Mary Fulbrook

Reckonings (eBook, ePUB)

Legacies of Nazi Persecution and the Quest for Justice

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

A single word - Auschwitz - is often used to encapsulate the totality of persecution and suffering involved in what we call the Holocaust. Yet a focus on a single concentration camp - however horrific what happened there, however massively catastrophic its scale - leaves an incomplete story, a truncated history. It cannot fully communicate the myriad ways in which individuals became tangled up on the side of the perpetrators, and obscures the diversity of experiences among a wide range of victims as they struggled and died, or managed, against all odds, to survive. In the process, we also miss the continuing legacy of Nazi persecution across generations, and across continents. Mary Fulbrook's encompassing book attempts to expand our understanding, exploring the lives of individuals across a full spectrum of suffering and guilt, each one capturing one small part of the greater story. At its heart, Reckonings seeks to expose the disjuncture between official myths about "dealing with the past," on the one hand, and the extent to which the vast majority of Nazi perpetrators evaded justice, on the other. In the successor states to the Third Reich-East Germany, West Germany, and Austria - the attempts at justice varied widely in the years and decades after 1945. The Communist East German state pursued Nazi criminals and handed down severe sentences; West Germany, seeking to draw a line under the past, tended toward leniency and tolerance. Austria made nearly no reckoning at all until the 1980s, when news broke about UN Secretary General Kurt Waldheim's past. Following the various periods of trials and testimonials after the war, the shifting attitudes toward both perpetrators and survivors, this major book weighs heavily down on the scales of justice. The Holocaust is not mere "history," and the memorial landscape covering it barely touches the surface; beneath it churns the maelstrom of reverberations of the Nazi era. Reckonings uses the stories of those who remained below the radar of public representations, outside the media spotlight, while also situating their experiences in the changing wider contexts and settings in which they sought to make sense of unprecedented suffering. Fulbrook uses the word "reckoning" in the widest possible sense, to evoke the consequences of violence on those directly involved, but also on those affected indirectly, and how its effects have expanded almost infinitely across place and time.

---

Dieser Download kann aus rechtlichen Gründen nur mit Rechnungsadresse in A, B, BG, CY, CZ, D, DK, EW, E, FIN, F, GR, HR, H, IRL, I, LT, L, LR, M, NL, PL, P, R, S, SLO, SK ausgeliefert werden.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Oxford University Press
• Seitenzahl: 528
• Erscheinungstermin: 3. Oktober 2018
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9780192539298
• Artikelnr.: 54629569

Autorenporträt

Mary Fulbrook is Professor of German History at University College London and the author of the Fraenkel Prize-winning A Small Town near Auschwitz: Ordinary Nazis and the Holocaust.

Inhaltsangabe

1 Introduction: The significance of the Nazi past
Part I. Chasms: Perpetrators and victims as communities of experience
2 The explosion of state-sponsored violence
3 Microcosms of violence: Toil and terror
4 Endpoints: The machinery of extermination
5 Defining experiences
6 Silence and communication
7 Crossing thresholds
Part II. Confrontations: Perpetrators and victims in German courtrooms
8 Stages of justice
9 Redefining perpetrators: From Euthanasia to the Holocaust
10 Major concentration camp trials
11 The diffraction of guilt
12 Late, too late
Part III. Connections: Constructing links between present and past
13 Hearing the voices of victims
14 Making sense of the past, living for the present
15 Discomfort zones
16 The sins of the fathers
17 The long shadows of persecution
18 Oblivion and memorialisation
Conclusions
19 A resonant past