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Alon Confino seeks to rethink dominant interpretations of the Holocaust by examining it as a problem in cultural history. As the main research interests of Holocaust scholars are frequently covered terrain the anti-Semitic ideological campaign, the machinery of killing, the brutal massacres during the war Confino's research goes in a new direction. He analyzes the culture and sensibilities that made it possible for the Nazis and other Germans to imagine the making of a world without Jews. Confino seeks these insights from the ways historians interpreted another short, violent, and foundational event in modern European history the French Revolution. The comparison of the ways we understand the Holocaust with scholars' interpretations of the French Revolution allows Confino to question some of the basic assumptions of present-day historians concerning historical narration, explanation, and understanding.

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9786613341006

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The Nazis claimed to replace the ideas of 1789 with those of 1933. Provocatively using the French Revolution as a historical foil, Alon Confino contends that the Nazis exterminationist fantasy about Jews was at once rooted in German-Christian culture and a revolutionary attempt to inaugurate a new temporal order. This erudite, calm, and accessible meditation challenges contemporary explanations of the Holocaust by showing that, while genocide may be rationally approached, its irrationality and emotionality threaten to elude our analytical grasp. A. Dirk Moses, European University Institute

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