New Books In Genocide Studies

What difference can a trial make, really? In Guatemala: The Question of Genocide (Taylor and Frances, 2016), Elizabeth Obglesby and Diane Nelson start from this question to examine much more broadly the memory and politics of genocide in Guatemala. To do so, they invited many of the scholars familiar with the conflict in Guatemala to reflect on the role genocide has played in that country. Many authors are Guatemalan, others have worked in the country for years or decades. The result is a wide-ranging, perceptive group of essays published as a special issue of the Journal of Genocide Research. Some deal specifically with the trial itself and its significance within and outside of Guatemala. Others investigate the experience of witnesses at the trial, especially survivors of sexual assault, and ask what these witnesses hoped to achieve. Others broaden their lens to investigate the arguments over how to characterize the violence in Guatemala and the ways in which this argument has shaped responses to the confli

During the mid- to late 1930s, a small but socially prominent group of right-wing Britons took a public stance in support of the Nazi regime in Germany. While many of them curtailed their activities upon Britain’s declaration of war in 1939, as Richard Griffiths reveals in his book What Did You Do During the War? The Last Throes of the British Pro-Nazi Right, 1940-45 (Routledge, 2016) some of them continued to support their nation’s declared enemy in a variety of ways. Refuting ex post facto justifications of their actions, Griffiths punctures the myth of wartime national unity by demonstrating how Oswald Mosley and others sought to erode Britons’ support for the war effort in the early months of the conflict by joining pacifist organizations and criticizing openly the motivations behind Britain’s participation in the conflict. Though many of these prominent pro-Nazis were locked up by the authorities in May 1940, several far-right advocates for Germany among the upper class were spare

Benjamin Martin’s The Nazi-Fascist New Order for European Culture (Harvard University Press, 2016) examines the attempt by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy to forge a European cultural empire out of their military conquests during World War II. Martin shows that the idea of Europe as a discrete political and cultural entity did not come from the postwar period (much less the European Union of the 1990s), but owes much to the cultural discourses of the 1930s. Germany in particular pushed for a kind of authentic “volkisch” cultural nationalism with a basis in folk traditions of central and eastern Europe. Germany’s initiatives in music, film, and literature appealed to the cultural sensibilities of Europe’s conservative cultural elite, offering a third way between American commercialism (epitomized by jazz and Hollywood films) and Soviet Bolshevism. With the Fall of France in 1940, the Nazi-fascist new order aimed to replace Anglo-French Civilization the universalist basis of Europea

Why does the UN intervene in some cases of mass violence and not others? Why and how have public attitudes toward humanitarian intervention changed over the past decades? And how do the stories we tell each other about cases of violence and civil war impact our decisions about when intervention is appropriate? Carrie Booth Walling’s recent book, All Necessary Measures: The United Nations and Humanitarian Intervention (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013) sets out to answer these questions. She looks at a series of international crises in the 1990s in the 1990s and early 2000s, beginning with Iraq in 1991-2 and concluding with the recent conflict in Syria. In each case, she examines how member-states in the UN characterize the conflict and how that characterization shapes their preferred responses. The conclusion is simple: narratives matter. They determine how people describe the conflict. They determine the kind of responses countries are willing to consider. And they determine, at least in part, wh

During the Second World War millions of Britons tuned in nightly to hear the broadcasts of Lord Haw-Haw coming from Nazi Germany. Though the label was broadly applied to a number of English-speaking broadcasters, it was most famously associated with William Joyce. In Searching for Lord Haw-Haw: The Political Lives of William Joyce (Routledge, 2016), Colin Holmes provides a study of Joyce’s life that unravels many of the mysteries and misconceptions surrounding it. He chronicles Joyce’s early years in Ireland, where his work as an informer and his family’s association with the British during the War of Independence led to his relocation to London after the Irish won their independence. There he quickly found a home in the embryonic Fascist movement, in which became a leading figure. His clashes with Oswald Mosley in the mid-1930s brought about Joyce’s purge from the British Union of Fascists in 1937 and the formation of his own National Socialist League. Yet it was Joyce’s relocat

In this lively memoir, We’re In America Now: A Survivor’s Stories (Holy Cow! Press, 2016), Fred Amram offers a series of stories documenting his childhood in 1930s Germany through his coming-of-age in New York City, after his family’s successful immigration to the United States in 1939. With clarity and a touch of humor, Amram provides well-crafted portraits of family members and a vivid sense of what it meant to be a child in Nazi Germany and a refugee in World War II America and beyond.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I serve on a planning committee for the annual Holocaust Commemoration in Wichita, where I live and teach. Every year when we convene, we remind ourselves that we need to invite survivors to speak. With survivors aging, the time is quickly approaching when we will no longer be able to hear about their experiences firsthand. But of course this isn’t quite true. For more than a quarter century, organizations have devoted time, attention and resources to preserving the memories of survivors. In this way, those of us interested in hearing these stories–whether academic researchers or ‘ordinary’ people–can access the power and authenticity of survivor narratives through recorded video testimony. All of this is a good thing. But as Noah Shenker reminds us, the appearance of authenticity can distract us from the very real impact of the ways interviews are staged. Previous scholarship has alerted us to the need to consider the dynamics between the interviewer and interviewee in. In Refra

In Survivors and Exiles: Yiddish Culture after the Holocaust (Wayne State University Press, 2015), Jan Schwarz, Associate Professor of Yiddish studies at Lund University, Sweden, reveals that in the two and a half decades after the Holocaust, Yiddish writers and cultural organizations maintained a staggering level of activity in fostering publications and performances, collecting archival and historical materials, and launching young literary talents. He examines seven major Yiddish writers and traces a transnational post-Holocaust network. This book is a compelling contribution to our understanding of Yiddish and Jewish cultures in the post-War era. Max Kaiser is a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne. He can be reached at kaiser@student.unimelb.edu.au.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today is the third of our occasional series on the question of how to respond to mass atrocities. Earlier this summer I talked with Scott Straus and Bridget Conley-Zilkic. Later in September I’ll talk with Carrie Booth Walling. I’m teaching a class on the Historical Method this semester. As part of this we’ve talked quite a bit about the question of whether historians have ethical imperatives as part of their writing. As you might expect, the students have disagreed, sometimes emotionally, about this issue. Within the field of genocide studies, this question is considerably less contentious. No one expects to be completely neutral in the face of studying mass atrocities. Each of the books in this occasional series on our response to mass atrocities has examined the topic carefully, thoroughly and objectively. Yet, each has an ethical imperative manifested in a tangible urgency that underlays the careful scholarly analysis. James Waller’s new book Confronting Evil: Engaging Our Responsi

If you want to know how to bring future mass atrocities to an end, the best place to start is to examine how past mass atrocities have ended. This simple piece of logic is at the heart of Bridget Conley-Zilkic’s new edited collection titled How Mass Atrocities End: Studies from Guatemala, Burundi, Indonesia, the Sudans, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Iraq (Cambridge University Press, 2016). As Conley points out in her introduction, leaders choose to engage in mass atrocities because the rewards for doing so seem greater than the cost. They end either because they have achieved their goal or because the balance of rewards and costs has changed. So, for people interested in preventing or stopping mass atrocities, the challenge lies in changing that balance. This book, then, examines a variety of different case studies to understand how the changing calculus of rewards and cots has occurred historically. The case studies are superb, the range of cases broad and the analysis perceptive. It is a sobering book to rea

I teach at a Catholic university and last semester co-taught (with a theologian) a class titled The Holocaust and its Legacies. Once my students became comfortable with me, they began to pepper me with questions about the role of the Catholic church during the Holocaust. Some of these questions–about the church and antisemitism, about the role of the Pope–I was able to answer effectively. But when they started asking me about the behaviors and beliefs of the bishops and priests-the people in the church who interacted with ordinary people on an everyday basis–I was at a loss. Thanks to Lauren Faulkner Rossi’s new book Wehrmacht Priests: Catholicism and the Nazi War of Annihilation (Harvard University Press, 2015), I can now give a much more informed and thoughtful answer to these questions. While Rossi spends some time looking at the macro level, she devotes most of her book to ‘ordinary’ priests who served in the German army. Some of these men were chaplains specifically en

This podcast is the first of a new occasional series of interviews addressing the question of responding to mass atrocities and genocide. Later in the summer I’ll interview Bridget Conley-Zilkic, James Waller and Carrie Booth Walling. First up, however, is today’s interview with Scott Straus. Whenever I teach classes on genocide or on the Holocaust, students most want to know the answer to a simple question: How can we make sure this doesn’t happen again? Straus’ new book, Fundamentals of Genocide and Mass Atrocity Prevention (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2016), surveys the recent research to try and answer this question. In part, it’s a resource for practitioners, summarizing the consensus on best practices. But it’s much more than that. It’s a succinct but subtle conversation with the research–pointing out complexities, interrogating common assumptions and pointing to places where more research is needed. The result is a book that professionals, ac

I remember working on my master’s thesis while at Ohio State. Hour after hour after hour I labored-writing, rewriting, formatting. Then the day of the defense arrived. Ninety minutes later, I exited the room with my degree assured. And no one ever looked at the master’s thesis again. I suspect this is true with most theses. For some this is clearly justified. But many others, while not of the depth and scale of a dissertation, represent a great deal of original thought and analysis. Ugur Umit Ungor’s collection of essays titled Genocide: New Perspectives on its Causes, Courses and Consequences (Amsterdam University Press, 2016), offers a number of examples of this. The book is composed of essays that present the original ideas and conclusions of a number of the best students at NIOD. The collection is wide-ranging–representing a variety of disciplines and time periods. Ungor divides them broadly into three different areas–the causes, courses and consequences noted in the title. A

At least twice in past interview descriptions I’ve used the famous phrase attributed to Hitler: “Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?” To be honest, I couldn’t have told you much more about the extent of German knowledge of the Armenian genocide and its aftermath. After reading Stefan Ihrig’s wonderful new book Justifying Genocide: Germany and the Armenians from Bismarck to Hitler (Harvard University Press, 2016), that’s no longer true. The book is a comprehensive and insightful look at what Germans knew about the Armenian genocide, when they knew it, what they wrote and said about, and how what they wrote and said mattered. It’s a wonderful book, full of colorful quotations and insightful asides. It’s important, of course, for people interested in Armenia and/or the Holocaust. But it’s equally important in suggesting the ways in which genocides do not happen in isolation and in suggesting our need to see the phenomenon global

I grew up in Michigan, in the United States, where I was surrounded by places named with Native American names. I drove to Saginaw to play in basketball tournaments and to Pontiac to watch an NBA team play. Now in Kansas, I live near towns called Kiowa and Cherokee. But for much of my life, despite my profession as an historian, names like these were just background noise in the everyday reality of my life, not reminders of the fact that Native Americans have lived in and with the presence of settlers for centuries. Andrew Woolford has done much to help me recognize and understand this. Woolford is one of the preeminent scholars on the relationship between “natives” and settlers in the United States and Canada. He is also one of the most thoughtful voices in considering whether this relationship should be called genocidal. In my discussion with him, we tried to get at the essence of his ideas by looking at three of his works. We begin with the volume of essays he co-edited with Alexander Hinton an

What makes a person? What makes an act heroic? And what determines a person’s fate? These are the questions driving the narrative in Ingrid Carlberg‘s new book, Raoul Wallenberg: The Biography (MacLehose Press, 2016). A diplomatic envoy in Hungary, Wallenberg has been lauded throughout the world for his efforts to save Jews living during World War II. But, his fate following his arrest in 1945 remains unknown and, as a result, his story has no clear end. In her excellent biography, Carlberg excavates the details of Wallenberg’s end, but she also digs deeply into the story of his life- shedding light upon a time that is often eclipsed by all that came after. It’s a time which is essential to any understanding of the man Wallenberg was,the course he pursued, and the hero he’s remembered as.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Suzanne Brown-Fleming suggests that most people think the archives of the International Tracing Service is largely a list of names and addresses. I was one of these people until I read her excellent new book Nazi Persecution and Postwar Repercussions: The International Tracing Service Archive and Holocaust Research (Rowman and Littlefield, 2016). What Brown-Fleming makes clear in her work is that the archive is far richer and more interesting than that. The book is partly an extended discussion of the contents of the archive. But Brown-Fleming’s goals are broader than this. She hopes to help people recognize the new kinds of research questions the archive makes it possible to ask and answer. She tries to help researchers imagine how they might employ Big Data approaches to open new vistas on old questions. And she hopes to give people personal examples of the stakes of these questions by offering specific examples of stories, tragedies and conflicts drawn from the archive itself. Anyone who is intereste

Some books fly high above the field, making sweeping generalizations about big questions. Other books circle over a specific problem, analyzing it in great detail to say something important about a single subject. Joshua Zimmerman‘s The Polish Underground and the Jews, 1939-1945 (Cambridge University Press, 2015) shows how important and valuable books that adopt the latter approach can be. The book is an exceptionally rich account of the attitudes, politics, policies and actions of the Polish Underground regarding Polish Jews during the Second World War. Zimmerman, Associate Professor of History at Yeshiva University in New York, spent years exploring archives, memoirs and secondary sources in preparing the book. Nearly every page of the book displays this research, with extensive quotes from newspapers, internal communications and leaders within the army. Zimmerman is well-aware of the historical and political stakes involved in his question. His answers are careful, nuanced and balanced. I can imagine

In her new book Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form (Harvard UP, 2016), Hillary Chute analyses the documentary power in the comics-form sometimes known as “graphic novels.” Chute is particularly interested in Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Keiji Nakazawa’s I Saw It, and Joe Sacco’s series Palestine, but she also introduces us to the long history of hand-drawn documentation of war-time trauma dating to Goya and Callot. Chute treats comics as a serious literary form that is especially efficacious for representing the act of witness-to-war and those who witness. It is through the power of graphic illustration combined with the written word–the comics-form–that the otherwise unspeakable atrocities of modern war can be conveyed. The book also serves as a primer to the language of comics–words like “gutter” and “tier”–and the craft of decoding comics as practiced by scholars such as Chute. In this interview Chute respon

In his book, In the Shadow of Hitler: Alabama’s Jews, the Second World War, and the Holocaust (University of Alabama Press, 2014), Dan J. Puckett, Associate Professor of History at Troy University, traces how Alabama’s Jews overcame community divisions to work together on behalf of European Jewry during the Holocaust.  Utilizing a variety of archival sources, Puckett shows how Alabama’s Jews lobbied policymakers and community leaders across the state and the nation in support of their cause.  The story helps us think about the regional importance of the South in American Jewish history.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices