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Preface
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
Summary
Preface
In 2004, I was invited by Professor Milton Shain at Cape Town University to give the biennial Kaplan Holocaust Lectures. Those lectures represent the first time I formally combined my interest in German churches and German universities. They also represent the first time I began explicitly to consider the question of Holocaust complicity in relation to these two institutions. The following summer, Christopher Browning and I hosted a small conference in Gig Harbor, Washington, on the topic of “Future Directions in Holocaust Studies.” It was at this conference, funded by Zev Weiss and the Holocaust Education Foundation, that I began to ponder more seriously another question: If we try to identify complicity in the Holocaust, does that mean we are also identifying how not to be complicit? Does scholarship on the Holocaust imply a right, or even an obligation, to search for “lessons” of the Holocaust?
Anyone familiar with Holocaust education will recognize the ubiquity of this idea of lessons, whether in teaching children not to bully or teaching adults to value tolerance and oppose injustice. These are worthy goals. However, pieties in response to the Holocaust can become saccharine and simplistic. In the worst case, they can trivialize events and impede understanding. The Holocaust was horrific, probably beyond our understanding, and it likely has no “meaning” in any important sense of the word. Furthermore, anyone familiar with the norms of modern scholarship will detect another problem in the instrumental use of Holocaust education. Objectivity is an important expectation among scholars. Can that be reconciled with turning history into moral judgments or the pronouncement of moral lessons? The nineteenth-century German, Leopold von Ranke, set the standard for historians when he said we must describe history “as it actually was,” without letting our present concerns or points of view impinge.
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- Complicity in the HolocaustChurches and Universities in Nazi Germany, pp. xiii - xviiiPublisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2012