New Books in Genocide Studies

In Sing This at My Funeral: A Memoir of Fathers and Sons (Wayne State University Press, 2019), David Slucki, Assistant Professor in the Yaschik/Arnold Jewish Studies Program at the College of Charleston, gives us a very different type of history book. Slucki’s memoir blends the scholarly and literary, grounding the story of his grandfather and father in the broader context of the twentieth century. Based on thirty years of letters from Jakub to his brother Mendel, on archival materials, and on interviews with family members, this is a unique story and an innovative approach to writing both history and family narrative. Students, scholars, and general readers of memoirs will enjoy this deeply personal reflection on family, Jewish history and grief.Max Kaiser is a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne. He can be reached at kaiser@student.unimelb.edu.au  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/genocide-studies

In his book  Peacemakers: American Leadership and the End of Genocide in the Balkans (University of Kentucky Press, 2017), Ambassador James W. Pardew describes the role of the U.S. involvement in ending the wars and genocide in the Balkans.  As a soldier-diplomat, Pardew reminds us of the human nature of diplomacy.  Pardew was the one of the major players in U.S. policy making, leading Balkan task forces. He was also a policy advisor to NATO.  His book reflects the perspective of an experienced soldier who led the peace-making process through his use of compassion when dealing with mass murdering despots.  He refocuses the nature of the dissolution of the Yugoslavia as a humanitarian crisis that could not be settled without dealing with all of the participants.  His work is inspiring in the face of the senseless destruction of 100,000+ dead and thousands more displaced.  He proves that the good guys can win without dropping down to the levels of the tyrants. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/genocide-studies

The Holocaust was and remains a central trauma in Israel’s national consciousness. It has found ample expressions in Israeli documentary cinema from 1945 until the present. Third-generation Holocaust survivors were born between the late 1960s and the early 1980s. They grew up in a society which acts out the trauma and since the 1990s they have related to the Holocaust in a range of cultural fields. Remaking Holocaust Memory aims to paint the first comprehensive portrait of third-generation Holocaust documentaries phenomenon. It takes a cinematic, cultural, and sociohistorical comparative approach to examine how third-generation filmmakers have responded to previous narratives and representations. Liat Steir-Livny analyzes 19 prominent films that reflect the key tendencies of third-generation Holocaust documentaries. These films are compared to 16 Holocaust documentaries by second-generation survivors. The book explores how third-generation filmmakers are both affected by and deviate from earlier Holocaust representations. They create a new layer of commemoration that coexists with the former, while constructing new thematic, moral, and aesthetic recollections of the trauma. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/genocide-studies

Most of the time, memory studies focuses on well-known case studies.  The result Is that we know lots about commemoration and memory regarding the Holocaust, about slavery, about apartheid, and other cases, but much less about how memory works in smaller states and less well-known tragedies.Erik Sjöberg's  new book The Making of the Greek Genocide: Contested Memories of the Ottoman Greek Catastrophe (Berghahn Books, 2018) is an exception to this rule.  Sjöberg is interested in the violence and expulsion of ethnic Greeks from Anatolia before, during and especially after World War One.  But the focus of his work is on how this violence has been remembered and contested in the last 30 years.  He argues that efforts to remember the violence and deploy it politically emerged in the 1980s.  It then became a prominent feature in the complicated politics of national identity within and outside of Greece.Sjöberg book is deeply researched, methodologically sophisticated and precise in argument and tone.  He deploys concepts from sociology to help understand the way memory has functioned.  In doing so, he helps us consider both the particular details of his case study and the broader lessons that writing about a less-well known case can teach us about memory and the past.Kelly McFall is Professor of History and Director of the Honors Program at Newman University. He’s the author of four modules in the Reacting to the Past series, including The Needs of Others: Human Rights, International Organizations and Intervention in Rwanda, 1994, published by W. W. Norton Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/genocide-studies

Carolyn J. Dean’s The Moral Witness: Trials and Testimony after Genocide (Cornell University Press, 2019) examines the cultural history of the idea of the “witness to genocide” in Western Europe and the United States.  She portrays the witness in non-traditional genocide court trials as the moral compass.  In fact, many of these “moral witnesses” were not utilized for their testimony to identify perpetrators or mass murder, but rather a symbolic voice for survivor’s that would not normally be admissible in traditional legal proceedings.Dr. Dean is the Charles J. Still Professor of History and French at Yale University and is the author of several other books focused on morality and genocide.  The Moral Witness is part of the Cornell University Press’s series Corpus Juris: The Humanities in Politics and Law. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/genocide-studies

Paul Thomas Chamberlin has written a book about the Cold War that makes important claims about the nature and reasons for genocide in the last half of the Twentieth Century. In The Cold War's Killing Fields: Rethinking the Long Peace (Harper, 2018), Chamberlin reminds us that the Cold War was not at all Cold for hundreds of millions of people.  He argues that the Soviet Union and the US competed fiercely over the states and people living in a wide swath of land starting in Manchuria, running south into South East Asia and then turning west into South Asia and the Middle East.  This zone received a huge percentage of aid and support from the superpowers.  This zone saw by far the most military interventions by the superpowers.  And this zone saw millions of people die in conflicts tied to the Cold War.Chamberlin reminds us that these conflicts were not simply instigated and propelled by the superpowers.  Instead, the Cold War intersected with colonial and post-colonial conflicts in complicated and nonlinear ways.  Similarly, he argues that the nature of these conflicts changed dramatically over time, from Maoist people's revolutions to conflicts driven by sectarian struggles.By making the broader contours of this period clearer, Chamberlin is able to put genocides in Indonesia, Cambodia, Bangladesh and others into a common framework.   In doing so, he's written a book that is not explicitly about genocide, but says a great deal about genocidal violence in the second half of the twentieth century.Kelly McFall is Professor of History and Director of the Honors Program at Newman University. He’s the author of four modules in the Reacting to the Past series, including The Needs of Others: Human Rights, International Organizations and Intervention in Rwanda, 1994. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/genocide-studies

Jennifer Dixon’s Dark Pasts: Changing the State’s Story in Turkey and Japan (Cornell University Press, 2018), investigates the Japanese and Turkish states’ narratives of their “dark pasts,” the Nanjing Massacre (1937-38) and Armenian Genocide (1915-17), respectively. The official version of history initially advocated by both states was similar in its adherence to a strategy of silencing critics and relativizing or denying the massacre, but Dixon shows how the two governments’ narratives of their dark pasts have diverged. The book draws on a combination of extensive fieldwork and archival research to present a holistic picture not just of the narratives themselves but of the domestic and international factors influencing when and how those historical myths about such large-scale atrocities change over time. Dark Pasts argues that while international pressures exerted on state actors like Turkey and Japan can produce change in the official versions of events, it is domestic factors that shape the content of the new versions. Dixon’s work should be of interest to audiences not just in East Asian or Middle Eastern studies or political science, but also to those with particular concerns with historical memory. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/genocide-studies

In his new book, The First Soldier: Hitler as a Military Leader (Yale University Press, 2018), Stephen Fritz professor of history at East Tennessee State University reexamines Hitler as a military commander and strategist. That Hitler saw World War II as the only way to retrieve Germany’s fortunes and build an expansionist Thousand-Year Reich is uncontroversial. But while his generals did sometimes object to Hitler’s tactics and operational direction, they often made the same errors in judgment and were in agreement regarding larger strategic and political goals. A necessary volume for understanding the influence of World War I on Hitler’s thinking, this work is also an eye-opening reappraisal of major events like the invasion of Russia and the battle for Normandy.Craig Sorvillo is a PhD candidate in modern European history at the University of Florida. He specializes in Nazi Germany, and the Holocaust. He can be reached at craig.sorvillo@gmail.com or on twitter @craig_sorvillo. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/genocide-studies

Last month Rwanda commemorated the 25th anniversary of the genocide.  Unlike the recent outpouring of books marking hundredth anniversary of the end of the First World War, there was only a short flurry of newspaper and radio remembrances of the events of April and May of 1994.  The number of book-length narratives was similarly small.Now Andrew Wallis has published a significant new survey of the origins and aftermath of the genocide. Stepp’d in Blood:  Akazu and the Architects of the Rwandan Genocide Against the Tutsis (Zero Books, 2019), engages the deep roots of the genocide.  Wallis argues that the decision to commit genocide emerged out of a political crisis.  Their power and wealth threatened by the emergence of a multi-party political process and an RPF invasion, a small group of politicians, governmental officials and family members around  Juvenal and Agathe Habyarimana resorted to massive violence in order to secure their positions.  While the violence targeted Tutsis especially, it was essentially political in nature and in aims.Wallis is a journalist who has written about Rwanda for decades.  He is intimately familiar with the country, its leaders and its history.  Writing for a broad audience, Wallis brings a journalist’s eye and pen to his book.  His prose is full of fascinating details, quotes and images.  The many cartoons, in particular, make this book stand out.Kelly McFall is Professor of History and Director of the Honors Program at Newman University. He’s the author of four modules in the Reacting to the Past series, including The Needs of Others: Human Rights, International Organizations and Intervention in Rwanda, 1994. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/genocide-studies

In his book, Fegelein’s Horsemen and Genocidal Warfare: The SS Cavalry Brigade in the Soviet Union (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), Dr. Henning Pieper, examines the conduct of the SS Cavalry Brigade during World War II. The SS Cavalry Brigade was a unit of the Waffen-SS that differed from other German military formations as it developed a dual role: SS cavalrymen both helped to initiate the Holocaust in the Soviet Union and experienced combat at the front. Pieper’s book highlights an understudied aspect of both the Holocaust and World War II.Craig Sorvillo is a PhD candidate in modern European history at the University of Florida. He specializes in Nazi Germany, and the Holocaust. He can be reached at craig.sorvillo@gmail.com or on twitter @craig_sorvillo. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/genocide-studies