Foundational Pasts

דדדוווין.
"One of the most thoughtful, exciting, and original responses to the Holocaust to have appeared in years, Foundational Pasts is a concise and trenchant study that opens up new ways of conceiving of the Nazi genocide of the Jews. With its empha sis on Nazism and the Holocaust as problems of cultural history, Confino's book will generate much discussion and will be a major stimulus to further reflection on how the Holocaust should be interpreted by historians."
- Dan Stone, Royal Holloway, University of London
"The Nazis claimed to replace the 'ideas of 1789' with those of '1933. Provocatively using the French Revolution as a historical foil, Alon Confino contends that the Nazis' exterminationist fantasy about Jews was at once rooted in German-Christian culture and a revolutionary attempt to inaugurate a new temporal order. This erudite, calm, and accessible meditation challenges contemporary explanations of the Holo caust by showing that, while genocide may be rationally approached, its irrational ity and emotionality threaten to elude our analytical grasp."
– A. Dirk Moses, European University Institute
lon Confino seeks to rethink dominant interpretations of the Holocaust by ex amining it as a problem in cultural history. As the main research interests of Holocaust scholars are frequently covered terrain - the anti-Semitic ideological cam paign, 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 with out Jews. Confino seeks these insights from the ways historians interpreted another short, violent, and foundational ev 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 ba sic assumptions of present-day historians concerning historical narration, explana tion, and understanding.
ALON CONFINO is a professor of history at the University of Virginia, where he has taught since 1993. He has written extensively and influentially on historical memory, historical method, and German history. Among his books are The Nation as a Local Metaphor: Württemberg, Imperial Germany, and National Memory, 1871-1918 (1997) and Germany as a Culture of Remembrance: Promises and Limits of Writing His tory (2006). As a visiting professor, Confino has taught at the Hebrew University, Tel Aviv University, and École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, and was a visiting fellow at the European University Institute in Florence. He received a 2011 Guggenheim Fellowship for his new project on Nazi memories that made the Holocaust, as well as grants from the Fulbright, Humboldt, DAAD, and the Lady Davis Foundations; the Institute of Advanced Studies at the Hebrew University; the Social Science Research Council; the Israel Academy of Sciences; and the Center for Advanced Ho locaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC.
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS