Gavriel D Rosenfeld
Biographic Data
| ID | 1190892 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Gavriel D Rosenfeld |
| GIVEN NAMES | Gavriel D |
| FAMILY NAME | Rosenfeld |
| SIGNATURE | ROSENFELD G D |
| AFFILIATIONS | Fairfield University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9469-5373 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 35 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 55 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 33 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1994 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Fascism in America: Past and Present
Has fascism arrived in America? In this pioneering book, Gavriel D. Rosenfeld and Janet Ward have gathered experts to survey the history of fascism in the United States. Although the US established a staunch anti-fascist reputation by defeating the Axis powers in World War II, the unsettling truth is that fascist ideas have long been present within American society. Since the election of Donald Trump as President in 2016, scholars have debated wh…
What's in a Name? Past Possibilities and the Challenges of Historicizing Counterfactual History
As wondering "what if?" about the past has become increasingly prominent in Western life, scholars have sought to historicize the phenomenon. The latest attempt to do so is Quentin Deluermoz and Pierre Singaravélou's A Past of Possibilities: A History of What Could Have Been. A stimulating, if somewhat meandering, book of essayistic reflections on historical speculation, A Past of Possibilities highlights the challenges of, and continuing opportu…
The rise of illiberal memory
The essay seeks to explain how and why rightwing populists in Europe, North America, and beyond have developed an “illiberal” politics of memory in opposition to the global liberal memory culture of the past generation. After explaining the rise of “illiberal memory” as a byproduct of the rise of illiberal democracy since 2008, the essay advances a comprehensive typology of the movement’s overall objectives and tactics based on numerous empirical…
The Fourth Reich: The Specter of Nazism from World War II to the Present
Ever since the collapse of the Third Reich, anxieties have persisted about Nazism's revival in the form of a Fourth Reich. Gavriel D. Rosenfeld reveals, for the first time, these postwar nightmares of a future that never happened and explains what they tell us about Western political, intellectual, and cultural life. He shows how postwar German history might have been very different without the fear of the Fourth Reich as a mobilizing idea to com…
An American Führer? Nazi Analogies and the Struggle to Explain Donald Trump
Ever since Donald Trump announced his candidacy for the US presidency in June 2015, journalists, scholars, and other commentators in the United States have attempted to explain his political success with the aid of historical analogies. In so doing, they have sparked a wider debate about whether the Nazi past helps to make sense of the US present. One group in the debate has contended that Trump's ascent bears a worrisome resemblance to interwar …
Who Was “Hitler” Before Hitler? Historical Analogies and the Struggle to Understand Nazism, 1930–1945
Since the turn of the millennium, major political figures around the world have been routinely compared to Adolf Hitler. These comparisons have increasingly been investigated by scholars, who have sought to explain their origins and assess their legitimacy. This article sheds light on this ongoing debate by examining an earlier, but strikingly similar, discussion that transpired during the Nazi era itself. Whereas commentators today argue about w…
The Holocaust: History and Memory
As the field of Holocaust studies has expanded, scholars have recognized the need to integrate the study of Holocaust history with Holocaust memory. For this reason, a short introductory study covering both topics would seem to be a desideratum, especially for pedagogical purposes. Jeremy Black’s new study is to be commended for attempting to fill this gap. Yet, while it displays certain strengths, it paradoxically underscores the difficulty of s…
Despina Stratigakos. Hitler at Home
The historical literature on Adolf Hitler continues to fall into one of two categories: grand syntheses and granular case studies. The former has been well represented by Ian Kershaw’s recent multivolume study Hitler, 1936–45: Nemesis (2000), while the latter has found expression in works such as Claudia Schmölders’s Hitler’s Face: The Biography of an Image (2006), Timothy Ryback’s Hitler’s Private Library: The Books That Shaped His Life (2008), …
What Ifs of Jewish History: From Abraham to Zionism
What if the Exodus had never happened? What if the Jews of Spain had not been expelled in 1492? What if Eastern European Jews had never been confined to the Russian Pale of Settlement? What if Adolf Hitler had been assassinated in 1939? What if a Jewish state had been established in Uganda instead of Palestine? Gavriel D. Rosenfeld's pioneering anthology examines how these and other counterfactual questions would have affected the course of Jewis…
Other Pasts, Different Presents, Alternative Futures
Jeremy Black’s new volume is a welcome addition to the burgeoning literature on counterfactual history. Joining recent studies such as Richard Ned Lebow’s Archduke Franz Ferdinand Lives! A World Wi...
"The Ways We Wonder "What If
In this essay, I seek to refine our understanding of historical counterfactuals by classifying them into a new typology. After providing a systematic definition of counterfactuals, I divide them up into five different categories: causal, emotive, temporal, spatial, and manneristic. Within each of these categories, I identify eighteen different types of counterfactuals, which I classify with descriptive names and illustrate with specific examples …
Whither "What If" History
Richard Evans's new book, Altered Pasts, offers a perceptive but flawed critique of the field of counterfactual history. The author provides a useful historical survey of the field's recent rise to prominence and intelligently analyzes its respective strengths and weaknesses. His overall assessment of the field is quite skeptical, however. Evans cites many reasons for his skepticism, but his overall critique can be summarized in three words: plau…
"A Looming Crash or a Soft Landing? Forecasting the Future of the Memory "Industry
Studying the Jew: Scholarly Antisemitism in Nazi Germany
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
A Flawed Prophecy? Zakhor, the Memory Boom, and the Holocaust
A Flawed Prophecy?Zakhor, the Memory Boom, and the Holocaust Gavriel D. Rosenfeld, Associate Professor of History When it first appeared in 1982, Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi's Zakhor seemed an anxious book—anxious about the state of Jewish collective memory, about the alleged role of professional historians in weakening it, and about the future of Jewish historical consciousness overall. Twenty-five years later, it is clear that many of the anxieties …
Visions of Victory: The Hopes of Eight World War II Leaders
In this brief but stimulating volume, Gerhard L. Weinberg straddles the genres of history and alternate history in surveying how the war aims of the major leaders of the Second World War did (and did not) shape the post-war world. Weinberg's selection of leaders includes all the major figures one would expect to encounter: Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Tojo Hideki, Chiang Kai-shek, Joseph Stalin, Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle, and Frankl…
Der Brand: Deutschland im Bombenkrieg, 1940-1945
Military histories tend to discuss the allied air war against the German Reich within the context of the origins and development of World War II as a whole, stressing its character as a contest between allied bombers and German air defenses, delineating different phases and targets, and debating the contribution that the strategic air campaign may or may not have made to overall allied victory.[1] Der Brand
A Mastered Past? Prussia in Postwar German Memory
This article compares the recent ‘Prussia Year 2001’ events marking the 300th anniversary of the founding of the Prussian state with the famous ‘Prussia Wave’ of the late 1970s and early 1980s in order to evaluate the evolving status of Prussia in postwar German memory. It asserts that Germans have largely abandoned their formerly polarized views of Prussia and have increasingly arrived at a more balanced view of its historical legacy. In develop…
The Historian as Judge
T H E J E W I S H QUA R T E R LY RE V I E W, Vol. 94, No. 2 (Spring 2004) 376-385 The Historian as Judge G AV R I E L D. RO S E N F E L D IN THE YEAR 1824, the patriarch of the modern Western historical profession , Leopold von Ranke, became embroiled in a famous debate with another historian, Heinrich Leo, over a profound matter of historical methodology. Ranke had just published his first book, the Histories of the Romanic and Germanic Peoples …
Facing the Nazi past: United Germany and the Legacy of the Third Reich
Facing the Nazi Past examines how the communist East viewed the events of these years very differently from West Germany during the Cold War. Following the unification of Germany, these contrasting memories of the Third Reich have contributed to a new perspective on this period of German history. Facing the Nazi Past explores the developments and debates that were symptomatic of this shift towards a more open confrontation with the past, such as:…
Remembering the Holocaust in Germany, 1945–2000: German Strategies and Jewish Responses
Munich and Memory: Architecture, Monuments, and the Legacy of the Third Reich
Munich, notorious in recent history as the capital of the Nazi movement, is the site of Gavriel Rosenfeld's stimulating inquiry into the German collective memory of the Third Reich. Rosenfeld shows, with the aid of a wealth of photographs, how the city's urban form developed after 1945 in direct reflection of its inhabitants' evolving memory of the Second World War and the Nazi dictatorship. In the second half of the twentieth century, the German…
Geschichtsvergessenheit, Geschichtsversessenheit: Vom Umgang mit deutschen Vergangenheiten nach 1945
Why Do We Ask "What If?" Reflections on the Function of Alternate History
The new prominence of alternate history in Western popular culture has increasingly prompted scholars to historicize it as a broader phenomenon. What has largely escaped notice until now, however, has been the question of the underlying function of alternate history as a genre of speculative narrative representation. In this essay, I argue that writers and scholars have long produced "allohistorical narratives" out of fundamentally presentist mot…
At Memory's Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture
James Young explores Germany's fraught efforts to memorialize the Holocaust, and also asks how late 20th century artists can remember an event they never knew directly but which is shaped through images in films, photographs and museums
The rise of illiberal memory
The essay seeks to explain how and why rightwing populists in Europe, North America, and beyond have developed an “illiberal” politics of memory in opposition to the global liberal memory culture of the past generation. After explaining the rise of “illiberal memory” as a byproduct of the rise of illiberal democracy since 2008, the essay advances a comprehensive typology of the movement’s overall objectives and tactics based on numerous empirical…
"A Looming Crash or a Soft Landing? Forecasting the Future of the Memory "Industry
Why Do We Ask "What If?" Reflections on the Function of Alternate History
The new prominence of alternate history in Western popular culture has increasingly prompted scholars to historicize it as a broader phenomenon. What has largely escaped notice until now, however, has been the question of the underlying function of alternate history as a genre of speculative narrative representation. In this essay, I argue that writers and scholars have long produced "allohistorical narratives" out of fundamentally presentist mot…
"The Ways We Wonder "What If
In this essay, I seek to refine our understanding of historical counterfactuals by classifying them into a new typology. After providing a systematic definition of counterfactuals, I divide them up into five different categories: causal, emotive, temporal, spatial, and manneristic. Within each of these categories, I identify eighteen different types of counterfactuals, which I classify with descriptive names and illustrate with specific examples …
Whither "What If" History
Richard Evans's new book, Altered Pasts, offers a perceptive but flawed critique of the field of counterfactual history. The author provides a useful historical survey of the field's recent rise to prominence and intelligently analyzes its respective strengths and weaknesses. His overall assessment of the field is quite skeptical, however. Evans cites many reasons for his skepticism, but his overall critique can be summarized in three words: plau…
An American Führer? Nazi Analogies and the Struggle to Explain Donald Trump
Ever since Donald Trump announced his candidacy for the US presidency in June 2015, journalists, scholars, and other commentators in the United States have attempted to explain his political success with the aid of historical analogies. In so doing, they have sparked a wider debate about whether the Nazi past helps to make sense of the US present. One group in the debate has contended that Trump's ascent bears a worrisome resemblance to interwar …
Other Pasts, Different Presents, Alternative Futures
Jeremy Black’s new volume is a welcome addition to the burgeoning literature on counterfactual history. Joining recent studies such as Richard Ned Lebow’s Archduke Franz Ferdinand Lives! A World Wi...
The Reception of William L. Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich in the United States and West Germany, 1960-62
In the vast historiographical literature on the nazi period, few works have achieved as enduring a reputation or attained as unique a commercial success as William L. Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. First published in October 1960, Shirer's epic history of the nazi dictatorship has, over the years, acquired a status unparalleled by any prior or subsequent historical work on the subject. In the thirty years since the book's initial …
Visions of Victory: The Hopes of Eight World War II Leaders
In this brief but stimulating volume, Gerhard L. Weinberg straddles the genres of history and alternate history in surveying how the war aims of the major leaders of the Second World War did (and did not) shape the post-war world. Weinberg's selection of leaders includes all the major figures one would expect to encounter: Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Tojo Hideki, Chiang Kai-shek, Joseph Stalin, Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle, and Frankl…
A Mastered Past? Prussia in Postwar German Memory
This article compares the recent ‘Prussia Year 2001’ events marking the 300th anniversary of the founding of the Prussian state with the famous ‘Prussia Wave’ of the late 1970s and early 1980s in order to evaluate the evolving status of Prussia in postwar German memory. It asserts that Germans have largely abandoned their formerly polarized views of Prussia and have increasingly arrived at a more balanced view of its historical legacy. In develop…
Monuments and the Politics of Memory: Commemorating Kurt Eisner and the Bavarian Revolutions of 1918–1919 in Postwar Munich
Given the turbulent nature of recent German history, studies of postwar German memory understandably have focused upon the issue of Vergangenheitsbewältigung —the difficult process of “coming to terms” with the historical experience of the Third Reich and the Second World War. This topic's magnitude has rightly inspired considerable scholarly attention but, at the same time, it has also had the unintended effect of overshadowing other German stru…
A Flawed Prophecy? Zakhor, the Memory Boom, and the Holocaust
A Flawed Prophecy?Zakhor, the Memory Boom, and the Holocaust Gavriel D. Rosenfeld, Associate Professor of History When it first appeared in 1982, Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi's Zakhor seemed an anxious book—anxious about the state of Jewish collective memory, about the alleged role of professional historians in weakening it, and about the future of Jewish historical consciousness overall. Twenty-five years later, it is clear that many of the anxieties …
The Controversy That Isn't: The Debate Over Daniel J. Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners in Comparative Perspective
This article attempts to explain the heated controversy sparked by Daniel Goldhagen's bestselling book Hitler's Willing Executioners , by comparing it with its most obvious precedent: the international furor in 1960–62 over William Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich . Through such a comparison, the Goldhagen controversy emerges as a relatively shallow event, largely driven by the book's own weaknesses and by media hype, that provides l…
The Reception of William L. Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich in the United States and West Germany, 1960-62
In the vast historiographical literature on the nazi period, few works have achieved as enduring a reputation or attained as unique a commercial success as William L. Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. First published in October 1960, Shirer's epic history of the nazi dictatorship has, over the years, acquired a status unparalleled by any prior or subsequent historical work on the subject. In the thirty years since the book's initial …
The Architects' Debate: Architectural Discourse and the Memory of Nazism in the Federal Republic of Germany, 1977-1997
The ten-year anniversary of the Historians' Debate provides an opportu nity not only for revisiting the most famous controversy over the Nazi past in recent years but for examining another important, if less well known, struggle over memory from the same period. Nearly a decade before German historians became embroiled in the Historikerstreit, German architects and architectural critics were engaged in a less publicized but equally heated controv…
Europe
Monuments and the Politics of Memory: Commemorating Kurt Eisner and the Bavarian Revolutions of 1918–1919 in Postwar Munich
Given the turbulent nature of recent German history, studies of postwar German memory understandably have focused upon the issue of Vergangenheitsbewältigung —the difficult process of “coming to terms” with the historical experience of the Third Reich and the Second World War. This topic's magnitude has rightly inspired considerable scholarly attention but, at the same time, it has also had the unintended effect of overshadowing other German stru…
Where Ghosts Walked: Munich's Road to the Third Reich
Jews in Germany after the Holocaust: Memory, Identity, and Jewish-German Relations
The Controversy That Isn't: The Debate Over Daniel J. Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners in Comparative Perspective
This article attempts to explain the heated controversy sparked by Daniel Goldhagen's bestselling book Hitler's Willing Executioners , by comparing it with its most obvious precedent: the international furor in 1960–62 over William Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich . Through such a comparison, the Goldhagen controversy emerges as a relatively shallow event, largely driven by the book's own weaknesses and by media hype, that provides l…
Munich and Memory: Architecture, Monuments, and the Legacy of the Third Reich
Munich, notorious in recent history as the capital of the Nazi movement, is the site of Gavriel Rosenfeld's stimulating inquiry into the German collective memory of the Third Reich. Rosenfeld shows, with the aid of a wealth of photographs, how the city's urban form developed after 1945 in direct reflection of its inhabitants' evolving memory of the Second World War and the Nazi dictatorship. In the second half of the twentieth century, the German…
Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory through the Camera's Eye
There is no more gruesome and tragic record in the history of the 20th century than the photographs taken at the liberation of the concentration camps in Germany after World War II. These images are seared into our collective memory as brutal evidence of the of war and the evil of which humanity is capable. But the horrific content of these images has somewhat obscured their status as historical documents. This text reveals the unique significanc…
German National Identity after the Holocaust
Preface. 1. National Identity and German History. 2. Landscapes of Memory. 3. Overcoming the Past in Practice? Trials and Tribulations. 4. Awkward Anniversaries and Contested Commemorations. 5. The Past which Refuses to Become History. 6. Collective Memory? Patterns of Historical Consciousness. 7. Citizenship and Fatherland. 8. Friends, Foes and Volk. 9. The Nation as Legacy and Destiny. Index
At Memory's Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture
James Young explores Germany's fraught efforts to memorialize the Holocaust, and also asks how late 20th century artists can remember an event they never knew directly but which is shaped through images in films, photographs and museums
Munich and Memory: Architecture, Monuments, and the Legacy of the Third Reich
Munich, notorious in recent history as the capital of the Nazi movement, is the site of Gavriel Rosenfeld's stimulating inquiry into the German collective memory of the Third Reich. Rosenfeld shows, with the aid of a wealth of photographs, how the city's urban form developed after 1945 in direct reflection of its inhabitants' evolving memory of the Second World War and the Nazi dictatorship. In the second half of the twentieth century, the German…
Geschichtsvergessenheit, Geschichtsversessenheit: Vom Umgang mit deutschen Vergangenheiten nach 1945
Why Do We Ask "What If?" Reflections on the Function of Alternate History
The new prominence of alternate history in Western popular culture has increasingly prompted scholars to historicize it as a broader phenomenon. What has largely escaped notice until now, however, has been the question of the underlying function of alternate history as a genre of speculative narrative representation. In this essay, I argue that writers and scholars have long produced "allohistorical narratives" out of fundamentally presentist mot…
Facing the Nazi past: United Germany and the Legacy of the Third Reich
Facing the Nazi Past examines how the communist East viewed the events of these years very differently from West Germany during the Cold War. Following the unification of Germany, these contrasting memories of the Third Reich have contributed to a new perspective on this period of German history. Facing the Nazi Past explores the developments and debates that were symptomatic of this shift towards a more open confrontation with the past, such as:…
Remembering the Holocaust in Germany, 1945–2000: German Strategies and Jewish Responses
Der Brand: Deutschland im Bombenkrieg, 1940-1945
Military histories tend to discuss the allied air war against the German Reich within the context of the origins and development of World War II as a whole, stressing its character as a contest between allied bombers and German air defenses, delineating different phases and targets, and debating the contribution that the strategic air campaign may or may not have made to overall allied victory.[1] Der Brand
A Mastered Past? Prussia in Postwar German Memory
This article compares the recent ‘Prussia Year 2001’ events marking the 300th anniversary of the founding of the Prussian state with the famous ‘Prussia Wave’ of the late 1970s and early 1980s in order to evaluate the evolving status of Prussia in postwar German memory. It asserts that Germans have largely abandoned their formerly polarized views of Prussia and have increasingly arrived at a more balanced view of its historical legacy. In develop…
The Historian as Judge
T H E J E W I S H QUA R T E R LY RE V I E W, Vol. 94, No. 2 (Spring 2004) 376-385 The Historian as Judge G AV R I E L D. RO S E N F E L D IN THE YEAR 1824, the patriarch of the modern Western historical profession , Leopold von Ranke, became embroiled in a famous debate with another historian, Heinrich Leo, over a profound matter of historical methodology. Ranke had just published his first book, the Histories of the Romanic and Germanic Peoples …
Visions of Victory: The Hopes of Eight World War II Leaders
In this brief but stimulating volume, Gerhard L. Weinberg straddles the genres of history and alternate history in surveying how the war aims of the major leaders of the Second World War did (and did not) shape the post-war world. Weinberg's selection of leaders includes all the major figures one would expect to encounter: Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Tojo Hideki, Chiang Kai-shek, Joseph Stalin, Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle, and Frankl…
Studying the Jew: Scholarly Antisemitism in Nazi Germany
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
A Flawed Prophecy? Zakhor, the Memory Boom, and the Holocaust
A Flawed Prophecy?Zakhor, the Memory Boom, and the Holocaust Gavriel D. Rosenfeld, Associate Professor of History When it first appeared in 1982, Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi's Zakhor seemed an anxious book—anxious about the state of Jewish collective memory, about the alleged role of professional historians in weakening it, and about the future of Jewish historical consciousness overall. Twenty-five years later, it is clear that many of the anxieties …
"A Looming Crash or a Soft Landing? Forecasting the Future of the Memory "Industry
Whither "What If" History
Richard Evans's new book, Altered Pasts, offers a perceptive but flawed critique of the field of counterfactual history. The author provides a useful historical survey of the field's recent rise to prominence and intelligently analyzes its respective strengths and weaknesses. His overall assessment of the field is quite skeptical, however. Evans cites many reasons for his skepticism, but his overall critique can be summarized in three words: plau…
What Ifs of Jewish History: From Abraham to Zionism
What if the Exodus had never happened? What if the Jews of Spain had not been expelled in 1492? What if Eastern European Jews had never been confined to the Russian Pale of Settlement? What if Adolf Hitler had been assassinated in 1939? What if a Jewish state had been established in Uganda instead of Palestine? Gavriel D. Rosenfeld's pioneering anthology examines how these and other counterfactual questions would have affected the course of Jewis…
History (25 works) · Political science (25 works) · Law (19 works) · History (17 works) · Art (15 works) · German (15 works) · Italian Fascism and Post-war Society (15 works) · Philosophy (15 works) · Politics (15 works) · Archaeology (13 works)