Foundational Pasts
The Holocaust as Historical Understanding
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 11477273 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Richard Steigmann‐Gall (Kent State University, corresponding author), R Steigmann-Gall |
| Year | 2014 |
| Volume | 32 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 157-158 |
| Publication date | 2014-03-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | German History (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0266-3554 • E-ISSN: 1477-089X |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1093/gerhis/ght089 |
| OpenAlex | W2045730127 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 5 |
Alon Confino’s Foundational Pasts is a deeply ambitious and very welcome historiographical intervention into the field of Holocaust studies. Taking stock of the philosophical trends and methodological currents—and also of the empirically detailed microstudies—that have shaped the current state of Holocaust studies, Confino seeks to lay out the forest that the current generation of scholars can easily miss for the trees. This book is thus meant to be less a comprehensive survey of recent scholarly developments, à la Dan Stone or Ian Kershaw, than an extended think-piece on the state of our understanding. Through an examination of the interplay of contingency and structure, he takes issue with many of the popular fashions that seem to dominate not just Holocaust scholarship at the moment, but also historical writing more broadly. In a field of study marked not only by a constant flood of new research, but also by a wealth of theorizing, Confino’s contribution is distinctive for the almost equal attention he gives to that other great benchmark event in the history of modern Europe, against which the Holocaust is often only implicitly compared: the French Revolution. He uses it as a useful foil for exploring method and theory in history more broadly—which is salutary in itself, not least for highlighting the dissociation of ideology from context that can plague both fields of study. But he also uses the French Revolution to assess its role as a metahistorical mirror image to Nazism—both among scholars today and for the Nazis themselves. This particular aspect of Confino’s work is particularly necessary and welcome, not only for the methodological insights that such a comparison provides, but for the content of his arguments which will come in the latter half of the book. By this point larger methodological and conceptual insights gleaned from comparisons between the French Revolution and the Holocaust give way to Confino’s engagement with scholarly arguments about perpetrator motivation.
Political science · Sociology · The Holocaust · European history and politics · German History and Society · History · Italian Fascism and Post-war Society · Law
| Unique citing works | 5 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,36 |
| Citation span | 2012 - 2022 (11) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |