Chapter 6 discusses the representation of memory in trauma narratives. Accounts of victims of childhood trauma are contrasted with the testimony of Holocaust survivors. I argue that that the distinctive qualities of trauma narratives can also be understood as differences in the culturally constructed landscapes of memory that shapes the distance and effort to remember affectively charged and socially defined events. Landscapes of memory draw from implicit models of memory that influence what can be recalled and warranted as accurate. Trauma narratives involve cultural models and metaphors of personal and historical memory. For them to function as personal and collective history, there must be public places for them to be told, acknowledged, and retold. The political recognition of collective identity and history can help create such a place. Individuals’ stories, in turn, can serve as testimony to ground collective history and call for further moral and political response. Understanding the personal, social, and political meanings of trauma in theory and practice requires tracing the systemic loops that link memory, symptom, and response with a landscape of cultural affordances.

This chapter examines how the Holocaust affected thinking about the humanities and social sciences throughout the West. It offers an intellectual history of key responses to the Holocaust, with an emphasis on political philosophy and social theory. Major intellectuals (Arendt, Adorno, Agamben), as well as less well-known thinkers (Günther Anders, Moishe Postone) are considered. The trajectory of post-Holocaust thought forms the throughline. In the first postwar decades, the Jewish genocide was considered as part of a broader eruption of war and totalitarian violence, while more recent thinkers have tended to subsume the entire history of Western violence, perhaps even “the West” itself, under the sign of the Holocaust.

This chapter traces the long trajectory of Holocaust testimony from the 1940s to the present. It notes that there are different temporal registers for testimony, from accounts offered during the war to retrospective accounts offered after 1945, sometimes decades later. It notes the ways in which the testimony considered valuable expanded over time to include not just that of survivors of camps or ghettos, but also that of hidden children or Jews living in hiding with false papers. It also evolved in content, as testimony came to not just remember the dead, but also shape the living and the reconstruction of Jewish life. Even material culture has been incorporated into testimony, as artifacts from survivors have become “sacred relics” of a sort.

Few historical events have been more often depicted in film than the Holocaust. This started in the 1940s and continues to the present day. Many of the representational challenges and conundrums found in other arts are present in film as well, though if anything in more acute form. Film is arguably the most mimetic of all the arts, which makes the risk of prurience, voyeurism, or sadistic (or masochistic) pleasure in watching artificial depictions of the suffering of others all the graver. This chapter situates the history of Holocaust films between the poles of melodramatic realism embodied in the American television miniseries Holocaust and the epic documentary film Shoah. These represent conventional realism, on the one hand, and a rigorous and austere refusal to represent the past at except through images of the present, on the other. As the chapter shows, a myriad of other films situate themselves either at one pole or the other, or between the two.

This chapter offers a global and pan-European account of Holocaust trials, which stretch from occupied Germany immediately after the war to Australia in the 1980s, and much in between. It shows that initially crimes against Jews were not in the primary prosecutorial focus of the thousands of trials dealing with Nazi crimes across Europe, but that over the decades Holocaust-related crimes moved to the center of Nazi war crimes and criminal trials related to the Second World War. The chapter trances the evolution of Nazi trials, from an initial period of intensive prosecution in the immediate aftermath of the war, to a period of relative quiet in the 1950s, to a renewed wave of prosecutions beginning in the 1960s.

This chapter looks at the complex and contested legacy of the Holocaust within Germany itself. It considers both the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) and the German Democratic Republic (East Germany), and the way Holocaust memory in the two states interacted. It traces the politics of the past from early Allied efforts at denazification and reeducation, through the amnesty and rehabilitation of former Nazis into the memory wars of the 1980s and 1990s. It concludes with an analysis of the ways in which the Holocaust continues to shape German political culture into the twenty-first century, as with Chancellor Angela Merkel’s controversial decision to support large-scale migration of Syrian refuges in the context of that country’s brutal civil war.

This chapter establishes and problematizes the category of “survivor” and the ways in which its meaning changed over the postwar decades. The definition of survivors is “unstable,” and includes diverse groups, not just those who lived through the camps or ghettos, but also those in exile or hiding. The chapter discusses how trauma affected not just survivors, but also their children and grandchildren, in complex ways. It analyzes the ways in which the experience of the Holocaust affected family life and the intergenerational transfer of knowledge and culture, as well as the (re)construction of Jewish communal life.

This chapter reviews the Nazi plunder of art works, Judaica, and other cultural objects during and before the Second World War, showing how it operated as both a top-down and a bottom-up practice. It then traces the diverse efforts around the world to gain restitution or compensation for these plundered goods. Beginning with Allied efforts to locate and return stolen artworks during the closing days of the war (the so-called “Monuments Men”) and continuing through the evasive policies of Germany and Austria after the war, up to the renewed litigation, in Europe and America, starting in the 1990s, the chapter demonstrates the long and difficult road survivors and descendants walked to try to retrieve their stolen property. All too often such efforts failed.

This chapter offers an intellectual history of theological responses to the Holocaust, focusing on the way Jewish and Christian religious thinkers sought to make sense of Nazi mass murder. Focusing mainly on the USA, it follows post-Holocaust theologians’ explorations of the problem of evil. It demonstrates that, while theological explorations of the Holocaust saw a high point in the 1970s, since then they have declined in favor of historicization, whereby theological explorations of the Holocaust have given way to the historical study of the religious responses of Jews and Christians to Nazi crimes as they were unfolding.

This chapter treats the daily life experiences of Jews who survived the Second World War in the interior regions of the Soviet Union. Included among this group were Soviet citizens who evacuated eastward ahead of invading German armies as well as refugees from Poland, the Baltic states, Romania, and Czechoslovakia.

This chapter examines the legacy of the Holocaust in all dimensions of Israeli life. It considers the evolving policy landscape, including decisions regarding commemoration, education, and the prosecution of collaborators. It also traces the evolution of the cultural and political status of “survivors.” Initially, resistance fighters were treated as heroes, while ordinary survivors were viewed as passive weaklings unable to defend themselves. Both stances were part of a Zionist understanding of Israeli identity. Over time, especially in the 1960s with the Eichmann Trial and in the wake of the 1973 Yom Kippur war, a more nuanced, mournful view took hold that acknowledged the importance of survival itself as essential for Jewish identity in a precarious world.

Focusing particularly on Poland and Ukraine, with less detailed considerations of other parts of eastern Europe, this chapter examines the politicization of Holocaust memory in the post-Cold War period. An attempt to forge a new, postcommunist identity in eastern Europe also entailed an evasion of wartime reality. The all too real suffering of Poles or Ukrainians during the Second World War was conflated with, or even substituted for, the extermination of east European Jews. The tragic reality that collaboration was commonplace among non-Jewish Poles or Ukrainians was denied. Even more strikingly, Poland and Ukraine tried to use the power of the state to craft a new, revisionist mythology about the past in which Poles and Ukrainians were rescuers, Jews were largely absent (or even blamed for their own murder), and only Germans did anything bad. This revisionism was part of a revived nationalism that sought to ground new, postcommunist, often authoritarian regimes in a comforting mythic history.

This chapter explores the relationship between Holocaust and genocide, beginning with the the emergence of the concept of genocide and its relationship to prior law on war crimes. The chapter offers a close examination of Lemkin’s evolving thinking, and that of other contemporaries on the relationship between the Jewish experience under Nazism and other mass atrocities. It argues that Lemkin’s genocide concept blurred some critical distinctions, notably whether genocide necessarily implied biological extermination. This ambiguity was, however, critical to its political utility in the early postwar context, but the resulting law and terminology has become a political weapon, often obscuring the reality of the violence it purports to describe.

Focusing on the Federal Republic of Germany, this chapter explores the often hidden history of the lasting impact of Nazi racial violence on non-Jewish victims. It analyzes the forces and structures that continued to discriminate against homosexuals, survivors of sterilization, Roma, “asocials,” and others. Many of these groups were initially excluded from reparations programs for survivors and, in some cases, were subjected to ongoing legal discrimination. Over time, this began to shift, largely in response to pressure from survivor activists from among these groups, who fought hard to establish their status as recognized victims of the Nazi regime.

This chapter engages the interrelation between German agency and non-German interest in the pursuit of the “Final Solution” and other projects of ethnic, economic, or political restratification; and discusses the European dimensions (including imperial/colonial aspirations) in the history of these projects and the specifics of the “Final Solution” in the attempt to locate the Holocaust on the historical map of genocides.

The introduction to Volume I considers the shift in Holocaust historiography since the end of the Cold War to focus on eastern Europe and, increasingly, on neglected areas such as south-eastern Europe. Noteworthy too is the increasing diversity in methodologies, including digital humanities, gender history, family history, microhistory, transnational history, and spatial, geographical, and material approaches. Each of these strands approaches sources differently, meaning that what historians consider to be a usable source has also changed a great deal. This diversity reflects also the changing face of the historical profession itself and the world in which it operates. Our awareness has grown that the Holocaust was a continent-wide crime committed by willing participants everywhere. The historiography is moving in two opposite directions: towards more microhistories, but also towards greater understanding of the continent-wide scale of the Holocaust, with a particular focus on the hitherto unacknowledged extent of participation in the killings by non-Germans all across Europe. How to reconcile them and bring all of this research together is the challenge of our hyper-productive times.

This chapter offers a nuanced account of liberation, displacement, and homecoming after the Second World War. It emphasizes the ambiguity of a liberation that was not always freeing, displacement that continued wartime suffering, and a homecoming that was often bittersweet, when it was even possible. It traces the ways in which the savage history of postwar Europe led to massive population transfers, including of Jewish Holocaust survivors. It looks at “homecoming” both in western and in eastern Europe, as well as post-liberation migration out of Europe. After all, most east European Jews quickly realized they had little future in Europe, their sense of belonging shattered. The surrounding societies were often unwelcoming for returnees, reluctant to return appropriated property, and retained substantial antisemitism. If, in western Europe, Jewish survivors could, to a degree, “go home again,” this proved impossible for the most part in eastern Europe. Thus, Jewish survivors often abandoned Europe altogether, seeking new lives in Israel, the USA, and elsewhere. The political and social history of displaced persons after the war is thus both pan-European and global.

This general introduction introduces the significance and thinking behind the Cambridge History, and the challenges in defining and delimiting the Holocaust. It discusses the way in which the Holocaust’s massive impact on postwar thought has shaped the approach to the Cambrideg History. Finally, it makes sense of the structure of the four volumes.

The twenty-first century is a digital century, and the use of digital media and data-analyzing technology has become widespread and even trendy in the humanities. What does this mean for the legacy of the Holocaust? What are the advantages and challenges of digitalization in the context of Holocaust archives, for example with online access to videos of survivor testimony? Are there new strategies for representing or analyzing the Holocaust that draw on the techniques of digital humanities? This chapter explores the uses (and abuses) of digital technologies for both analyzing the history of the Holocaust and presenting that history to a public audience. It also considers the question of the post-survivor future, for example holograms of survivors, and what this says about “authenticity” and authority.