David Cesarani: A Historian with Breadth, Depth, and the Flair of a Raconteur

Rozett, Robert

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-28675-0_2

David Cesarani: A Historian with Breadth, Depth, and the Flair of a Raconteur

Robert Rozett⁵

Chapter
First Online: 26 November 2019

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Part of the book series: The Holocaust and its Contexts ((HOLC))

Abstract

David Cesarani was a prolific scholar and lucid writer who displayed a very broad perspective and wide-ranging understanding about the Holocaust. His long list of publications about the Holocaust began with a study about war criminals who came to Great Britain after the war. He then went on to explore subjects such as the bystanders, the perpetrators, and liberation and survivor testimonies. His final work of scholarship was a comprehensive history of the Holocaust: Final Solution: The Fate of the Jews 1933–1949, completed just before his premature death. Several motifs are present throughout the body of his scholarship. Cesarani demonstrates complexity and unravels myths. He discusses the events of the Holocaust in wider context and he emphasizes that within that history, the perspective of the Jewish victims is crucial. Throughout his writings, one can find the voices of the actors in the unfolding drama as well as Cesarani’s own clearly articulated voice.

This chapter first appeared as a journal article in Yad Vashem Studies, 44, 1 (2016): 1–22. An edited version is reproduced here by kind permission of Yad Vashem.

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Notes

1.
David Cesarani, Final Solution: The Fate of the Jews 1933–1949 (London: Macmillan, 2016).
2.
David Cesarani, Justice Delayed: How Britain Became a Refuge for Nazi War Criminals (London: William Heinemann, 1992).
3.
Ibid., 44.
4.
Ibid., 47–62.
5.
Ibid., 82.
6.
Ibid., 13–14, 22.
7.
Ibid., 15–19.
8.
Ibid., 103–131.
9.
Ibid. 132.
10.
Ibid., 163–164.
11.
Ibid., 247.
12.
Ibid., 266.
13.
David Cesarani, ed., The Final Solution: Origins and Implementation (London: Routledge, 1994), 2.
14.
David Cesarani, ed., Genocide and Rescue: The Holocaust in Hungary (Oxford: Berg, 1997), 2.
15.
Ibid., 21–22.
16.
David Cesarani, Arthur Koestler: The Homeless Mind (London: William Heinemann, 1998), 557.
17.
Ibid., 144.
18.
Ibid., 178–209.
19.
Ibid., 235.
20.
David Cesarani and Paul A. Levine, eds., ‘Bystanders’ to the Holocaust: A Re-evaluation (London: Frank Cass, 2002).
21.
Ibid., 28–56.
22.
Ibid., 53.
23.
Ibid., 269–270.
24.
David Cesarani, Eichmann: His Life and Crimes (London: William Heinemann, 2004).
25.
Yaacov Lozowick, Hitler’s Bureaucrats: The Nazi Security Police and the Banality of Evil (London: Continuum, 2002).
26.
Cesarani, Eichmann, 13.
27.
Ibid., 17.
28.
Ibid., 115–117.
29.
Ibid., 147.
30.
Ibid., 170.
31.
Ibid., 188.
32.
Ibid., 283–284.
33.
Ibid., 367.
34.
Suzanne Bardgett and David Cesarani, eds., Belsen 1945: New Historical Perspectives (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2006).
35.
Ibid., 1–20.
36.
Ibid., 16.
37.
Ibid., 19.
38.
Suzanne Bardgett, David Cesarani, Jessica Reinisch and Johannes-Dieter Steinert, eds., Survivors of Nazi Persecution in Europe after the Second World War: Landscapes after Battle, vol. 1 (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2010); and Justice Politics and Memory in Europe after the Second World War: Landscapes after Battle, vol. 2 (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2011). David Cesarani and Eric J. Sundquist, eds., After the Holocaust: Challenging the Myth of Silence (London: Routledge, 2012).
39.
Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (New York: Penguin, 2005); Keith Lowe, Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2012); Ian Buruma, The Year Zero: A History of 1945 (New York: Penguin, 2013).
40.
See, for example, Hasia Diner, We Remember with Love and Reverence: American Jews and the Myth of Silence after the Holocaust, 1945–1962 (New York: New York University, 2009); Robert Rozett, ‘Published Memoirs of Holocaust Survivors,’ in John K. Roth and Elizabeth Maxwell, eds., Remembering for the Future: The Holocaust in the Age of Genocide (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave, 2001), 167–171; among others, Hanna Yablonka, Survivors of the Holocaust: Israel after the War (London: Macmillan, 1999) and Roni Stauber, The Holocaust in Israeli Public Debate in the 1950s, Ideology and Memory (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2007) have shown this for Israeli society.
41.
David Cesarani, ‘A New Look at some Old Memoirs: Early Narratives of Nazi Persecution and Genocide,’ in Bardgett, Cesarani, Reinisch and Steinert, eds., Justice, Politics and Memory, 121–122.
42.
Ibid., 161.
43.
Ibid., 124.
44.
Leo Schwarz, ed., The Root and the Bough: The Epic of an Enduring People (New York: Rinehart & Co., 1949).
45.
Cesarani, ‘A New Look at some Old Memoirs,’ 151.
46.
David Cesarani, ed., Holocaust: Critical Concepts in Holocaust Studies (London: Routledge, 2004).
47.
Peter Longerich, Holocaust: the Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
48.
Saul Friedländer, The Years of Persecution: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1933–1939 (New York: Harper Collins, 1997) and The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945 (New York: Harper Collins, 2007).
49.
Cesarani, Final Solution, xvii–xviii.
50.
Ibid., xx.
51.
Ibid., 45.
52.
Ibid., xxi.
53.
Ibid., 296.
54.
Ibid., xxv.
55.
Ibid., 385.
56.
Ibid., 737.
57.
Ibid., 56.
58.
Ibid., 413.
59.
Ibid., 448.
60.
Ibid., 273.
61.
Ibid., 480.
62.
Ibid., 523–524.
63.
See Christopher R. Browning, Remembering Survival: Inside a Nazi Slave-Labor Camp (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2010); Nikolaus Wachsmann, KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015).
64.
Cesarani, Final Solution, 646.
65.
Ibid., 647.
66.
Ibid., 649.
67.
Ibid., 650–651.
68.
Ibid., 331–348.
69.
Cesarani, Arthur Koestler, 287.

References

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Google Scholar
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Cesarani, David. Arthur Koestler: The Homeless Mind. London: William Heinemann, 1998.
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Google Scholar
Cesarani, David and Eric J. Sundquist, eds. After the Holocaust: Challenging the Myth of Silence. London: Routledge, 2012.
Google Scholar
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Yad Vashem, Jerusalem, Israel
Robert Rozett

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University of Derby, Derby, UK
Larissa Allwork
King’s College London, London, UK
Rachel Pistol

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Rozett, R. (2019). David Cesarani: A Historian with Breadth, Depth, and the Flair of a Raconteur. In: Allwork, L., Pistol, R. (eds) The Jews, the Holocaust, and the Public. The Holocaust and its Contexts. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28675-0_2

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28675-0_2
Published: 26 November 2019
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
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