A World Without Jews: Interpreting the Holocaust*
University of Virginia
confino{at}virginia.edu
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Abstract |
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It is my claim that a period of Holocaust consciousness stretching from the mid-1970s to the present is coming to an end. As the Holocaust now becomes part and parcel of history, memory, and the wider culture, a stage in the process of internalizing it comes to an end. This sense of pastness opens up new ways for understanding and interpreting it. In this essay, I discuss three interpretative notions that up to now have dominated historians’ discussion of the Holocaust—racial ideology, radicalization of Nazi policy, and the context of war—and that in my view need to be rethought. The text shows how these notions were used in Holocaust historiography and how their use has been changing. I discuss future avenues of research. In particular, I suggest a new direction that builds on these notions and on new historiographical innovations, but that diverges from them. I propose to treat the persecution and extermination of the Jews as a problem of culture, a term that is admittedly vague but interpretatively rewarding: that is, narrating the world the Nazis and some Germans built—a Germany, and later a world, without Jews—and what they thought they were engaged in—namely, a necessary battle against their enemy, ‘the Jew’—by placing memories, identities, fantasies, and symbols at the centre of the explanation.
Keywords: Holocaust, historiography, Nazi culture, Nazi memories, racial ideology, Nazi radicalization, Second World War