The modes in which historical research is being shaped have become themselves topics of research. Holocaust historiography - the documentation, depiction and analysis of one of the most horrific events in human history - is today a wide ranging academic field in which Jewish and non-Jewish scholars throughout the world are active. But how did this historiography, especially its Jewish aspect, emerge and by what factors was it shaped? This volume examines the very beginnings of the effort to apply scholarly standards to the understanding of the Holocaust - when World War II was still raging and immediately after it had ended.

"On the one hand, then, this is traditional historiography: the history of history writing. On the other hand, the problem is approached via recent work in the philosophy of history, closely analysing historical works as texts. This is an interdisciplinary study that brings to bear on historiography the kind of textual analysis usually reserved for fiction, testimony, or film." "The Holocaust, precisely because it throws into doubt older methodologies, demands the search for new ones. Showing how Holocaust historians inadvertently and paradoxically reinscribe into the wider culture patterns of thought that the Holocaust repudiated, Constructing the Holocaust tries to respond to the Holocaust in a way that recognises its potential impact on usually unquestioned beliefs and unspoken methodological assumptions."--BOOK JACKET.

This book is timely and necessary and often extremely challenging. It brings together an impressive cast of scholars, spanning several academic generations. Anyone interested in writing about the Holocaust should read this book and consider the implications of what is written here for their own work. There seems to me little doubt that Holocaust history writing stands at something of a cross roads, and the ways forward that this volume points to are extremely thought provoking. -- Tom Lawson, University of Winchester.

This collection of essays by leading scholars in their fields provides the most comprehensive and up-to-date survey of Holocaust historiography available. Covering both long-established historical disputes as well as research questions and methodologies that have developed in the last decade's massive growth in Holocaust Studies, this collection will be of enormous benefit to students and scholars alike.

This ePaper, History and Memory: lessons from the Holocaust, presents the original text of the Leçon inaugurale delivered by Professor Saul Friedländer on 23 September 2014 at the Maison de la Paix, which marked the opening of the academic year of the Graduate Institute, Geneva. The lecture highlights an original analysis of the evolution of German memory since the end of World War II and its consequences on the writing of history. Generations of historians have been particularly marked in a differentiated manner, depending on their personal proximity to the war, but also on collective representations conveyed by film and television in a globalised world. Saul Friedländer is Emeritus Professor at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA). He won numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize in 2008 for his book The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945. In 1963, he received his PhD from the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva, where he taught until 1988.

Holocaust and Human Behavior uses readings, primary source material, and short documentary films to examine the challenging history of the Holocaust and prompt reflection on our world today

A collection of articles, lectures, and reviews, some of them published previously. Includes some material not published in the Hebrew version, and some which appeared only in the French or German version. Partial contents:

A comprehensive assessment of Holocaust literature, from World War II to the present day