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Le but de ce travail est une tentative d'analyser la Shoah par l'intermédiaire de notions éthiques fondamentales. Dans ce livre, il apparaît que la notion essentielle de dignité s'avère insuffisante pour rendre compte de cet évènement historique ; c'est ainsi que les enjeux de décence et d'incarnation sont proposés pour complémenter cette analyse.Par ailleurs, ce travail mentionne aussi que la simple considération de négativité des buts nazis est aussi insuffisante pour qualifier la Shoah si bien qu'il est fait appel au concept kantien de négativité positive pour indiquer que des moyens éthiques négatifs furent mis au service de projets nazis grandioses mais fondamentalement malfaisants. Ces considérations éthiques devraient permettre de conférer un sens à de tels comportements si cruellement immoraux.

This volume on »Nazi ideology and ethics« documents the scholarly debate on the subject, ranging from texts that initiated the debate on Nazi ethics to the current scholarly discourse. It puts together texts by leading Holocaust scholars from Germany, the US. Great Britain, and Belgium who cover a variety of topics relevant for questions of Nazi ideology and ethics. Among other topics scholars from various disciplines of the humanities address memory politics, ethical aspects of Nazi ideology, and political mass murders in comparative perspective. It furthermore discusses implications of Nazi ideology and ethics for current ethical issues and challenges.

In the vein of Tuesdays with Morrie, a devoted student and friend of Holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace Prize recipient Elie Wiesel invites readers to witness one of the world's greatest thinkers in his own classroom in this instructive and deeply moving read, a National Jewish Book Award–winner. The world remembers Elie Wiesel (1928–2016) as a Nobel laureate, activist, and author of more than forty books, including Oprah's Book Club selection Night. Ariel Burger met Wiesel when he was a teenage student, eager to learn Wiesel's life lessons. Witness chronicles the intimate conversations between these two men as Burger sought Wiesel's counsel on matters of intellect, faith, and survival while navigating his own personal journey from boyhood to manhood, from student and assistant to rabbi and teacher. In this thought-provoking account, Burger brings the spirit of Wiesel's classroom to life, where the art of storytelling and the act of listening conspire to make witnesses of us all—as it does for readers of this inspiring book as well.

In Repentance for the Holocaust, C. K. Martin Chung develops the biblical idea of'turning'(tshuvah) into a conceptual framework to analyze a particular area of contemporary German history, commonly referred to as Vergangenheitsbewältigung or'coming to terms with the past.'Chung examines a selection of German responses to the Nazi past, their interaction with the victims'responses, such as those from Jewish individuals, and their correspondence with biblical repentance. In demonstrating the victims'influence on German responses, Chung asserts that the phenomenon of Vergangenheitsbewältigung can best be understood in a relational, rather than a national, paradigm. By establishing the conformity between those responses to past atrocities and the idea of'turning,'Chung argues that the religious texts from the Old Testament encapsulating this idea (especially the Psalms of Repentance) are viable intellectual resources for dialogues among victims, perpetrators, bystanders, and their descendants in the discussion of guilt and responsibility, justice and reparation, remembrance and reconciliation. It is a great irony that after Nazi Germany sought to eliminate each and every single Jew within its reach, postwar Germans have depended on the Jewish device of repentance as a feasible way out of their unparalleled national catastrophe and unprecedented spiritual ruin.

If you are a bystander and witness a crime, should intervention to prevent that crime be a legal obligation? Or is moral responsibility enough? In The Crime of Complicity, Amos N. Guiora addresses these profoundly important questions and the bystander-victim relationship from a deeply personal and legal perspective, focusing on the Holocaust and then exploring cases in contemporary society. Sharing the experiences of his parents, who were Holocaust survivors, and his grandparents, who did not survive, and drawing on a wide range of historical material and interviews, Guiora examines the bystander during three distinct events: death marches, the German occupation of Holland, and the German occupation of Hungary. He explains that while the Third Reich created policy, its implementation was dependent on bystander non-intervention. Bringing the issue of intervention into current perspective, he examines sexual assault cases at Vanderbilt and Stanford Universities, as well as other crimes where bystanders chose whether or not to intervene, and the resulting consequences. After examining the intensely personal example of his own parents'survival of the Holocaust, Guiora asserts that a society cannot rely on morals and compassion alone in determining our obligation to help another in danger. It is ultimately, he concludes, a legal issue. Should we make the obligation to intervene the law, and thus non-intervention a crime?

In The Genocide Contagion, Israel W. Charny asks uncomfortable questions about what allows people to participate in genocide—either directly, through killing or other violent acts, or indirectly, by sitting passively while witnessing genocidal acts. Charny draws on both historical and current examples such as the Holocaust and the Armenian Genocide, and presses readers around the world to consider how they might contribute to genocide. Given the number of people who die from genocide or suffer indirect consequences such as forced migration, Charny argues that we must all work to resist and to learn about ourselves before critical moments arise.

How should one respond, personally or theologically, to genocide committed on one's behalf? After the Allied bombing of Darmstadt, Germany, in 1944, some Lutheran young women perceived their city's destruction as an expression of God's wrath-a punishment for Hitler's murder of six million Jews, purportedly on behalf of the German people. George Faithful tells the story of a number of these young women, who formed the Ecumenical Sisterhood of Mary in 1947 in order to embrace lives of radical repentance for the sins of the German people against God and against the Jews. Under Mother Basilea Schlink, the sisters embraced an ideology of collective national guilt. According to Schlink, a handful of true Christians were called to lead their nation in repentance, interceding and making spiritual sacrifices as priests on its behalf and saving it from looming destruction. Schlink explained that these ideas were rooted in her reading of the Hebrew Bible; in fact, Faithful discovers, they also bore the influence of German nationalism. Schlink's vision resulted in penitential practices that dominated the life of her community. While the women of the sisterhood were subject to each other, they elevated themselves and their spiritual authority above that of any male leaders. They offered female and gender-neutral paradigms of self-sacrifice as normative for all Christians. Mothering the Fatherland shows how the sisters overturned German Protestant norms for gender roles, communal life, and nationalism in their pursuit of redemption.

Schlagworte der seit den neunziger Jahren geführten globalen Diskussion über'Wiedergutmachung'sind Historical Justice und Transitional Justice. Von diesem Diskurs wurden Politik und Praxis der deutschen Entschädigung für NS-Verfolgte beeinflusst. In eingängigen Fallstudien zeigen deutsche und israelische Zeithistoriker, wie sich neue Akteure und Experten - z.B. große Unternehmen, der Kunsthandel, Vertriebenenverbände, aber auch die Historiker selbst - im Lauf der letzten zwei Jahrzehnte in diesem Feld verhalten haben, wie die Dominanz eines'amerikanisierten'Rechtsdiskurses die Wiedergutmachung verändert hat und welche Rolle internationale Konferenzen dabei spielten. Der Band schließt mit einem Gespräch über die'Moral'von sechs Jahrzehnten Wiedergutmachungspolitik, an dem sich prominente Denker aus den USA, Israel, Österreich und Deutschland beteiligten. Dabei werden provokante Positionen zu Schuld und Schulden, Pflichten und Verantwortung und zu den Aufgaben von Staat und Gesellschaft deutlich.

Different Horrors, Same Hell brings together a variety of essays demonstrating the breadth of contributions that feminist theory and gender analysis make to the study of the Holocaust. The collection provides new perspectives on central works of Holocaust scholarship and representation, from the books of Hannah Arendt and Ruth Klüger to films such as Claude Lanzmann's Shoah and Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List. Interviews with survivors and their descendants draw new attention to the significance of women's roles and family structures during and in the aftermath of the Holocaust, and interviews and archival research reveal the undercurrents of sexual violence within the Final Solution. As Doris Bergen shows in the book's first chapter, the focus on women's and gender issues in this collection'complicates familiar and outworn categories, and humanizes the past in powerful ways.'

In Disappearing Traces, Dorota Glowacka examines the tensions between the ethical and aesthetic imperatives in literary, artistic, and philosophical works about the Holocaust, in a search for new ways to understand the traumatic past and its impact on the present. She engages with the work of leading 20th-century philosophers and theorists, including Levinas, Benjamin, Lyotard, and Derrida, to consider the role of language in the construction and transmission of traumatic memories; the relation between self-identity and the act of bearing witness; and the ethical implications of representing trauma.Glowacka's work draws on a wide range of discourses and disciplines, bringing into conversation various genres of writing and artistic production. It reveals the need to find innovative idioms and new means of engaging with the past, and to create alliances between different disciplines and modes of representing the past that transform and transcend existing paradigms of representation.

The Silesian town of Bedzin lies a mere twenty-five miles from Auschwitz; through the linked ghettos of Bedzin and its neighbouring town, some 85,000 Jews passed on their way to slave labour or the gas chambers. The principal civilian administrator of Bedzin, Udo Klausa, was a happily married family man. He was also responsible for implementing Nazi policies towards the Jews in his area - inhumane processes that were the precursors of genocide. Yet he later claimed, like so many other Germans after the war, that he had'known nothing about it'; and that he had personally tried to save a Jew before he himself managed to leave for military service. A Small Town Near Auschwitz re-creates Udo Klausa's story. Using a wealth of personal letters, memoirs, testimonies, interviews and other sources, Mary Fulbrook pieces together his role in the unfolding stigmatization and degradation of the Jews under his authoritiy, as well as the heroic attempts at resistance on the part of some of his victims. She also gives us a fascinating insight into the inner conflicts of a Nazi functionary who, throughout, considered himself a'decent'man. And she explores the conflicting memories and evasions of his life after the war. But the book is much more than a portrayal of an individual man. Udo Klausa's case is so important because it is in many ways so typical. Behind Klausa's story is the larger story of how countless local functionaries across the Third Reich facilitated the murderous plans of a relatively small number among the Nazi elite - and of how those plans could never have been realized, on the same scale, without the diligent cooperation of these generally very ordinary administrators. As Fulbrook shows, men like Klausa'knew'and yet mostly suppressed this knowledge, performing their day jobs without apparent recognition of their own role in the system, or any sense of personal wrongdoing or remorse - either before or after 1945. This account is no ordinary historical reconstruction. For Fulbrook did not discover Udo Klausa amongst the archives. She has known the Klausa family all her life. She had no inkling of her subject's true role in the Third Reich until a few years ago, a discovery that led directly to this inescapably personal professional history.

For the last decade scholars have been questioning the idea that the Holocaust was not talked about in any way until well into the 1970s. After the Holocaust: Challenging the Myth of Silence is the first collection of authoritative, original scholarship to expose a serious misreading of the past on which, controversially, the claims for a ‘Holocaust industry'rest. Taking an international approach this bold new book exposes the myth and opens the way for a sweeping reassessment of Jewish life in the postwar era, a life lived in the pervasive, shared awareness that Jews had narrowly survived a catastrophe that had engulfed humanity as a whole but claimed two-thirds of their number.The chapters include: an overview of the efforts by survivor historians and memoir writers to inform the world of the catastrophe that had befallen the Jews of Europe an evaluation of the work of survivor-historians and memoir writers new light on the Jewish historical commissions and the Jewish documentation centres studies of David Boder, a Russian born psychologist who recorded searing interviews with survivors, and the work of philosophers, social thinkers and theologians theatrical productions by survivors and the first films on the theme made in Hollywood how the Holocaust had an impact on the everyday life of Jews in the USA and a discussion of the different types, and meanings, of ‘silence'. A breakthrough volume in the debate about the ‘Myth of Silence', this is a must for all students of Holocaust and genocide.

In Aversion and Erasure, Carolyn J. Dean offers a bold account of how the Holocaust's status as humanity's most terrible example of evil has shaped contemporary discourses about victims in the West. Popular and scholarly attention to the Holocaust has led some observers to conclude that a'surfeit of Jewish memory'is obscuring the suffering of other peoples. Dean explores the pervasive idea that suffering and trauma in the United States and Western Europe have become central to identity, with victims competing for recognition by displaying their collective wounds. She argues that this notion has never been examined systematically even though it now possesses the force of self-evidence. It developed in nascent form after World War II, when the near-annihilation of European Jewry began to transform patriotic mourning into a slogan of'Never Again': as the Holocaust demonstrated, all people might become victims because of their ethnicity, race, gender, or sexuality—because of who they are.The recent concept that suffering is central to identity and that Jewish suffering under Nazism is iconic of modern evil has dominated public discourse since the 1980s. Dean argues that we believe that the rational contestation of grievances in democratic societies is being replaced by the proclamation of injury and the desire to be a victim. Such dramatic and yet culturally powerful assertions, however, cast suspicion on victims and define their credibility in new ways that require analysis. Dean's latest book summons anyone concerned with human rights to recognize the impact of cultural ideals of'deserving'and'undeserving'victims on those who have suffered.

An original and revolutionary interpretation of the Jews'destiny in modern politics.Is the Shoah a unique event or just one of the many genocides that have occurred (and continue to occur) in modern history? In The Democratic Ideal and the Shoah, Shmuel Trigano begins with the hypothesis that the Shoah must be understood in both universal and singular terms: insofar as it addresses the meaning and value of modernity, it is solely because the singular experience of the Jews is at its center. Drawing on history, political philosophy, hermeneutics, and psychoanalysis, Trigano argues that the attitude of democracy towards the Jews is key to understanding the very nature of democracy and the democratic ideal, and he postulates that the anti-Semitism that has haunted modern times is the same spectre that has haunted democracy throughout history in the form of nationalism, totalitarianism, and now multiculturalism. Can democratic theory rid itself of the dilemma between universality and particularity, between collectivity and individuality? This is the ultimate question addressed by this book.Shmuel Trigano is Professor of Sociology at the Université of Paris X Nanterre. He is the author of many books, including L'avenir des Juifs de France and Les Frontières d'Auschwitz: Les ravages du devoir de mémoire. This is the first of his works to be translated into English.

A philosopher addresses conceptual and ethical questions that arise from historical accounts of the Holocaust.

Using accessible archival sources, a team of historians reveal how much the USA, Britain, Switzerland and Sweden knew about the Nazi attempt to murder all the Jews of Europe during World War II.

This book addresses the problem of religion, ethics, and public policy in a global technological civilization. It attempts to do what narrative ethicists have said cannot be done—to construct a cross-cultural ethic of human dignity, human rights, and human liberation which respects the diversity of narrative traditions. It seeks to do this without succumbing to either ethical relativism or ethical absolutism.The author confronts directly the dominant narrative of our technological civilization: the Janus-faced myths of “Apocalypse or Utopia.” Through this myth, we view technology ambivalently, as both the object of our dread and the source of our hope. The myth thus renders us ethically impotent: the very strength of our literal utopian euphoria sends us careening toward some literal apocalyptic “final solution.” The demonic narrative that dominated Auschwitz (“killing in order to heal”) is part of this Janus-faced technological mythos that emerged out of Hiroshima. And it is this mythic narrative which underlies and structures much of public policy in our nuclear age.This book proposes a coalition of members of holy communities and secular groups, organized to prevent any future eruptions of the demonic. Its goal is to construct a bridge not only over the abyss between religions, East and West, but also between religious and secular ethics.Darrell J. Fasching is Professor of Religious Studies and Associate Dean for Faculty Development of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of South Florida, Tampa.

American-born Cardinal Aloisius Muench (1889-1962) was a key figure in German and German-American Catholic responses to the Holocaust, Jews, and Judaism between 1946 and 1959. He was arguably the most powerful American Catholic figure and an influential Vatican representative in occupied Germany and in West Germany after the war. In this carefully researched book, which draws on Muench's collected papers, Suzanne Brown-Fleming offers the first assessment of Muench's legacy and provides a rare glimpse into his commentary on Nazism, the Holocaust, and surviving Jews. She argues that Muench legitimized the Catholic Church's failure during this period to confront the nature of its own complicity in Nazism's anti-Jewish ideology.The archival evidence demonstrates that Muench viewed Jews as harmful in a number of very specific ways. He regarded German Jews who had immigrated to the United States as'aliens,'he believed Jews to be'in control'of American policy-making in Germany, he feared Jews as'avengers'who wished to harm'victimized'Germans, and he believed Jews to be excessively involved in leftist activities. Muench's standing and influence in the United States, Germany, and the Vatican hierarchies gave sanction to the idea that German Catholics needed no examination of conscience in regard to the Church's actions (or inactions) during the 1940s and 1950s.This fascinating story of Muench's role in German Catholic consideration—and ultimate rejection—of guilt and responsibility for Nazism in general and the persecution of European Jews in particular will be an important addition to scholarship on the Holocaust and to church history.