New Microhistorical Approaches to an Integrated History of the Holocaust

✍ Scribed by Frédéric Bonnesoeur; Hannah Wilson; Christin Zühlke (editors)

• Publisher: De Gruyter Oldenbourg
• Year: 2023
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 388
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

In 1997, Saul Friedländer emphasized the need for an integrated history of the Holocaust. His suggestion to connect ‘the policies of the perpetrators, the attitudes of surrounding society, and the world of the victims’ provides the inspiration for this volume. Following in these footsteps, this innovative study approaches Holocaust history through a combination of macro analysis with micro studies. Featuring a range of contemporary research from emerging scholars in the field, this peer-reviewed volume provides detailed engagement with a variety of historical sources, such as documents, artifacts, photos, or text passages. The contributors investigate particular aspects of sound, materiality, space and social perceptions to provide a deeper understanding of the Holocaust, which have often been overlooked or generalised in previous historical research. Yet, as we approach an era of no first hand witnesses, this multidisciplinary, micro-historical approach remains a fundamental aspect of Holocaust research, and can provide a theoretical framework for future studies.

✦ Table of Contents

Table of Contents
1 Introduction
1 Introduction
2 Materiality
2.1 Exploring the Representation of the Jewish Ghetto Policeman’s Uniform in the Confessional Diary of Calel Perechodnik
2.2 Display vs Decay: Historical and Material Narratives of a Parokhet from Czestochowa
2.3 Fragmented Families and Material Memory: The Striped Trousers of Juda van der Velde and an Excavated Nametag from Sobibór Death Camp
3 Space
3.1 A Window with a View: Reading Clandestine Death March Photography as Counter-Cartographical Practice
3.2 “Their turn came the next day”: In-between Spaces of the Holocaust and its Photographical Representation
3.3 Emotions and Natural Environment in Bergen-Belsen: The Role of the Forest in the Diary of Margit Holländer
4 Sound
4.1 Recovered Music, Recovered Memory: Viktor Ullmann’s Sonata for Violin
4.2 Sonic Experiences in the Night: The Case of the Falling Bunk at Auschwitz-Birkenau
5 Gender
5.1 “And I Gave Them Skirts like the Ones We Used to Wear”: Roma Women’s Recollections of Helping Jews during the Holocaust in Transnistria
5.2 The Beauty of Ugliness: Naomi Judkowski’s Cugangi (New Prisoners), Sexual Violence and Aesthetic Capital in the Holocaust
5.3 Sexualized Violence in Auschwitz-Birkenau: The Perspectives of the Sonderkommando Prisoners
5.4 Henrietta Stein Klotz and Henry Morgenthau Jr.: A Secretary’s Influence on the Treasury Department’s Response to the Holocaust
5.5 The Scientific Exploitation of Marie Anna Schirmann: A Study of Intersectional Discrimination in Academia during the Holocaust
6 Social History
6.1 Reconsidering the Personal Archives of a Victim: The Case of Vollrath von Maltzan, a “Mischling” in German Diplomacy
6.2 Foreigner at Home: The Expulsion of the Kaufer Family from Hungary
6.3 Gathering Information as Resistance: Ordinary Jews and First News about the Chełmno Death Camp
6.4 “Essenausgabe”: A Poem of Life and Death
6.5 Craving News from Dear Ones: The Impact of Organisation Todt Forced Labour on the Survival Chances of the Families of the Jewish Workers from Antwerp
7 Acknowledgement
Short Bios
Index