By Michael Stelzer Jocks, History Faculty.
Many people undoubtedly have found it strange how much history has been in the news lately. Whether it is the Confederate monuments being taken down in New Orleans or the fact that Frederick Douglass and Andrew Jackson were trending on Twitter recently, historical topics are hot right now. But truthfully, Americans have always been contentious about our history, since our history is…well…contentious. Topics like the Civil War or Jackson’s role in ‘The Trail of Tears’ will spark lively, sometimes angry, disagreement.
However, there are certain historical events that mainstream Americans generally agree upon. One such non-contentious event is the Holocaust. The American public, pop-culture and politicians for the last 40 years have universally depicted the Holocaust as THE horrific event of modern times. Case closed. No discussion needed. For 20th century Americans, Nazi Germany has been the quintessential ‘bad guy’ of history. We have taken this so far that the era of the Holocaust and the event itself is in danger of being portrayed in simplistic political bromides. It is easy, if no less true and unthinking, to state that Nazi Germany and Hitler were irredeemably evil. The murder of Europe’s Jews was Nazi Germany’s most horrendous crime. Who would argue with that?
This is why the last four months have been so disturbing. Since taking power in January, the Trump Administration has had not one…but TWO ‘Holocaust’ controversies. First, there was the strange, and evidently intentional, Holocaust Remembrance Day statement issued by President Trump which did not specify Nazi Germany’s specific war on European Jewry. Then, in April, Press Secretary Sean Spicer stuck his foot in his mouth by claiming that Hitler ‘didn’t even gas his own people’, unlike Syrian President al-Assad. After immediately being called on this outrageously false statement, Spicer sounded even more like an idiot when he referred (I assume) to extermination camps as ‘Holocaust centers’.
What is going on? Some, like Holocaust historian and famous scholar of Holocaust denial Debra Lipstadt felt that the Trump White House’s Holocaust Remembrance Day statement was a classic case of ‘soft denialism’. On the other hand, most commentators believed that Spicer’s slip-ups simply pointed to incredible historical ignorance. However, such ignorance and ‘soft denialism’ are not mutually exclusive. Whether or not Lipstadt is correct in her assessment of Trump’s statement, such ‘denialism’ does exist in certain corners, and it will become easier to peddle to the general public as their inevitable ignorance of the past created by passing time increases.
‘Never forget’ can easily become an unthinking slogan, but that makes it no less true. So, with these notions in mind, I feel it is important to provide a quick reading list of books all Americans should read about the Holocaust. These are 15 works that any one with a passing interest in the topic can pick and read today.
- Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews: Volume 1 and The Years of Persecution and Volume 2, The Years of Extermination. Friedländer’s highly readable classic account. A great place to start for a thorough overview.
- Peter Hayes, Why: Explaining the Holocaust. A book that was just published a couple months ago. Deals with the big ‘why’ questions people always ask regarding the Holocaust. Does so with clear, jargon-free language. Read this after Friedländer’s work
- Ian Kershaw, Hitler: 1889-1936, Hubris and Hitler: 1936-1945, Nemesis. Kershaw’s massive two part biography is still generally considered to be the definitive explanation of Hitler’s life and worldview.
- Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. Though 30 years old at this point, still a groundbreaking take on why people commit ‘evil’ acts.
- Gitta Sereny, Into That Darkness: An Examination of Conscience. Sereny was a journalist who had the opportunity to interview Franz Stangl, the Commandant of Treblinka. Her book investigating the man is fascinatingly horrible.
- Wendy Lower, Hitler’s Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields. A recent book that sheds light on a topic ignored by many previous historians: Women’s role in genocide.
- Primo Levi, Survival at Auschwitz and The Drowned and the Saved. An Italian Jew, Levi survived the war and produced some of the most important writings of the 20th century.
- Viktor Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness, 2 Volumes. Klemperer was a German Jew who chronicled life in Nazi Germany from the beginning of 1933 until the end of the war. The amazing story of his survival will make you forget the 1000 pages.
- Art Spiegelman, The Complete Maus. I wrote a blog about this work a couple years ago. It is a graphic novel, and though that may seem like a strange genre for a Holocaust memoir, I believe it is required reading.
- Nikolaus Wachsmann, KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps. If you are looking to find out about the horror, structure and ubiquity of the Nazi camps, this is the new definitive text.
- Deborah Lipstadt, The Eichmann Trial. Though Hannah Arendt’s classic Eichmann in Jerusalem is still important on a philosophical level, Lipstadt deals with the true history of the trial. She also illustrates a historically accepted truth that Arendt missed. Eichmann was not really banal, but he was evil.
- Daniel Mendolsohn, The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million. Mendolsohn is a famous literary critic. In The Lost, he provides a touching, beautiful memoir of discovering his family’s Holocaust past.
- Rich Cohen, The Avengers: A Jewish War Story. The story of Jewish resistance to Nazi crimes is still one not often told. Cohen’s narrative tells the story of his grandmother who fought alongside Abba Kovner, the most famous Jewish partisan during the war.
- Claude Lanzmann, Shoah. Technically, this is not a book. But, it is a text. Shoah is Lanzmann’s 8 hour film masterpiece. Filmed in the early 1980s, Lanzmann interviewed victims, perpetrators and collaborators. Most of the interviews are emotionally wrenching. It may take you a couple days to get through.
- Thomas Kühne, Genocide and Belonging: Hitler’s Community, 1918-1945. This is the one specifically scholarly monograph I am adding to this list. After reading and watching all of the above, tackle this one.
These books are accessible. They are readable. But they are not going to be ‘fun’. They can hit you in the gut, and leave you staggered. That is what makes them all the more necessary.
protest to the community? There was only one week before finals started. You couldn’t get that story to the student paper in time. The 50,000 students attending MSU would be home for the summer by the time The State News picked it up. Picket lines? Flyers on campus? None of these methods were going to have much effect.
The Friday of the protest was cold and rainy. As 7pm grew nearer, I was getting more and more nervous. A couple friends and I decided we needed to trek over to Munn Field to see what was going to happen. A couple days earlier, the Administration learned of the protest. The University wanted to put a stop to it. The campus police took out an ad in The State News that warned about consequences for students ‘trespassing’ on Munn Field. Things were getting serious. Walking over that Friday, I quickly realized thousands of others were heading out to do the same thing as me and my friends. The protest was no more. Now, it was just a gathering.
All modern nation-states have ‘top secrets’ for acceptable eyes only. But, the ‘Top Secret’ conspiracy theorist takes this truth to unlikely, or fantastic proportions. Hence, to him/her, the US government is not just hiding a new military aircraft at the local Air Force base; they are also hiding alien life-forms and/or space ships! Or, the government weather satellites don’t truly STUDY the weather; instead, the satellites CONTROL the weather! It’s is okay to laugh. The conspiracy theorist might laugh with you.
government (or multi-national organizations) that has undue, authoritarian power. This conspiracy may be connected to notions that there are world-wide government entities that control policy and have nefarious plans for either a utopian, or a dystopian future. The two most common groups associated with such conspiracy theories are the illuminati and/or freemasons. Both of these secret organizations have been connected to conspiracies for centuries. For the conspiracy theorist, this historical tradition further proves the supposed conspiracy. Though darker than the ‘Top Secret’ conspiracy, there is still a heavy element of absurdity in the ‘Secret Power’ conspiracy. 
patios and drinking coffee at the local Starbucks. The sun and blue sky made the suburb feel alive. The colorful houses and buildings of green, red, blue seemed incongruous with the black and white photos of the camp stuck indelibly in my mind from countless history books.
I stepped off the bus, back into the sunny warmth. There are tourists everywhere, slowly walking through a twisting wooded pass. Before entering there was a sign of notices=. No dogs, no Neo-Nazi clothing….be serious. This is hallowed ground. Respect the over 30,000 dead of Dachau. Remember that they faced murder, torture, malnutrition, illness. Forget about all that world you passed through to get here. Throw your Starbucks’ Pumpkin Spice Latte away.
want to take pictures, but I can’t not. ‘Click’…the barbwire fence. ‘Click’…. the crematorium. Glance at the ovens. Walk inside the gas chamber. Don’t worry though, it was never used. Look, over there! ‘Click’….a meandering path into the shady woods. Escape 
the sun. But there is no escape from this place. The woods hold a plaque informing the visitor that the dilapidated wall to the left was the pistol execution range. The human nightmare scars nature. The remnants of a ‘blood-ditch’ used to easily clean up the aftermath of the executions makes that clear. 
have been dying to write about it, but we have that whole ‘no controversy’ goal. What to do, what to do?
sort of partisan alliance. There will be no hyping of one candidate or the other. There will be no soap-box stances taken on any particular ‘contentious’ issues. This subsection will simply deal with the changing face of American politics, and our larger political culture.
op-eds categorically stating that today’s ‘college students can’t write.’ If you don’t believe me, 
fighting? Scratch that; I really don’t care. Any explication of the plot will be absurd. Putting these two characters in the same film would be like plopping Indiana Jones down in a James Bond movie. What is the point? It reminds me of when Scooby Doo would inexplicably team up with Sonny & Cher or the Harlem Globetrotters. Come on! Why are these people hanging out with meddling kids and helping solve mysteries? I say again, ‘ridiculously asinine’.
accomplished this better than Christopher Nolan’s adaption of Frank Miller’s ‘Dark Knight’ series. The Batman/Bruce Wayne in Nolan’s films is emotionally and mentally fragile. He is complex. Sure, you know Batman will win in the end. But Nolan creates realistically troubling adversity for his hero. He wants you, the viewer, to ask questions. Are you sure Batman’s vigilantism is a positive thing? Is he obsessed with justice so much that it will destroy him and all he loves? And, what about Batman’s relationship with his arch-nemesis, The Joker? Perhaps Batman should have killed The Joker? The Joker, like Batman, is mortal. He is not some demigod or alien. These films then illustrate the struggle of man v. man, not monster v. monster. For goodness sakes, by the third installment of the series, Bruce Wayne needs to get a knee brace if he wants to keep fighting villains! Can’t get much more human than that.
movements and foresee actions. But, the show illustrates the challenges of these ‘powers’. The character must train himself to use this power, and prepare himself physically to fight the evil all around him. He does not have super-strength, super-speed or the ability to shoot lasers out of any orifices. Since he is just a man with some unlikely mental abilities, Daredevil doesn’t automatically win all his fights. Out on the streets of NYC, he usually gives worse than he takes, but he takes quite a bit. He comes home with scratches, bruises, sprains and breaks. Daredevil could lose. The tension is real.
his generation, he was a leftist who flirted with Communism before becoming disenchanted by Stalin, Stalinism and the horrendous crimes perpetuated by the regime during that era.
America gain it’s independence from?’, ‘When did we gain our independence?’ and ‘Who is the Vice President of the US?’ were a couple of these softballs. 
sessions with unsuspecting strangers. His cringe-worthy experiment of interviewing ignorant Americans has been taken up recently by 
it’s central importance. Think about it: If these kids knew who won the Civil War, would it be all that edifying in regards to their knowledge regarding the event? If they could identify a picture of James Madison, would that tell us anything in regards to their ability to be good ‘citizens’? This seems to be the notion behind such recorded questionnaires. If you can recognize Madison, if you can say who won the Civil War, if you can identify what country America gained independence from, then you are one of the enlightened, and our education system is working. But, this is a ridiculous assumption. Rote memorization or facial recognition does little to illustrate your understanding of a topic.
likable. But, his notions of what proved your knowledge of history was sometimes questionable. For instance, in his course, each student was required to memorize an important speech that shaped American History. Like many others, I recited the Gettysburg Address. One day, I sat at his desk and repeated verbatim the words of Lincoln’s revolutionary 2 minute masterpiece. I did this with no hesitation, and knew every word, and hence, I received an A on the assignment. Repetition was the only thing necessary for memorization. Memorization was the only thing necessary for an A.
oddest nostalgia occurred when I was in college. Inexplicably at 19, I began to view my high school days through rose-tinted glasses. This made absolutely no sense. When I was living high school, I hated high school. I deeply romanticized a time that should not have been nostalgic.
for college probably had as much to do with the location of my university as it did with parties, classes and social life. The entity of Chicago just added to the stress of school and career life. Chicago was bills. Chicago was truly being independent for the first time. Chicago was living with my fiance, paying rent on time, dealing with bad landlords and constantly taking in stray cats. All the eras of my life seemed simple compared to Chicago.
it hit me: That feeling of nostalgia. The feeling put a silly smile on my face. All of a sudden, I find myself doing something unexpected: I am looking around and absorbing Chicago. I look at the faces on the train. I look out the window on the El at the neighborhoods going by. I pay attention to the beautiful architecture of the loop. Heck, I even enjoyed a Chicago hot dog the other day. The people, the culture, the history of Chicago are wonderful! This class reminded me that when I lived in Chicago, it wasn’t just stressful, it was also incredibly exciting! The restaurants, the friends, the unknown. These things are now my romantic past, and the thought of them warms the cockles of my heart.
The Flâneur's Turtle 