Holocaust/Shoah - recommended reading in history/theory

[articul8]

Where do you start with this? I'm surprised there isn't a thread already. The list of publications must be very voluminous by now. I've read Finkelstein and the critique of the "holocaust industry".

But what are the key texts - not only in establishing *that* it happened and *how*, but more importantly *why*, *why like this, at that time, in that way*? Arendt's "Eichmann in Jerusalem"? There's a book by Arno Mayer (called something like "Why did the skies not darken" or some such on my list. Raul Hilberg worth reading? What else? Richard Evans panned two recent works in the LRB, but didn't really say what the key texts are.

 

[DotCommunist]

Primo Levi 'This Is a Man'

 

[butchersapron]

All serious work on this starts with Hilberg - don't read that then you're not in the game. All later published work has to be read as responses to him. That's John Weiss, Peter Longerich, Christopher Browning, Saul Friedlander etc. These are the ones you can use to get into the current debates - these are the ones whose work today stands up and sets the terms of further research.

 

[hot air baboon]

I think this fella's pretty good : Dan Stone

Histories of the Holocaust

The Holocaust is one of the most intensively studied phenomena in modern history. The volume of writing that fuels the numerous debates about it is overwhelming in quantity and diversity. Even those who have dedicated their professional lives to understanding the Holocaust cannot assimilate it all.

There is, then, an urgent need to synthesize and evaluate the complex historiography on the Holocaust, exploring the major themes and debates relating to it and drawing widely on the findings of a great deal of research. Concentrating on the work of the last two decades, Histories of the Holocaust examines the 'Final Solution' as a European project, the decision-making process, perpetrator research, plunder and collaboration, regional studies, ghettos, camps, race science, antisemitic ideology, and recent debates concerning modernity, organization theory, colonialism, genocide studies, and cultural history. Research on victims is discussed, but Stone focuses more closely on perpetrators, reflecting trends within the historiography, as well as his own view that in order to understand Nazi genocide the emphasis must be on the culture of the perpetrators.

The book is not a 'history of the history of the Holocaust', offering simply a description of developments in historiography. Stone critically analyses the literature, discerning major themes and trends and assessing the achievements and shortcomings of the various approaches. He demonstrates that there never can or should be a single history of the Holocaust and facilitates an understanding of the genocide of the Jews from a multiplicity of angles. An understanding of how the Holocaust could have happened can only be achieved by recourse to histories of the Holocaust: detailed day-by-day accounts of high-level decision-making; long-term narratives of the Holocaust's relationship to European histories of colonialism and warfare; micro-historical studies of Jewish life before, during, and after Nazi occupation; and cultural analyses of Nazi fantasies and fears.

 

[butchersapron]

Have look what i got here. Can't remenber.

 

[Manter]

I'd echo Hilberg, Friedlander particularly. Also Kenrick and Burleigh.

This: is the Leeds reading list on the third reich- the racial state section is most relevant (and I don't think you can make any sense of the holocaust without the wider context) http://lib5.leeds.ac.uk/rlists/brok...70&bbListId=_2944552_1&bbLastListId=_560262_1
And this is the genocide reading list- there is some very interesting stuff in here about denial then and now. http://lib5.leeds.ac.uk/rlists/brok...713016_1&bbLastListId=_560266_1#THE_HOLOCAUST

The professor on these courses was not who taught me /who I studied under but the reading lists look largely unchanged and were very good/rounded (there are some books I wildly disagree with, such as Hitler's willing executioners, but there is nothing not worth reading)

 

[articul8]

Dan Stone was one of those Evans called superficial...was a bit surprised that Amazon are openly selling holocaust denial stuff (ie not just via marketplace)

 

[frogwoman]

Norman Cohn as well.

 

[Manter]

I've just got home and looked at my shelves. Diary of a man in despair is well worth reading. Also primo Levi the drowned and the saved.

 

[Looby]

Primo Levi 'This Is a Man'

My brother bought me this but I didn't get round to reading it as I was too busy not reading a-level texts.
I decided to include it as one of my favourite books in my UCAS statement though and two days before my interview at Brighton uni, realised it was top of the course reading list. [emoji35] I had to hurriedly read it on the train and they didn't even fucking ask me about it at the interview.

I did read it properly afterwards too as I definitely didn't give it the attention it deserved.

 

[DotCommunist]

Norman Cohn as well.

Warrant for Genocide

shows the psuedo intellectual lies underpinning the whole shebang. Not many books have made me visibly angry and having family go 'settle down its just a book' before

 

[DotCommunist]

Dan Stone was one of those Evans called superficial...was a bit surprised that Amazon are openly selling holocaust denial stuff (ie not just via marketplace)

amazon are apolitical shits who would sell your mother if it turned a few quid, expect nothing from them wrt conscience

 

[weltweit]

Primo Levi 'This Is a Man'

I will add that to my to read list, I did read Moments of Reprieve, Primo Levi which was thought provoking.

 

[frogwoman]

Have look what i got here. Can't remenber.

That Austria one looks good.

 

[frogwoman]

There's Lucy Dawidowicz's 'war against the Jews' as well.

 

[frogwoman]

If you can stomach it have a look at what Nazis said in their own words, on the German propaganda archive. Grim as fuck.

 

[butchersapron]

There's Lucy Dawidowicz's 'war against the Jews' as well.

I wouldn't go near her with a shitty bargepole - apart from being massively outdated and simplistic she was on one of the key boosters of the Joan Peters fraud. Telling lies about history.

 

[Manter]

I wouldn't go near her with a shitty bargepole - apart from being massively outdated and simplistic she was on one of the key boosters of the Joan Peters fraud. Telling lies about history.

Blimey, didn't realise Wiesel was involved in that too

 

[frogwoman]

I wouldn't go near her with a shitty bargepole - apart from being massively outdated and simplistic she was on one of the key boosters of the Joan Peters fraud. Telling lies about history.

It was more than few years ago that I read that to be fair.

 

[hot air baboon]

Dan Stone was one of those Evans called superficial...was a bit surprised that Amazon are openly selling holocaust denial stuff (ie not just via marketplace)

....mmmm...interesting.....did cross my mind if he was one of them....maybe he dumbed down for the general reader too much for Evan's liking .....but then its only 300 pages & Evans is popping out 1,000 page tomb-stones - horses for courses ( I've only read DS's Breeding Superman not the newer book )


....for the skim readers the quote's a non-sequitur....I wasn't reccommending holocaust denial by Dan Stone...

 

[articul8]

no of course - wasn't implying that about Stone. Evans was saying that Stone makes extraordinary presumptuous claims about what he's doing, which is actually not that novel at all, and has already been done better elsewhere.

 

[butchersapron]

no of course - wasn't implying that about Stone. Evans was saying that Stone makes extraordinary presumptuous claims about what he's doing, which is actually not that novel at all, and has already been done better elsewhere.

Where did he do this?

 

[articul8]

Apologies I fucked up - wasn't Dan Stone it was Dan McMillan.
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n02/richard-j-evans/written-into-history

 

[butchersapron]

Lesson: do some work first.

 

[articul8]

To be fair the description of the Stone book sounded similar to Evans' description of McMillan, and they're both called Dan! Still, yes, I need to spend time getting to grips with all this.

 

[trabuquera]

Of first-person accounts, Fatelessness by Imre Kertesz is worth reading for a Hungarian perspective; I have read (and - well, not enjoyed, but been impressed by ) these two by Eva Hoffmann: Shtetl: The Life and Death of a Small Town and the World of Polish Jews (1997) and After Such Knowledge: Memory, History and the Legacy of the Holocaust (2004) - which are about the longer centuries of coexistence between Jews and gentile Poles before the war. Sorry if these works aren't academic or theoretically strong enough to answer OP's demand - just thought they might be relevant.

 

[Manter]

Of first-person accounts, Fatelessness by Imre Kertesz is worth reading for a Hungarian perspective; I have read (and - well, not enjoyed, but been impressed by ) these two by Eva Hoffmann: Shtetl: The Life and Death of a Small Town and the World of Polish Jews (1997) and After Such Knowledge: Memory, History and the Legacy of the Holocaust (2004) - which are about the longer centuries of coexistence between Jews and gentile Poles before the war. Sorry if these works aren't academic or theoretically strong enough to answer OP's demand - just thought they might be relevant.

I liked* shtetl too.

*well, you know what I mean

 

[ViolentPanda]

I'd like to point out to the OP that concentrating solely on the holocaust/shoah pretty much divorces those subjects from the majority of the context they developed in. To understand the how, the why and the what of the attempted extermination of European Jewry, you have to study among other subjects: German political history; the history of German-speaking communities in central and eastern Europe; German racism pre-Hitler; German attempts at imperialism; the German Revolution; German economics post-seizure of power, and many other diverse influencing factors.This is why some of us read widely on subjects - because it helps provide a context that simply reading around a subject, however detailed individual authors may be, can't.

As a basic "starter pack",outwith anything solely on the holocaust,I'd recommend (and I'm sure that frogwoman or butchersapron or others can provide other apposite recommendations):

Karl Deitrich Bracher's The German Dictatorship (a decent root-and-branch study of how Hitlerism came about - about the social factors,not the man).
Adam Tooze's The Wages of Destruction (a decently-forensic investigation of the economics of Total War, and how the Jews and/or, in the advent of a victory over western Europe, the Slavs were seen as embodying the resources necessary to fund it. Also makes very clear how Nazi Germany depended on outside assistance prior to '39)
Suzanne E. Evans' Hitler's Forgotten Victims (an account of those victims who weren't Jews).
Just about any text on Germany 1848 to 1945 that emphasises the religious divide and doesn't fall back on the old saw about Germans not wanting democracy.

 

[youngian]

Gitta Sereny's Into That Darkness emerged from extensive interviews with Treblinka Commander Franz Stangl charting his journey from junior administrator to mass murderer. The dispassionate nature of the interviews is all the more chilling and illuminating. Its a personal story that doesn't give much comfort to those that wished to see the Holocaust as an aberration perpetrated by wicked monsters. I first came across Sereny on a TV kangaroo court hosted by Robert Kilroy-Silk having to defend her Mary Bell book against a baying hate mob of tabloid reading morons. Lets just say they weren't people who wanted to acquire a deeper understanding of the banality of evil.

 

[Lo Siento.]

depending on what it is that you're looking to learn, Christopher Browning's The Path to Genocide is good. Particularly the chapter entitled "One day in Jozefow: Initation to Mass Murder"