New Books in Genocide Studies

Episode 4 of the CEU Press Podcast Series introduces one of the Press’s new series, entitled Perpetrators of Organized Violence: Eastern, Central and South-Eastern Europe. The series editors, Waitman Wade Beorn, Weronika Grzebalska and Iva Vukušić talk about the aims of the series, ethical considerations when researching perpetrators of organized violence, and about the book proposals they are interested in.This new series aims to publish work contributing to the burgeoning field of Perpetrator Studies, with a focus specifically on the East, Central and Southeast Europe region. You can read more about the series on the CEU Press’s website here.If you have a book or edited volume proposal that you think would fit the series, or you would like to have a chat about your project, get in touch with either the series editors or with Jen McCall (McCallJ@press.ceu.edu), who is our acquisitions editor for the series. The series editors can be reached at:·    Waitman Beorn: waitman.beorn@northumbria.ac.uk·    Weronika Grzebalska: w.grzebalska@politic.edu.pl ·    Iva Vukušić: I.Vukusic@uu.nl The CEU Press Podcast Series delves into various aspects of the publishing process: from crafting a book proposal, finding a publisher, responding to peer review feedback on the manuscript, to the subsequent distribution, promotion and marketing of academic books. We will also talk to series editors and authors, who will share their experiences of getting published and talk about their series or books.Interested in the CEU Press’s publications? Click here to find out more.Stay tuned for future episodes and subscribe to our podcast to be the first to be notified. You can find us on Apple Podcast, Spotify and all other major podcast apps.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/genocide-studies

In this bold and provocative new book, Blackness as a Universal Claim: Holocaust Heritage, Noncitizen Futures, and Black Power in Berlin (University of California Press, 2023), Damani Partridge examines the possibilities and limits for a universalized Black politics. German youth of Turkish, Arab, and African descent use claims of Blackness to hold states and other institutions accountable for racism today. Partridge tracks how these young people take on the expressions of Black Power, acting out the scene from the 1968 Olympics, proclaiming "I am Malcolm X," expressing mutual struggle with Muhammad Ali and Spike Lee, and standing with raised and clenched fists next to Angela Davis. Partridge also documents public school teachers, federal program leaders, and politicians demanding that young immigrants account for the global persistence of anti-Semitism as part of the German state's commitment to anti-genocidal education. He uses these stories to interrogate the relationships between European Enlightenment, Holocaust memory, and Black futures, showing how noncitizens work to reshape their everyday lives. In doing so, he demonstrates how Blackness is a concept that energizes, inspires, and makes possible participation beyond national belonging for immigrants, refugees, Black people, and other People of Color.Damani J. Partridge is Professor of Anthropology and Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan. Reighan Gillam is an Associate Professor in the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College. Her research examines the ways in which Afro-Brazilian media producers foment anti-racist visual politics through their image creation. She is the author of Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media (University of Illinois Press). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/genocide-studies

Within the vast network of Nazi camps, Stutthof may be the least known beyond Poland. This book is the first scholarly publication in English to break the silence of Stutthof, where 120,000 people were interned and at least 65,000 perished. A Nazi Camp Near Danzigoffers an overview of Stutthof's history. It also explores Danzig's significance in promoting the cult of German nationalism which led to Stutthof's establishment and which shaped its subsequent development in 1942 into a Concentration Camp, with the full resources of the Nazi Reich.A Nazi Camp Near Danzig: Perspectives on Shame and on the Holocaust from Stutthof (Bloomsbury, 2022) shows how Danzig/Gdansk, generally identified as the city where the Second World War started, became under Albert Forster, Hitler's hand-picked Gauleiter, 'the vanguard of Germandom in the east' and with its disputed history, the poster city for the Third Reich. It reflects on the fact that Danzig was close enough to supply Stutthof with both prisoners - initially local Poles and Jews - as well as local men for its SS workforce. Throughout the study, Ruth Schwertfeger draws on the stories of Danziger and Nobel Prize winner, Günter Grass to consider the darker realities of German nationalism that even Grass's vibrant depictions and wit cannot mask. Schwertfeger demonstrates how German nationalism became more lethal for all prisoners, especially after the summer of 1944 when thousands of Jewish woman died in the Stutthof camp system or perished in the 'death marches' after January 1945. Schwertfeger uses archival and literary sources, as well as memoirs, to allow the voices of the victims to speak. Their testimonies are juxtaposed with the justifications of perpetrators. The book successfully argues that, in the end, Stutthof was no less lethal than other camps of the Third Reich, even if it was, and remains, less well-known. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/genocide-studies

Katarzyna Person and Johannes-Dieter Steinert's book Przemysłowa Concentration Camp: The Camp, the Children, the Trials (Palgrave MacMillan, 2023) explores one of the most notorious aspects of the German system of oppression in wartime Poland: the only purpose-built camp for children under the age of 16 years in German-occupied Europe. The camp at Przemysłowa street, or the Polen-Jugendverwahrlager der Sicherheitspolizei in Litzmannstadt as the Germans called it, was a concentration camp for children. The camp at Przemysłowa existed for just over two years, from December 1942 until January 1945. During that time, an unknown number of children, mainly Polish nationals, were imprisoned there and subjected to extreme physical and emotional abuse. For almost all, the consequences of atrocities which they endured in the camp remained with them for the rest of their lives. This book focuses on the establishment of the camp, the experience of the child prisoners, and the post-war investigations and trials. It is based on contemporary German documents, post-war Polish trials and German investigations, as well as dozens of testimonies from camp survivors, guards, civilian camp staff and the camp leadership Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/genocide-studies

Foremost among the images of the Armenian Genocide is the specter of tattooed Islamized Armenian women. Blue tribal tattoos that covered face and body signified assimilation into Muslim Bedouin and Kurdish households. Among Armenians, the tattooed survivor was seen as a living ethnomartyr or, alternatively, a national stain, and the bodies of women and children figured centrally within the Armenian communal memory and humanitarian imaginary. In Remnants: Embodied Archives of the Armenian Genocide (Stanford UP, 2023), these tattooed and scar-bearing bodies reveal a larger history, as the lived trauma of genocide is understood through bodies, skin, and-in what remains of those lives a century afterward-bones.With this book, Elyse Semerdjian offers a feminist reading of the Armenian Genocide. She explores how the Ottoman Armenian communal body was dis-membered, disfigured, and later re-membered by the survivor community. Gathering individual memories and archival fragments, she writes a deeply personal history, and issues a call to break open the archival record in order to embrace affect and memory. Traces of women and children rescued during and after the war are reconstructed to center the quietest voices in the historical record. This daring work embraces physical and archival remnants, the imprinted negatives of once living bodies, as a space of radical possibility within Armenian prosthetic memory and a necessary way to recognize the absence that remains. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/genocide-studies

Bookshop.org is an online book retailer that donates more than 80% of its profits to independent bookstores. Launched in 2020, Bookshop.org has already raised more than $27,000,000. In this interview, Andy Hunter, founder and CEO discusses his journey to creating one of the most revolutionary new organizations in the book world. Bookshop has found a way to retain the convenience of online book shopping while also supporting independent bookstores that are the backbones of many local communities. Andy Hunter is CEO and Founder of Bookshop.org. He also co-created Literary Hub.Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/genocide-studies

Framing the Holocaust: Photographs of a Mass Shooting in Latvia, 1941 (University of Wisconsin Press, 2023), edited by Valerie Hébert, compiles essays on the meaning of twelve photographs of a terrible atrocity. In December 1941, German police and their local collaborators shot 2,749 Jews at the beach in Sķēde, near Liepāja, Latvia. Twelve photographs were taken at the scene. These now-infamous images show people in extreme distress, sometimes without clothing. Some capture the very moments when women and children confronted their imminent deaths, while others show their dead bodies. They are nearly unbearable to look at -- so why should we? Framing the Holocaust offers a multidimensional response to this question. While photographs are central to our memory of modern historical events, they often inhabit an ambivalent intellectual space. What separates the sincere desire to understand from voyeuristic curiosity? Comprehending atrocity photographs requires viewers to place themselves in the very positions of the perpetrators who took the images. When we engage with these photographs, do we risk replicating the original violence? In this tightly organized book, scholars of history, photography, language, gender, photojournalism, and pedagogy examine the images of the Sķēde atrocity along with other difficult images, giving historical, political, and ethical depth to the acts of looking and interpreting. With a foreword by Edward Anders, who narrowly escaped the December 1941 shooting, Framing the Holocaust represents an original approach to an iconic series of Holocaust photographs. This book contributes to compelling debates in the emerging field of visual history, including the challenges and responsibilities of using photographs to teach about atrocity.Link Mentioned in the Episode: Digitized Mizrakh Yidisher Historisher Arkhiv archive (YIVO Institute for Jewish Research)Hallel Yadin is an archivist and special projects manager at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/genocide-studies

On September 1, 1967, one of the Third Reich's most infamous figures hanged herself in her cell after nearly twenty-four years in prison. Known as the "Bitch of Buchenwald," Ilse Koch was singularly notorious, having been accused of owning lampshades fabricated from skins of murdered camp inmates and engaging in "bestial" sexual behavior. These allegations fueled a public fascination that turned Koch into a household name and the foremost symbol of Nazi savagery. Her subsequent prosecution resulted in a scandal that prompted US Senate hearings and even the intervention of President Truman.Yet the most sensational atrocities attributed to Koch were apocryphal or unproven. In this authoritative reappraisal, Tomaz Jardim shows that, while Koch was guilty of heinous crimes, she also became a scapegoat for postwar Germans eager to distance themselves from the Nazi past. The popular condemnation of Koch--and the particularly perverse crimes attributed to her by prosecutors, the media, and the public at large--diverted attention from the far more consequential but less sensational complicity of millions of ordinary Germans in the Third Reich's crimes.Ilse Koch on Trial: Making the 'Bitch of Buchenwald' (Harvard UP, 2023) reveals how gendered perceptions of violence and culpability drove Koch's zealous prosecution at a time when male Nazi perpetrators responsible for greater crimes often escaped punishment or received lighter sentences. Both in the international press and during her three criminal trials, Koch was condemned for her violation of accepted gender norms and "good womanly behavior." Koch's "sexual barbarism," though treated as an emblem of the Third Reich's depravity, ultimately obscured the bureaucratized terror of the Nazi state and hampered understanding of the Holocaust. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/genocide-studies

The Twin Children of the Holocaust: Stolen Childhood and the Will to Survive (Academic Studies Press, 2023) is an annotated collection of original, informative, and moving photographs of the twins who survived the brutal medical experiments conducted at the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp (1943-1945). The experiments were conducted by the infamous physician, Josef Mengele. These never-before-seen photographs were taken by the author (Segal) at the 40th anniversary of the camp’s liberation (January 27, 1985) and the public hearing on Mengele’s crimes at Yad Vashem (A Memorial and a Name) in Jerusalem that followed. Other memorable moments, captured in photographs, include traveling to Krakow, visiting Warsaw and hearing survivors’ testimonies. The photographs are organized into ten sections that unfold chronologically—each section is accompanied by a brief essay to provide compelling context and each photograph has an informative caption.Dr. Nancy L. Segal is Psychology Professor and Director, Twin Studies Center, at California State University, Fullerton. Her book, Born Together-Reared Apart, won the American Psychological Association’s William James Book Award. Her work has been featured in the New York Times and Atlantic Monthly. She has appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Show, Good Morning America, and the BBC. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/genocide-studies

In the wake of the Second World War, the victorious Allied armies implemented a radical program to purge Nazism from Germany and preserve peace in Europe. Between 1945 and 1949, twenty million political questionnaires, or Fragebögen, were distributed by American, British, French, and Soviet armies to anxious Germans in positions of influence who had to prove their non-Nazi status to gain employment. Drafted by idealistic university professors and social scientists, these surveys came to define much of the denazification experience and were immensely consequential to the material and emotional recovery of Germans. In Everyday Denazification in Postwar Germany: The Fragebogen Questionnaire and Political Screening During the Allied Occupation (Cambridge University Press, 2023), Mikkel Dack draws the curtain to reveal what denazification looked like on the ground and in practice and how the highly criticized vetting program impacted the lives of individual Germans and their families as they recovered from dictatorship and war. Accessing recently declassified documents, this book challenges traditional interpretations by recounting a more comprehensive history of denazification, one of mid-level planners, civil affairs soldiers, and regular German citizens. The Fragebogen functions as a window into this everyday history.Mikkel Dack is Assistant Professor of History at Rowan University and Director of Research at the Rowan Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Human Rights.Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/genocide-studies