Foundational Pasts
The Holocaust as Historical Understanding

Compares Holocaust research with interpretations of the French Revolution to reveal new insights into what made the persecution of Jews possible.

Alon Confino (Author)

9780521516655, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 26 September 2011

192 pages, 1 b/w illus.
23.6 x 15.9 x 1.4 cm, 0.39 kg

'Confino's short Foundational Pasts is a masterpiece, a sublime and thought-provoking book which challenges us to think differently not just about the Holocaust but about the ways in which we conceptualize history.' Journal of Contemporary History

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.

1. Between the French Revolution and the Holocaust: events that represent an age
2. A dominant interpretive framework
3. Narrative form and historical sensation
4. Beginnings and endings
5. The totality and limits of historical context
6. Contingency, the essence of history
7. Ideology, race, and culture.

Subject Areas: The Holocaust [HBTZ1], 20th century history: c 1900 to c 2000 [HBLW], European history [HBJD]