According to Berghahn's rules, the last pre-print version of this article is herewith uploaded. This article is a programmatic one, tackling the following issues: how the terminology designating the persecution and murder of the Jews... more
According to Berghahn's rules, the last pre-print version of this article is herewith uploaded. This article is a programmatic one, tackling the following issues: how the terminology designating the persecution and murder of the Jews emerged, the question of identifying the core of historical events, the relationship with genocide studies, recent problematic developments in the understanding of the Holocaust and the disregard for using the perspective of Jewish history to understand the nature of the perpetration, and more; finally, a description of what should be included in "the Holocaust" and what is unique about it is proposed.
Part 2 of a sequence that I have posted earlier on Academia. A work in progress. In response to Putin's War, the cruelties, violences, and desolations. An Iconostasis.
in: Journal of Modern European History, 12(4), 2014, pp. 427-447. Abstract: Timothy Snyder’s book Bloodlands was sceptically received by a considerable part of the community of German historians. It was intensively criticized, among... more
in: Journal of Modern European History, 12(4), 2014, pp. 427-447.
Abstract:
Timothy Snyder’s book Bloodlands was sceptically received by a considerable part of the community of German historians. It was intensively criticized, among other places, in this very publication. It is not difficult to see, however, that this reception was a result of an basically normative discomfort with Snyder’s comparison between National Socialist and Stalinist mass murder between the rise of Hitler and the death of Stalin. The heritage of the Historikerstreit still makes itself felt. The critique of Bloodlands by historians of the Holocaust and the Second World War reveals itself, in this connection, as a questionably self-referential and moreover national methodology based upon morally grounded, politically motivated, and intellectually unrealisable ideals. This presumption for redemptive history conveys the impression of a kind of special German right to paternalism in the field. In all this it has been neglected that Snyder has presented not an analysis of ideological motives but rather a structural analysis of totalitarian mass murder that is sensitive to the concept of space. In so doing he takes up the major themes of classical political totalitarianism theory and brings them into harmony with the most recent international imperial histories and interdisciplinary studies of the politics of space.
