Foundational Pasts
：The Holocaust as Historical Understanding
Publication subTitle ：The Holocaust as Historical Understanding
Author： Alon Confino
Publisher： Cambridge University Press
Publication year： 2011
E-ISBN: 9781139153416
P-ISBN(Paperback): 9780521516655
Subject： K152 World War II (1939 - 1945)
Keyword： 欧洲史
Language： ENG
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Foundational Pasts
Description
Alon Confino seeks to rethink dominant interpretations of the Holocaust by examining it as a problem in cultural history. As the main research interests of Holocaust scholars are frequently covered terrain – the anti-Semitic ideological campaign, the machinery of killing, the brutal massacres during the war – Confino's research goes in a new direction. He analyzes the culture and sensibilities that made it possible for the Nazis and other Germans to imagine the making of a world without Jews. Confino seeks these insights from the ways historians interpreted another short, violent and foundational event in modern European history – the French Revolution. The comparison of the ways we understand the Holocaust with scholars' interpretations of the French Revolution allows Confino to question some of the basic assumptions of present-day historians concerning historical narration, explanation and understanding.
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