Lessons of History

Klas-Göran Karlsson has been Professor of History at Lund University since 2000 and specializes in modern international history, particularly: Russian, Soviet, and Post-Soviet Studies; Genocide Studies; history of the World Wars; the Baltic Sea regional history; and the uses of history in society, culture, and education.

“Karlsson’s own mastery of these subjects comes through loud and clear, as does his sense of moral urgency to make cries of “never again!” signify something concrete. He identifies different types of lessons of history, from the “genetic” (linear and developmental) to the “structural” (concerned with systems and interconnections) to the “genealogical” (what amounts to culturally situated pursuits of historical “laws”). Karlsson asserts that “borderline events,” or extreme phenomena such as mass atrocities and repression, are especially promising places to look for usable knowledge from the human past.”— Paula Chan, Journal of Modern Jewish Studies“What are the lessons of history? Is history the ‘teacher of life,’ as Cicero put it, or is the only lesson of history that there is none? Karlsson takes up these age-old questions in a remarkable new way. Starting with how historians and politicians have used and abused history over the centuries, he provides a useful theoretical framework that he then puts to the test by choosing to study at length two borderline events: the Gulag and Auschwitz. Beyond the 'never again,' how can we make sense of these two borderline events that represent absolute evil? This book's great contribution is showing what lessons historians—whose work served as benchmarks between 1960 and 2000—drew and, above all, how they formulated these lessons according to their own context. All in all, this is a thoughtful lesson about lessons.”— François Hartog, Professor of Historiography Ancient and Modern, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (Paris)“Departing from Jörn Rüsen’s concept of ‘borderline events,’ the author embarks on an exploration of the separate but entangled historiographies of the Holocaust and Soviet terror since the 1960s. This is done through a detailed analysis of the most important studies in those respective fields, which provides the reader with an overview of the debates and controversies that have accompanied scholarship. Particular attention is dedicated to situating the historiography within contemporary European history, culminating in the fall of the Soviet system and the search for a ‘European’ identity that became intimately connected to a rejection of ‘totalitarian’ pasts. By focusing on the relationship between historiography and political change in the 1990s, this book also offers an excellent overview of the entanglements that accompanied the emergence and evolution of Holocaust and genocide studies as an interdisciplinary and comparative research domain.”— Tomislav Dulic, Professor at the Hugo Valentin Centre, Uppsala University“What can we learn from history when it comes to ‘borderline events’ of disturbing violence like the Holocaust and Stalinist terror, events that conventional concepts of historical meaning fail to make sense of? In this thought-provoking book, Klas-Göran Karlsson develops a genetical typology of lessons of history that he then applies to seminal works of Holocaust and Stalinism historiography. In more recent decades, scholars ‘require or have an interest in “enrolling” in the history they narrate,’ now that the notion of a radical difference between ‘us’ and the totalitarian ‘others’ has dissipated since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Lessons from borderline events can only be drawn if we are aware of the difficulties of sense-making and if we reflect them by implicitly narrating the history of learning history. Historians’ language irrefutably assumes meaningfulness, the existence of which one must put in doubt in the same vein. By historicizing historiography, Karlsson demonstrates that this dilemma exists and cannot be resolved—rather, it must be endured. Highly recommended!”— Dr. Thomas Sandkühler, Professor and Holocaust historian, Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany

• IntroductionThe First Two Decades: The 1960s and 1970s The 1980s: A Time of Departure and Consolidation The 1990s: A Decade of Comparison and Ordinary Men’s Violence The 2000s: The Entanglement Era ConclusionAcknowledgementsBibliographyIndex