The Holocaust and historical methodology
By: edited by Dan Stone
Series: Making sense of history -- v. 16
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Published: 2012
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 323
ISBN-13: 9780857454928; 9780857454935
Subjects: Historiography; Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)
Description: In the last two decades our empirical knowledge of the Holocaust has been vastly expanded. Yet this empirical blossoming has not been accompanied by much theoretical reflection on the historiography. This volume argues that reflection on the historical process of (re)constructing the past is as important for understanding the Holocaust -- and, by extension, any past event -- as is archival research. It aims to go beyond the dominant paradigm of political history and describe the emergence of methods now being used to reconstruct the past in the context of Holocaust historiography.

This book is timely and necessary and often extremely challenging. It brings together an impressive cast of scholars, spanning several academic generations. Anyone interested in writing about the Holocaust should read this book and consider the implications of what is written here for their own work. There seems to me little doubt that Holocaust history writing stands at something of a cross roads, and the ways forward that this volume points to are extremely thought provoking. -- Tom Lawson, University of Winchester.
Table of contents: title: The Holocaust and historical methodology / Dan Stone; title: A world without Jews: interpreting the Holocaust / Alon Confino; title: Holocaust historiography and cultural history / Dan Stone; title: The invisible crime: Nazi politics of memory and postwar representations of the Holocaust / Dirk Rupnow; title: The history of the Jews in the ghettos: a cultural perspective / Amos Goldberg; title: National Socialism, Holocaust, and ecology / Boaz Neumann; title: Bearing witness: theological roots of a new secular morality / Samuel Moyn; title: Transcending history? Methodological problems in Holocaust testimony / Zoe Waxman; title: Studying the Holocaust: is history commemoration? / Doris L. Bergen; title: An integrated history of the Holocaust: some methodological challenges / Saul Friedlander; title: Truth and circumstance: what (if anything) can be properly said about the Holocaust? / Hayden White; title: Modernist Holocaust historiography: a dialogue between Saul Friedlander and Hayden White / Wulf Kansteiner; title: The Holocaust and European history / Donald Bloxham; title: Fascism and the Holocaust / Federico Finchelstein; title: The Holocaust and world history: Raphael Lemkin and comparative methodology / A. Dirk Moses.