Essays on Hitler's Europe - Softcover

Deak, Istvan

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9780803266308: Essays on Hitler's Europe

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0803266308 ISBN 13: 9780803266308

Publisher: University of Nebraska Press, 2001

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Istv�n De�k is one of the world's most knowledgeable and clearheaded authorities on the Second World War, and for decades his commentary has been among the most illuminating and influential contributions to the vast discourse on the politics, history, and scholarship of the period. Writing chiefly for the New York Review of Books and the New Republic, De�k has crafted review essays that cover the breadth and depth of the huge literature on this ominous moment in European history when the survival of democracy and human decency were at stake. Collected here for the first time, these articles chart changing reactions and analyses by the regimes and populations of Europe and reveal how postwar governments, historians, and ordinary citizens attempt to come to terms with—or to evade—the realities of the Holocaust, war, fascism, and resistance movements. They track the acts of scoundrels and the collusion of ordinary citizens in the so-called Final Solution but also show how others in authority and on the street heroically opposed the evil of the day. With its depth, conciseness, and interpretive power, this collection allows readers to consider more clearly and completely than ever before what has been said, how thought has shifted, and what we have learned about these momentous, world-changing events.

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About the Author:

Istv�n De�k is Seth Lowe Professor Emeritus of History and special lecturer at Columbia University. Among his many works are The Lawful Revolution: Louis Kossuth and the Hungarians, 1848–1849 and Beyond Nationalism: A Social and Political History of the Habsburg Officer Corps, 1848–1918.

From Publishers Weekly:

In the past few decades, scholars have produced a prodigious amount of work on the Nazi period and the Holocaust. As Deak puts it, "Holocaust literature is one of the richest devoted to a single event; it is also one of the newest." In this collection of scholarly essays, many of them first published in the New York Review of Books and the New Republic, Deak provides a balanced, incisive review of much of this academic work. The articles deal with a broad variety of topics, demonstrating remarkable familiarity with hundreds of books, all crafted around several themes. De k, a Hungarian-born professor of history at Columbia University, generally takes a cautious approach to the vast amounts of scholarship he reviews, ranging from the initial support for the Nazi Party (more spread out among all classes of society than once believed), Pope Pius XII and the Jews (the pope "proved weak and fallible") and the Holocaust in several European countries (all of which, he says, "produced roughly the same proportion of butchers, of the indifferent, of sympathizers, and of active rescuers"). But he's not afraid to be more opinionated. For example, he's critical of Daniel Goldhagen's controversial theory about longstanding "German eliminationist anti-Semitism" being responsible for the Holocaust. "What stands out is the book's preconceived notions and unsubstantiated claims, its intended shock value instead of historical value," he writes. This can take its place alongside Robert Wistrich's Hitler and the Holocaust (Forecasts, Sept. 3) as an up-to-date shortcut to holocaust scholarship.

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