Dan Diner
Dire Times, Magnes Press, Jerusalem 2022.
This book collects rewritten articles and essays by the author related first and foremost, but not exclusively, to the catastrophe of the Holocaust as an epistemic crisis – qualified as a “rupture in civilization”, i.e. the destruction of concepts deeply rooted in a common anthropology of humankind, while focusing on methodological as well as conceptual questions.
The composition of the volume runs roughly chronologically along several layers of interpretation – embracing questions of German constitutional law, the formation of Continental expansionist geopolitical thinking, the epistemology of the Holocaust, the assertion and transformation of paradigms of historical interpretation in the second half of the 20th century, especially the turn from social history to memory studies, as well as the turn from a Western- and Eurocentric approaches into the direction of colonial and global history.
Ein anderer Krieg: Das jüdische Palästina und der Zweite Weltkrieg 1935-1942 (The Other War: Jewish Palestine and World War II, 1935-1942), Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Munich 2021.
The bo
ok tells the geopolitical anatomy of the Second World War. An unfamiliar perspective is taken: the narrator looks substantially from south to north, in a subordinate way from west to east. Nevertheless, both horizons are merged into one another, focusing on different forms of violence executed during warfare and beyond, while trying to judge their bearings and repercussions in material reality as well as in public memory. Jewish Palestine, situated at the intersection of European-continental and non-European colonial perception, serves as an insightful hub of understanding and meaning for such an epistemological fusion. Its geographical location at the extreme north-western tip of imperial British rule in Asia always calls India as a reference to the overall spatial narrative that finds its core period in 1935/1942 – between the Italian Abyssinia War and the fateful battles of El-Alamain and Stalingrad.
Nationalbesitzstand und “Wiedergutmachung”: Zur historischen Semantik sudetendeutscher Kampfbegriffe (National Ownership and “Wiedergutmachung”: Historical Semantics of Sudeten German Combat Terms), Veröffentlichungen des Collegium Carolinum, Vol. 142, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2021.
The book deals with the origin of the Sudeten German demands for reparation against Czechoslovakia. Using Reinhart Koselleck’s “history of concepts approach” as well as “historical discourse analysis”, the book presents three new insights: (a) The Sudeten German redress claims against Czechoslovakia/the Czech Republic after 1989 were not a new invention. Rather, Germans in Czechoslovakia had already demanded compensation (Wiedergutmachung) from Prague for damages to their national assets at the end of World War I and throughout the interwar period. (b) The Sudeten German compensation rhetoric is rooted in the conflict over national ownership in the 19 th -century Habsburg Empire and is thus an outcome of the German nationalization project.Among the leaders of the German minority in Czechoslovakia, who demanded compensation from Prague after 1918, were liberals of Jewish origin who identified as members of the (Sudeten) German nation.