Geschichtsoptimismus und Katastrophenbewusstsein

Current controversies about the "singularity of the Holocaust" often overlook the fact that it took some time after 1945 for the murder of European Jews to penetrate the consciousness of European societies. This anthology investigates the reasons for this by presenting the memory history of the Holocaust with the political history and history of ideas of the Cold War. The German and English-language contributions do not simply trace the belated history of reception or the official culture of remembrance in various European countries. Rather, they focus on the question of the latent effect of the event, which was essentially determined by national peculiarities, and approach these country-specific constellations via paradigmatic biographies of the political left.The volume thus not only offers an innovative approach to the historicization of the 1950s and 1960s, but also achieves one Contribution to the current discussion about the possibility of a multi-perspective memory.

Current controversies about the "singularity of the Holocaust" often overlook the fact that it took some time after 1945 for the murder of European Jews to penetrate the consciousness of European societies. This anthology investigates the reasons for this by presenting the memory history of the Holocaust with the political history and history of ideas of the Cold War. The German and English-language contributions do not simply trace the belated history of reception or the official culture of remembrance in various European countries. Rather, they focus on the question of the latent effect of the event, which was essentially determined by national peculiarities, and approach these country-specific constellations via paradigmatic biographies of the political left.The volume thus not only offers an innovative approach to the historicization of the 1950s and 1960s, but also achieves one Contribution to the current discussion about the possibility of a multi-perspective memory.