A focused view of an important period in Canadian history, replete with insightful stories, vignettes, and anecdotes, Mackenzie King in the Age of the Dictators shows Canada flexing its foreign ...policy under King's cautious eye and ultimately ineffective guiding hand.
Should French railwaymen during the Second World War be viewed as great resisters or collaborators in genocide? Ludivine Broch revisits histories of resistance, collaboration and deportation in Vichy ...France through the prism of the French railwaymen – the cheminots. De-sanctifying the idea of railwaymen as heroic saboteurs, Broch reveals the daily life of these workers who accommodated with the Vichy regime, cohabitated with the Germans and stole from their employer. Moreover, by intertwining the history of the working classes with Holocaust history, she highlights unexpected histories under Vichy and sensitive memories of the post-war period. Ultimately, this book bursts the myths of cheminot resistance and collaboration in the Holocaust, and reveals that there is more to their story than this. The cheminots fed both the French nation and the German military apparatus, exemplifying the complexities of personal, professional and political life under occupation.
How did "ordinary women," like their male counterparts, become capable of brutal violence during the Holocaust? Cultural historian Elissa Mailänder examines the daily work of twenty-eight women ...employed by the SS to oversee prisoners in the concentration and death camp Majdanek/Lublin in Poland. Many female SS overseers in Majdanek perpetrated violence and terrorized prisoners not only when ordered to do so but also on their own initiative. The social order of the concentration camp, combined with individual propensities, shaped a microcosm in which violence became endemic to workaday life. The author's analysis of Nazi records, court testimony, memoirs, and film interviews illuminates the guards' social backgrounds, careers, and motives as well as their day-to-day behavior during free time and on the "job," as they supervised prisoners on work detail and in the cell blocks, conducted roll calls, and "selected" girls and women for death in the gas chambers. Scrutinizing interactions and conflicts among female guards, relations with male colleagues and superiors, and internal hierarchies, FemaleSS Guards and Workaday Violenceshows how work routines, pressure to "resolve problems," material gratification, and Nazi propaganda stressing guards' roles in "creating a new order" heightened female overseers' identification with Nazi policies and radicalized their behavior.
Holocaust artworks intuitively must fulfill at least two criteria: artistic (lest they be merely historical documents) and historical (lest they distort the Holocaust or become merely artworks). The ...Sense of Semblance locates this problematic within philosophical aesthetics, as a version of the conflict between aesthetic autonomy and heteronomy, and argues that Adorno's dialectic of aesthetic semblance describes the normative demand that artworks maintain a dynamic tension between the two. The Sense of Semblance aims to move beyond familiar debates surrounding postmodernism by demonstrating the usefulness of contemporary theories of meaning and understanding, including those from the analytic tradition. Pickford shows how the causal theory of names, the philosophy of tacit knowledge, the analytic philosophy of quotation, Sartre's theory of the imaginary, the epistemology of testimony, and Walter Benjamin's dialectical image can help explicate how individual artworks fulfill artistic and historical desiderata. In close readings of Celan's poetry, Holocaust memorials in Berlin, the quotational artist Heimrad Backer, Claude Lanzmann's film Shoah, and Art Spiegelman's graphic novel Maus, Pickford offers interpretations that, in their precision, specificity, and clarity, inaugurate a dialogue between contemporary analytic philosophy and contemporary art. The Sense of Semblance is the first book to incorporate contemporary analytic philosophy in interpretations of art and architecture, literature, and film about the Holocaust.
Provides an eye-witness account of the Holocaust through the events recorded in the author's diary between the years 1942 and 1944. In vivid, raw, documentary style, he describes his experiences in ...the Lwow Ghetto, the Janowska Concentration Camp, and in an underground bunker where he and twenty-three other Jews were hidden by a courageous Polish farmer and his family. This is a tremendous resource for historians, scholars and those interested in the Holocaust.
Details the relationship between Quebec lieutenant Ernest Lapointe and Prime Minister Mackenzie King, showing how the close association of the two affected Canadian history in many important ways.
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