Understanding the Abyss: Holocaust Scholarship into the 21st Century

About this episode

This episode explores the evolution of Holocaust scholarship from the late 20th century to the present, highlighting its complexity and ongoing developments.

Hey again everybody. I know I just dropped a big essay on all of you adapted from my final research paper in grad school, and many of you might still be working through it, but I wanted to give everyone another little bonus for all of your patience waiting for the proper big historical episodes of History Impossible. It’s been a while since I’ve done an episode based purely on historiographical analysis, but the paper/essay I wrote a couple of years ago that covers the trajectory of Holocaust scholarship in the late 20th and early 21st centuries seemed thematically appropriate with what I’ve been doing lately. I will spare you the TL;DR on this one since it’s not a very long episode, but I think it’s important to map this out so no one is mistaken in thinking that Holocaust scholarship is purely one-dimensional, moralistic, and remaining static since 1945. It’s a constantly-changing field, with historians still trying to puzzle out certain aspects of one of modern history’s most unthinkable crimes. It only scratches the surface of the literature that exists out there, but it broadly reflects the thematic shifts that have occurred over the last thirty five years of study. We seem…

People in this episode

Host: Alexander von Sternberg

Topics covered

• Holocaust scholarship
• historiographical analysis
• 20th century history
• 21st century history
• thematic shifts in history

Keywords

• Holocaust
• scholarship
• historiography
• history
• 20th century
• 21st century
• thematic shifts

Mentioned in this episode

Books & works: Holocaust scholarship

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