The Holocaust-- A Global History? Approaches, Prospects, Pitfalls

This talk examines approaches to and key challenges of writing a global history of the Holocaust. The speaker reflects on a range of previous and ongoing studies from Gerhard Weinberg's pathbreaking evaluations of the Holocaust as an evolving global genocide of the Jews steeped in the pronounced intentionalist readings of the 1980s to Herbert A. Strauss' approach to Jewish migration histories from Nazi Germany on a global scale and Timothy Snyder's renewed intellectual history that positions Adolf Hitler as a committed "globalist" at the center of analysis. The talk then makes the case for applying and fine-tuning approaches from new global and re-calibrated transnational histories to illuminate the Holocaust's increasingly global dimensions. It combines methodological reflections with empirical examples that encompass, for example, Tunisia under German-Italian occupation and the Philippines and present-day Indonesia after the 1941-42 Japanese attacks.
Prior to the lecture, at 5:30pm, please join us for dinner by RSVPing here: https://go.unl.edu/kaplandinner