Integrated Approaches and Boundaries in Holocaust Scholarship

doi:10.1017/9781108913614.010

7 - Integrated Approaches and Boundaries in Holocaust Scholarship

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 May 2025

Dan Stone

Edited by

Mark Roseman and

Dan Stone

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Mark Roseman: Affiliation:
Indiana University
Dan Stone: Affiliation:
Royal Holloway, University of London

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Summary

The idea of an “integrated history” of the Holocaust is primarily associated with Saul Friedländer. For Friedländer, integration means bringing the Jewish dimension of the Holocaust into the history of the Nazi epoch. This is to be achieved by ensuring that the historian’s focus is not only on the Germans but also on institutions of all sorts across Nazi-occupied Europe, as well as on Jewish responses both under Nazi occupation and outside it. This “simultaneous representation of the events – at all levels and in all different places – enhances the perception of the magnitude, the complexity, and the interrelatedness of the multiple components of this history,” as he writes. This chapter considers the extent to which Friedländer realized his goal, and asks what other kinds of integration – such as placing the genocide of the Jews in a single analytical framework alongside the Nazis’ “other victims”; or placing the Holocaust in the context of genocide studies – might help us to understand about the Holocaust as a historical event or about its significance for the contemporary world. While most historians are in favor of integration, what that means in practice remains contested.

Keywords

Integrated history Saul Friedländer victims perpetrators collaborators the Holocaust and genocide boundaries of the Holocaust violence the Holocaust and war other victim groups Soviet prisoners of war asocials Romanies Jehova’s Witnesses

Type: Chapter
Information: The Cambridge History of the Holocaust , pp. 134 - 151

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108913614.010 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2025

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