Mark Roseman

Surviving Memory: Truth and Inaccuracy in Holocaust Testimony

In writing the biography of the Holocaust survivor, Marianne Ellenbogen (who survived in hiding in Germany), the author was able to draw not only on the oral testimony of the subject but on an unusual range of additional historical sources, some of which seemed to challenge the veracity of the survivor’s recollections in small but significant ways. In documenting the process by which these discrepancies were uncovered and opening them to scrutiny, the author seeks not to contest the unique value of eyewitness testimony, but to lay bare the complex layers of memory apparent in one individual’s re-telling of her Holocaust experience and the strategies adopted within her account to help her cope with an unbearable past.

The lives of others—amid the deaths of others: biographical approaches to Nazi perpetrators

Using the example of several recent biographies of leading Nazis, the article explores whether biography enables us to understand involvement in racial violence and genocide. In particular, it questions whether the degree of agency, initiative and individual malleability in a dictatorship is visible from this vantage point. It also investigates the kind of understanding of leadership and agency held by the subjects themselves, and the model of action they sought to embody. Along the way it explores the methodological issues confronting any attempt to penetrate the minds of such figures. It argues that biography offers valuable glimpses, but the nature of the sources and the difficulty of interpreting speech acts before, during and after the Nazi period make it extremely difficult to identify the limits of agency and Eigensinn even of high-profile players in the Nazi system. Finally, it confronts the challenge of empathy and argues that the moral inadmissibility of empathizing with the perpetrators sets invisible limits from the outset on the explanatory potential of biography.

Recasting the Ruhr, 1945-1958 : manpower, economic recovery, and labour relations

Part 1 Resourcing the Ruhr: coercion and constraint - military government, manpower and the mines 1945-46 bringing home the bacon - manpower, incentives and coal production, 1946-48 supplies in demand - housing new labour in the pre-currency reform economy an imperfect market - financing workforce regeneration in the social market economy. Part 2 Reshaping the Ruhr: Stammbelegschaft and Masenmenschen the apprenticeship programme, 1948-58 the foundations of stability? housing new labour, 1948-58 compulsive talking and constrained silence - propaganda in the mining hostels of work and wastage minings new relations, new labour, the labour movement and labour relations, 1945-1958.

Thomas Kühne, Belonging and Genocide: Hitler's Community, 1918–1945

in the short term, to achieve radical social change. Belco’s book is impressive because of the scale of archive research (in local and national archives), the variety of sources (including oral testimony and unpublished diaries), and the meticulous (at times excessively so) reconstruction of the brief period covered by the book. The work is also praiseworthy because of the depth of its historical analysis, its incorporation of the most recent historiography, and the author’s interpretative acumen. Her decision to approach the question of the impact of war and defeat on civil society through the lens of a local study has proved to be a felicitous one. It is to be hoped that Belco’s investigations will stimulate further studies that will help us better understand the different aspects of Italy’s postwar ‘rebirth’ and their long-term impact on the structure of the Italian state, the political system and the national society.

The Pleasures of Opposition: Leisure, Solidarity and Resistance of a Life-Reform Group

Let me begin with two surprising accounts, both of which relate to physical recreation and training undertaken in the Nazi years by the League for Socialist Life,1 a little-known life-reform group from the Ruhr region.

Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin

John Connelly Recently, I came across a review of Timothy Snyders Bloodlands that surprised me. The reviewer called the book ‘revisionist history of the best kind’. ‘Of the best kind’ was easy to ...

Recent Writing on the Holocaust

Peter Longerich, Politik der Vernichtung. Eine Gesamtdarstellung der nationalsozialistischen Judenverfolgung, Munich and Zürich, Piper Verlag, 1998; pp. 772; ISBN 3-492-03755-0 Ulrich Herbert, Best. Biographische Studien über Radikalismus, Weltanschauung und Vernunft 1903–1989, Bonn, J.H.W. Dietz Nachfolger, 1996; pp. 695; ISBN 3-8012-5019-9 Henry Greenspan, On Listening to Holocaust Survivors. Recounting and Life History, Westport, CT, Praeger, 1998; pp. xx + 199; ISBN 0-275-95718-7 Brana Gurewitsch (ed.), Mothers, Sisters, Resisters. Oral Histories of Women who Survived the Holocaust, Tuscaloosa and London, University of Alabama Press, 1998; pp. xxi + 396; ISBN 0-8173-0931-4 (hbk), 0-8173-0952-7 (pbk) Dalia Ofer and Lenore J. Weitzman (eds), Women in the Holocaust, New Haven, CT and London, Yale University Press, 1998; pp. vii + 402; ISBN 0-300-07354-2 Aviva Halamish, The Exodus Affair. Holocaust Survivors and the Struggle for Palestine, New York, Syracuse University Press, 1998; pp. xxii + 313; ISBN 0-8156-0516-1 Idith Zertal, From Catastrophe to Power. Holocaust Survivors and the Emergence of Israel, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, University of California Press, 1998; pp. xiii + 344; ISBN 0-520-21578-8

Restoration and Stability: The Creation of a Stable Democracy in the Federal Republic of Germany

The Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) has come to be as indelibly associated with stability as Weimar was with crisis, and its government coalitions have been some of the most stable and enduring in Europe. Until 1966 every government lasted its full term. In stark contrast to the inter-war period, the occasions where coalitions have spent their life clinging to survival by a hair’s breadth have been few indeed. Even when governments changed — as in 1966/69 and 1982 — the political agenda evinced remarkable continuity. This is partly because the CDU (Christian Democratic Union) has been in government for almost three-quarters of the FRG’s existence, but also because after 1949 the polarization of Weimar politics gave way very rapidly to a different scenario: extreme parties disappeared from the political scene, and constitutional parties came increasingly to share the same centre ground. Politics itself had moved off the street; the tumult and protests of Weimar were replaced by orderly parliamentary politics. Class conflict was regulated within the institutional confines of the new state, and after 1951 neither employers nor unions attempted seriously to challenge that framework. From the FRG’s inception the number of strikes remained low. In the era of full employment in the late 1950s and 1960s strikes were generally well below even the depressed level to which union activity had sunk in the 1930s as a result of the massive demoralization and unemployment produced by the slump.