Foundational pasts : the Holocaust as historical understanding
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Bibliographic Information
Foundational pasts : the Holocaust as historical understanding
Cambridge University Press, 2012
- : Hardback
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Includes index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
Alon Confino seeks to rethink dominant interpretations of the Holocaust by examining it as a problem in cultural history. As the main research interests of Holocaust scholars are frequently covered terrain - the anti-Semitic ideological campaign, the machinery of killing, the brutal massacres during the war - Confino's research goes in a new direction. He analyzes the culture and sensibilities that made it possible for the Nazis and other Germans to imagine the making of a world without Jews. Confino seeks these insights from the ways historians interpreted another short, violent and foundational event in modern European history - the French Revolution. The comparison of the ways we understand the Holocaust with scholars' interpretations of the French Revolution allows Confino to question some of the basic assumptions of present-day historians concerning historical narration, explanation and understanding.
Table of Contents
- 1. Between the French Revolution and the Holocaust: events that represent an age
- 2. A dominant interpretive framework
- 3. Narrative form and historical sensation
- 4. Beginnings and endings
- 5. The totality and limits of historical context
- 6. Contingency, the essence of history
- 7. Ideology, race, and culture.
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