Reading the Holocaust

This 2002 book explores the Holocaust from both the victims' and the perpetrators' points of view.

Inga Clendinnen (Author)

9780521012690, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 2 May 2002

238 pages, 7 b/w illus. 1 map
21.6 x 13.8 x 1.7 cm, 0.288 kg

'... this is an important, insightful, superbly written meditation on a sorrow beyond words, well worth the attention of outsiders and insiders alike.' New York Times Book Review

More than fifty years after their occurrence, the events of the Holocaust remain for some of their most dedicated students as morally and intellectually baffling, as 'unthinkable', as they were at their first rumouring. Reading the Holocaust, first published in 2002, challenges that bafflement, and the demoralization that attends it. Exploring the experience of the Holocaust from both the victims' and the perpetrators' points of view, as it appears in histories and memoirs, films and poems, Inga Clendinnen seeks to dispel what she calls the 'Gorgon effect': the sickening of imagination and curiosity and the draining of the will that afflict so many of us when we try to look squarely at the persons and processes implicated in the Holocaust. Searching, eloquent and elegantly written, her book is an uncompromising attempt to extract the comprehensible from the unthinkable.

1. Beginning
2. Impediments
Part I. Victims: 3. Witnessing
4. Resisting
Part II. Perpetrators: 5. Defining: inside the grey zone: the Auschwitz Sonderkommando
6. Leaders
7. The men in the green tunics: the order police in Poland
8. The Auschwitz SS
9. Representing the Holocaust.

Subject Areas: Second World War [HBWQ], The Holocaust [HBTZ1], European history [HBJD], Literary studies: general [DSB]