Years of Persecution, Years of Extermination

Christian Wiese holds the Martin Buber Chair in Jewish Thought and Philosophy at the Goethe University Frankfurt am Main, Germany. He is the editor, together with Cornelia Wilhelm, of American Jewry: Transcending the European Experience? (Bloomsbury, 2016). Paul Betts is Reader in History at the University of Sussex. His publications include Between Mass Death and Individual Loss: The Place of the Dead in Twentieth Century Germany (with Alon Confino and Dirk Schumann, 2008).

This collection of essays provides an exceptional compendium of informed and thought-provoking commentaries both justifiably honoring and critically assessing a masterwork of history, memory, and mourning that will, for the foreseeable future, be crucial in shaping the study and prompting newer understandings of the "final solution" and extreme historical processes in general. The reader...will be consistently challenged to rethink pre-existing approaches and interpretations.

• Introduction - Paul Betts and Christian Wiese / i.An Integrated History of the Holocaust: Possibilities and Challenges - Saul Friedlander / Part I: The Holocaust as a Narrative Problem / ii. Narrative Form and Historical Sensation: On Friedlander's TheYears of Extermination - Alon Confino / iii. Kaleidoscopic Writing: On Friedlander's The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews 1939-1945 - Dan Diner / iv. Friedlander, Holocaust Historiography and the Use of Testimony - Tony Kushner / v. Holocaust Perpetrators in Victims' Eyes - Mark Roseman / vi. Raul Hilberg and Saul Friedlander: Two Perspectives on the Holocaust - Michael Wildt / Part II: German Society and Redemptive Antisemitism / vii. National Socialism, Antisemitism and the 'Final Solution' - Peter Pulzer / viii. Speaking in Public about the Murder of the Jews: What did the Holocaust mean to the Germans? - Nicholas Stargardt / ix. An 'Indelible Stigma' : The Churches between Silence, Ideological Involvement, and Political Complicity - Christian Wiese / x. 'The Ethics of a Truth-Seeking Judge': Konrad Morgen, SS Judge and Corruption Expert - Raphael Gross / Part III: Mass Killings and Genocide / xi. Mass Killing and Genocide from 1914 to 1945 - Alan Kramer / xii. Redemptive Antisemitism and the Imperialist Imaginary - A.Dirk Moses / xiii. Murder amidst Collapse: Explaining the Violence of the Last Months of the Third Reich - Richard Bessel / xiv. Opportunistic Killings and Plunder of Jews by their Neighbours: A Norm or an Exception in German Occupied Europe?- Jan T Gross / Part IV: Perspectives / xv. No End in Sight? The Ongoing Challenge of producing an Integrated History of the Holocaust - Doris L. Bergen / xvi. Towards an Integrated History of the Holocaust: Masculinity, Femininity and Genocide - Zoe V. Waxman / xvii.The History of the Holocaust: Multiple Actors, Diverse Motives, Contradictory Developments and Disparate (Re)actions - Wolf Gruner / xviii. Nazi Germany and the Jews and the Future of Holocaust Historiography - Dan Stone.