Abstract
Preter novick’s The Holocaust in American Life1 seems to have been intended initially to express his disapproval of what he takes to be the excessive prominence of the Holocaust on the American scene, but it became, in effect, another instance of Holocaust denial. I shall start with an outline of the book’s main themes. Though my brief summaries may oversimplify Novick’s argument, I will engage Novick’s text directly as I develop my own counter-themes, thus, I hope, doing full justice to the complexity of his views.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1999). Hereafter page numbers will appear in text.
See Richard J. Evans, In Hitler’s Shadow (Pantheon Books, New York, 1989), especially Chapter 2, ‘Asiatic Deeds’. Evans’s book is still the clearest and most fair-minded presentation in English of the debate among German historians.
Eugen Weber, in ‘Recommended Reading’ The Key Reporter, Phi Beta Kappa 64/4 (Summer, 1999): 12.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Stephen E. Whicher (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1957, pp.21–22.
Lionel Trilling, ‘Manners, Morals, and the Novel,’ in The Liberal Imagination (Garden City, New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1957), p.200.
Ron Schoolmeeste, USA Today, 11. September 1990, Life Section, p. 1D
Doug Gelbert, Civil War Sites, Memorials, Museums and Library Collections (Jefferson, North Carolina, and London: McFarland & Company, Inc., 1997), p.1.
Erich Kahler, The Tower and the Abyss (New York: George Braziller, 1957; rpt. Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick & London, 1989), p.xxi.
C.S. North, S.J. Nixon, S. Shariat, S. Mallonee, J.C. McMillen, E.L. Spitznagel, E.M. Smith,, ‘Psychiatric Disorders Among Survivors of the Oklahoma City Bombing’, The Journal of the American Medical Association 282/8, (25 August 1999): 755–762.
Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell To Arms, with an Introduction by Robert Penn Warren (New York, etc., Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1957), p. 191.
To appreciate the enormous gap in the quality of the poetry generated by the two wars in England and America, see Vernon Scanneil, Not Without Glory: Poets of the Second World War (London: The Woburn Press, 1976) and
Fred D. Crawford, British Poets of the Great War (London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1988). Crawford’s book is one of many on poets and/or literature of the Great War.
David Piper, Trial by Battle (New York, Chilmark Press, 1965). See also, The Second World War in Fiction, p. 13.
Jorge Semprun, Literature or Life, translated from the French by Linda Coverdale (New York: Penguin Books, 1997), p.226.
Editor information
Copyright information
© 2001 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Hirsch, D.H. (2001). America, the Holocaust, and the Experience of Radical Evil. In: Roth, J.K., Maxwell, E., Levy, M., Whitworth, W. (eds) Remembering for the Future. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-66019-3_50
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-66019-3_50
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-0-333-80486-5
Online ISBN: 978-1-349-66019-3
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)