It is not surprising that the Holocaust occupies a good part of today's moral landscape. Any serious consideration of moral responsibility, mass destruction, victimization, and the "bystander phenomenon" borrows generously from the language of the Holocaust. But what is unexpected is the steady emergence of new ways of remembering the Holocaust. During the past decade, the subject has prompted significant reinterpretations of Nazi Germany (notably, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners), and unanticipated public sensations, such as Schindler's List and the revelations concerning Switzerland's wartime relationship with the Third Reich.

Jeremiah M. Riemer, a comparative politics expert, writes, in our first essay, that contemporary Germans are searching for ways to balance historical memory and an unencumbered and forward-looking national agenda. The balancing act is proving difficult; currently, the Nazi past is a powerful factor in everything from the development of Germany's immigration policy to the nation's implementation of its global geopolitical commitments.

William E. Seidelman, a physician and professor of family and community medicine at the University of Toronto, urges a number of medical and scientific institutions in Germany and Austria to examine their former relationships with the Nazi regime. He also argues that it is immoral that these institutions still possess the anatomical remains of victims of the Gestapo and SS.

John Sutherland (a professor of modern English literature at University College, London) believes that one ominous aspect of the Internet communications revolution is the visibility -- and credibility -- it gives to neo-Nazis and their dogmas. That the Internet offers the privacy and means to purvey, or revel in, extremist doctrines will come as no surprise to those familiar with the Anti-Defamation League's reports on this phenomenon. But Sutherland's article is mainly concerned with the way certain respectable, mainstream Internet business enterprises bestow legitimacy on neo-Nazi hate-mongers by selling their "literature" along with more distinguished books.

David Patterson, author of Sun Turned to Darkness: Memory and Recovery in the Holocaust Memoir, scrutinizes some new themes in recent Holocaust-survivor memoirs. The earliest written memoirs were fixated almost solely on destruction and despair, and were read by only a small audience. "Late-life" memoirs often speak of life's preciousness and the author's hopes for the future. Moreover, the readership for late-life memoirs is a rather large one.

The Director of the Anti-Defamation League's Braun Holocaust Institute, helps elucidate how teaching the Holocaust in middle and high schools can clarify moral issues for students.

Susan Miron, who writes for Partisan Review and the Forward, reviews Aleksandar Tisma's The Book of Blam, a novel about one man's experiences in Yugoslavia during World War II.

Return to Top