Perpetration and Complicity under Nazism and Beyond

Compromised Identities?

Mary Fulbrook, Bastiaan Willems, Stephanie Bird, Stefanie Rauch, Mary Fulbrook, Bastiaan Willems, Stephanie Bird, Stefanie Rauch

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN: 9781350327771
• eBook ISBN: 9781350327795
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

Perpetration and Complicity under Nazism and Beyond analyses perpetration and complicity under National Socialism and beyond. Contributors based in the UK, the USA, Canada, Germany, Israel and Chile reflect on self-understandings, representations and narratives of involvement in collective violence both at the time and later – a topic that remains highly relevant today. Using the notion of 'compromised identities' to think about contentious questions relating to empathy and complicity, this inter-disciplinary collection addresses the complex relationships between people's behaviours and self-understandings through and beyond periods of collective violence. Contributors explore the compromises that individuals, states and societies enter into both during and after such violence. Case studies highlight patterns of complicity and involvement in perpetration, and analyse how people's stories evolve under changing circumstances and through social interaction, using varying strategies of justification, denial and rationalisation. Each chapter also considers the ways in which contemporary responses and scholarly practices may be affected by engagement with perpetrator representations.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: ‘Compromised Identities?’
• Part I Theorizing ambiguity, compromise and complexity
• 2 ‘Compromised identities?’, ageing perpetrators and compromising forgiveness
• 3 Conformity, compliance and complicity: ‘Ordinary people’ and the Holocaust
• 4 Complicities, re-presented: Literary portrayals in totalitarianism and neoliberalism
• 5 In search of the bystander: Some reflections on the ‘social turn’ in Holocaust studies and its ramifications
• Part II Confrontations with violence
• 6 Studying East European perpetrators: The case of Belarus
• 7 Compromising roles: German actresses in German-occupied Minsk
• 8 Gender and transgressive violence in post-war accounts
• 9 Israeli national narratives, complicity and activism: Noam Chayut’s The Girl Who Stole My Holocaust and Breaking the Silence
• Part III Law, complicity and perpetration
• 10 The constitutive role of Nazi law: Constructing complicity in the Third Reich
• 11 Public execution in your community: The summary courts of 1945 Germany
• 12 Excess and normality: West German and Austrian media and Nazi crimes trials from the 1950s to the 1980s
• 13 Pinochet’s accomplices: Perpetration, civilian complicity and individual versus institutional culpability in domestic atrocity crime accountability
• Part IV Framing the past
• 14 Perpetrator memory and the fascist exile in Argentina: A case study
• 15 Complicity versus cooperation: Zygmunt Bauman’s Modernity and the Holocaust and Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah and its outtakes
• 16 Challenging the museum visitor? Complicity and perpetration during and beyond the Second World War in contemporary museum exhibitions
• 17 Compromised identities? Reflections on perpetration and complicity under Nazi rule: An exhibition
• 18 Conclusion
• Index
• Copyright