The Holocaust
An Unfinished History
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
A revelatory new history that reexamines the brutal reality of the Holocaust–and reinterprets the events as a living trauma from which modern society has not yet recovered
One of the most acclaimed books of the year: "Outstanding" (Times Literary Supplement); "Remarkable" (Guardian); "Important and challenging" (Jewish Chronicle); "Deeply haunting" (Telegraph)
The Holocaust is much discussed, much memorialized, and much portrayed. But there are major aspects of its history that have been overlooked.
Spanning the entirety of the Holocaust, this sweeping history deepens our understanding. Dan Stone—Director of the Holocaust Research Institute at Royal Holloway, University of London—reveals how the idea of “industrial murder” is incomplete: many were killed where they lived in the most brutal of ways. He outlines the depth of collaboration across Europe, arguing persuasively that we need to stop thinking of the Holocaust as an exclusively German project. He also considers the nature of trauma the Holocaust engendered, and why Jewish suffering has yet to be fully reckoned with. And he makes clear that the kernel to understanding Nazi thinking and action is genocidal ideology, providing a deep analysis of its origins.
Drawing on decades of research, The Holocaust: An Unfinished History upends much of what we think we know about the Holocaust. Stone draws on Nazi documents, but also on diaries, post-war testimonies, and even fiction, urging that, in our age of increasing nationalism and xenophobia, it is vital that we understand the true history of the Holocaust.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Historian Stone (The Liberation of the Camps) argues in this powerful study that "in many ways we have failed unflinchingly to face the terrible reality of the Holocaust." Surveying the wide body of research on the subject, he contends that public consciousness has wrongly been dominated by "the perception of ‘factory-like' genocide"—a misleading idea that serves to replace the brutal, up-close murders of the Holocaust with an imaginary bureaucratic killing machine. To counter this inaccurate vision, Stone analyzes the "ideology" of the Holocaust—from its roots in European antisemitism, through the brutal Nazi race regime that was quickly adopted by collaborators in countries invaded by Germany, to its aftermath when some Jewish people who refused to emigrate from Europe were kept in "displaced persons" camps all the way through 1957, and into the following decades of mass trauma and attempts at commemoration. His astute investigation, which adeptly moves between "microhistories" and large-scale events, shows how the Holocaust was primarily made possible by the widespread adoption of racist thinking and the long-term nurturing of "genocidal fantasy" in Europe—the latter of which is still poorly reckoned with today, since the emotional frenzy of genocide is rarely brought to the fore in "sanitized" Holocaust historiography. Concluding with a dire warning that the modern nation-state is a catalyst for racist and genocidal thinking that is today often targeted at migrants, Muslims, and other maginalized groups, this is an urgent new perspective on a much-studied calamity.
