Abstract
Peter Hayes and John K. Roth (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Holocaust Studies, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2010; xiii + 776 pp.; US$150.00 hbk; ISBN 9780199211869
Several reference works on the Holocaust have appeared in the past 15 years, but the new Oxford Handbook of Holocaust Studies is quite special. Nearly 50 North American, European, and Israeli scholars provide excellent essays measuring current research and thinking while providing up-to-date and substantial rather than perfunctory bibliography. But the additional achievement of the editors, Peter Hayes and John K. Roth, lies in the Handbook's new framework for interpreting the rapidly expanding field of Holocaust Studies.
The Handbook’s first three sections – ‘Enablers’, ‘Protagonists’, and ‘Settings’ – replace the older paradigm of perpetrators, victims, and bystanders. The sections reflect current Holocaust scholarship and the nuance it provides to older categorizations. They also reflect fundamental tensions in the field of historical research. Thus ‘Enablers’ contains six essays on the Holocaust’s intellectual preconditions including not only traditional explanations such as ‘Antisemitism’ (Richard S. Levy) ‘Science’ (Patricia Haberer) and the ‘World Wars’ (Doris Bergen), but also newer explanations such as ‘Colonialism’ (A. Dirk Moses), which tie the Holocaust to trends in Imperial Germany and Nazi settlement schemes in the East.
Likewise, the longer ‘Protagonists’ section includes 11 broad essays. From the German perspective, they range from the center of Nazi decision-making (Alan E. Steinweis’s essay on ‘Hitler and Himmler’ and Christopher R. Browning’s essay on Nazi ‘Problem-Solvers’) to the mentalities of ‘Killers’ (Edward Westerman). But the ‘Protagonists’ in this rendering also include ‘Jews’ (Dan Michman), ‘Rescuers’ (Debórah Dwork), ‘Catholics’ (Kevin Spicer), ‘The Allies’ (Shlomo Aronson) and others, all of whom interconnect with one another in broader narratives that do not, as is often the case when thinking of Holocaust categories, have intellectual barriers between them. The volume’s section on ‘Settings,’ meanwhile, has essays ranging from ‘Occupied and Allied States’ (Radu Ioanid) and ‘Living Space’ (Wendy Lower) to ‘Ghettos’ (Martin Dean) and ‘Camps’ (Karin Orth), which tie the Holocaust to local political, economic, and administrative conditions.
Yet because the Handbook is indeed on Holocaust Studies, fully half of the essays concern postwar textual, artistic, and political approaches to the Holocaust. The eight essays in the section on ‘Representation’ are especially useful. The efficacy of varied historical sources are discussed in essays ranging from ‘German Documents and Diaries’ (Peter Fritszche) to ‘Survivor Accounts’ (Henry Greenspan), which are especially useful given the ways in which scholars have expanded their readings of individual accounts to supplement official records. The section also contains fine essays on ‘Literature’ (Sara Horowitz), ‘Film’ (Lawrence Baron), ‘Art,’ (Dora Appel), ‘Music,’ (Bret Werb) and ‘Memorials’ (James Young) – fields that expand representation from the purely historical to the aesthetic, and wrestle with questions of gender, authenticity, and larger truths, to say nothing of Theodor Adorno’s dictum of Poetry after Auschwitz.
The final section on ‘Aftereffects’ contains 15 very helpful essays on expanding research areas such as ‘Refugees’ (Arieh Kochavi), ‘Punishment’ (Rebecca Wittmann), ‘Restitution’ (Peter Hayes) and political memory in Germany (Jeffrey Herf), Israel (Boaz Cohen) and elsewhere. Most of the essays in the ‘Aftereffects’ section, however, concern the Holocaust's indelible mark on Judaism, Christianity, and academic disciplines ranging from the humanities to the social sciences to international law and even secondary school teaching. The Holocaust, to be sure, has no affirmational ending. But can it help us understand contemporary mass killing? In his essay on ‘The Social Sciences’, James E. Waller assesses academic efforts to understand perpetrator behavior and thus genocide itself. Initial psychological studies of a few ‘mad Nazis’ gave way to Hannah Arendt's ‘banality of evil’, which gave way to current chilling theories concerning the ‘universality of the potential for genocide’ (676). In his closing essay on ‘Ethics’, John Roth further explains how the Holocaust revealed the malleability of right and wrong and notes that postwar reaffirmations of decency in war-crimes trials, museums, and the like cannot make the idea of ethics less vulnerable as we move through the twenty-first century.
One could quibble over topics that the editors omitted. Sections on Jewish emigration from a global perspective, the role of interethnic and political conflicts in Eastern Europe, and signals and other forms of intelligence would have reflected other growing fields of Holocaust research, as would a section on memory and representation in perpetrator nations such as Romania and Hungary. Still, the Handbook is an excellent reference work and more. It contains broad implications for the understanding of genocide as such while emphasizing the Holocaust's uniqueness. As important, however, is the Handbook's broad thematic and interdisciplinary approach, which encourages all Holocaust scholars to rethink constantly the paradigmatic and disciplinary barriers that tend to compartmentalize the academic world more generally.
University of Florida