With a Penetrating Gaze from the Sidelines: Raul Hilberg, the Destruction of European Jews, and the History of Holocaust Historiography: 10 (Vermont Studies on Nazi Germany and the Holocaust)

Raul Hilberg (1926-2007) was a pioneer of Holocaust historiography. After sifting through tens of thousands of perpetrators documents, he published The Destruction of the European Jews in 1961, with two revised editions to follow in 1985 and 2003. Hilberg’s magnum opus describes the persecution as a complex bureaucratic process involving the entire German society. The book has served as a foundational text and intellectual companion to the field of Holocaust historiography since its first publication.

The contributions in this volume explore the origins of Hilberg’s pioneering study, map out the debates in which it was implicated, highlight its unprecedented accomplishments as well as disturbing blind spots, and use “The Destruction” as a prism for an appraisal of eight decades of Holocaust research.

René Schlott is a freelance historian and associated researcher at the Centre for Contemporary History in Potsdam. He received his PhD in 2011 at the University of Giessen and is working on a biography of Raul Hilberg. He was awarded scholarships from the German Historical Institutes in Paris, Rome, and Washington, from the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung and from the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies. He published numerous papers about life, work, and legacy of Raul Hilberg and is coeditor, with Walter H. Pehle, of Raul Hilberg's The Anatomy of the Holocaust. Selected Works from a Life of Scholarship (2020).

Wulf Kansteiner (1964-2025) was Professor of Memory Studies and Contemporary History at Aarhus University and held a PhD from the University of California, Los Angeles. He was a cultural historian, historical theorist, and memory studies expert whose research focused on representations of history in visual culture, especially in regard to Nazism and the Holocaust; the narrative structures of historical writing; and the methods and theories of memory studies. He was the author of In Pursuit of German Memory: History, Television, and Politics after Auschwitz (2006) and co-editor of Probing the Ethics of Holocaust Culture (2016) and Agonistic Memory and the Legacy of 20th Century Wars in Europe (2022). He was also cofounder and co-editor of the journal Memory Studies and past President of the Memory Studies Association (MSA).