New Books in Genocide Studies

Every semester when I get to the point in World Civ when we’re talking about Nazi Germany, I ask my students to guess how many camps and ghettos there were. I get guesses anywhere from a few, to a few dozen, to a couple thousand. When I tell them that the true number is above 40,000, I get astonished stares and a barrage of ‘your kidding’ (and stronger words). The camps and ghettos were an essential part of the Nazi system.So today we’re beginning a five part series dedicated to the camps and ghettos in Germany, the areas Germany controlled and in Germany’s allies. Later this summer we’ll hear from Sarah Helms, Nik Wachsmann, Dan Stone and Shelly Cline. The series starts, however, with an interview with Geoff Megargee. Geoff is the general editor of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos (Indiana University Press 2009-).This is a monumental project. Each of the first two volumes runs well over 1000 pages and includes an enormous amount of information. Once the series is done, it will probably exceed 10,000 pages. The result will be an almost unprecedented addition to our understanding of the Holocaust. I’ll talk with Geoff about the process of creating the Encyclopedia and about how the accumulation of knowledge about specific camps can reshape our understanding of the Holocaust as a whole. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/genocide-studies

Normally I don’t try and talk about two books in the same interview. But, in discussing the interview, Anton Weiss-Wendt suggested that it made sense to pair The Nazi Genocide of the Roma (Berghahn Books, 2015) and Racial Science in Hitler’s New Europe, 1938-1945 (University of Nebraska Press, 2013) together. His instinct was sound. While they deal with different subjects, they share a common approach and structure that casts new light on each subject individually and on the war more generally. Often, works on the Holocaust focus on Germany, Poland and the USSR while marginalizing smaller and weaker countries. The two books here certainly address these countries. But they do the topic a great service by bringing other areas to the forefront. Each book is structured geographically, with contributors examining the course of racial science or the genocide of the Roma in a specific country. This allows the authors to look in depth at the historical context that led to different decisions and ideas. And it allows them to honor the agency of Rumanians or Croations or Latvians rather than simply surveying German actions in specific regions. Such an approach might have led to a series of essays that ran parallel to each other without ever touching on common themes. Fortunately, Weiss-Wendt (and his co-editor, Rory Yeomans) make sure that doesn’t happen. Instead, the careful construction of the essays and the thoughtful introductions shed light on patterns of behavior and the interactions that shaped genocide across Eastern Europe. In doing so, they’ve added to our knowledge not just of the genocide of the Roma or of racial science, but of the role and actions of peoples heretofore largely ignored in the literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/genocide-studies

Who, in the field of genocide studies, hasn’t at least once used the phrase “The century of genocide?”  Books carry the title, journalists quote it in interviews and undergrads adopt it. There’s nothing wrong with the phrase, as far as it goes.  But, as Scott Straus points out, conceptualizing the century in that way masks a fundamental truth about the period–that there were many more crises that could have led to genocide but which stopped short than there were actual genocides. And this is a problem for the academic study of genocide.   For if that discipline is at least in part attempting to understand what causes genocides and how to prevent them, ignoring the dog that didn’t bark is a serious challenge. This is the point Straus makes in his wonderful new book Making and Unmaking Nations:  War, Leadership and Genocide in Modern Africa (Cornell University Press, 2015).  A political scientist, Straus looks to address two methodological issues in understanding genocide.  The first is the problem of  the dog that didn’t bark.  The second is the fact that genocide studies often compares genocides that occurs in dramatically different contexts and cultures. The result is a wonderfully rich and thought-provoking study.  It’s one that all genocide scholars will need to wrestle with.  And, with Straus a former journalist, non-specialists will find it readable and interesting as well. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/genocide-studies

In her new book, Contemporary Psychoanalysis and the Third Reich: History, Memory, Tradition (Routledge, 2013), Emily Kuriloff details a dimension of psychoanalytic history that has never been so extensively documented: The impact of the Shoah on the not only the psychoanalysts who were directly involved, but also the aftershocks to later generations of analysts and the effect on theoretical developments on the field. Utilizing scholarly research, personal interviews and first-person accounts, Kuriloff contends in our interview that the events that analysts lived through in the years leading up to, and through World War II, led them to disavow the effects of trauma on their work. It has only been more recently, when later generations have reconsidered these events, and with the emergence of the relational paradigm, that analysts have been able to integrate concepts of trauma and dissociation into their analytic lives. Her book is essential reading not only for psychoanalysts and students of history but for anyone interested in the continuing aftershocks of the Holocaust. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/genocide-studies

Historians have spent the last two decades detailing and explaining the actions of the Einsatzgruppen in the Soviet Union.  We now know much more than we used to about the escalation of violence in 1941 and the so-called “Holocaust by Bullets.” The actions of the Einsatzgruppen in Poland, in contrast, are less well known.But they are crucial to understanding the evolution of violence against Jews and others.JuergenMatthaus, Jochen Boehler, and Klaus-Michael Mallmann set out to fill this gap.Their work War, Pacification and Mass Murder, 1939:The Einsatzgruppen in Poland (Rowman and Littlefield, 2014)–part of theUnited StatesHolocaust Memorial Museum’s excellent Documenting Life and Destruction series–sets carefully chosen documents into a richly described military and institutional context. By doing so, they illustratenot just what the Einsatzgruppen did, but how theiractions evolved over time, how they interacted withWehrmacht and political leaders and how this violence impacted people on the ground. In the interview, I talked with Juergen Matthaus about the origin of the volume, the nature of violence in Poland and the way in which this violence set the stage for the escalation of persecution and destruction. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/genocide-studies

Adolf Hitler famously (and probably) said in a speech to his military leaders “Who, after all, speaks to-day of the annihilation of the Armenians?” This remark is generally taken to suggest that future generations won’t remember current atrocities, so there’s no reason not to commit them. The implication is that memory has something like an expiration date, that it fades, somewhat inevitably, of its own accord. At the heart of Fatma Muge Gocek’s book is the claim that forgetting doesn’t just happen. Rather, forgetting (and remembering) happens in a context, with profound political and personal stakes for those involved. And this forgetting has consequences. Denial of Violence: Ottoman Past, Turkish Present, and Collective Violence against the Armenians 1789-2009 (Oxford University Press, 2015) looks at how this process played out in Turkey in the past 200 years. Gocek looks at both the mechanisms and the logic of forgetting. In doing so she sets the Turkish decisions to reinterpret the Armenian genocide into a longer tale of modernization and collective violence. And she illustrates the complicated ways in which remembering and forgetting collide. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/genocide-studies

I’ll be leaving soon to take students on a European travel course. During the three weeks we’ll be gone, in addition to cathedrals, museums and castles, they’ll visit Auschwitz, the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe and a variety of other Holocaust related sights.  And I’ll ask them to think about what we can say about how people in East-Central Europe remember the Holocaust based on the places they’ve visited. This is not simply a matter of historical reckoning.  The responses to the recent op-ed by FBI director James Comey show how important the question is in contemporary politics.   They also show how limited our understanding of the dynamics of memory in Eastern Europe has been. My answers to the students’ questions will be enormously more sophisticated and thoughtful after having read the work of John-Paul Himka and Joanna Beata Michlic.  Their recent edited collection titled Bringing the Dark Past to Light: The Reception of the Holocaust in Postcommunist Europe (University of Nebraska Press, 2013) is a remarkable collection of essays.  The book surveys the state of memory and memorialization in each of the countries of the former Soviet Block.  It highlights broadly similar responses while explaining differences between the countries.  And the editors explain why they believe it is so important to, as they say, bring the dark past to light.  In doing so, they begin the process of bringing our understanding of the memory of the Holocaust in this region to the same level of sophistication we now bring to the subject in Western Europe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/genocide-studies

So I should start out with a confession. I don’t know much about the history of Argentina (I said something similar about Guatemala a year or so ago on the program). And I don’t think it would have occurred to me to do a comparative study Argentina and Nazi Germany. Fortunately, Daniel Feierstein was more imaginative than I. The resulting study, recently translated into English as Genocide as Social Practice:Reorganizing Society under the Nazis and Argentina’s Military Juntas (Rutgers UniversityPress, 2014), offers a provocative and insightful rethinking of the nature of genocide and genocidal regimes Feierstein is a prominent member of the genocide studies community and currently serves as the president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars. But he also has a personal connection with his material, having participated in the demonstrations that brought Argentina’s junta down. Genocide as Social Practice is intellectually rigorous but informed by a deep personal passion for his subject. In the book, he offers an important expansion of our understanding of genocide, one which links seemingly disparate phenomenon and extends the concept into the period after physical destruction has ended. It’s an important observation, one which will challenge any reader to rethink his or her previous assumptions. That in itself makes it an worthwhile book. It goes without saying that it has also convinced me that I need to pay more attention to Latin American history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/genocide-studies

Genocide studies is one of the few academic fields with which I’m acquainted which is truly interdisciplinary in approach and composition. Today’s guest Abdelwahab El-Affendi, and the book he has edited, Genocidal Nightmares: Narratives of Insecurity and the Logic of Mass Atrocities (Bloomsbury Academic 2014), is an excellent example of how this works out in practice. The question this book addresses is not that unusual: How it is that societies and individuals come to a place where they feel it necessary to commit mass atrocities. But El-Affendi has assembled a set of authors remarkably varied in their background and approach. Indeed, his is one of the very few books in the field to draw on African and Middle Eastern scholars. Andthe case studies he examined go well beyond the usual canon of genocide studies. His conclusions clearly emerge out of this interdisciplinary cooperation. The book focuses on what he calls narratives of insecurity. These are stories people tell themselves about their relationships with others, stories that both reflect and further the securitization of relationships between people. These narratives, he argues, play a key role in moving people to commit acts they would earlier have believed unnecessary and even criminal. The book offers a variety of well-written and considered essays. And, if you’re like me, it will acquaint you with an area of international relations theory I knew nothing about. After we concluded the interview, Abdelwahab realized he had not mentioned in our discussion one of the key contributors to the book, the UN’s Special Adviser to the Secretary General on the Prevention of Genocide..  Deng authored the books forward and richly deserve the thanks Abdelwahab wanted to give him. I hope this will serve as an adequate substitute for a verbal appreciation from Abdelwahab. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/genocide-studies

After “Schindler’s List,” it became customary for my students, and I, to repeat the slogan “Never Again.” We did so seriously, with solemn expressions on our faces and intensity in our voices. But, if I’m being honest, I also uttered this slogan with some trepidation. For, while I believed absolutely in the necessity of such a commitment, I didn’t really know how to carry it out.Looking at Bosnia and Rwanda, then the Sudan and the Congo, such affirmations confronted the messy reality of our world. Ervin Staub‘s recent book Overcoming Evil: Genocide, Violent Conflict and Terrorism (Oxford University Press, 2010), offers a refreshing hint of possibility. Staub has been working on the question of why people participate in mass violence for decades (his earlier book The Roots of Evil is one of the foundational texts in the field of perpetrator studies). In his most recent book, he offers concrete guidelines and strategies for reducing the possibility and frequency of mass violence in our world. Staub is not a dreamer–he has no illusions that genocide and terrorism can be eliminated immediately.  But he believe both that it is everyone’s obligation to try and create a world in which mass violence is less prevalent and that such a world is in fact possible. The book offers both a comprehensive summary of what psychology can tell us about the behavior of perpetrators and a lengthy set of recommendations. It should be an important resource for both scholars and practitioners for years to come. Update: Overcoming Evilhas won the 2012 Alexander George Book Award of The International Society of Political Psychology for the Best Book Published in 2011 in the Field of Political Psychology, and also won the the 2013 Ursula Gielen Global Psychology Book Award of the International Psychology Division of the American Psychological Association for significant and fundamental contributions to psychology as a global discipline. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/genocide-studies