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Hannah Arendt's Ghosts: Reflections on the Disputable Path from Windhoek to Auschwitz

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 May 2009

Robert Gerwarth
Affiliation:
University College Dublin
Stephan Malinowski
Affiliation:
Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies (FRIAS)

Extract

Historians on both sides of the Atlantic are currently engaged in a controversy about the allegedly genocidal nature of western colonialism and its connections with the mass violence unleashed by Nazi Germany between 1939 and 1945. The debate touches upon some of the most “sensitive” issues of twentieth-century history: the violent “dark side” of modern western civilization, the impact of colonial massacres on the European societies that generated this violence and, perhaps most controversially, the origins and uniqueness of the Holocaust.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Conference Group for Central European History of the American Historical Association 2009

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References

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20 Strangely enough, the much more large-scale violence inflicted on the indigenous population during Maji-Maji war is not mentioned in this context although the death figures are significantly higher than during the Herero uprising. See Becker, Feliticas and Beez, Jigal, eds., Der Maji-Maji-Krieg in Deutsch-Ostafrika 1905–1907 (Berlin: Christoph Links, 2005)Google Scholar.

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31 Kipling's poem was first published in McClure's Magazine (February 1899) with the subtitle, “The United States and the Philippine Islands.”

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62 The vast existing literature on German anti-Semitism has thus far not acknowledged any influences of colonial racism on anti-Semitism. See, for example, Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews; Pulzer, Peter, The Rise of Political Anti-Semitism in Germany and Austria (rev. ed., Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988)Google Scholar; Laqueur, Walter, The Changing Face of Anti-Semitism (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007)Google Scholar; Herf, Jeffrey, The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda during World War II and the Holocaust (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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73 Arendt, Origins, 37.