Dirk Rupnow - Böcker

The World Wide Web (WWW) and digitisation have become important sites and tools for the history of the Holocaust and its commemoration. Today, some memory institutions use the Internet at a high professional level as a venue for self-presentation and as a forum for the discussion of Holocaust-related topics for potentially international, transcultural and interdisciplinary user groups. At the same time, it is not always the established institutions that utilise the technical possibilities and potential of the Internet to the maximum. Creative and sometimes controversial new forms of storytelling of the Holocaust or more traditional ways of remembering the genocide presented in a new way with digital media often come from people or groups who are not in the realm of influence of the large memorial sites, museums and archives. Such "private" stagings have experienced a particular upswing since the boom of social media. This democratisation of Holocaust memory and history is crucial though it is as yet undecided how much it will ultimately reinforce old structures and cultural, regional or other inequalities or reinvent them. The “Digital space” as an arbitrary and limitless archive for the mediation of the Holocaust spanning from Russia to Brazil is at the centre of the essays collected in this volume. This space is also considered as a forum for negotiation, a meeting place and a battleground for generations and stories and as such offers the opportunity to reconsider the transgenerational transmission of trauma, family histories and communication. Here it becomes evident: there are new societal intentions and decision-making structures that exceed the capabilities of traditional mass media and thrive on the participation of a broad public.

This volume is concerned with the hitherto neglected role of the humanities in the histories of the idea of race. Its aim is to begin to fill in this significant lacuna. If, in the decades following World War II and the Holocaust – years that witnessed European decolonization and the African-American civil rights movement – the concept of ‘race’ slowly but surely lost its legitimacy as a cultural, political and scientific category, for much of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century concepts of race enjoyed widespread currency in numerous fields of knowledge such as the history of art, history, musicology, or philosophy. Bringing together some of the most distinguished scholars in their respective fields, this is the first collective attempt to address the history of notions of race in the humanities as a whole.

This volume is concerned with the hitherto neglected role of the humanities in the histories of the idea of race. Its aim is to begin to fill in this significant lacuna. If, in the decades following World War II and the Holocaust – years that witnessed European decolonization and the African-American civil rights movement – the concept of ‘race’ slowly but surely lost its legitimacy as a cultural, political and scientific category, for much of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century concepts of race enjoyed widespread currency in numerous fields of knowledge such as the history of art, history, musicology, or philosophy. Bringing together some of the most distinguished scholars in their respective fields, this is the first collective attempt to address the history of notions of race in the humanities as a whole.