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ABSTRACT
Written and revised in stages, from the “BC,” pre-COVID “Age of Trump” era to an uncertain current transitional moment in February 2021, the article considers questions about shifting approaches to research, teaching, and public engagement in Holocaust Studies and the history of National Socialism. It argues that, precisely in order to deepen and focus understanding of the Nazi legacy in the “Age of Trump,” especially among diverse politically attuned students, we can no longer think the Holocaust outside of a more comparative history of genocide, war, displacement, and extreme violence across time and place. The article suggests two specific arenas of inquiry that seem especially suitable for this ongoing rethinking and repositioning of Nazism and the Holocaust in comparative studies of trauma and resistance. First, a focus on expanding the chronological and geographical parameters to highlight the global dimensions of flight and rescue, especially in non-Western colonial or semi-colonial regions. Secondly, recent scholarship on gender—a “Holocaust #MeToo” moment—revealing still mostly untold stories about sexual violence and coercion as well as instrumental sexuality, desire, and even love during the Holocaust, opens up questions that can both integrate and differentiate histories of Nazism and the Holocaust in comparative studies and contemporary experience.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 For example, Gary Younge expertly brings the question of racism “home” to Europe but does not address racialized antisemitism. As any media survey reveals, these difficult conversations are happening throughout academia at the same time as schools and universities struggle with the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Gary Younge, “What Black America Means to Europe,” New York Review of Books, 6 June 2020, https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2020/06/06/what-black-america-means-to-europe.
2 See for example, Marisa Fox-Bevilacqua, “It’s Time for a Holocaust #MeToo Reckoning,” Forward, 5 February 2018.
4 See among an array of popularizing books, online posts and videos, and Twitter feeds by scholars: Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (New York: Tim Duggan Books, Penguin Random House, 2017) and soon, a graphic version with illustrations by Nora Krug, due October 2021; Jason Stanley, How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them (New York: Random House, 2018); and Ruth Ben-Ghiat (one of the few female historians of fascism to have established a strong mainstream media presence), Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present (New York: W.W. Norton, 2020). For more skeptical voices, see Christopher Browning, “The Suffocation of Democracy,” New York Review of Books, 25 October 2018, https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2018/10/25/suffocation-of-democracy/; and more recently Sam Moyn, “The Trouble with Comparisons,” New York Review of Books, 19 May 2020, https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2020/05/19/the-trouble-with-comparisons/.
5 “The Nazi Legacy in the Trump Era: Research, Pedagogy, and Public Engagement,” American Historical Association, 3 January 2020, New York City, https://aha.confex.com/aha/2020/webprogram/Session19284.html; see also Colleen Flaherty, “Past as Present,” Inside Higher Ed, 6 January 2020, https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/01/06/are-historians-increasingly-driven-weigh-contemporary-policy-debates.
6 For a perspective that situates the Holocaust as the central paradigm, see Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider, The Holocaust and Memory in a Global Age (Philadelphia: Temple University Press 2006) and Human Rights and Memory (State College, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010). For a different take, see Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory in the Age of Decolonization (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2009) and The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2020).
7 My comments below are drawn from a paper originally intended for publication in a (canceled) documentation of the April 2019 CUNY Conference on the future of Holocaust studies.
8 See, for example, Rebecca Erbelding, Rescue Board: The Untold Story of America’s Efforts to Save the Jews of Europe (New York: Doubleday, 2018), which documents the still relatively unknown significant, if agonizingly slow and ultimately only minimally successful, initiatives to rescue European Jews by American organizations (Jewish and not) as well as US government officials.
9 See Mark Edele, Sheila Fitzpatrick, and Atina Grossmann, (eds.), Shelter from the Holocaust: Rethinking Jewish Survival in the Soviet Union (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2017). See most recently the important study by Eliyana Adler, Survival on the Margins (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2020).
10 See also Atina Grossmann, “Remapping Survival: Jewish Refugees and Lost Memories of Displacement, Trauma, and Rescue in Soviet Central Asia, Iran, and India,” Jahrbuch des Dubnow Instituts/Dubnow Institute Yearbook, vol. 15 (2016): pp. 71–97.
11 See the forthcoming dissertations by Kimberly Cheng (NYU) on encounters between refugee Jews and local Chinese as well as other ethnic groups in Shanghai, and by Pragya Kaul (University of Michigan) on refugee European Jews in Calcutta. Scholars are now beginning to investigate the complex interactions between refugee European Jews and the colonial or semicolonial non-European spaces into which they fled for brief or longer periods of time, recognizing that, as Pragya Kaul has commented, “the lack of imperial contexts in understanding the Holocaust and international response to it despite the centrality of colonized nations and populations to the war” needs to be addressed. See her abstract for a paper on “Between Colonizer and Colonized: Nationalism, the War, and Refugee Identity in British India,” https://umich.academia.edu/PragyaKaul. Refugees’ stories are being uncovered in virtually every corner of the globe, including the British and French (Vichy-occupied) Caribbean and Africa where European Jews encountered different racial hierarchies and forms of colonial control as well as anticolonial movements. The November 2018 “Lessons and Legacies” conference in St. Louis featured a multiday seminar on destinations defined as “marginal sites” as well a panel on “Globalizing the Refugee: Transit Sanctuaries during Nazism and the Holocaust,” with papers on Tehran, Martinique, Libya, and Portugal.
12 See Mikhal Dekel, Tehran Children: A Holocaust Refugee Odyssey (New York: W.W. Norton, 2019).
13 Mark Mazower, Nazi Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe (New York: Penguin, 2009). See especially Omer Bartov’s sweeping history of ethnonational tensions in Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2018).
14 The relevance of anticolonial campaigns, including the “double V” strategies in Palestine and British India (and for equal rights within the African American community—which invented the term) calling for Allied victory against fascism as well as human rights within Allied nations during World War II, and postwar decolonization is of increasing interest to scholars of the Holocaust and its aftermath. See, for example, the contributions by Arie Dubnow, “The Jewish Postwar Moment Reframed, Or: Jewish Nationalism on the Road from New Delhi to Bandung,” and Raphael Stern’s intriguing analysis of the impact of partition settlements (including property) in South Asia on early Zionist policies in the state of Israel, “Looking to the East: Zionist and Israeli Links to India and Pakistan during Decolonization.” Both papers were presented at the Tauber Institute for the Study of European Jewry’s workshop on 1948 in April 2018 at Brandeis University.
15 See Atina Grossmann, “JointFund Teheran: JDC and the Jewish Life-Line to Central Asia,” in Avinoam Patt, Atina Grossmann, Maud Mandel, and Linda Levi, (eds.), The JDC at 100: A Century of Humanitarianism (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2019).
16 See for example, Marion Kaplan, Dominican Haven: The Jewish Refugee Settlement in Sosúa, 1940–1945 (New York: Museum of Jewish Heritage, 2008); on South Africa, see Shirli Gilbert, From Things Lost: Forgotten Letters and the Legacy of the Holocaust (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2017); see also Margit Franz, Gateway India: Deutschprachiges Exil in Indien zwischen britischer Kolonialherrschaft, Maharadschas und Gandhi (Graz: Clio, 2015).
17 See the research and forthcoming documentary by Marisa Fox-Bevilacqua, “My Underground Mother: An Untold Women’s Holocaust Story,” based on her excavation of her mother’s experience in the Gabersdorf camp, part of the forced labor camp network set up by “Organization Schmeldt.” Janine Holc (Loyola University Maryland) is working on a related book project, “The Weavers of Trautenau: Jewish Female Forced Labor in the Holocaust.”
18 Tim Cole, “‘Please Mind the Gap’: Integrated Histories and Geographies of the Holocaust and Holocaust Memory” (lecture at the “Beyond Camps and Forced Labor” conference, London, January 2018), https://backdoorbroadcasting.net/2018/01/tim-cole-please-mind-the-gap-integrated-histories-and-geographies-of-the-holocaust-and-holocaust-memory/.
19 See notably the very different stories recounted in the memoirs by Fanya Gottesfeld Heller, Love in a World of Sorrow: A Teenage Girl’s Holocaust (Jerusalem: Gefen, 2015) and Marie Jalowicz Simon, Underground in Berlin: A Young Woman’s Extraordinary Tale of Survival in the Heart of Nazi Germany, trans. Anthea Bell (New York: Little, Brown, 2017).
20 See, for example, the “Forum” about Holocaust and the history of gender and sexuality with Doris Bergen, Patrick Farges, Atina Grossmann, Anna Hajkova, and Elissa Mailänder, in German History, vol. 36, no. 1 (2018): pp. 78–100. See also Anna Hájková, “Sexual Barter in Times of Genocide: Negotiating the Sexual Economy of the Theresienstadt Ghetto,” Signs, vol. 38, no. 3 (2013): pp. 503–533; and, more recently, The Last Ghetto: An Everyday History of Theresienstadt (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), Anna Hájková, “Between Love and Coercion: Queer Desire, Sexual Barter and the Holocaust,” and the entire special issue on “Sexuality, Holocaust, Stigma” in German History (June 2020).
21 For example, David Boder’s 109 oral interviews with survivors, recorded between July and October 1945, are available in the archives of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC.
22 See Natalia Aleksiun’s painstaking research on social (and sexual) relations in hiding, especially “Intimate Violence: Jewish Testimonies on Victims and Perpetrators in Eastern Galicia,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies: A Journal of Culture and History, vol. 23, no. 1–2 (2017): pp. 17–33; Aleksiun, “Daily Survival: Social History of Jews in Family Bunkers in Eastern Galicia,” in Wendy Lower and Lauren Faulkner Rossi, (eds.), Lessons and Legacies: New Directions in Holocaust Research and Education, vol. 12 (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2017), pp. 304–31; Aleksiun, “Gender and the Daily Lives of Jews in Hiding in Eastern Galicia,” Nashim, vol. 27 (2014): pp. 38–61, and Aleksiun, “Uneasy Bonds: On Jews in Hiding and the Making of Surrogate Families?” in Eliyana Adler and Kateřina Čapková, (eds.), Family Perspectives in Holocaust Studies (forthcoming). See also Helene Sinnreich, “‘And it was something we didn’t talk about’: Rape of Jewish Women During the Holocaust,” Holocaust Studies, vol. 14, no. 2 (2008): pp. 1–22; and the pioneering article by Elizabeth Heineman, “The Doubly Unspeakable? Sexuality and Nazism,” Journal of the History of Sexuality, vol. 11, no. 1–2 (2002): pp. 22–66.
23 These shifts are poignantly revealed in Gottesfeld Heller, Love in a World of Sorrow. See also Natalia Aleksiun, “When Fajga Left Tadeusz: The Afterlife of Survivors’ Wartime Relationships,” Jahrbuch des Dubnow Instituts/Dubnow Institute Yearbook, vol. 18 (forthcoming).
24 Among so many other sources, see Marion Kaplan, Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany (New York, Oxford University Press, 1996); Claudia Koonz, Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, the Family, and Nazi Politics (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987); and Claudia Koonz, The Nazi Conscience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003).
25 See the republication in English of Melita Maschmann, Account Rendered: A Dossier on My Former Self, introduction by Helen Epstein (Lexington, MA: Plunkett Lake Press, 2016).
26 For example, Elizabeth Harvey, Women and the Nazi East: Agents and Witnesses of Germanization (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003); Elissa Mailänder, Female SS Guards and Workaday Violence: The Majdanek Concentration Camp, 1942–1944 (East Lansing, MI.: Michigan State University Press, 2015); and Wendy Lower, Hitler’s Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2013). On the comparative genocide turn in gender studies, see Elissa Bemporad and Joyce W. Warren, (eds.), Women and Genocide: Survivors, Victims, Perpetrators (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018).
27 David Nasaw’s The Last Million: Europe’s Displaced Persons from World War to Cold War (New York: Penguin Press, 2020) discusses Jewish war refugees as part of larger displacement and migration in postwar Europe but not beyond. A relatively recent example of the increasing interest (and legitimacy) of an intersectional comparative approach is the inclusion at the Lessons and Legacies conference in St. Louis in November 2018 of a panel on “Violence in the ‘Hinterland’: Intersecting Interpretations of the Holocaust and Settler Colonial Genocides” with papers by Ed Westerman (on alcoholism and sexual violence on the Eastern Front), Lorena Sekwan Fontaine (on residential schools in Canada), and Dorota Glowacka (on the relevance of concepts of “cultural genocide” to the history of the Holocaust in Eastern Europe, with response by Doris Bergen). Moreover, scholars have cautiously opened up a dialogue about the different but inextricably connected experiences of what a recent book frames as The Holocaust and the Nakba: A New Grammar of Trauma and History, ed. Bashir Bashir and Amos Goldberg (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), with a foreword by Elias Khoury and afterword by Jacqueline Rose.
28 Readings include: Sarah Churchwell, Behold America: The Entangled History of “America First” and the “The American Dream” (New York: Basic Books, 2018); “American Fascism: It Has Happened Here,” New York Review of Books, 22 June 2020, https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2020/06/22/american-fascism-it-has-happened-here/; Linda Gordon, The Second Coming of the KKK: The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the American Political Tradition (New York: Liveright W.W.W. Norton, 2017); James Q. Whitman, Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017); and Jonathan Wiesen, "American Lynching in the Nazi Imagination: Race and Extra-Legal Violence in 1930s Germany," German History, vol. 36, no. 1 (February 2018): pp. 38–59.
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Atina Grossmann
Atina Grossmann is Professor of History in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Cooper Union, New York.