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“Fit for Purpose? The Concept of Genocide and Civilian Destruction,” in Donald Bloxham and A. Dirk Moses, eds., Genocide: Key Themes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), 12-44.
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This is a response to commentaries on my _The Problems of Genocide_.
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“The German Campaign against Cultural Freedom: Documenta 15 in Context,” Grey Room, no. 92 (Summer 2023), 75-93.
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“‘Die deutsche Debatte ist von Obsessionen geprägt’: Erinnerungsräumliche Betrachtungen zum Katechismus der Deutschen,” in Jürgen Zimmerer, ed., Erinnerungskämpfe: Neues deutsches Geschichtsbewusstsein (Stuttgart: Reklam, 2023), 214-240.
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Memory and the Future: Transnational Politics, Ethics and Society edited by Yifat Gutman, Adam D. Brown, and Amy Sodaro (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Pp. 232. £50.
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This article argues that Hayden White's vision of historiography can be appropriated for the public use of history in many ethnic and nationalist conflicts today. That is, it can be used to provide the theoretical arguments... more
This article argues that Hayden White's vision of historiography can be appropriated for the public use of history in many ethnic and nationalist conflicts today. That is, it can be used to provide the theoretical arguments that justify the instrumentalization of histor-ical memory by ...
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All in all, The Fragility of Empathy after the Holocaust is a thoughtful work of analysis, but its loosely related essays never really settle on a common theme. The closest Dean comes to a unifying thesis appears in her brief conclusion,... more
All in all, The Fragility of Empathy after the Holocaust is a thoughtful work of analysis, but its loosely related essays never really settle on a common theme. The closest Dean comes to a unifying thesis appears in her brief conclusion, where she describes the current discourses on ...
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Bohleber, Werner, 2003, Collective Phantasms, Destructiveness, and Terrorism, in Sverre Varvin and Vamik D. Vokan, eds., Violence or Dialogue? Psychoanalytic Insights on Terror and Terrorism. London: International Psychoanalytic... more
Bohleber, Werner, 2003, Collective Phantasms, Destructiveness, and Terrorism, in Sverre Varvin and Vamik D. Vokan, eds., Violence or Dialogue? Psychoanalytic Insights on Terror and Terrorism. London: International Psychoanalytic Association, 111-31.
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in Matthias Böckmann, Reinhart Koessler, Matthias Gockel, and Henning Melber, eds., Jenseits der Mbembe-Debatte Erinnerung, Politik, Solidarität (Berlin: Metropol Verlag, 2022), 156-174.
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“Deutschlands Erinnerungskultur und der ‘Terror der Geschichte,’” in Susan Neiman and Michael Wildt, ed., Historiker Streiten (Berlin: Ullstein Verlag, 2022), 199-242.
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“Does the Holocaust Reveal or Conceal Other Genocides? The Canadian Museum for Human Rights and Grievable Suffering,” in Douglas S. Irvin, Alexander L. Hinton, and Tom LaPointe, eds., Hidden Genocides: Power, Knowledge, and Memory (New... more
“Does the Holocaust Reveal or Conceal Other Genocides? The Canadian Museum for Human Rights and Grievable Suffering,” in Douglas S. Irvin, Alexander L. Hinton, and Tom LaPointe, eds., Hidden Genocides: Power, Knowledge, and Memory (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2013), 21-51.
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29 September 2015 Chair: Dirk Moses | EUI 15.00-16.30 Leon Saltiel | University of Macedonia Collective Victimhood and Out-Group Prejudice: a Post-Holocaust Theory of AntiSemitism Linh Nguyen Vu Thuc | EUI The Persistance of "Jewish... more
29 September 2015 Chair: Dirk Moses | EUI 15.00-16.30 Leon Saltiel | University of Macedonia Collective Victimhood and Out-Group Prejudice: a Post-Holocaust Theory of AntiSemitism Linh Nguyen Vu Thuc | EUI The Persistance of "Jewish Communism" in Poland Intersectional Perspectives 16:30-16:45 Coffee break 16.45-18.00 Christelle Gomis | EUI 'Immigrant' Parents and the British School System (1963-88)
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1. Colonial counterinsurgency and mass violence: the Dutch empire in Indonesia Part I. Conquest and reconquest 2. Colonial warfare and military ethics in the Netherlands East Indies, 1816-1941 3. Genocide in the Kampongs? Dutch nineteenth... more
1. Colonial counterinsurgency and mass violence: the Dutch empire in Indonesia Part I. Conquest and reconquest 2. Colonial warfare and military ethics in the Netherlands East Indies, 1816-1941 3. Genocide in the Kampongs? Dutch nineteenth century colonial warfare in Aceh, Sumatra 4. Business as usual: Dutch mass violence in the Indonesian War of Independence 1945-1949 5. Learning on 'the job': Dutch war volunteers entering the Indonesian war of independence, 1945-46 6. 'Who wants to cover everything, covers nothing': the organization of indigenous security forces in Indonesia, 1945-50 Part II. Indonesian violence 7. The killing of Dutch and Eurasians in Indonesia's national revolution (1945-49): a 'brief genocide' reconsidered 8. Anti-Chinese violence in Java during the Indonesian Revolution, 1945-49 9. Walking the tightrope: internal Indonesian conflict, 1945-1949 Part III. Representations and memories 10. 'Not a colonial war': Dutch film propaganda in the fight against Indonesia, 1945-49 11. 'Trust me, this news is indeed true': representations of violence in Indonesian newspapers during the Indonesian revolution, 1945-1948 12. Cleo's 'unfinished business': coming to terms with Dutch war crimes in Indonesia's war of independence 13. Colonial memory and forgetting in the Netherlands and Indonesia 14. From national sacrifice to compensation claims: changing Indonesian representations of the Westerling massacres in South Sulawesi (1946-1947) 15. Competitive or multidirectional memory? The interaction between postwar and postcolonial memory in the Netherlands 16. Epilogue: On genocide and mass violence in colonial Indonesia
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Research Interests: Sociology, Anthropology, Applied Ethics, International Law, Political Science, and 13 moreImperial History, International History, International Human Rights Law, International Humanitarian Law, History of International Thought, History of International Legal Thought, Francisco de Vitoria, History of Palestine and Israel, Humanity, The law of belligerent occupation, Historical Studies, Israel Palestine, and History of Israel Palestine Conflict
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How does the Holocaust relate to genocide as a concept and an event? This question has caused considerable controversy because scholarly discourse and identity politics cannot be separated neatly. While the term ‘genocide’ was coined... more
How does the Holocaust relate to genocide as a concept and an event? This question has caused considerable controversy because scholarly discourse and identity politics cannot be separated neatly. While the term ‘genocide’ was coined during the Second World War and enshrined in international law in 1948, the Holocaust as a specifically Jewish tragedy did not become an object of consciousness until almost two decades later. Ever since, those highlighting a distinctive experience for European Jewry have sought to separate it from that of other victims of the Nazis as well as other cases of ethnic and racial extermination.1 Sometimes this endeavour takes on sectarian overtones. When President Carter established the United States Holocaust Museum and Memorial in 1979 and referred to ‘eleven million innocent victims exterminated’ — a figure that included five million non-Jewish Nazi victims — the Israeli historian Yehuda Bauer accused him of attempting to ‘de-Judaize’ the Holocaust. Indignant survivor groups led by Elie Wiesel campaigned successfully to ensure that the permanent exhibition made only passing reference to ‘other [non-Jewish] victims’.Z Bauer went so far as to condemn tendencies to ‘submerge the specific Jewish tragedy in the general sea of suffering caused by the many atrocities committed by the Nazi regime’ as part of a ‘worldwide phenomenon connected with dangers of anti-Semitism’.3
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For the older generation of ‘genocide scholars’, an intimate relationship between genocide and modernity seemed so obvious as to hardly warrant investigation.1 After all, the frequency and scale of genocides in all parts of the globe... more
For the older generation of ‘genocide scholars’, an intimate relationship between genocide and modernity seemed so obvious as to hardly warrant investigation.1 After all, the frequency and scale of genocides in all parts of the globe during the twentieth century suggested that modernization crises regularly resulted in the destruction of human communities. It remained to reconstruct and compare cases by mixing the ingredients of the standard recipe: a base of utopian ideology, a packet of racial enmity, plenty of state terror and some indifferent bystanders, topped off by an uncaring global community. These scholars also had an activist agenda, more interested in predicting and preventing genocide in the contemporary world by exhorting the United States, where they lived, to ‘humanitarian intervention’, than in reflecting on the deeper causes of civil wars and regional conflicts.2 There seemed little point in pondering the nuances of such concepts when people were being displaced and killed en masse today.
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Sydney Review of Books, 10 February 2017 http://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/the-vanquished-why-the-first-world-war-failed-to-end/
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in Aparna Sundar and Nandini Sundar, eds., Civil Wars in South Asia: State, Sovereignty, Development (New Delhi: Sage India, 2014), 142-64.
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Hayden White wants history to serve life by having it inspire an ethical consciousness, by which he means that in facing the existential questions of life, death, trauma, and suffering posed by human history, people are moved to formulate... more
Hayden White wants history to serve life by having it inspire an ethical consciousness, by which he means that in facing the existential questions of life, death, trauma, and suffering posed by human history, people are moved to formulate answers to them rather than to feel that they have no power to choose how they live. The ethical historian should craft narratives that inspire people to live meaningfully rather than try to provide explanations or reconstructions of past events that make them feel as if they cannot control their destiny. This Nietzschean-inspired vision of history is inadequate because it cannot gainsay that a genocidal vision of history is immoral. White may be right that cultural relativism results in cultural pluralism and toleration, but what if most people are not cultural relativists, and believe fervently in their right to specific lands at the expense of other peoples? White does not think historiography or perhaps any moral system can provide an answer. Is he right? This rejoinder argues that the communicative rationality implicit in the human sciences does provide norms about the moral use of history because it institutionalizes an intersubjectivity in which the use of the past is governed by norms of impartiality and fair-mindedness, and protocols of evidence based on honest research. Max Weber, equally influenced by Nietzsche, developed an alternative vision of teaching and research that is still relevant today.
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Introduction. It is Scarcely Possible to Believe that Human Beings Could be so Hideous and Loathsome: Discourses of Genocide in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century America and Australia. Mr Darwin's Shooters: On Natural Selection and... more
Introduction. It is Scarcely Possible to Believe that Human Beings Could be so Hideous and Loathsome: Discourses of Genocide in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century America and Australia. Mr Darwin's Shooters: On Natural Selection and the Naturalizing of Genocide. Caribbean Genocide: Racial War in Haiti, 1802-4. Raphael Lemkin's 'Tasmania': An Introduction. Tasmania. The Birth of the Ostland Out of the Spirit of Colonialism: A Postcolonial Perspective on the Nazi Policy of Conquest and Extermination. The Concentration Camp and Development: The Pasts and Future of Genocide
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Historians are dumb witnesses to a culture wrangling with itself about its criminal past if they only narrate the sequence of historical controversies such as those that have dotted the German public landscape since the Holocaust. They... more
Historians are dumb witnesses to a culture wrangling with itself about its criminal past if they only narrate the sequence of historical controversies such as those that have dotted the German public landscape since the Holocaust. They need to be alive to the subterranean biblical themes flowing beneath the surface froth of events, linking past and present through the continuity of German political emotions that are necessarily collective and therefore sensitive to anxieties about accusations of collective, inherited sin. This article argues that the guilt/shame couplet so common both in public German and academic discourses about postwar Germany cannot account for the intergenerational transmission of moral pollution signified by Holocaust memory. In order to understand the dynamics of German political emotions, it is more useful to employ an alternative couplet: stigma and sacrifice.
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In this collection of conference papers and public addresses, the long-time director of the Zentrum für Antisemitismusforschung at the Technical University in Berlin, Wolfgang Benz, presents his reflections on discrimination, ethnic... more
In this collection of conference papers and public addresses, the long-time director of the Zentrum für Antisemitismusforschung at the Technical University in Berlin, Wolfgang Benz, presents his reflections on discrimination, ethnic cleansing and genocide. These ten chapters are not ...
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What can one say about the state of the art in the Federal Republic? A number of aspects are discernible, not only in the practices and various traditions of intellectual history there, but also in its politics: the stark dichotomy... more
What can one say about the state of the art in the Federal Republic? A number of aspects are discernible, not only in the practices and various traditions of intellectual history there, but also in its politics: the stark dichotomy between Marxists and anti-Marxists; the ever-present metahistorical question of which (sub)discipline, field, or method would set the political agenda; and the position of Jewish émigrés. These issues raise still more basic ones: how to understand the Nazi experience, which remained living memory for most West Germans; how to confront the gradually congealing image of the Holocaust in private and public life; and the related matters of German intellectual traditions and the new order's foundations. Had the Nazi experience discredited those traditions and had the personal and institutional continuities from the Nazi to Federal Republican polities delegitimated the latter? These were questions with which intellectuals wrestled while they wrangled about ...