This book discusses ethical behavior through the genocidal stages of the Holocaust. Paul E. Wilson first looks at the antisemitism in Germany and Europe beginning in the decades preceding the Nazis reign of terror, and goes on to discuss the ethical decisions made in the initial stages that moved society toward genocide. The author maintains that the stages of genocide represent subtle changes that can be happening within a society in response to the moral choices made by actors. By giving attention to the stages of genocide in the Holocaust, this book contributes to the overall understanding of how the Holocaust was possible, and encourages the moral community to join the watch for the development of genocide in the modern world.
Winner, 2015 USC Book Award in Literary and Cultural Studies, for outstanding monograph published on Russia, Eastern Europe or Eurasia in the fields of literary and cultural studies The Ethics of Witnessing investigates the reactions of five important Polish diaristswriters—Jaroslaw Iwaszkiewicz, Maria Dabrowska, Aurelia Wylezynska, Zofia Nalkowska, and Stanislaw Rembek—during the period when the Nazis persecuted and murdered Warsaw’s Jewish population. The responses to the Holocaust of these prominent prewar authors extended from insistence on empathic interaction with victims to resentful detachment from Jewish suffering. Whereas some defied the dehumanization of the Jews and endeavored to maintain intersubjective relationships with the victims they attempted to rescue, others selfdeceptively evaded the Jewish plight. The Ethics of Witnessing examines the extent to which ideologies of humanism and nationalism informed the diarists’ perceptions, proposing that the reality of the Final Solution exposed the limits of both orientations and ultimately destroyed the ethical landscape shaped by the Enlightenment tradition, which promised the equality and fellowship of all human beings.
Endorsements: "This book is a study of the Holocaust as problem in ethical theory. How could a whole society participate in an ethic of mass torture and genocide for over a decade without opposition from responsible political, legal, medical, or religious leaders? How does a society create and adopt its ethical norms? This is a study in narrative ethics at its best, yet the author's purpose is to discover how a people redefined evil to the degree that they committed heinous atrocities that were reprehensible under normal circumstances." --Guy Greenfield, Southwestern Journal of Theology "Peter Haas gives us a good overall description of the Holocaust, the way the Nazis and their myriad collaborators treated the Jews. The book . . . is well formulated and well written. It makes a good one-volume introduction to the Holocaust." --Frederick K. Wentz, Lutheran Quarterly "Peter Haas urges us to recognize ourselves in the perpetrators of the Holocaust. . . . In the course of setting forth his position, the author offers a concise and wonderfully accessible account of the formation of German political culture from Bismarck through Hitler. . . . Morality After Auschwitz is a serious book that should provoke long thoughts, and perhaps useful disputes, about the power of ethics to shape political cultures." --First Things
Talking about the Holocaust has provided an international language for ethics, victimization, political claims, and constructions of collective identity. As part of a worldwide vocabulary, that language helps set the tenor of the era of globalization. This volume addresses manifestations of Holocaust-engendered global discourse by critically examining their function and inherent dilemmas, and the ways in which Holocaust-related matters still instigate public debate and academic deliberation. It contends that the contradiction between the totalizing logic of globalization and the assumed uniqueness of the Holocaust generates continued intellectual and practical discontent.
Over the last seventy years, memories and narratives of the Holocaust have played a significant role in constructing Jewish communities. The author explores one field where these narratives are disseminated: Holocaust pedagogy in Jewish schools in Melbourne and New York. Bringing together a diverse range of critical approaches, including memory studies, gender studies, diaspora theory, and settler colonial studies, Anxious Histories complicates the stories being told about the Holocaust in these Jewish schools and their broader communities. It demonstrates that an anxious thread runs throughout these historical narratives, as the pedagogy negotiates feelings of simultaneous belonging and not-belonging in the West and in Zionism. In locating that anxiety, the possibilities and the limitations of narrating histories of the Holocaust are opened up once again for analysis, critique, discussion, and development.
Genocide murders innocents in a society, and it leaves behind moral corruption and societal twistedness. A genocide like the Holocaust can happen only if the normative ethical commitments to honor the fundamental right to life are compromised or abandoned. When a society lives through a genocide, the moral imagination of peoples and collectives, their ethical behaviors, and even the underlying social contract become twisted and broken. Societies and individuals caught within a genocide need an ethical rehabilitation to move a post-genocidal society out of its ethical degradation. This book discusses the steps of transitional justice as ethical ways to move individuals and societies away from lingering injustices and toward an equilibrium of justice. Paul E. Wilson is a faculty member and Program Coordinator for Shaw University, where he has taught religion and philosophy classes for the past thirty-two years. His monograph, The Degradation of Ethics Through the Holocaust, was published by Palgrave in 2023.
The controversial journalistic analysis of the mentality that fostered the Holocaust, from the author of The Origins of Totalitarianism Sparking a flurry of heated debate, Hannah Arendt’s authoritative and stunning report on the trial of German Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann first appeared as a series of articles in The New Yorker in 1963. This revised edition includes material that came to light after the trial, as well as Arendt’s postscript directly addressing the controversy that arose over her account. A major journalistic triumph by an intellectual of singular influence, Eichmann in Jerusalem is as shocking as it is informative—an unflinching look at one of the most unsettling (and unsettled) issues of the twentieth century.
In this moving account of the life, work, and ethics of four Jewish women intellectuals in the world of the Holocaust, Rachel Feldhay Brenner explores the ways in which these women sought to maintain their faith in humanity while aware of intensifying destruction. She argues that through their written responses of autobiographical self-assertion, Edith Stein, Simone Weil, Anne Frank, and Etty Hillesum resisted the Nazi terror in ways that defy its horrifying dehumanization. Personal identity crises engendered the intellectual-spiritual acts of autobiographical self-searching for each of these women. About to become a nun in 1933, Edith Stein embarked on her autobiography as a daughter of a Jewish family. Fleeing France and deportation in 1942, Simone Weil examined her inner struggle with faith and the Church in her "Spiritual Autobiography." Hiding for more than two years in the attic, Anne Frank poignantly confided in her diary about her efforts to become a better person. Having volunteered as a social worker in Westerbork, Etty Hillesum searched her soul for love in the reality of terror. In each case, autobiographical writing becomes an act of defiance that asserts humanity in a dehumanized/dehumanizing world. By focusing on the four women's accomplishments as intellectuals, writers, and thinkers, Brenner's account liberates them from other posthumous treatments that depict them as symbols of altruism, sanctity, and victimization. Her approach also elucidates the particular predicament of Western Jewish intellectuals who trusted the ideals of the Enlightenment and believed in human fellowship. While suffering the terror of physical annihilation decreed by the Final Solution, these Jews had to contend with their exclusion from the world that they considered theirs. On yet another level, this study of four extraordinary life stories contributes to a deeper understanding of the postwar development of ethical, theological, and feminist thought. In showing concern about a world that had ceased to care for them, Stein, Weil, Frank, and Hillesum demonstrated that the meaning of human existence consisted in the responsibility for the other, in the protection of the suffering God, in the primary value of relatedness through empathy. Arguing that their ethical tenets anticipated the thought of such postwar thinkers as Levinas, Fackenheim, Tillich, Arendt, and Nodding, Brenner proposes that the breakup of the humanist tradition of the Enlightenment in the Holocaust engendered the postwar exploration of humanist potential in self-givenness to the other.
Most current talk of forgiveness and reconciliation in the aftermath of collective violence proceeds from an assumption that forgiveness is always superior to resentment and refusal to forgive. Victims who demonstrate a willingness to forgive are often celebrated as virtuous moral models, while those who refuse to forgive are frequently seen as suffering from a pathology. Resentment is viewed as a negative state, held by victims who are not "ready" or "capable" of forgiving and healing. Resentment's Virtue offers a new, more nuanced view. Building on the writings of Holocaust survivor Jean Améry and the work of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Thomas Brudholm argues that the preservation of resentment can be the reflex of a moral protest that might be as permissible, humane or honorable as the willingness to forgive. Taking into account the experiences of victims, the findings of truth commissions, and studies of mass atrocities, Brudholm seeks to enrich the philosophical understanding of resentment.
Surveying irreverent and controversial representations of the Holocaust - from Sylvia Plath and the Sex Pistols to Quentin Tarantino and Holocaust comedy - Matthew Boswell considers how they might play an important role in shaping our understanding of the Nazi genocide and what it means to be human.
