Praise for The Perfect Nazi: 'Absorbing, highly readable and
painstakingly researched' NIALL FERGUSON 'Unforgettable, haunting
reading' SIMON SCHAMA 'A fascinating and extraordinary journey into
the banality of evil at the heart of Nazism' BEN MACINTYRE
'Riveting' THE TIMES 'Fascinating, scrupulously researched,
compelling' SUNDAY TIMES In this radical new perspective on the
Holocaust, Davidson challenges popular understanding and existing
histories of the Holocaust. He does this in three main ways.
Firstly, he describes the way in which German policy developed and
was enacted in new and compelling detail, providing a road map to
the 'long and twisting road to Auschwitz', skilfully dramatising
those twists and turns, many of which are not generally included in
conventional narratives. Secondly, he allows us to hear from new
voices, notably female perpetrators, resisters and victims. These
provide individual human perspectives on the unfolding events,
without which true understanding is impossible; from planning and
implementation, to knowledge - and its opposite, denial - all the
way to its final reckoning, then and now. And finally, he provides
a reappraisal of the moral perspective that drove the Holocaust,
getting beyond the conventional notion of 'evil' as a catch-all
rationale, to examine why anti-Jewish vitriol was such a powerful
motivator for so many Germans, who used arguments and
self-justifications that are more resonant today than they have
been for decades. Never more so than in the use of the idea of
suffering - how 'our' supposed suffering justifies 'theirs'. His
focus is very much on the mindset that brought about the Holocaust,
the desire to 'make Germany great again' and to make Germany's
perceived enemies suffer. Again, this story of dreams of national
greatness, and racially-targeted redemptive malevolence could not
be more resonant today. Davidson foregrounds the stories of women,
in part to illustrate the mindset of Nazi true believers - the
German wife stationed in Poland, for example, who found a group of
Jewish children who had escaped a mass execution, and shot them
herself. He also describes the particular horror experienced by
female inmates of the camps, who, as mothers, were the first to be
killed alongside their children, and who were among the bravest of
German resisters to the crimes being committed in their name - like
twenty-one-year-old Sophie Scholl, whose leaflets listing and
denouncing Nazi crimes resulted in her execution, in October 1943.
The Holocaust forces us to understand that it wasn't the power of a
single malevolent leader who made it happen; it was something
altogether more alarming. A system of a thousand moving parts, the
genocidal logic of which was willed into being, before being
planned, mobilised - and submitted to - by millions of different
people, acting via different agencies, under different
jurisdictions, like iron filings held in the pull of a particular
magnetic field which they were happy to replicate and reinforce.
The resulting feedback loop would help shape-shift the Final
Solution throughout the years of its existence, its direction of
travel only ever from bad to worse. That is why the story has to be
understood not just in the form of a fast-moving narrative - step
after step after step, taken by myriad different people acting out
their very different roles - but in the round, held up to the light
and rotated through 360 degrees, drawing in not just war and
politics, ideology and delusion, geography and economics, but
accident, contingency, intention, sadism, innocence,
self-justification, resistance, denial and ultimately,
meaninglessness too.
General
Is the information for this product incomplete, wrong or inappropriate?
Let us know about it.
Does this product have an incorrect or missing image?
Send us a new image.
Is this product missing categories?
Add more categories.
Review This Product
No reviews yet - be the first to create one!
Welcome to Loot.co.za!
Sign in / Register |Wishlists & Gift Vouchers |Help | Advanced search
