Reckonings - Fulbrook, Mary

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Résumé :
A single word - Auschwitz - is often used to encapsulate the totality of persecution and suffering involved in what we call the Holocaust. Yet a focus on a single concentration camp - however horrific what happened there, however massively catastrophic its scale - leaves an incomplete story, a truncated history. It cannot fully communicate the myriad ways in which individuals became tangled up on the side of the perpetrators, and obscures the diversity of experiences among a wide range of victims as they struggled and died, or managed, against all odds, to survive. In the process, we also miss the continuing legacy of Nazi persecution across generations, and across continents.

Mary Fulbrook's encompassing book attempts to expand our understanding, exploring the lives of individuals across a full spectrum of suffering and guilt, each one capturing one small part of the greater story. At its heart, Reckonings seeks to expose the disjuncture between official myths about dealing with the past, on the one hand, and the extent to which the vast majority of Nazi perpetrators evaded justice, on the other. In the successor states to the Third Reich-East Germany, West Germany, and Austria - the attempts at justice varied widely in the years and decades after 1945. The Communist East German state pursued Nazi criminals and handed down severe sentences...

Biographie:
Mary Fulbrook is Professor of German History at University College London and the author of the Fraenkel Prize-winning A Small Town near Auschwitz: Ordinary Nazis and the Holocaust.

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Sommaire:

• 1: Introduction: The significance of the Nazi Past


• Part I. Chasms: Patterns of Persectuion


• 2: The Explosion of State-Sponsored Violence


• 3: Institutionalized Murder


• 4: Microcosms of Violence: Polish Prisms


• 5: Endpoint: The Machinery of Extermination


• 6: Defining Experiences


• 7: Silence and Communication


• Part II. Confrontations: Landscapes of the Law


• 8: Transitional Justics


• 9: Judging Their Own: Selective Justice in the Successor States


• 10: From Euthanasia to Genocide


• 11: Major Concentration Camp Trials: Auschwitz and Beyonc


• 12: The Diffraction of Guilt


• 13: Late, Too Late


• Part III. Connections: Memories and Explorations


• 14: Hearing the Voices of Victims


• 15: Making Sense of the Past, Living for the Present


• 16: Discomfort Zones


• 17: The Sins of the Fathers


• 18: The Long Shdows of Persecution


• 19: Oblivion and Memorialization


• Conclusions


• 20: A Resonant Past