Catherine Epstein
Biographic Data
| ID | 3759950 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Catherine Epstein |
| GIVEN NAMES | Catherine |
| FAMILY NAME | Epstein |
| SIGNATURE | EPSTEIN C |
| AFFILIATIONS | Amherst College |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 22 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 14 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 22 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1993 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
The People’s Dictatorship
Andrew Kornbluth, The August Trials
M ario K eßler . Westemigranten
In Westemigranten: Deutsche Kommunisten zwischen USA-Exil und DDR, Mario Keßler tells the story of some forty-nine German leftists who emigrated to the United States during the Nazi years and returned to communist East Germany after 1945. The book’s subtitle translates to “German Communists between USA-Exile and the GDR,” yet formal criteria for membership in the group is unclear. Some belonged to the Communist Party of Germany (Kommunistische Pa…
Aktion 1005”—Spurenbeseitigung von NS-Massenverbrechen 1942–1945
In this massive two-volume work on “Aktion 1005,” Andrej Angrick writes a sweeping history of the Holocaust that provides a new lens on Nazi atrocities. The Nazis, it turns out, found it much easier to murder Jews (and other victims) than to remove their remains. By shifting the emphasis from killing to the removal of corpses, Angrick highlights the technical challenges facing the Nazi murderers; the growing urgency to remove all traces of genoci…
A. James McAdams. Vanguard of the Revolution
In Vanguard of the Revolution: The Global Idea of the Communist Party, A. James McAdams presents a narrative, a methodology, an argument, and a theme about the global history of Communist parties and regimes. Over five hundred pages, he gives a sweeping account of the history of Communism—from the thought of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in the 1840s, to the actions of Fidel Castro and Xi Jinping in the 2010s. He deploys a methodology—a comparat…
Munich 1919
Dachau and the SS
In this richly textured history of the first Nazi concentration camp, Christopher Dillon takes issue with what he terms the ‘universalist perpetrator literature’ (p. 40). According to Dillon, this literature argues that there is a ‘universal human readiness to inflict suffering’ (p. 3). In addition, it focuses too much on the institutional settings that facilitate perpetrator conduct; by neglecting the role of individuals, Dillon claims, it resul…
Peter Longerich. Goebbels
Seventy years after the fall of the Third Reich, biographical writing of leading Nazi leaders has its own history. Initially, top Nazis were portrayed as diabolical sadists set apart from the rest of humanity. After the publication of Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil in 1963, many historians adhered to the “banality of evil” thesis, which suggests that leading Nazis were ambitious, unthinking, and largely ap…
The Pursuit of the Nazi Mind
Journal Article The Pursuit of the Nazi Mind: Hitler, Hess and the Analysts, by Daniel Pick Get access The Pursuit of the Nazi Mind: Hitler, Hess and the Analysts, by Daniel Pick (Oxford: Oxford U.P., 2012, pp. 357. £10.99). Catherine Epstein Catherine Epstein Amherst College, Amherst, MA Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The English Historical Review, Volume 130, Issue 544, June 2015, Pages 788–789, https:/…
Che mno and the Holocaust
Patrick Montague has written the definitive work on the first Nazi death camp, Chełmno. In his quest to document fully the camp’s history, he has left no stone unturned. Chełmno was located in the Warthegau, an area of western Poland annexed to the Third Reich. It began operations on 7 December 1941, some six weeks before the Wannsee Conference. Altogether, some 152,000 individuals, mostly Jews, were gassed or otherwise murdered at the camp. The …
Ideologie und Herrschaftsrationalitat
In this ambitious book, Gerhard Wolf challenges received orthodoxy. He questions the ‘racial state’ paradigm and its application to Nazi Germany. In his view, proponents of the ‘racial state’ focus too much on the exclusionary practices of the regime. In his study of Nazi-occupied Poland, Wolf found inclusionary programmes, not least ‘the largest assimilation project in modern German history’ (p. 467). Wolf also hopes to overcome what he sees as …
Hitler's Hangman
On 27 May 1942, as his car slowed to make a hair-pin turn, Czech assassins attacked Reinhard Heydrich, acting Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia and head of the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA). An avid sportsman, Heydrich chose to take on his assassins and, in the process, incurred wounds that brought on a fatal infection (that penicillin, if it had been available, would have cured). Ironically, Heydrich had been obsessed with his own secur…
German Historians at the Back of the Pack
Some years ago, I realized that I was the first historian of Germany hired in a tenure-track position at Amherst College. I got my job in 2000. Steeped in German history, I was surprised that a premier liberal arts college chose to hire a historian of Germany only at the very end of the twentieth century. My generation of historians of Germany often think—and other historians of Europe share our perception—that German history is a strong (if not …
Mary FULBROOK. A Small Town near Auschwitz
In the late 1980s, Saul Friedländer began to call for an “integrated history” of the Holocaust. Holocaust history, he believed, should include German and Jewish views and voices. In her intriguing study of the Holocaust in Będzin, Mary Fulbrook has done just that. Będzin, a small town in Upper Silesia, is located roughly twenty-five miles from Auschwitz. Fulbrook chose to write about Będzin for a very personal reason. The wife of Udo Klausa (1910…
Years of Persecution, Years of Extermination
This is a book about a book: Saul Friedländer’s The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945. Friedländer rightly commands enormous respect among scholars of the Holocaust. This volume, then, might have sunk to the level of hagiography. Fortunately, this is not the case; there are only a few excessively laudatory pieces, and they are the least interesting essays in the volume. Instead, this collection shows how some of today’s…
Model Nazi
This book is the biography of Arthur Greiser, the man who initiated the Final Solution in Nazi-occupied Poland. Beginning with his early years prior to the First World War, it charts his rise to Nazi prominence in Danzi and his years as the Nazi territorial leader of the Warthegau, to his trial and execution in post-war Poland. Between 1939 and 1945, Greiser was in charge of the Warthegau — an area of western Poland annexed to Nazi Germany. In an…
Beyond Totalitarianism
Journal Article Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazism Compared Get access Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazism Compared. Edited by Michael Geyer and Sheila Fitzpatrick. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. 2009. xii + 536 pp. £17.99 (paperback). Catherine Epstein Catherine Epstein Amherst College Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar German History, Volume 28, Issue 4, December 2010…
Judenmord in Zentralpolen
What was the fate of Jews in Radom District, one of eventually five districts making up the General Government? Drawing on an impressive array of sources, Jacek Andrzej Młynarczyk has written a history of the Shoah in an area in which the Nazis ultimately murdered some 380,000 Jews. Młynarczyk argues that regional studies of the Holocaust have focused almost exclusively on the perpetrators and on their mechanisms of persecution and murder. He ins…
Eastern German Film, 1945-2000
Joshua Feinstein, The Triumph of the Ordinary: Depictions of Daily Life in the East German Cinema, 1949-1989 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2002)Leonie Naughton, Film Culture, Unification, and the "New" Germany (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002
East Germany and Its History since 1989
The Production of “Official Memory” in East Germany
In East Germany, official memory was reputedly embodied in Old Communists, those men and women who had joined the German Communist Party (KPD) before Hitler's rise to power in 1933. After 1945, the Socialist Unity Party (SED), East Germany's ruling party, exploited the tragic experiences of Old Communists during the Third Reich—exile, resistance, and concentration–camp incarceration—to foster a triumphant official memory of heroic, Communist-led …
A Past Renewed
A Past Renewed portrays the generation of German-speaking refugee historians who settled in the United States after fleeing Hitler's Europe. Bio-bibliographical entries on eighty-eight refugee historians document their scholarly contributions, historical interests, and impact on the American historical profession after 1945. Besides material on noted historians of modern Europe such as Felix Gilbert, Hajo Holborn, and Hans Rosenberg, the catalogu…
German Historians at the Back of the Pack
Some years ago, I realized that I was the first historian of Germany hired in a tenure-track position at Amherst College. I got my job in 2000. Steeped in German history, I was surprised that a premier liberal arts college chose to hire a historian of Germany only at the very end of the twentieth century. My generation of historians of Germany often think—and other historians of Europe share our perception—that German history is a strong (if not …
East Germany and Its History since 1989
The Production of “Official Memory” in East Germany
In East Germany, official memory was reputedly embodied in Old Communists, those men and women who had joined the German Communist Party (KPD) before Hitler's rise to power in 1933. After 1945, the Socialist Unity Party (SED), East Germany's ruling party, exploited the tragic experiences of Old Communists during the Third Reich—exile, resistance, and concentration–camp incarceration—to foster a triumphant official memory of heroic, Communist-led …
A Past Renewed
A Past Renewed portrays the generation of German-speaking refugee historians who settled in the United States after fleeing Hitler's Europe. Bio-bibliographical entries on eighty-eight refugee historians document their scholarly contributions, historical interests, and impact on the American historical profession after 1945. Besides material on noted historians of modern Europe such as Felix Gilbert, Hajo Holborn, and Hans Rosenberg, the catalogu…
The Production of “Official Memory” in East Germany
In East Germany, official memory was reputedly embodied in Old Communists, those men and women who had joined the German Communist Party (KPD) before Hitler's rise to power in 1933. After 1945, the Socialist Unity Party (SED), East Germany's ruling party, exploited the tragic experiences of Old Communists during the Third Reich—exile, resistance, and concentration–camp incarceration—to foster a triumphant official memory of heroic, Communist-led …
Eastern German Film, 1945-2000
Joshua Feinstein, The Triumph of the Ordinary: Depictions of Daily Life in the East German Cinema, 1949-1989 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2002)Leonie Naughton, Film Culture, Unification, and the "New" Germany (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002
East Germany and Its History since 1989
Judenmord in Zentralpolen
What was the fate of Jews in Radom District, one of eventually five districts making up the General Government? Drawing on an impressive array of sources, Jacek Andrzej Młynarczyk has written a history of the Shoah in an area in which the Nazis ultimately murdered some 380,000 Jews. Młynarczyk argues that regional studies of the Holocaust have focused almost exclusively on the perpetrators and on their mechanisms of persecution and murder. He ins…
Model Nazi
This book is the biography of Arthur Greiser, the man who initiated the Final Solution in Nazi-occupied Poland. Beginning with his early years prior to the First World War, it charts his rise to Nazi prominence in Danzi and his years as the Nazi territorial leader of the Warthegau, to his trial and execution in post-war Poland. Between 1939 and 1945, Greiser was in charge of the Warthegau — an area of western Poland annexed to Nazi Germany. In an…
Beyond Totalitarianism
Journal Article Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazism Compared Get access Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazism Compared. Edited by Michael Geyer and Sheila Fitzpatrick. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. 2009. xii + 536 pp. £17.99 (paperback). Catherine Epstein Catherine Epstein Amherst College Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar German History, Volume 28, Issue 4, December 2010…
Years of Persecution, Years of Extermination
This is a book about a book: Saul Friedländer’s The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945. Friedländer rightly commands enormous respect among scholars of the Holocaust. This volume, then, might have sunk to the level of hagiography. Fortunately, this is not the case; there are only a few excessively laudatory pieces, and they are the least interesting essays in the volume. Instead, this collection shows how some of today’s…
Ideologie und Herrschaftsrationalitat
In this ambitious book, Gerhard Wolf challenges received orthodoxy. He questions the ‘racial state’ paradigm and its application to Nazi Germany. In his view, proponents of the ‘racial state’ focus too much on the exclusionary practices of the regime. In his study of Nazi-occupied Poland, Wolf found inclusionary programmes, not least ‘the largest assimilation project in modern German history’ (p. 467). Wolf also hopes to overcome what he sees as …
Hitler's Hangman
On 27 May 1942, as his car slowed to make a hair-pin turn, Czech assassins attacked Reinhard Heydrich, acting Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia and head of the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA). An avid sportsman, Heydrich chose to take on his assassins and, in the process, incurred wounds that brought on a fatal infection (that penicillin, if it had been available, would have cured). Ironically, Heydrich had been obsessed with his own secur…
German Historians at the Back of the Pack
Some years ago, I realized that I was the first historian of Germany hired in a tenure-track position at Amherst College. I got my job in 2000. Steeped in German history, I was surprised that a premier liberal arts college chose to hire a historian of Germany only at the very end of the twentieth century. My generation of historians of Germany often think—and other historians of Europe share our perception—that German history is a strong (if not …
Mary FULBROOK. A Small Town near Auschwitz
In the late 1980s, Saul Friedländer began to call for an “integrated history” of the Holocaust. Holocaust history, he believed, should include German and Jewish views and voices. In her intriguing study of the Holocaust in Będzin, Mary Fulbrook has done just that. Będzin, a small town in Upper Silesia, is located roughly twenty-five miles from Auschwitz. Fulbrook chose to write about Będzin for a very personal reason. The wife of Udo Klausa (1910…
Che mno and the Holocaust
Patrick Montague has written the definitive work on the first Nazi death camp, Chełmno. In his quest to document fully the camp’s history, he has left no stone unturned. Chełmno was located in the Warthegau, an area of western Poland annexed to the Third Reich. It began operations on 7 December 1941, some six weeks before the Wannsee Conference. Altogether, some 152,000 individuals, mostly Jews, were gassed or otherwise murdered at the camp. The …
The Pursuit of the Nazi Mind
Journal Article The Pursuit of the Nazi Mind: Hitler, Hess and the Analysts, by Daniel Pick Get access The Pursuit of the Nazi Mind: Hitler, Hess and the Analysts, by Daniel Pick (Oxford: Oxford U.P., 2012, pp. 357. £10.99). Catherine Epstein Catherine Epstein Amherst College, Amherst, MA Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The English Historical Review, Volume 130, Issue 544, June 2015, Pages 788–789, https:/…
Dachau and the SS
In this richly textured history of the first Nazi concentration camp, Christopher Dillon takes issue with what he terms the ‘universalist perpetrator literature’ (p. 40). According to Dillon, this literature argues that there is a ‘universal human readiness to inflict suffering’ (p. 3). In addition, it focuses too much on the institutional settings that facilitate perpetrator conduct; by neglecting the role of individuals, Dillon claims, it resul…
Peter Longerich. Goebbels
Seventy years after the fall of the Third Reich, biographical writing of leading Nazi leaders has its own history. Initially, top Nazis were portrayed as diabolical sadists set apart from the rest of humanity. After the publication of Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil in 1963, many historians adhered to the “banality of evil” thesis, which suggests that leading Nazis were ambitious, unthinking, and largely ap…
Munich 1919
A. James McAdams. Vanguard of the Revolution
In Vanguard of the Revolution: The Global Idea of the Communist Party, A. James McAdams presents a narrative, a methodology, an argument, and a theme about the global history of Communist parties and regimes. Over five hundred pages, he gives a sweeping account of the history of Communism—from the thought of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in the 1840s, to the actions of Fidel Castro and Xi Jinping in the 2010s. He deploys a methodology—a comparat…
Aktion 1005”—Spurenbeseitigung von NS-Massenverbrechen 1942–1945
In this massive two-volume work on “Aktion 1005,” Andrej Angrick writes a sweeping history of the Holocaust that provides a new lens on Nazi atrocities. The Nazis, it turns out, found it much easier to murder Jews (and other victims) than to remove their remains. By shifting the emphasis from killing to the removal of corpses, Angrick highlights the technical challenges facing the Nazi murderers; the growing urgency to remove all traces of genoci…
Andrew Kornbluth, The August Trials
M ario K eßler . Westemigranten
In Westemigranten: Deutsche Kommunisten zwischen USA-Exil und DDR, Mario Keßler tells the story of some forty-nine German leftists who emigrated to the United States during the Nazi years and returned to communist East Germany after 1945. The book’s subtitle translates to “German Communists between USA-Exile and the GDR,” yet formal criteria for membership in the group is unclear. Some belonged to the Communist Party of Germany (Kommunistische Pa…
The People’s Dictatorship
Political science (21 works) · History (18 works) · Law (16 works) · Nazism (15 works) · European history and politics (14 works) · Archaeology (13 works) · Politics (13 works) · German (12 works) · The Holocaust (9 works) · Economic history (8 works)