Probing the Ethics of Holocaust Culture: The Roots of Militarism, 1866–1945

Published by Harvard University Press 2016

Probing the Ethics of Holocaust Culture

The Roots of Militarism, 1866–1945

Edited by: Claudio Fogu , Wulf Kansteiner and Todd Presner

https://doi.org/10.4159/9780674973244

Overview
Contents

About this book

Depictions of the Holocaust in history, literature, and film became a focus of intense academic debate in the 1980s and 1990s. Today, with the passing of the eyewitness generation and the rise of comparative genocide studies, the Holocaust’s privileged place not only in scholarly discourse but across Western society has been called into question.

Probing the Ethics of Holocaust Culture is a searching reappraisal of the debates and controversies that have shaped Holocaust studies over a quarter century. This landmark volume brings international scholars of the founding generation of Holocaust studies into conversation with a new generation of historians, artists, and writers who have challenged the limits of representation through their scholarly and cultural practices. Focusing on the public memorial cultures, testimonial narratives, and artifacts of cultural memory and history generated by Holocaust remembrance, the volume examines how Holocaust culture has become institutionalized, globalized, and variously contested. Organized around three interlocking themes—the stakes of narrative, the remediation of the archive, and the politics of exceptionality—the essays in this volume explore the complex ethics surrounding the discourses, artifacts, and institutions of Holocaust remembrance.

From contrasting viewpoints and, in particular, from the multiple perspectives of genocide studies, the authors question if and why the Holocaust should remain the ultimate test case for ethics and a unique reference point for how we understand genocide and crimes against humanity.

Author / Editor information

C. Fogu, University of California, Santa Barbara; W. Kansteiner, Aarhus University; T. Presner University of California, Los Angeles.

Reviews

Twenty-five years after the publication of Saul Friedländer's trailblazing book, the questions being asked about the Holocaust have changed but its importance as a test case for the humanities remains just as strong. Probing the Ethics of Holocaust Culture is a worthy successor to Friedländer's volume, skillfully charting as it does the epistemological, intellectual, and cultural issues at stake in engaging with this most defining event of human destructiveness.
-- Dan Stone, author of The Liberation of the Camps: The End of the Holocaust and Its Aftermath

These essays provide a new framework for the study of collective violence and state terror at a global scale. No longer bound to modernist anxieties about narrative and images, this book shows how the Holocaust remains a prism for ethics and politics as we are grappling with our world of continuing violence and denial of rights. A must read for anyone interested in the past and future of Holocaust studies and a great tribute to Saul Friedländer.
-- Andreas Huyssen, author of Miniature Metropolis: Literature in an Age of Photography and Film

The Holocaust is at the center of wide-ranging intellectual discussion, but where exactly is the center? What can words say, explanations do, comparisons offer, assemblages reveal, and self-reflection add? This extraordinary collection of essays traces the shadows of the Holocaust on contemporary thought, providing insights on what we can and cannot know, on what will not be settled. A remarkable contribution that will be read again and again.
-- Peter Fritzsche, author of An Iron Wind: Europe Under Hitler

Masterfully addresses the place of the Holocaust in shaping our understanding of fateful events, trauma, remembrance, and the politics of memory. Written by some of the most distinguished scholars of the Holocaust, the essays in this exquisite collection also point to the future of Holocaust scholarship in helping us formulate our ethical stance when faced with other cases of mass atrocity. An indispensable source for anyone considering how and why our recent past matters.
-- Amir Eshel, author of Futurity: Contemporary Literature and the Quest for the Past

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	v
Introduction: The Field of Holocaust Studies and the Emergence of Global Holocaust Culture Wulf Kansteiner and Todd Presner Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
Part I. The Stakes of Narrative
1. Historical Truth, Estrangement, and Disbelief Hayden White Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	43
2. On “Historical Modernism”: A Response to Hayden White Saul Friedländer Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	72
3. Sense and Sensibility: The Complicated Holocaust Realism of Christopher Browning Wulf Kansteiner Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	79
4. A Reply to Wulf Kansteiner Christopher R. Browning Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	104
5. Scales of Postmemory: Six of Six Million Ann Rigney Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	113
6. Interview with Daniel Mendelsohn, Author of The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	129
7. The Death of the Witness; or, The Persistence of the Differend Marc Nichanian Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	141
Part II. Remediations of The Archive
8. The Ethics of the Algorithm: Close and Distant Listening to the Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive Todd Presner Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	167
9. On the Ethics of Technology and Testimony Stephen D. Smith Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	203
10. A “Spatial Turn” in Holocaust Studies? Claudio Fogu Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	218
11. Interview with Anne Knowles, Tim Cole, Alberto Giordano, and Paul B. Jaskot, Contributing Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	240
12. Freeze- Framing: Temporality and the Archive in Forgács, Hersonski, and Friedländer Nitzan Lebovic Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	257
13. Witnessing the Archive Yael Hersonski Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	277
14. Deconstructivism and the Holocaust: Peter Eisenman’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Eu rope Gavriel D. Rosenfeld Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	283
15. Berlin Memorial Redux Peter Eisenman Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	304
Part III. The Politics of Exceptionality
16. The Holocaust as Genocide: Experiential Uniqueness and Integrated History Omer Bartov Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	309
17. Anxieties in Holocaust and Genocide Studies A. Dirk Moses Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	332
18. The Witness as “World” Traveler: Multidirectional Memory and Holocaust Internationalism before Human Rights Michael Rothberg Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	355
19. Fiction and Solicitude: Ethics and the Conditions for Survival Judith Butler Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	373
20. Catastrophes: Afterlives of the Exceptionality Paradigm in Holocaust Studies Elisabeth Weber Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	389
Epilogue: Interview with Saul Friedländer Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	411
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	427
Acknowledgments Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	496
Illustration Credits Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	497
Contributors Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	499
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	504

Language: English
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Audience: General/trade;
Pages
- Main content: 490
Illustrations
- Other: 24 halftones

eBook

Published: April 10, 2017
ISBN: 9780674973244