In her new book, Contemporary Psychoanalysis and the Third Reich: History, Memory, Tradition (Routledge, 2013), Emily Kuriloff details a dimension of psychoanalytic history that has never been so extensively documented: The impact of the Shoah on the not only the psychoanalysts who were directly involved, but also the aftershocks to later generations of analysts and the effect on theoretical developments on the field. Utilizing scholarly research, personal interviews and first-person accounts, K...
Jun 02, 2015•53 min
Historians have spent the last two decades detailing and explaining the actions of the Einsatzgruppen in the Soviet Union. We now know much more than we used to about the escalation of violence in 1941 and the so-called “Holocaust by Bullets.” The actions of the Einsatzgruppen in Poland, in contrast, are less well known.But they are crucial to understanding the evolution of violence against Jews and others. JuergenMatthaus , Jochen Boehler , and Klaus-Michael Mallmann set out to fill this gap.Th...
May 18, 2015•52 min
Adolf Hitler famously (and probably) said in a speech to his military leaders “Who, after all, speaks to-day of the annihilation of the Armenians?” This remark is generally taken to suggest that future generations won’t remember current atrocities, so there’s no reason not to commit them. The implication is that memory has something like an expiration date, that it fades, somewhat inevitably, of its own accord. At the heart of Fatma Muge Gocek’s book is the claim that forgetting doesn’t just hap...
May 11, 2015•1 hr 8 min
I’ll be leaving soon to take students on a European travel course. During the three weeks we’ll be gone, in addition to cathedrals, museums and castles, they’ll visit Auschwitz, the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe and a variety of other Holocaust related sights. And I’ll ask them to think about what we can say about how people in East-Central Europe remember the Holocaust based on the places they’ve visited. This is not simply a matter of historical reckoning. The responses to the recent...
Apr 29, 2015•1 hr 13 min
So I should start out with a confession. I don’t know much about the history of Argentina (I said something similar about Guatemala a year or so ago on the program). And I don’t think it would have occurred to me to do a comparative study Argentina and Nazi Germany. Fortunately, Daniel Feierstein was more imaginative than I. The resulting study, recently translated into English as Genocide as Social Practice:Reorganizing Society under the Nazis and Argentina’s Military Juntas (Rutgers University...
Apr 10, 2015•1 hr 7 min
Genocide studies is one of the few academic fields with which I’m acquainted which is truly interdisciplinary in approach and composition. Today’s guest Abdelwahab El-Affendi , and the book he has edited, Genocidal Nightmares: Narratives of Insecurity and the Logic of Mass Atrocities (Bloomsbury Academic 2014), is an excellent example of how this works out in practice. The question this book addresses is not that unusual: How it is that societies and individuals come to a place where they feel i...
Mar 25, 2015•59 min
After “Schindler’s List,” it became customary for my students, and I, to repeat the slogan “Never Again.” We did so seriously, with solemn expressions on our faces and intensity in our voices. But, if I’m being honest, I also uttered this slogan with some trepidation. For, while I believed absolutely in the necessity of such a commitment, I didn’t really know how to carry it out.Looking at Bosnia and Rwanda, then the Sudan and the Congo, such affirmations confronted the messy reality of our worl...
Mar 14, 2015•1 hr 19 min
Alon Confino ‘s A World Without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide (Yale University Press, 2014) begins with a vivid and devastating scene in the small German town of Fürth on November 10, 1938: Jews are forced from their homes and assembled in the main square.Many are made to stand for hours at the local community center; the men are beaten, humiliated, and transported to Dachau.There is a good deal of symbolic violence, too.The synagogue and all its contents are vandalize...
Mar 02, 2015•53 min
As a graduate student at Ohio State in the early 1990s, I remember watching the collapse of Yugoslavia on the news almost every night and reading about it in the newspaper the next day.The first genocidal conflict covered in real time, dozens of reporters covered the war from the front lines or from a Sarajevo under siege. Not surprisingly, the media coverage was accompanied by a flood of memoirs and histories trying to explain the wars to a population that, at least in the US, knew little to no...
Feb 06, 2015•1 hr 7 min
Last month on New Books in Geography, historian Susan Schulten discussed the development of thematic maps in the nineteenth century. Such maps focused on a particular topic such as disease, immigration, or politics and raised questions about society and geography. In many ways, these nineteenth-century maps were the predecessors to the maps made through Geographic Information Systems (GIS). In the past decade, geographers and historians have begun using GIS for innovative historical research. Am...
Jan 30, 2015•49 min
In his biography of Jozef Tiso, Catholic priest and president of independent Slovakia (1939-1944), James Ward provides a deeper understanding of a man who has been both honored and vilified since his execution as a Nazi collaborator in 1947. Priest, Politician, Collaborator: Jozef Tiso and the Making of Fascist Slovakia (Cornell University Press, 2013) is also a fascinating look at Catholicism, nationalism and human rights as moral standards in 20th century East Central Europe. The book explores...
Dec 25, 2014•1 hr 14 min
As a teenager, I heard or read or saw (in films or on television) story after story about the Gestapo, the Nazi secret police. Despite the occasional ‘corrective’ offered by Hogan’s Heroes, the impression given was that the Gestapo were all knowing and ever present. We now know differently, of course. But knowing that the Nazi state functioned as much or more through consensus as coercion has led historians to think again about the way in which this consensus was created and sustained. And it ha...
Dec 23, 2014•1 hr 9 min
The field of genocide studies is surprisingly young. As Sam Totten and I discussed in an interview earlier this year, it dates back to the late 1980s or early 1990s. That makes the field about 25 years old. That’s about the time it takes for a generation of scholars to lay out their ideas and to train new researchers to follow in their footsteps. And, as it usually goes, that new generation often takes issue with past assumptions and conclusions. It shouldn’t surprise us, then, that a variety of...
Nov 19, 2014•1 hr 6 min
What is justice for a man who supervised the interrogation and killing of thousands? Especially a man who now claims to be a Christian and to be, at least in some ways and cases, repentant for his crimes? Thierry Cruvellier has written a fascinating book about the trial of ‘Duch’ the director of the S-21 prison and interrogation center in Cambodia during the rule of the Khmer Rouge. Cruvellier watched virtually the entire trial and interviewed many of the participants and observers. The Master o...
Oct 31, 2014•1 hr 1 min
I live and work in the state of Kansas in the US. We think of ourselves as living in tornado alley and orient our schedules in the spring around the weather report. Earthquakes are something that happen somewhere else. Recently, however, our southern neighbor, Oklahoma, has been rocked repeatedly by minor earthquakes. Why this is so has been the subject of endless speculation. In the midst of this speculation, one occasionally hears reference to the fact that major earthquakes are frequently pre...
Sep 23, 2014•1 hr 5 min
In 1994 I was in graduate school, trying hard to juggle teaching, getting started on my dissertation and having something of a real life. The real life part suffered most of all. But every once in a while, the world around me would startle me out of my cave and remind me that life was proceeding without me. The genocide in Rwanda was one of these events. Along with the ongoing ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, it made me question whether academics was a meaningful career choice and what I could and sh...
Sep 13, 2014•1 hr 10 min
Works in the field of genocide studies tend to fall into one of a few camps. Some are emotional and personal. Others are historical and narrative. Still others are intentionally activist and aimed at changing policy or decisions. Martin Shaw ‘s works fit into a fourth category. A historical sociologist, Shaw brings the very best of the social sciences to bear on the subject. His work is carefully reasoned, theoretically informed and intensely analytical. He’s driven to understand how the inciden...
Aug 08, 2014•1 hr 2 min
Most of the authors I’ve interviewed for this show have addressed episodes in the past, campaigns of mass violence that occurred long ago, often well-before the author was born. Today’s show is different. In his book Genocide by Attrition: The Nuba Mountains of Sudan (Transaction Publishers, 2012), Samuel Totten addresses the violence against the people of the Nuba Mountains of the Sudan. This violence was part of a broader civil war and unrest in the Sudan in the 1980s and 90s. Totten makes a c...
Jul 18, 2014•1 hr 25 min
My marginal comment, recorded at the end of the chapter on the Belzec trial in Michael Bryant ‘s fine new book Eyewitness to Genocide: The Operation Reinhard Death Camp Trials, 1955-1966 (University of Tennessee Press, 2014), is simple: “!!!!” Text speak, to be sure, but it conveys the surprise I felt. One can ask many questions about the trials of the German guards and administrators of Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka. Why did it take so long to put them on trial? How did the German public and go...
Jul 15, 2014•1 hr 17 min
It seems quite reasonable to wonder if there’s anything more to learn about the Holocaust. Scholars from a variety of disciplines have been researching and writing about the subject for decades. A simple search for “Holocaust” on Amazon turns up a stunning 27,642 results. How can there still be uncovered terrain? Wendy Lower shows it is in fact possible to say new things about the Holocaust (to be fair, she’s following a handful of other scholars who have focused on gender and the Holocaust). He...
Jul 07, 2014•59 min
What do you say to someone who suggests that genocide is not just destructive, but constructive? This is the basic theme of Benjamin Lieberman ‘s excellent new book Remaking Identities: God, Nation and Race in World History (Rowman and Littlefield, 2013). The book surveys two thousand years of history to explain how people have used violence to reconstruct identities. This obviously involves death and destruction. But it also involves recasting the identities of survivors. It involves evangelism...
Jun 27, 2014•53 min
I imagine one of the greatest compliments an author of an historical monograph can receive is to hear that his or her book changed the way a subject is taught. I will do just that after reading Mark Levene ‘s new two volume work The Crisis of Genocide (2 Vols. Devastation: The European Rimlands, 1912-1938; Annihilation and The European Rimlands, 1938-1953) (Oxford University Press, 2014). These books, a continuation of Mark’s earlier volumes titled Genocide in the Age of the Nation State, offer ...
Jun 03, 2014•1 hr 14 min
This spring, I taught a class loosely called “The Holocaust through Primary Sources” to a small group of selected students. I started one class by asking them the deceptively simple question “When did the Holocaust end?” The first consensus answer was “1945.” After some discussion, the students changed their answer. The new consensus was simple. It hasn’t yet. This came to mind when reading Susan Thomson ‘s powerful new book Whispering Truth to Power: Everyday Resistance to Reconciliation in Pos...
May 24, 2014•57 min
This book tells a remarkable and–to me at least–little known but very important story. In Nazis, Islamists, and the Making of the Modern Middle East (Yale UP, 2014), Barry Rubin and Wolfgang G. Schwanitz trace the many connections between Germany–Imperial and Nazi–and the Arab world. Their particular focus is on a fellow named Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem between from 1921 to 1948. Both Al-Husseini and, a bit later, Hitler inherited a project hatched by the German officials in ...
May 11, 2014•1 hr 1 min
For many years now, historians have wondered whether Hitler had any sort of consistent ideology. His writings are rambling and confusing. His speeches are full of plain lies. His “table talk” reflects a wandering, impulsive mind distinguished by a remarkable disconnection from reality. There are obvious themes: strident German nationalism, radical racialism, vicious anti-semitism, and militarism. Do these themes add up to an internally consistent “worldview”? Richard Weikart argues that they do....
May 03, 2014•55 min
It’s hard to overestimate the role of Raphael Lemkin in calling the world’s attention to the crime of genocide. But for decades his name languished, as scholars and the broader public devoted their time and attention to other people and other things. In the past few years, this has changed. We now have a greater understanding of Lemkin’s role in pushing the UN to write and pass the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide. Moreover, researchers have a newfound appreciation for the...
May 01, 2014•38 min
It’s hard to overestimate the role of Raphael Lemkin in calling the world’s attention to the crime of genocide. But for decades his name languished, as scholars and the broader public devoted their time and attention to other people and other things. In the past few years, this has changed. We now have a greater understanding of Lemkin’s role in pushing the UN to write and pass the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide. Moreover, researchers have a newfound appreciation for the...
Apr 12, 2014•1 hr 1 min
I have a colleague at Newman who takes students to Guatemala every summer. Since I arrived she’s encouraged me to join her. I would stay with the order of sisters who sponsor our university. I’d learn at least a few words of rudimentary Spanish. And, she says, if I’m really interested in genocide, I must visit this complicated, conflicted country. I’ve always declined (granted, I’m usually taking students to Europe, so I have a good excuse). However, after reading Virginia Garrard-Burnett’ s exc...
Mar 17, 2014•42 min
Thomas Mann referred to Ludwig Klages (1872-1956) as a “criminal philosopher,” a “Pan-Germanist,” “an irrationalist,” a “Tarzan philosopher,” “a cultural pessimist… the voice of the world’s downfall.” Yet, Walter Benjamin urged his friend Gershom Scholem to read Klage’s latest book in 1930, at a time when Klages was increasingly bending his anti-Semitic philosophy of life (Lebensphilosophie) in a political direction. It was, Benjamin wrote, “without a doubt, a great philosophical work, regardles...
Feb 14, 2014•1 hr 12 min
Fifty years of Holocaust screenplays and films -largely unknown, killed by censors, and buried in dusty archives – come to life in Olga Gershenson ‘s The Phantom Holocaust: Soviet Cinema and Jewish Catastrophe (Rutgers University Press, 2013). As she ventures across three continents to uncover the stories behind these films, we follow her adventures, eager to learn what happened, why, when – and what comes next. This page-turning exploration begins with the first-ever films made about the Nazi t...
Feb 05, 2014•1 hr 13 min
