Read more
Of the three categories that Raul Hilberg developed in his analysis of the Holocaust-perpetrators, victims, and bystanders-it is the last that is the broadest and most difficult to pinpoint. Described by Hilberg as those who were "once a part of this history," bystanders present unique challenges for those seeking to understand the decisions, attitudes, and self-understanding of historical actors who were neither obviously the instigators nor the targets of Nazi crimes. Combining historiographical, conceptual, and empirical perspectives on the bystander, the case studies in this book provide powerful insights into the complex social processes that accompany state-sponsored genocidal violence.
List of contents
Table of Contents List of Illustrations
Introduction: Probing the Limits of Categorization
Christina Morina and Krijn Thijs PART I: APPROACHES Chapter 1. Bystanders: Catchall Concept, Alluring Alibi or Crucial Clue?
Mary Fulbrook Chapter 2. Raul Hilberg and His "Discovery" of the Bystander
René Schlott Chapter 3. Bystanders as Visual Subjects: Onlookers, Spectators, Observers, and Gawkers in Occupied Poland
Roma Sendyka Chapter 4. "I Am Not, What I Am.": A Typological Approach to Individual (In)Action in the Holocaust
Timothy Williams Chapter 5. The Many Shades of Bystanding: On Social Dilemmas and Passive Participation
Froukje Demant Chapter 6. The Dutch Bystander as Non-Jew and Implicated Subject
Remco Ensel and Evelien Gans SECTION II: HISTORY Chapter 7. Photographing Bystanders
Christoph Kreutzmüller Chapter 8. The Imperative to Act: Jews, Neighbors, and the Dynamics of Persecution in Nazi Germany, 1933-1945
Christina Morina Chapter 9. Martin Heidegger's Nazi Conscience
Adam Knowles Chapter 10. Natura Abhorret Vacuum: Polish "Bystanders" and the Implementation of the "Final Solution"
Jan Grabowski Chapter 11. Defiant Danes and Indifferent Dutch?: Popular Convictions and Deportation Rates in the Netherlands and Denmark, 1940-1945
Bart van der Boom Chapter 12. The Notion of Social Reactivity: The French Case, 1942-1944
Jacques Semelin SECTION III: MEMORY Chapter 13. Ordinary, Ignorant and Noninvolved?: The Figure of the Bystander in Dutch Research and Controversy
Krijn Thijs Chapter 14. Hidden in Plain View: Remembering and Forgetting the Bystanders of the Holocaust on (West) German Television
Wulf Kansteiner Chapter 15. Stand by Your Man: (Self-)Representations of SS Wives after 1945
Susanne C. Knittel Chapter 16. "Bystanders" in Exhibitions at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Susan Bachrach Epilogue I: A Brief Plea for the Historicization of the Bystander
Norbert Frei Epilogue II: Saving the Bystander
Ido de Haan Index
About the author
Christina Morina is Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Bielefeld. From 2015 to 2019, she was DAAD Visiting Assistant Professor at the Duitsland Instituut Amsterdam. She has also worked as lecturer at the University of Jena and was a research fellow at the Jena Center 20th Century History. Her dissertation Legacies of Stalingrad: Remembering the Eastern Front War in Germany since 1945 appeared in 2011. Since then, she has published a number of books and articles on modern German and European political-intellectual history and memory culture, among them Die Erfindung des Marxismus. Wie eine Idee die Welt eroberte (2017, forthcoming in English in 2022), and Zur rechten Zeit. Wider die Rückkehr des Nationalismus (2019, with N. Frei, F. Maubach and M. Tändler).
Krijn Thijs is senior researcher at the German Studies Institute Amsterdam and lecturer at Amsterdam University. He has published on political history, memory cultures and historiography in Germany and the Netherlands. In 2006, he received his PhD from Amsterdam Free University. The dissertation about Berlin master narratives in the 20th century was published by Böhlau Verlag as Drei Geschichten, eine Stadt. Die Berliner Stadtjubiläen 1937 und 1987 (2008). Currently, he is working on a book synthesis about professional and biographical upheavals in East German Historiography after 1989. Thijs also publishes on the experiences of Wehrmacht soldiers in the occupied Netherlands and on controversies in Dutch historiography. He is co-founder of the Dutch-German History Workshop.
Summary
Combining historiographical, conceptual, and empirical perspectives on the bystander, the case studies in this book provide powerful insights into the complex social processes that accompany state-sponsored genocidal violence.
