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With articles on cultural memory in Persian lands, debates regarding the memory of a Prussian slave trader, the role of humor in countering Holocaust denial, the soundscape of a national [...]

A literary criticism of the books "Foundational Pasts: The Holocaust as Historical Understanding" and "A World Without Jews: The Nazi Imagination From Persecution to Genocide" by Alon Confino is presented. The books focus on Holocaust historiography and antisemitic views of people during the Nazi regime in Germany. The author talks about Nazi racial discourse, Nazi persecution and relations between the Jews and Christians in Germany.

A literary criticism of the book "World Without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide" by Alon Confino is presented. It outlines the characters and explores the significance of these characters. It examines various topics including Holocaust, Nazi revolution and anti-Semitism. An overview of the story is also given.

An essay is presented on the French Revolution and its relation with the Holocaust, and historian Alon Confino's concept of foundational pasts. Topics discussed in the essay include Confino's argument that the French Revolution and the Holocaust create foundational pasts; Confino's study on the association between the French Revolution and mass violence; and Confino's views on the genocide of the Jews under the Nazi leadership.

ABSTRACT Alon Confino has issued a desideratum to other historians that they should bring questions and insights from cultural history to bear on the study of the Holocaust. Taking the work of Saul Friedländer as his point of departure, Confino nonetheless sets out on a path different from Friedländer's. He turns away from the goal of 'integrated history' and instead seeks to investigate the realm of German culture, understood as encompassing much more than just Nazi ideology. By analyzing how the Holocaust has come to be perceived as unprecedented, as a rupture in human history, and furthermore by treating Jewish victims' sense of disbelief as an artifact of the past, one that has continued to inform unduly the historical understanding of the Holocaust up to the present day, historians will be able to account anew for what made the persecution and extermination of Jews imaginable and thus possible. With Confino's approach, a major historiographical question resurfaces, however: namely, what place an analysis of non-Germans should occupy in the history of the Holocaust, and in particular what place should be accorded to Jewish voices? This essay argues that we cannot make sense of why Germans supported and carried out the Holocaust without also considering Jewish contemporaneous perspectives and imaginings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An interview with historians Monica Black, Jennifer Evans, Alon Confino, Jack Halberstam, Regina Mülhäuser, and Jürgen Zimmerer is presented. They discuss the ways in which cultural history has influenced scholarly discourse on the Jewish Holocaust of 1939-1945. Topics include oral history, the role of the Third Reich in German historiography, and European colonialism.

The article presents a review of several books about German history including "The Work of Memory. New Directions in the Study of German Society and Culture," by Alon Confino and Peter Fritzsche and "Pain and Prosperity. Reconsidering Twentieth Century German History," by Paul Betts and Greg Eghigian.

Brief profiles of scholars Alon Confino, Sara Jones, and Johannes Heuman, who contributed to the writing of the journal, are presented.