Dan Stone

The historiography of the Holocaust

Notes on Contributors Introduction D.Stone German or Nazi Antisemitism? O.Heilbronner Hitler and the Third Reich J.Noakes Ghettoization T.Cole War, Occupation and the Holocaust in Poland D.Pohl Expropriation and Expulsion F.Bajohr Local Collaboration in the Holocaust in Eastern Europe M.Dean Big Business and the Third Reich: An Appraisal of the Historical Arguments C.Kobrak & A.H.Schneider The Decision-Making Process C.R.Browning Historiography and the Perpetrators of the Holocaust J.Matthaus The Topography of Genocide A.Charlesworth Britain, the United States and the Holocaust: In Search of a Historiography T.Kushner The Holocaust and the Soviet Union J.Klier The German Churches and the Holocaust R.P.Ericksen & S.Heschel Jewish Leadership in Extremis D.Michman Jewish Resistance R.Rozett Gender and the Family L.Pine Romanies and the Holocaust: A Re-evaluation and an Overview I.Hancock From Streicher to Sawoniuk: The Holocaust in the Courtroom D.Bloxham The Holocaust Under Communism T.C.Fox Antisemitism and Holocaust Denial in Post-Communist Eastern Europe F.Lobont Post-Holocaust Philosophy J.Cohen Testimony and Representation Z.Waxman Memory, Memorials and Museums D.Stone The Holocaust and Genocide A.D.Moses Index

Genocide as Transgression

The origins of genocide have been sought by scholars in many areas of human experience: politics, religion, culture, economics, demography, ideology. All these of course are valid explanations, and go a long way to getting to grips with the objective conditions surrounding genocide. But, as Berel Lang put it some time ago, there remains an inexplicable gap between the idea and the act of mass murder. This article aims to be a step towards bridging that gap by adding a human dimension to the existing explanations. Building on Roger Caillois’s anthropological analysis of ‘war as festival’, Georges Bataille’s concept of society’s ‘excess energy’, and Emile Durkheim’s idea of ‘collective effervescence’, and connecting these terms to those used explicitly in relation to the Holocaust by Dominick LaCapra (‘scapegoating’ and the ‘carnivalesque’) and Saul Friedl‰nder (‘Rausch’ or ‘ecstasy’), I argue that prior to and during any act of genocide there occurs a heightening of community feeling, to the point at which this ecstatic sense of belonging permits, indeed demands, a normally forbidden act of transgression in order to ‘safeguard’ the community by killing the designated ‘threatening’ group. This article is a theoretical starting point aimed at stimulating discussion, in which I refer to the Nanjing and My Lai massacres and the genocides in Nazi Germany and Rwanda to show where empirical research is needed to illustrate this concept of ‘genocide as transgression’.

The historiography of genocide: beyond ‘uniqueness’ and ethnic competition

This article argues that neither the proponents of the uniqueness of the Holocaust nor those who see other genocides as paradigmatic provide helpful ways of furthering the scholarly understanding of genocide. A new generation of genocide scholars is incorporating the findings of earlier research into a synthesis that promises to respect the extremity of the Holocaust as well as the specificities of other genocides, positioning them in a history that sees genocide as a continuum of practices throughout the modern period that must also encompass the history of racism, colonialism, imperialism and nation-building.

Race in British Eugenics

The dominant historiographical view of eugenics in Britain is that it was a middle-class protest movement that found in early genetic science a justification for its objections to paying taxes to aid the poor. Often, this position is contrasted with a ‘harder’, blood-and-soil, continental type of eugenics, one that ended in genocide. In this article Stone does not dispute the class-based nature of British eugenics, but shows that, among all kinds of eugenicists, this class issue was inseparable from a racially motivated world view. ‘Race’, in this reading, was more than simply a synonym for ‘nation’, for already by the Edwardian period there was a widely accepted racial hierarchy. If this was not always referred to, it was because it was taken for granted. Hence the view of British eugenics that sees it as mildly threatening but basically embarrassing needs to be adjusted so that its full, sinister implications can be seen.

The English Mistery, the BUF, and the Dilemmas of British Fascism*

Was there a distinctively British form of fascism? The idea that fascism was a continental European import, thoroughly irrelevant to British concerns and unsuited to the British way of life has long been part of received wisdom. It is an idea that has been promulgated since the earliest days of Italian Fascism and German National Socialism, as a letter written to the cultural journal the New Age reveals: in response to an article by the Nietzschean scholar Oscar Levy in which he praised Mussolini, this correspondent wrote: I trust you do not suggest that the doctor’s ideas should be adopted by our nation. The principles of the Italians, Machiavelli and Mussolini, and the philosophy of the Polack Nietzsche, may be suited to the Latin and other Mediterranean races, but they are alien to the northern genius. Benevolent tyranny is the best thing for nations composed of gods and worms, but leadership without too much rule is better for the more homogeneous nations of the north.2 This letter typifies much of the contemporary response to fascism: fascism is fine for the Italians and the Germans, but not for us. As the authors of one popular study of the European dictatorships had it, ‘democracy failed in Italy and Germany because it was an alien tradition introduced on a foreign model. Let the future leader of England remember that dictatorship is alien to the English race and traditions.’3 Or as T. S. Eliot put it most succinctly, fascism was ‘an Italian regime for Italians, a product of the Italian mind’.4

Memory Wars in the ‘New Europe’

Seventy years since the start of World War II, revisionists across Europe have been arguing that Stalin was as much to blame for starting the war as Hitler. No historical fact, it seems, not even the one that every school pupil knows -that Hitler was responsible for the war — is any longer secure. At the same time, the British Conservative Party, the party of Churchill, has aligned itself in the European Parliament with a far-right grouping, the European Conservatives and Reformists Group (ECR), which includes the Latvian For Fatherland and Freedom Party and the Polish Law and Justice Party, whose former spokesman, Michal Kaminski, appealing to the old canard of Judeo-Bolshevism (Żydokomuna), explains the murder of Jews in Jedwabne in 1941 with reference to the ‘crimes’ supposedly committed by Jews during the period of Bolshevik rule in eastern Poland. As Adam Krzeminski rightly says, World War II is still being fought,2 and, we might add, more intensively today than at any point in the last seven decades.

‘Not a race but only a people after all’: the racial origins of the Jews in fin-de-siècle anthropology

ABSTRACT By the end of the nineteenth century an earlier ethnological tradition, based mainly on the description of ‘exotic peoples’, had given way to a more scientistic, biologically determinist anthropology. The latter sought, through physical measurements, to explain the racial origins of humankind, taking it for granted that races existed and explaining scientifically how the worlds peoples could be categorized on racial grounds. In this scheme the Jews presented a special problem, for most anthropologists assumed them to be racially pure and yet they looked like the majority populations wherever they lived. Thus, despite their small numbers, and despite the fact that anthropologists devoted more time to colonial subjects, almost all race scientists had something to say about the racial origins of the Jews and about how this question spoke to broader anthropological concerns. Stone examines how, at the moment when the discipline of anthropology became institutionalized, it dealt with the Jews in its racial schemas. Although many of the thinkers examined here were soon to be eclipsed, the article presents a snapshot of racial thinking at a crucial juncture in the development of anthropological thought.

Nazism as modern magic: bronislaw malinowski's political anthropology

In the 1930s, the functionalist anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski embarked on a lecture tour of the United States in an attempt to alert the American public to the threat posed by Nazism. This article considers how Malinowskis public campaigning built on his anthropological studies, and suggests how the insights contained therein can still be an impetus to further augment our understanding of Nazism as a phenomenon.

Beyond the Mnemosyne Institute: The Future of Memory after the Age of Commemoration

The ‘Mnemosyne Institute’ of my title refers to a story by Saul Bellow, ‘The Bellarosa Connection’.2 The narrator, whose name we do not find out, is the founder of the Mnemosyne Institute in Philadelphia, and after 40 years of successfully training ‘executives, politicians, and members of the defense establishment’ in what would be known to the Greeks as mnemotechnia or the Romans as ars memoriae, he retires, wishing to ‘forget about remembering’. This aspiration, as he immediately acknowledges, is ‘an Alicein-Wonderland proposition’ (35) — as Paul Ricoeur notes, in order to succeed, forgetting would have to outsmart its own vigilance and, as it were, forget itself.3 And whilst he will no longer train professionals in the use of their faculties, he will instead recall his own life. After all, his ‘main investment was in memory’ (37) and he could not simply forget it. He already knew that he was, like Funes, burdened with ‘so much useless information’ (52). On his retirement, he tries, after an unexpected telephone enquiry, to track down old friends, the Fonsteins, with whom he has not been in contact for 30 years, only to discover that they are dead. In a conversation with a young man claiming to be a house-sitting friend of the Fonstein’s son Gilbert, our narrator is stung by the youth’s snide comments about his ‘timing’ being ‘off’ (88). The story ends with the narrator’s angry reflections that ‘modern mental structures’ such as those exhibited by this boy cannot be dismantled and that such people can never understand ‘the roots of memory in feeling’ (89).

From Stockholm to Stockton: The Holocaust and/as Heritage in Britain

Reviewing the musical Imagine This for The Guardian, Michael Billington wrote: ‘they said it couldn’t be done: a musical about the Warsaw ghetto. And now that I’ve seen it, I know that they were right’.1 A few weeks later in the same newspaper, Anne Karpf suggested that one could be forgiven for thinking that every day was Holocaust Memorial Day (HMD) in the United Kingdom. The plethora of Holocaust-related films and other ‘cultural’ events (I use the term loosely, to include the musical of the Warsaw Ghetto and other such ill-considered phenomena) indicated to Karpf that there is an excess of attention being paid to the Holocaust and that, especially at a time when Israel was pounding the life out of the Gaza Strip, such attention is unjustified. Karpf, unintentionally recapitulating a standard trope of British responses, writes that we have ‘now become saturated with images and accounts of the Holocaust’.2