Foundational Pasts

Alon Confino is a professor of history at the University of Virginia, where he has taught since 1993. He has written extensively and influentially on historical memory, historical method and German history. Among his books are The Nation As a Local Metaphor: Württemberg, Imperial Germany, and National Memory, 1871–1918 (1997) and Germany As a Culture of Remembrance: Promises and Limits of Writing History (2006). As a visiting professor, Confino has taught at the Hebrew University, Tel Aviv University and École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, and was recently a visiting fellow at the European University Institute in Florence. He has received grants from the Fulbright, Humboldt, DAAD, and Lady Davis foundations, the Institute of Advanced Studies at the Hebrew University, the Social Science Research Council, the Israel Academy of Sciences, and the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.

'One of the most thoughtful, exciting, and original responses to the Holocaust to have appeared in years, Foundational Pasts is a concise and trenchant study that opens up new ways of conceiving of the Nazi genocide of the Jews. With its emphasis on Nazism and the Holocaust as problems of cultural history, Confino's book will generate much discussion and will be a major stimulus to further reflection on how the Holocaust should be interpreted by historians.' Dan Stone, Royal Holloway, University of London

• 1. Between the French Revolution and the Holocaust: events that represent an age; 2. A dominant interpretive framework; 3. Narrative form and historical sensation; 4. Beginnings and endings; 5. The totality and limits of historical context; 6. Contingency, the essence of history; 7. Ideology, race, and culture.