Dire Times by Dan Diner
Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 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 – 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 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, and 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 and from Western- and Eurocentric approaches to 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) by Dan Diner
Munich: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 2021
The book provides a geopolitical anatomy of the Second World War, centering on Jewish Palestine — situated at the intersection of European/continental and non-European/colonial perception. While taking the unfamiliar perspective of south to north over that of west to east, it nevertheless merges both horizons. The narrative focuses on the period between the Italian Abyssinia War in 1935 and the fateful battles of El-Alamain and Stalingrad in 1942. It considers different forms of violence perpetrated in warfare and beyond and assesses their bearings and repercussions in material reality as well as in public memory.
Nationalbesitzstand und “Wiedergutmachung”: Zur historischen Semantik sudetendeutscher Kampfbegriffe (National Ownership and “Wiedergutmachung”: Historical Semantics of Sudeten German Combat Terms) by Iris Nachum
Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2021, Veröffentlichungen des Collegium Carolinum, Vol. 142
The book deals with the origins of the Sudeten German demand for reparations from Czechoslovakia. Using Reinhart Koselleck’s conceptual history approach as well as historical discourse analysis, the book demonstrates that the Sudeten German redress claims against Czechoslovakia (and 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. The book further shows that Sudeten German compensation rhetoric is rooted in the conflict over national ownership in the 19th-century Habsburg Empire and is thus an outcome of the German nationalization project. Intriguingly, the book unearths the fact that leaders of the German minority demanding compensation included liberals of Jewish origin who identified as members of the (Sudeten) German nation.
A book review by Oskar Mulej, Institute for Eastern European History, University of Vienna on I. Nachum: Nationalbesitzstand und "Wiedergutmachung“
hsozkult.de, 22.12.2023
For the book review on Iris Nachum, Nationalbesitzstand und "Wiedergutmachung", click here