Gray Zones

by Petropoulos, Jonathan; Roth, John K.

• ISBN13: 9781845450717
• ISBN10: 184545071X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2005-06-01
• Publisher: Berghahn Books

Summary

Few essays about the Holocaust are better known or more important than Primo Levi's reflections on what he called "the gray zone," a reality in which moral ambiguity and compromise were pronounced. In this volume accomplished Holocaust scholars, among them Raul Hilberg, Gerhard L. Weinberg, Christopher Browning, Peter Hayes, and Lynn Rapaport, explore the terrain that Levi identified. Together they bring a necessary interdisciplinary focus to bear on timely and often controversial topics in cutting-edge Holocaust studies that range from historical analysis to popular culture. While each essay utilizes a particular methodology and argues for its own thesis, the volume as a whole advances the claim that the more we learn about the Holocaust, the more complex that event turns out to be. Only if ambiguities and compromises in the Holocaust and its aftermath are identified, explored, and at times allowed to remain - lest resolution deceive us - will our awareness of the Holocaust and its implications be as full as possible.

Table of Contents

List of Figures	xi
List of Abbreviations	xiii
Prologue: The Gray Zones of the Holocaust	xv
Jonathan Petropoulos
John K. Roth
Part One: Ambiguity and Compromise in Writing and Depicting Holocaust History
Introduction	1	(6)
The Ambiguities of Evil and Justice: Degussa, Robert Pross, and the Jewish Slave Laborers at Gleiwitz	7	(19)
Peter Hayes
``Alleviation'' and ``Compliance'': The Survival Strategies of the Jewish Leadership in the Wierzbnik Ghetto and the Starachowice Factory Slave Labor Camps	26	(11)
Christopher R. Browning
Between Sanity and Insanity: Spheres of Everyday Life in the Auschwitz-Birkenau Sonderkommando	37	(24)
Gideon Greif
Sonderkommando: Testimony from Evidence	61	(9)
Michael Berenbaum
A Commentary on ``Gray Zones'' in Raul Hilberg's Work	70	(11)
Gerhard L. Weinberg
Incompleteness in Holocaust Historiography	81	(16)
Raul Hilberg
Part Two: Identity, Gender, and Sexuality During and After the Third Reich
Introduction	93	(4)
Choiceless Choices: Surviving on False Papers on the ``Aryan'' Side	97	(10)
Robert Melson
``Who Am I?'' The Struggle for Religious Identity of Jewish Children Hidden by Christians During the Shoah	107	(11)
Eva Fleischner
Hitler's Jewish Soldiers	118	(9)
Bryan Mark Rigg
A Gray Zone Among the Field Gray Men: Confusion in the Discrimination Against Homosexuals in the Wehrmacht	127	(20)
Geoffrey J. Giles
Pleasure and Evil: Christianity and the Sexualization of Holocaust Memory	147	(18)
Dagmar Herzog
The Gender of Good and Evil: Women and Holocaust Memory	165	(20)
Sara R. Horowitz
Part Three: Gray Spaces: Geographical and Imaginative Landscapes
Introduction	179	(6)
Hitler's ``Garden of Eden'' in Ukraine: Nazi Colonialism, Volksdeutsche, and the Holocaust, 1941--1944	185	(20)
Wendy Lower
Life and Death in the ``Gray Zone'' of Jewish Ghettos in Nazi-Occupied Europe: The Unknown, the Ambiguous, and the Disappeared	205	(17)
Martin Dean
``Almost-Camps'' in Paris: The Difficult Description of Three Annexes of Drancy---Austerlitz, Levitan, and Bassano, July 1943 to August 1944	222	(18)
Jean-Marc Dreyfus
Alternate Holocausts and the Mistrust of Memory	240	(12)
Gavriel D. Rosenfeld
Laughter and Heartache: The Functions of Humor in Holocaust Tragedy	252	(18)
Lynn Rapaport
The Holocaust in Popular Culture: Master-Narrative and Counter-Narratives in the Gray Zone	270	(16)
Ronald Smelser
The Grey Zone: The Cinema of Choiceless Choices	286	(13)
Lawrence Baron
Part Four: Justice, Religion, and Ethics During and After the Holocaust
Introduction	293	(6)
Gray into Black: The Case of Mordecai Chaim Rumkowski	299	(12)
Richard L. Rubenstein
Catalyzing Fascism: Academic Science in National Socialist Germany and Afterward	311	(14)
Jeffrey Lewis
Postwar Justice and the Treatment of Nazi Assets	325	(14)
Jonathan Petropoulos
The Gray Zones of Holocaust Restitution: American Justice and Holocaust Morality	339	(21)
Michael J. Bazyler
The Creation of Ethical ``Gray Zones'' in the German Protestant Church: Reflections on the Historical Quest for Ethical Clarity	360	(12)
Victoria J. Barnett
Gray-Zoned Ethics: Morality's Double Binds During and After the Holocaust	372	(18)
John K. Roth
Epilogue: An Intense Wish to Understand	390	(5)
Jonathan Petropoulos
John K. Roth
Select Bibliography	395	(4)
About the Editors and Contributors	399	(8)
Index	407