Collected Memories: Holocaust History and Postwar Testimony

by Christopher R. Browning

Overview

    Christopher R. Browning addresses some of the most heated controversies that have arisen from the use of postwar testimony: Hannah Arendt’s uncritical acceptance of Adolf Eichmann’s self-portrayal in Jerusalem; the conviction of Ivan Demjanuk (accused of being Treblinka death camp guard "Ivan the Terrible") on the basis of survivor testimony and its subsequent reversal by the Israeli Supreme Court; the debate in Poland sparked by Jan Gross’s use of both survivor and communist courtroom testimony in his book Neighbors; and the conflict between Browning himself and Daniel Goldhagen, author of Hitler’s Willing Executioners, regarding methodology and interpretation in the use of pre-trial testimony.
    Despite these controversies and challenges, Browning delineates the ways in which the critical use of such problematic sources can provide telling evidence for writing Holocaust history. He examines and discusses two starkly different sets of "collected memories"—the voluminous testimonies of notorious Holocaust perpetrator Adolf Eichmann and the testimonies of 175 survivors of an obscure complex of factory slave labor camps in the Polish town of Starachowice.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780299189839
Publisher:	University of Wisconsin Press
Publication date:	11/24/2003
Series:	George L. Mosse Series in the History of European Culture, Sexuality, and Ideas
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	120
File size:	550 KB

About the Author

Christopher R. Browning is the Frank Porter Graham Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and author of many books, including Ordinary Men, The Path to Genocide, and Nazi Policy, Jewish Workers, German Killers. In 2002 he delivered at the University of Wisconsin–Madison the first of the George L. Mosse Lectures, upon which this book is based

Table of Contents

<table of contents, p. vii> Contents Preface 000 1. Perpetrator Testimony: Another Look at Adolf Eichmann 000 2.Survivor Testimonies from Starachowice: Writing the History of a Factory Slave Labor Camp 000 3. Survivor Testimonies from Starachowice: The Final Days 000 Notes 000

Library of Congress Subject Headings for this publication: Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945) Historiography, Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945) Personal narratives, Memory, Eichmann, Adolf, 1906-1962