Lessons and Legacies I: The Meaning of the Holocaust in a Changing World (Lessons & Legacies) - Softcover

9780810109568: Lessons and Legacies I: The Meaning of the Holocaust in a Changing World (Lessons & Legacies)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0810109565 ISBN 13: 9780810109568

Publisher: Northwestern University Press, 1991

Winner of the 1992 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award

Nearly half a century after the Nazi massacre of the Jews in Europe, the Holocaust is now moving from the domain of experience to that of history. It is becoming the subject of recorded rather than living memory. Is real comprehension of the development and horror of the Nazi onslaught accessible to us? If so, through what intellectual processes or categories of understanding, and in the face of what temptations or diversions? How can we preserve, expand, and apply our knowledge of why and how barbarity came to prevail? What meaning can present and future generations derive from the catastrophe? These are the vital questions addressed by the essays in this volume.

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About the Author:

Peter Hayes is associate professor of history and German at Northwestern University. He is the author of Industry and Ideology: I. G. Farben in the Nazi Era.

From Publishers Weekly:

Based on papers presented by Holocaust scholars at a conference held at Northwestern University in 1989, this earnest, valuable survey challenges the notion that the Holocaust is incomprehensible, alien and distant. Comparing the Holocaust with medieval anti-Semitism, the witch-hunts of the 15th to 18th centuries and the Gulag, Steven T. Katz demonstrates why the latter three were not genocidal and why the Nazi Final Solution was ``unprecedented and unparalleled.'' Alvin H. Rosenfeld questions if the dramatic and film versions of the enormously popular diary are a faithful portrayal of the image of Anne Frank and that of the larger Jewish tragedy she symbolizes, or if these media cheapen and distort, converting Anne Frank into a ``ready-at-hand formula for easy forgiveness.'' Nechama Tec's 10-year study of the nature of altruistic Polish Christians who rescued Jews during the Holocaust shows that these Poles overwhelmingly emphasize that they had responded to the persecution and suffering of the victims and not to their Jewishness. Hayes wrote Industry and Ideology: IG Farben in the Nazi Era.

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