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.

The Coming of the Holocaust aims to help readers understand the circumstances that made the Holocaust possible. Peter Kenez demonstrates that the occurrence of the Holocaust was not predetermined as a result of modern history but instead was the result of contingencies. He shows that three preconditions had to exist for the genocide to take place: modern anti-Semitism, meaning Jews had to become economically and culturally successful in the post French Revolution world to arouse fear rather than contempt; an extremist group possessing a deeply held, irrational, and profoundly inhumane worldview had to take control of the machinery of a powerful modern state; and the context of a major war with mass killings. The book also discusses the correlations between social and historical differences in individual countries regarding the success of the Germans in their effort to exterminate Jews.

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.

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.

Since the end of World War II, leaders of the Jehovah's Witness movement in both Germany and elsewhere have steadfastly argued that Witnesses were united in their opposition to Nazism and did not collude with the Third Reich. Documents have been uncovered, however, that prove otherwise. Using materials from Witness archives, the U.S. State Department, Nazi files, and other sources, M. James Penton demonstrates that while many ordinary German Witnesses were brave in their opposition to Nazism, their leaders were quite prepared to support the Hitler government. Penton begins his study with a close reading of the "Declaration of Facts" released by the Witnesses at a Berlin convention in June 1933. Witness leaders have called the document a protest against Nazi persecution, however, closer examination shows it contained bitter attacks on Great Britain and the United States--jointly referred to as "the greatest and most oppressive empire on earth"--the League of Nations, big business, and above all, Jews, who are referred to as "the representatives of Satan the Devil." It was later, in 1933--when the Nazis would not accept Witness blandishments--that leader J.F. Rutherford called on Witnesses to seek martyrdom by carrying on a campaign of passive resistance. Many ultimately died in prisons and concentration camps, and postwar Witness leaders have attempted to use this fact to assert that Jehovah's Witnesses stood consistently against Nazism. Drawing on his own Witness background and years of research on Witness history, Penton separates fact from fiction during this dark period.

An innovative contribution to the field of Holocaust Studies, this set of interdisciplinary and interfaith essays undertakes a gendered analysis of women as victims, rescuers, perpertrators, and survivors, as well as their representation by postwar artists. Despite the fact that Holocaust Studies is now a mature field, the topic of women and the Holocaust remains underexplored. Women's voices have given rise to many powerful accounts of the Holocaust, and yet few researchers have analyzed these perspectives to learn what the horrifying events meant for women in particular. In Experience and Expression, the authors take on this challenge, addressing the experiences of both Jewish and non-Jewish women. The book opens with an introduction that provides a through overview of the current status of research in the field, followed by two essays that propose new paradigms for theoretical approaches to this topic. The anthology includes essays on particular women who have been little studied in English-language publications. The essays explore the roles (both helpful and harmful) of German nurses. Women's roles in the French resistance and the experiences of Roma and Sinti women are also discussed. Anne Frank's diary, long acknowledged as the seminal work on the Holocaust from a female perspective, is examined with a critical eye to expose the way that scholars have both used and abused their interpretations of this key text. The anthology concludes with analyses of postwar filmic, fictional, and artistic depictions of women in the Holocaust. The interdisciplinary scope of this work includes essays from the fields of English, religion, nursing, history, law, comparative literature, philosophy,French studies, and German studies. Sometimes painful, always well-argued and penetrating, the essays in this collection explore an array of experiences and provide a sophisticated and nuanced understanding of this significant area of study; each essay seeks to push the theoretical boundaries that shape our understanding of women's experience and agency during the Holocaust. This text will be invaluable for scholars, particularly those interested in the areas of Holocaust studies and women's studies, as well as for classroom adoption.

A fascinating portrait of Reinhard Heydrich, one of the darkest figures of Hitler's elite, featuring words with those who knew him best, including in-depth and rare interviews with his wife, Lina. He was called the 'Hangman of the Gestapo' and the 'Butcher of Prague'. He had a reputation as a ruthlessly efficient killer and was known as an exemplar of Nazi ideals. He was the head of the SS and the Gestapo, second in command to Heinrich Himmler and supposedly in line to succeed the Fuhrer. His orders set in motion the Kristallnacht pogrom of 1938 and he was the lead planner of the Final Solution, which led to the murder of millions of Jews across Nazi-occupied Europe. Hitler called him 'the man with the iron heart'. This incredible biography explores who Reinhard Heydrich was, how he came to be and what led him to do what he did. Using in-depth research, Nancy Dougherty (and, following her death, Christopher Lehman-Haupt), paint a detailed picture of Heydrich as never seen before. Through extensive interviews with those who knew him best, including his wife Lina von Osten Heinrich, we hear about his rarefied musical family origins and ugly-duckling childhood, his failed Naval career and struggles to find employment, and finally his meteoric rise through the Nazi high command and his time within the Third Reich. The Man With the Iron Heart is an astonishing journey into the depths of Nazi evil and a powerful insight into one of humanity's darkest figures.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The life stories of child survivors who rebuilt their post-war lives in Israel have been largely left untold. This work is the first exploration into the experience of child survivors in Israel, focusing on the child survivors' experience in telling his/her past to a wider audience and in publicly identifying themselves as Holocaust survivors. Whilst psychological research focuses on the survivor's personal inhibitions and motivations in retelling his/her pasts, 'The Life Stories of Child Survivors in Israel' attempts to understand the impact that the post-war environment has had on the individual's relationship to it. Using a qualitative narrative approach, this study examines the dynamics of 'silence' and 'retelling' in the post-war experience of child survivors. This work demonstrates the ways in which social dynamics, as well as internal motivations, had an impact on the extent to which these people were likely to speak publicly about their war-time experience or whether they were more inclined to remain silent. The interviews with survivors are presented 'using their own voice', and can thereby be understood in their own unique context. disparate as history and psychology.

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.

Although the period leading up to the Nazi genocide of Europe's Jews has been well recorded, few sources convey the incremental effect of specific decrees aimed to dehumanize the Jews who were caught in Hitler's net, and how their everyday lives were transformed. These letters, written by Malvina Fischer to her daughter Mimi Weisz, have been translated and edited by her granddaughter Edith Kurzweil. They convey with vivid immediacy the fears and premonitions, the ghettoization and escape attempts that were the common experience of Viennese and German Jews in the years preceding the implementation of the "Final Solution." In the first section of the volume, Kurzweil establishes the personal and political contexts of the letters (written between April 6, 1940 and December 1941, when Malvina Fischer and her family were deported) and links them to the then emerging "Jewish laws." The second section contains the letters themselves and documents the throttling grip in which the authorities held every Viennese Jew who had not managed to escape. The third section consists of translations of official summaries of the relevant laws, ordinances, and edicts--many of them marked "secret"--which inexorably determined that Kurzweil's family become part of the "final solution." From these letters and documents we become aware, also, of the profusion of legal entities dealing with Jews, the rivalries among them, and the free-floating dimensions of victims' fear and dread. Because the letters are full of allusions rather than straightforward information, and characterized by self-censorship, Edith Kurzweil has annotated them and inserted the relevant numbers of the specific laws as these were being applied.

How did British Jewry respond to the Holocaust, how prominent was it on the communal agenda, and what does this response tell us about the values, politics, and fears of the Anglo-Jewish community? This book studies the priorities of that community, and thereby seeks to analyse the attitudes and philosophies which informed actions. It paints a picture of Anglo-Jewish life and its reactions to a wide range of matters in the non-Jewish world. Richard Bolchover charts the transmission of the news of the European catastrophe and discusses the various theories regarding reactions to these exceptional circumstances. He investigates the structures and political philosophies of Anglo-Jewry during the war years and covers the reactions of Jewish political and religious leaders as well as prominent Jews acting outside the community's institutional framework. Various co-ordinated responses, political and philanthropic, are studied, as are the issues which dominated the community at that time, namely internal conflict and the fear of increased domestic antisemitism: these preoccupations inevitably affected responses to events in Europe. The latter half of the book looks at the ramifications of the community's socio-political philosophies including, most radically, Zionism, and their influence on communal reactions. This acclaimed study raises major questions about the structures and priorities of the British Jewish community. For this paperback, the author has added a new Introduction summarizing research in the field since the book's first appearance.

This book provides a sophisticated investigation into the experience of being exterminated, as felt by victims of the Holocaust, and compares and contrasts this analysis with the experiences of people who have been colonized or enslaved. Using numerous victim accounts and a wide range of primary sources, the book moves away from the 'continuity thesis', with its insistence on colonial intent as the reason for victimization in relation to other historical examples of mass political violence, to look at the victim experience on its own terms. By affording each constituent case study its own distinctive aspects, The Victims of Slavery, Colonization and the Holocaust allows for a more enriching comparison of victim experience to be made that respects each group of victims in their uniqueness. It is an important, innovative volume for all students of the Holocaust, genocide and the history of mass political violence.

In The Construction of Testimony: Claude Lanzmann's Shoah and Its Outtakes, editors Erin McGlothlin, Brad Prager, and Markus Zisselsberger gather contributions on how Shoah (1985) fundamentally changed the nature and use of filmed testimony and laid the groundwork for how historians and documentarians regard and understand the history of the Holocaust. Critics have taken long note of Shoah's innovative style and its place in the history of documentary film and in cultural memory, but few scholars have touched on its extensive outtakes and the reams of documentation archived at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and at Yad Vashem, or the release of five feature-length documentaries based on the material in those outtakes. The Construction of Testimony, which contains thirteen essays by some of the most notable scholars in Holocaust film studies, reexamines Lanzmann's body of work, his film, and the impact of Shoah through this trove-over 220 hours-of previously unavailable and unexplored footage. Responding to the need for a sustained examination of Lanzmann's impact on historical and filmic approaches to testimony, this volume inaugurates a new era of scholarship, one that takes a critical position vis-a-vis the filmmaker's posturing, stylization, and editorial sleight-of-hand. The volume's contributors engage with a range of dimensions central to Lanzmann's filmography and the outtakes, including the dynamics of gender in his work, his representation of Nazi perpetrators, and complex issues of language and translation. In light of Lanzmann's invention of a radically new form of witnessing and remembrance, Shoah laid the framework for the ways in which subsequent filmmakers have represented the Holocaust cinematically; at the same time, the outtakes complicate this framework by revealing new details about the filmmaker's complex editorial choices. Scholars and students of film studies and Holocaust studies will value this close analysis.

Since the end of the 1980s the field of Holocaust studies has burgeoned, diversified, and experienced a series of important controversies. Drawing on the best research of the past sixty years, this collection brings together the most significant secondary literature on the Nazi persecution and mass murder of the Jews. Care is taken to set the work in a context of historical breadth and depth.

This volume examines the changing role which ordinary members of society played in the state-sponsored persecution of the Jews in Bukovina and Bessarabia, both during the summer of 1941, when Romania joined the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, and beyond. It establishes different patterns of civilian complicity and discusses the significance of the phenomenon in the context of the exterminatory campaign pursued by the Romanian military authorities against the Jews living in the borderlands.