Confronting the Communal Grave

A Reassessment of Social Relations During the Holocaust in Eastern Europe

Bibliographic Data

ID8958682
AuthorsJan Burzlaff (0000-0001-7633-4099, Harvard University Press, corresponding author)
Year2019
Volume63
Issue4
Pages1054-1077
Publication date2019-12-19
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueThe Historical Journal (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0018-246X • E-ISSN: 1469-5103
PublisherCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/s0018246x19000566
OpenAlexW2995420614
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited117

This historiographical review focuses on the complex interactions between Nazi Germany, local populations, and east European Jews during the Holocaust. Braving fierce historical revisionism in eastern Europe and the Baltic states, recent studies have shifted the spotlight from Germans to Poles, Ukrainians, Russians, Lithuanians, and other ethnicities. As a result, the analytic categories with which most historians still work – notably ‘perpetrator/victim/bystander’ and ‘collaboration/resistance’ – have outlived their usefulness. A more complex picture of the Nazi-occupied territories in eastern Europe has emerged and now awaits new theoretical frameworks. This article argues that past paradigms blinded scholars to a range of groups lost in the cracks and to behaviours remaining outside the political sphere. Through four criteria that shed light on the social history of the Holocaust in eastern Europe, it draws connections between central and east European, German, Jewish, and Soviet histories, in order to engage with other fields and disciplines that examine modern mass violence and genocide. As Holocaust studies stands at a crossroads, only a transnational history including all ethnicities and deeper continuities, both temporal and geographical, will enhance our knowledge of how social relations shaped the very evolution of the Holocaust

Archaeology · Ethnic group · Genocide · German · Historiography · Judaism · Nazism · Political science · Politics · Sociology · The Holocaust · Anthropology · Eastern European Communism and Reforms · European history and politics · Gender Studies · Historical Geopolitical and Social Dynamics · History · Law