sholem Aleichem (1944), Abraham Joshua Heschel's The Earth Is the Lord's (1950), Elizabeth Herzog and Mark Zborowski's Life Is with People (1952), Lucy Dawidowicz's The Golden Tradition (1967), and Roman Vishniac's A Vanished World (1983), alongside other texts that consider the symbiotic relationship between pre-Holocaust aesthetic artifacts and their postwar reframings and reconsiderations. Salvage Poetics is particularly attentive to how literary scholars deploy the notion of "ethnography" in their readings of literature in languages and/or cultures that are considered "dead" or "dying" and how their definition of an "ethnographic" literary text speaks to and enhance the scientific discipline of ethnography. This book makes a fresh contribution to the fields of American Jewish cultural and literary studies and art history.

I had an uneventful childhood. My family loved me." The author's direct, personal voice gives this Holocaust memoir its power. Although the writing is direct, almost monosyllabic at times, the book is not intended for young readers. It conveys a brutality that is sudden and close, just as it was for the boy when he heard that his beloved older brother and his father had been shot to death and thrown into a common grave. This is the story of a young boy who came of age before World War II in a small Polish-Jewish-Ukrainian town. Nearly his entire family met their end by gas or by bullet. He survived only by the barest of luck. Among the most moving pages in the book are those the author devotes to the Ukrainian and Polish men and women who found the courage, in the face of savage anti-Semitism raging about them, to come to the aid of the Jewish victims, thus risking death both at the hands of their neighbors and the German masters alike.

Haunted Laughter addresses whether it is appropriate to use comedy as a literary form to depict Adolf Hitler, The Third Reich, and the Holocaust. Guided by existing theories of comedy and memory and through a comprehensive examination of comedic film and television productions, from the United States, Israel, and Europe, Jonathan Friedman proposes a model and a set of criteria to evaluate the effectiveness of comedy as a means of representation. These criteria include depth of purpose, relevance to the times, and originality of form and content. Friedman concludes that comedies can be effective if they provide relevant information about life and death in the past, present, or future; break new ground; and serve a purpose or multiple purposes-capturing the dynamic of the Nazi system of oppression, empowering or healing victims, serving as a warning for the future, or keeping those who can never grasp the real horror of genocide from losing perspective.

At the end of World War II, an American military intelligence team retrieved an original copy of the 1935 Nuremberg Laws, signed by Hitler, and turned over this rare document to General George S. Patton. In 1999, after fifty-five years in the vault of the Huntington Library in southern California, the Nuremberg Laws resurfaced and were put on public display for the first time at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles. In this far-ranging, interdisciplinary study that is part historical analysis, part cultural critique, part detective story, and part memoir, Tony Platt explores a range of interrelated issues: war-time looting, remembrance of the holocaust, German and American eugenics, and the public responsibilities of museums and cultural centers. This book is based on original research by the author and co-researcher, historian Cecilia O'Leary, in government, military, and library archives; interviews and oral histories; and participant observation. It is both a detailed, scholarly analysis and a record of the author's activist efforts to correct the historical record.

At the end of World War II, an American military intelligence team retrieved an original copy of the 1935 Nuremberg Laws, signed by Hitler, and turned over this rare document to General George S. Patton. In 1999, after fifty-five years in the vault of the Huntington Library in southern California, the Nuremberg Laws resurfaced and were put on public display for the first time at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles. In this far-ranging, interdisciplinary study that is part historical analysis, part cultural critique, part detective story, and part memoir, Tony Platt explores a range of interrelated issues: war-time looting, remembrance of the holocaust, German and American eugenics, and the public responsibilities of museums and cultural centers. This book is based on original research by the author and co-researcher, historian Cecilia O'Leary, in government, military, and library archives; interviews and oral histories; and participant observation. It is both a detailed, scholarly analysis and a record of the author's activist efforts to correct the historical record.

'A breathtaking story' Daily Mail 'Extraordinary' The Telegraph on the Cook sisters Desperate circumstances can cause ordinary women to achieve extraordinary things. No one would have predicted such glamorous and daring lives for Ida and Louise Cook two decidedly ordinary women who lived quiet lives in the London suburbs. But throughout the 1930s, the remarkable sisters rescued dozens of Jews facing persecution and death. Ida's memoir of the adventures she and Louise shared remains as fresh, vital, and entertaining as the woman who wrote it. Even when Ida began to earn thousands as a successful romance novelist, the sisters directed every spare resource, as well as their considerable courage and ingenuity, towards saving as many as they could from Hitler's death camps.

'Bo, Jenny and I' is a memoir describing the life of a young woman growing up in unusual circumstances, as well as a discussion of political and sociological eff ects of troubled times upon "ordinary people." After an early childhood in pre-war Antwerp, the author, her formidable grandmother, and her young, unconventional working mother fl ed to England in 1940, upon Germany's invasion of Belgium. As refugees, the family adapted to its changed circumstances and to life in World War II England. The political upheavals of the times are refl ected in the life of this small family and its remarkable experiences.

Inspired by seven photographs of WWII refugees in an old album, the author embarked on a quest to uncover the story behind each portrait. Had the refugees been rescued by the diplomat Chiune Sugihara, who saved thousands of Jews from the Holocaust by providing Japanese transit visas? Searching for the identities of the people in the photographs, the author scoured historical records and interviewed numerous fascinating individuals, including Sugihara visa recipients and their descendants. While solving the mystery of the people in the photographs, the author uncovered more hero diplomats and new details about Sugihara visas. This account of the author's investigation supports the legacy of Chiune Sugihara and highlights other WWII saviors, such as the Dutch diplomat Jan Zwartendijk.

"In The Wartime Diary of Edmund Kessler," Dr. Kessler, a Jewish attorney from Lwow, Poland, gives an eye-witness account of the Holocaust through the events recorded in his diary between the years, 1942-1944. In vivid, raw, documentary style, he describes his experiences in the Lwow Ghetto, the Janowska Concentration Camp, and in an underground bunker where he and twenty-three other Jews were hidden by a courageous Polish farmer and his family. The book includes a chapter written by Kazimierz Kalwinski, who, as a teenager, was a care-taker for the hidden Jews on his family's farm. Edmund's daughter, Renata Kessler, coordinated the book and has written the epilogue about her search for the story, which has taken her to Israel, Poland, and Lviv, Ukraine. Renowned scholar Antony Polonsky contributes an insightful historical overview of the times in which the book takes place. A tremendous resource for historians, scholars, and all serious students of the Holocaust.

In "The Wartime Diary of Edmund Kessler," Dr. Kessler, a Jewish attorney from Lwow, Poland, gives an eye-witness account of the Holocaust through the events recorded in his diary between the years, 1942-1944. In vivid, raw, documentary style, he describes his experiences in the Lwow Ghetto, the Janowska Concentration Camp, and in an underground bunker where he and twenty-three other Jews were hidden by a courageous Polish farmer and his family. The book includes a chapter written by Kazimierz Kalwinski, who, as a teenager, was a care-taker for the hidden Jews on his family's farm. Edmund's daughter, Renata Kessler, coordinated the book and has written the epilogue about her search for the story, which has taken her to Israel, Poland, and Lviv, Ukraine. Renowned scholar Antony Polonsky contributes an insightful historical overview of the times in which the book takes place. A tremendous resource for historians, scholars, and all serious students of the Holocaust.

The majority of Poland's prewar Jewish population who fled to the interior of the Soviet Union managed to survive World War II and the Holocaust. This collection of original essays tells the story of more than 200,000 Polish Jews who came to a foreign country as war refugees, forced laborers, or political prisoners. This diverse set of experiences is covered by historians, literary and memory scholars, and sociologists who specialize in the field of East European Jewish history and culture.

During 1938 and 1939, Paul Neurath was a Jewish political prisoner in the concentration camps at Dachau and Buchenwald. He owed his survival to a temporary Nazi policy allowing release of prisoners who were willing to go into exile and to the help of friends on the outside who helped him obtain a visa. He fled to Sweden before coming to the United States in 1941. In 1943, he completed The The Society of Terror, based on his experiences in Dachau and Buchenwald. He embarked on a long career teaching sociology and statistics at universities in the United States and later in Vienna until his death in September 2001.After liberation, the horrific images of the extermination camps abounded from Dachau, Buchenwald, and other places. Neurath's chillingly factual discussion of his experience as an inmate and his astute observations of the conditions and the social structures in Dachau and Buchenwald captivate the reader, not only because of their authenticity, but also because of the work's proximity to the events and the absence of influence of later interpretations. His account is unique also because of the exceptional links Neurath establishes between personal experience and theoretical reflection, the persistent oscillation between the distanced and sober view of the scientist and that of the prisoner.

During 1938 and 1939, Paul Neurath was a Jewish political prisoner in the concentration camps at Dachau and Buchenwald. He owed his survival to a temporary Nazi policy allowing release of prisoners who were willing to go into exile and to the help of friends on the outside who helped him obtain a visa. He fled to Sweden before coming to the United States in 1941. In 1943, he completed The The Society of Terror, based on his experiences in Dachau and Buchenwald. He embarked on a long career teaching sociology and statistics at universities in the United States and later in Vienna until his death in September 2001.After liberation, the horrific images of the extermination camps abounded from Dachau, Buchenwald, and other places. Neurath's chillingly factual discussion of his experience as an inmate and his astute observations of the conditions and the social structures in Dachau and Buchenwald captivate the reader, not only because of their authenticity, but also because of the work's proximity to the events and the absence of influence of later interpretations. His account is unique also because of the exceptional links Neurath establishes between personal experience and theoretical reflection, the persistent oscillation between the distanced and sober view of the scientist and that of the prisoner.

This book follows Chagall's life through his art and his understanding of the role of the artist as a political being. It takes the reader through the different milieus of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries - including the World Wars and the Holocaust - to present a unique understanding of Chagall's artistic vision of peace in an age of extremes. At a time when all identities are being subsumed into a "national" identity, this book makes the case for a larger understanding of art as a way of transcending materiality. The volume explores how Platonic notions of truth, goodness, and beauty are linked and mutually illuminating in Chagall's work. A "spiritual-humanist" interpretation of his life and work renders Chagall's opus more transparent and accessible to the general reader. It will be essential reading for students of art and art history, political philosophy, political science, and peace studies.

'Granddaughters of the Holocaust: Never Forgetting What They Didn't Experience' delves into the intergenerational transmission of trauma to the granddaughters of Holocaust survivors. Although members of this generation did not endure the horrors of the Holocaust directly, they absorbed the experiences of both their parents and grandparents. Ten women participated in psychoanalytic interviews about their inheritance of Holocaust knowledge and memory, and their responses to this legacy. These women provided startling evidence for the embodiment of Holocaust residue in the ways they approached daily tasks of living and being. The resulting narratives revealed that frequently unspoken, unspeakable events are inevitably transmitted to, and imprinted upon, succeeding generations. Granddaughters continue to confront and heal the pain of a trauma they never experienced.

Paul R. Bartrop examines the formation and execution of Australian government policy towards European Jews during the Holocaust period, revealing that Australia did not have an established refugee policy (as opposed to an immigration policy) until late 1938. He shows that, following the Evian Conference of July 1938, Interior Minister John McEwen pledged a new policy of accepting 15,000 refugees (not specifically Jewish), but the bureaucracy cynically sought to restrict Jewish entry despite McEwen's lofty ambitions. Moreover, the book considers the (largely negative) popular attitudes toward Jewish immigrants in Australia, looking at how these views were manifested in the press and in letters to the Department of the Interior. The Holocaust and Australia grapples with how, when the Second World War broke out, questions of security were exploited as the means to further exclude Jewish refugees, a policy incongruous alongside government pronouncements condemning Nazi atrocities. The book also reflects on the double standard applied towards refugees who were Jewish and those who were not, as shown through the refusal of the government to accept 90% of Jewish applications before the war. During the war years this double standard continued, as Australia said it was not accepting foreign immigrants while taking in those it deemed to be acceptable for the war effort. Incorporating the voices of the Holocaust refugees themselves and placing the country's response in the wider contexts of both national and international history in the decades that have followed, Paul R. Bartrop provides a peerless Australian perspective on one of the most catastrophic episodes in world history.