Foundational Pasts : The Holocaust as Historical Understanding

Alon Confino interprets the Holocaust by focusing on the culture that allowed the Germans to imagine a world without Jews. Confino compares Holocaust research with historians' interpretations of the French Revolution and pinpoints aspects of Nazi and German imagination that made the persecution and extermination both conceivable and possible.

Alon Confino seeks to rethink dominant interpretations of the Holocaust by examining it as a problem in cultural history. As the main research interests of Holocaust scholars are frequently covered terrain – the anti-Semitic ideological campaign, the machinery of killing, the brutal massacres during the war – Confino''s research goes in a new direction. He analyzes the culture and sensibilities that made it possible for the Nazis and other Germans to imagine the making of a world without Jews. Confino seeks these insights from the ways historians interpreted another short, violent and foundational event in modern European history – the French Revolution. The comparison of the ways we understand the Holocaust with scholars'' interpretations of the French Revolution allows Confino to question some of the basic assumptions of present-day historians concerning historical narration, explanation and understanding.