Perpetration and Complicity under Nazism and Beyond analyses perpetration and complicity under National Socialism and beyond. Contributors based in the UK, the USA, Canada, Germany, Israel and Chile reflect on self-understandings, representations and narratives of involvement in collective violence both at the time and later – a topic that remains highly relevant today.
Using the notion of ‘compromised identities’ to think about contentious questions relating to empathy and complicity, this inter-disciplinary collection addresses the complex relationships between people’s behaviours and self-understandings through and beyond periods of collective violence. Contributors explore the compromises that individuals, states and societies enter into both during and after such violence.
Case studies highlight patterns of complicity and involvement in perpetration, and analyse how people’s stories evolve under changing circumstances and through social interaction, using varying strategies of justification, denial and rationalisation. Each chapter also considers the ways in which contemporary responses and scholarly practices may be affected by engagement with perpetrator representations.
List of Contributors
Acknowledgements
1 Introduction
Stephanie Bird, Mary Fulbrook, Stefanie Rauch, and Bastiaan Willems
Part I Theorizing Ambiguity, Compromise and Complexity
2 ‘Compromised Identities?’, Ageing Perpetrators and Compromising Forgiveness Stephanie Bird
3 Conformity, compliance, and complicity: ‘Ordinary People’ and the Holocaust
Mary Fulbrook
4 Complicities, Re-presented: Literary Portrayals in Totalitarianism and Neoliberalism Juliane Prade-Weiss
5 In Search of the Bystander: Some reflections on the ‘social turn’ in Holocaust studies and its Ramifications
Christina Morina
Part II Confrontations with Violence
6 Studying East European Perpetrators: The Case of Belarus
Leonid Rein
7 Compromising roles: German actresses in German-occupied Minsk
Anne-Lise Bobeldijk
8 Gender and Transgressive Violence in Postwar Accounts
Stefanie Rauch
9 Israeli National Narratives, Complicity, and Activism: Noam Chayut’s The Girl who Stole my Holocaust and Breaking the Silence
Nina Fischer
Part III Law, Complicity and Perpetration
10 The Constitutive Role of Nazi Law: Constructing Complicity in the Third Reich
Simon Lavis
11 Public execution in your community: The summary courts of 1945 Germany
Bastiaan Willems
12 Excess and Normality: West German and Austrian Media and Nazi Crimes Trials from the 1960s to the 1980s
Christoph Thonfeld
13 Pinochet’s Accomplices: perpetration, complicity, and institutional culpability before the Chilean court
Francisco Bustos, Cath Collins, and Francisco Ugas
Part IV Framing the Past
14 Perpetrator Memory and the Fascist Exile in Argentina: A Case Study
Zoltán Kékesi
15 Complicity versus Cooperation: Zygmunt Bauman’s Modernity and the Holocaust and Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah and its Outtakes
Sue Vice
16 Challenging the Museum Visitor? Complicity and Perpetration during and beyond the Second World War in Contemporary Museum Exhibitions
Stephan Jaeger
17 ‘Compromised Identities? Reflections on Perpetration and Complicity under Nazi Rule’. An Exhibition
Stephanie Bird, Mary Fulbrook, Stefanie Rauch, and Bastiaan Willems
18 Conclusion
Stephanie Bird, Mary Fulbrook, Stefanie Rauch, and Bastiaan Willems
Index
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