Abstract
This book deals with some of the key problems of modern and contemporary history: intellectuals’ responses to fascism; how to write the history of the Holocaust; and the relationship between history and memory, especially with respect to major, traumatic events such as genocide, revolution and other forms of large-scale social change. It offers a synthesis of discrete but related themes which together chart the rise of certain key ways of negotiating the recent past. The historiographical chapters in Part I offer ways into thinking about the origins and nature of the Holocaust; the essays on fascism and anti-fascism in Part II are mostly focused on individual thinkers, but in ways which raise questions about the ideas, fantasies and social trends which provided the settings and frameworks for Europe’s great mid-twentieth century catastrophe; and the final section on memory probes the reasons why so much contemporary history has been addressed through the concept of ‘memory’ and why this notion remains so hotly contested in today’s debates over the meanings of the past.
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Notes
Compare Bain Attwood’s comments in ‘In the Age of Testimony: The Stolen Generations Narrative, “Distance”, and Public History’, Public Culture, 20, 1 (2008), 94–95. My thanks go to Becky Jinks for reading — and greatly improving — an earlier version of this Introduction.
See, for example, Lothar Kroll, Utopie als Ideologie: Geschichtsdenken und politisches Handeln im Dritten Reich (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1999).
On the distinction between historicism in the sense of the speculative philosophy of history and historicism in the sense of setting events meaningfully in their historical context in the tradition of Ranke, see Frank Ankersmit, Meaning, Truth and Reference in Historical Representation (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2012).
See my discussions of these issues in Chapter 12 and in ‘History, Memory, Testimony’, in Jane Kilby and Antony Rowland (eds.), The Future of Testimony (London: Routledge, 2013).
Tony Judt with Timothy Snyder, Thinking the Twentieth Century (London: William Heinemann, 2012). That does not mean I agree wholeheartedly with their particular contextualisations; for example, Judt and Snyder suggest that the emergence of Holocaust consciousness in the West has buried an awareness of the sophistication of Central and Eastern European history and thought, which is now regarded as interesting only insofar as it illuminates the background to and possibility of the Holocaust. Other, positive traditions have been forgotten (237). I would suggest that things are a little more complicated than that, both with respect to Holocaust consciousness — which has hardly been a uniform process in ‘the West’ — and to Western knowledge of the history of Eastern Europe.
For a fuller discussion of these ideas, see my introduction to Dan Stone (ed.), The Holocaust and Historical Methodology (New York: Berghahn Books, 2012).
See, for example, Donald Bloxham, The Final Solution: A Genocide (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), and the review forum on that book in the Journal of Genocide Research, 13, 1&2 (2011), 107–52.
Also Finchelstein, Transatlantic Fascism: Ideology, Violence, and the Sacred in Argentina and Italy, 1919–1945 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 27.
Michael Wildt, Hitler’s Volksgemeinschaft and the Dynamics of Racial Exclusion: Violence against Jews in Provincial Germany, 1918–1939 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2011);
Frank Bajohr and Michael Wildt (eds.), Volksgemeinschaft: Neue Forschungen zur Gesellschaft des Nationalsozialismus (Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp Taschenbuch Verlag, 2009).
See Alon Confino, Foundational Pasts: The Holocaust as Historical Understanding (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
Dan Diner, ‘Historical Experience and Cognition: Juxtaposing Perspectives on National Socialism’, in Dan Diner, Beyond the Conceivable: Studies on Germany, Nazism, and the Holocaust (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000), 163.
The reference is to Gil Anidjar, ‘Against History’, afterword to Marc Nichanian, The Historiographic Perversion (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 125–59. See my discussion in ‘The Harmony of Barbarism: Locating the “Scrolls of Auschwitz” in Holocaust Historiography’, in Nicholas Chare and Dominic Williams (eds.), Inside Auschwitz: New Perspectives on Holocaust Testimony (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming).
Apart from Chapters 10 and 11, see A. Dirk Moses, ‘Genocide and the Terror of History’, Parallax, 17, 4 (2011), 90–108;
Apart from Chapters 10 and 11, see A. Dirk Moses, ‘Genocide and the Terror of History’, Parallax, 17, 4 (2011), 90–108; Jens Meierhenrich, ‘Topographies of Remembering and Forgetting: The Transformation of Lieux de Mémoire in Rwanda’, in Scott Straus and Lars Waldorf (eds.), Remaking Rwanda: State Building and Human Rights after Mass Violence (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2011), 283–96.
See also Janine Natalya Clark, ‘The “Crime of Crimes”: Genocide, Criminal Trials and Reconciliation’, Journal of Genocide Research, 14, 1 (2012), 55–77, which argues for limiting our expectations of the extent to which criminal trials can aid social reconciliation;
See Paul Connerton’s interesting suggestions in ‘Seven Types of Forgetting’, Memory Studies, 1, 1 (2008), 59–71.
Brandon Hamber, Liz Ševcˇenko and Ereshnee Naidu, ‘Utopian Dreams or Practical Possibilities? The Challenges of Evaluating the Impact of Memorialization in Societies in Transition’, International Journal of Transitional Justice, 4 (2010), 397–420.
On France, Zeev Sternhell, The Birth of Fascist Ideology: From Cultural Rebellion to Political Revolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994);
on Italy, David D. Roberts, The Syndicalist Tradition and Italian Fascism (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1979);
Roberts, ‘How Not to Think about Fascism and Ideology, Intellectual Antecedents and Historical Meaning’, Journal of Contemporary History, 35, 2 (2000), 185–211. One might also mention the role of the anti-Irish Home Rulers in the House of Lords, whose pre-1914 position surely has a good claim to be counted as one of the originating loci of fascism.
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Stone, D. (2013). Introduction: History and Its Discontents. In: The Holocaust, Fascism and Memory. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137029539_1
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