Perpetration and Complicity under Nazism and Beyond: Compromised Identities?

Hardback

Main Details

Title Perpetration and Complicity under Nazism and Beyond: Compromised Identities?
Authors and Contributors      Edited by Professor Mary Fulbrook
Edited by Dr Bastiaan Willems
Edited by Dr Stephanie Bird
Edited by Stefanie Rauch
Physical Properties
Format:Hardback
Pages:336
Dimensions(mm): Height 234,Width 156
Category/GenreHistory
The Holocaust
ISBN/Barcode 9781350327771
Audience
Professional & Vocational

Publishing Details

Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Imprint Bloomsbury Academic
Publication Date 10 August 2023
Publication Country United Kingdom

Description

Perpetration and Complicity under Nazism and Beyond analyses perpetration and complicity under National Socialism and beyond. Contributors based in the UK, the USA, Canada, Germany, Israel and Chile reflect on self-understandings, representations and narratives of involvement in collective violence both at the time and later - a topic that remains highly relevant today. Using the notion of 'compromised identities' to think about contentious questions relating to empathy and complicity, this inter-disciplinary collection addresses the complex relationships between people's behaviours and self-understandings through and beyond periods of collective violence. Contributors explore the compromises that individuals, states and societies enter into both during and after such violence. Case studies highlight patterns of complicity and involvement in perpetration, and analyse how people's stories evolve under changing circumstances and through social interaction, using varying strategies of justification, denial and rationalisation. Each chapter also considers the ways in which contemporary responses and scholarly practices may be affected by engagement with perpetrator representations.

Author Biography

Mary Fulbrook is Professor of German History at University College London, UK. She is the author of Reckonings: Legacies of Nazi Persecution and the Quest for Justice (2018, winner of the Wolfson History Prize) and A Small Town Near Auschwitz: Ordinary Nazis and the Holocaust (2012, winner of the Fraenkel Prize), amongst others. Stefanie Rauch is Research Fellow at the Centre for Collective Violence, Holocaust and Genocide Studies at University College London, UK. She is the author of Rethinking Holocaust Film Reception: A British Case Study (2020). Stephanie Bird is Senior Lecturer in German and Vice-Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at University College London, UK. She is the author of Women Writers and National Identity (2003) and Recasting Historical Women: Female Identity in German Biographical Fiction (1998). Bastiaan Willems is Postdoctoral Fellow in Modern European History at University College London, UK. He is the author of Violence in Defeat: The Wehrmacht on German Soil, 1944-1945 (2011).