As this volume’s editors argue, following some important contributions in the immediate aftermath of World War II, for several decades the social sciences largely refrained from addressing the Holocaust. In recent years, however, scholars in such fields as political science and sociology have turned their attention back to an event that had meanwhile been thoroughly examined by historians. Politics, Violence, Memory presents some of the more innovative contributions, highlighting how social scientists can shed new light on the making and memory of this well-researched event.
Following introductory essays by Charles King and Jan Burzlaff, which make a convincing case for how the social sciences can enrich and complicate our historical understanding, the first part of the book focuses on sites of violence. Daniel Solomon asks why a third of the synagogues in Germany were not attacked during the Kristallnacht Pogrom of November 1938, suggesting that generally only larger and more “visible” Jewish communities were targeted. Eugene Finkel, for his part, makes a good case for the relationship between Jewish survival strategies and the prewar circumstances of their communities. While better assimilated communities could both rely on more help from neighbors or merge into gentile society, both resisters and Judenrat officials tended to come from circles engaged in prewar Jewish politics. Conversely, Jeffrey Kopstein argues that the pogroms of summer 1941 in western Ukraine (and earlier historical instances he cites) had to do as much with ethnic and religious rivalry as with Nazi genocidal policies. Similarly, Benjamin Mishkin proposes that patterns of violence reflected interwar politics. Thus, unlike popular anti-Jewish violence in Poland, Lithuanian attacks on Jews were largely carried out by paramilitaries, because authoritarian rule had produced a “demobilized population” alongside a plethora of aggrieved right-wing militias eager to collaborate with the German invaders.
The second part of the volume examines how old data on antisemitism and the Holocaust can be used in new ways by social scientists. Robert Braun’s chapter employs data collected by folklorists in the early 1930s on the prevalence of Jewish bogeymen in Kinderschreck stories—tales meant to frighten children into conformity—to demonstrate the rise of antisemitism in regions bordering territories lost after World War I. Reassessing historical sources, Lewi Stone and Stephan Lehnstaedt offer a brilliant analysis of the hitherto unexplained rapid decline in the typhus epidemic that ravaged the Warsaw Ghetto just before the Great Deportation in July 1942, indicating the crucial role played by Jewish medical experts. Peter Tammes and Andrew Simpkin use administrative data to argue that Jewish immigrants (mostly from Germany) to the Netherlands survived at a higher rate than Dutch Jews, both because more of them went into hiding or fled, and because more of those deported survive the camps. Reexamining church, state, and Jewish sources, Aliza Luft suggests that the French bishops’ strong support for Vichy helped legitimize the regime’s antisemitic policies, despite their eventual protests during the deportations of Jews in August 1942. Susan Welch makes a strong case for using the Yad Vashem database to show that women were the majority of those deported from central and western Europe and were more likely to be selected for death upon arrival in the camps since many were caring for children and because they made up a larger share of the elderly. Finally, Rachel Einwohner proposes that we can partly overcome the natural bias of Holocaust testimonies in favor of survivors by using inferences in them to those who perished to restore their “missing voices.”
The last part of the volume turns to legacies of the Holocaust. Here Volha Charnysh notes that rather than promoting reconciliation and tolerance, commemorations of past atrocities may produce denial and animosity. Based on an online survey conducted in Poland in 2014, she shows that half of the respondents believed the perpetrators of the massacre in Jedwabne—in which the Polish inhabitants murdered their Jewish neighbors—were not Poles, and a third described the victims as non-Jews. Moreover, she finds that especially when simultaneously invoking Poles massacred by Ukrainians, the focus on Polish wrongdoing in the Holocaust fails to promote tolerance and may backfire. Zvi Gitelman similarly examines the effect of undermining national myths, not least in post-communist eastern Europe, where exposure of complicity in the Holocaust clashes with national narratives of heroism and liberation. And Jelena Subotić introduces an international relations perspective, stressing the extent to which state identity, the end of communism, and Holocaust commemoration have combined to create a particular east European predilection for a narrative of double genocide which, while not denying the Holocaust, generally relegates it to a secondary position vis-à-vis the perceived communist genocide, thereby sweeping local collaboration in the extermination of the Jews under the rug of national victimhood.
The volume concludes with a plea by Daniel Ziblatt not to lose sight of the larger, macro processes that made for the context and set in motion the micro and local processes examined in the book. Ziblatt stresses especially the impact of external forces on local events as well as the tendency of smaller states to emulate larger ones; he warns us—with an eye on current American politics—that the decline of democracy in hegemonic powers may have a substantial internation effect. This effect has indeed grown significantly even since the recent publication of this book, as shown by the rise of the extreme right in Europe. From this point of view, quite apart from its contribution to our understanding of the Holocaust as event and memory, and despite not a few jargon-ridden pages of frustratingly impenetrable formulations, this book may serve us also in better comprehending the brave new world into which we appear to be led by a new brand of rabble-rousers who have forgotten nothing and learned nothing from the catastrophes of the mid-twentieth century.
