Murder in Our Midst: The Holocaust, Industrial Killing, and RepresentationWar endlessly tries to mask itself. The myth of the heroic soldier testing his individual courage stands in stark contrast to the reality of mass, anonymous death and the suppression of individual actions. Murder in Our Midst shows that this fundamental tension reached its natural conclusion in the Holocaust, and that disguising it has required an ongoing effort to misrepresent war and the Holocaust as something other than industrial killing. Examining a broad range of the representations of war's horrors, from scholarly depictions to those in popular literature, poetry, art, and the movies, Omer Bartov finds they have some things in common. Societies and cultures have attempted to form coherent images of horrific events, to draw didactic lessons from them, and to exploit them to legitimate ideological or political positions. Made up of interconnected essays, this book is both a scholarly and an often personal and passionate examination of the emergence, implementation, and representation of industrial killing. Bartov draws out the links between recent revisionist attempts to minimize and deny the Holocaust, and Hollywood's ongoing fascination with National Socialism and Hitler's "Final Solution." Arguing that the modern predicament reflects the effects of the Nazi genocide on current perceptions of war, history, and memory, this book is a plea for compassion and commitment in an increasingly violent and indifferent world. |
Contents
| 3 | |
I Images of War and the Emergence of Industrial Killing | 13 |
Histories Memories Stories | 51 |
Visual Representations of Evil | 137 |
Other editions - View all
Murder in Our Midst: The Holocaust, Industrial Killing, and Representation Omer Bartov Limited preview - 1996 |
Murder in Our Midst: The Holocaust, Industrial Killing, and Representation Omer Bartov Limited preview - 1996 |
Common terms and phrases
Andreas Hillgruber antisemitism antiwar Arendt argue argument attempt Auschwitz authentic Bartov battle battlefield Broszat bureaucratic bystanders Cambridge Chapter cinematic civilization claim confrontation context course crimes crucial cultural death camps debate destruction Eastern Eastern Front Ernst Nolte essay Europe European event evil experience fact fascism fate fighting film Final Solution Finkielkraut France French Friedlander Front genocide German history Germany's Hanoch Bartov Harmondsworth Heimat hell Hence heroic heroism Hilberg Hillgruber Hillgruber's historians Historikerstreit Hitler Holocaust horror human Ibid idem ideology individual industrial killing intellectual Israel Israeli Jewish Jews Jünger Kaes Kluge's Langer least Levi London mass murder Memory and History military modern moral museum National Socialism Nazi Nazi Germany Nazism Nolte origins past perpetrators policies political postwar precisely present reality recent Red Army regime representation role Schindler's List scholars sense Shoah society soldiers Soviet survivors Third Reich tion victims viewers violence Wehrmacht Western Yad Vashem York