Abstract
The single most predictable and consistently repeated question that I face when giving public presentations is quite simple: why and how did I become a Holocaust historian? The answer to that question is fundamentally autobiographical, but it is not the only point in my career when my personal experiences have provided an important context for understanding my professional development. Looking back, I think four particular factors — the Vietnam War, Watergate politics, serving as an expert witness in various trials, as well as the usual professional debates and rivalries — have provided crucial context for understanding key points in the development of my career as a Holocaust historian. I would like to explore some of the major developments in Holocaust historiography through the lens of my own personal experience.
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Notes
Jean-Paul Sartre, Anti-semite and Jew, George Joseph Becker (trans.) (New York: Schocken Books, 1948).
Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Viking Press, 1963).
Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (London: W.H. Allen, 1961).
Lucy Dawidowicz, The War against the Jews, 1933–1945 (New York: Bantam Books, 1975).
Published in 1978 as The Final Solution and the German Foreign Office, the book was translated and published in Germany 32 years later in anticipation of the controversy that was sparked by an official commission report on the role of the German Foreign Office in the Third Reich and the continuity of its personnel into the Adenauer era. See Christopher R. Browning, Die ‘Endlösung’ und das Auswärtige Amt (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftlichte Buchgesellschaft, 2010), and Eckart Conze, Norbert Frei, Peter Hayes and Moshe Zimmermann, Das Amt und die Vergangenheit. Deutsche Diplomaten im Dritten Reich und in der Bundesrepublik (Munich: Karl Blessing Verlag, 2010).
Lucy S. Dawidowicz, The Holocaust and the Historians (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981).
Karl Schleunes, The Twisted Road to Auschwitz: Nazi Policy towards German Jews, 1933–1939 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1970).
Christopher Browning, The Final Solution and the German Foreign Office: A Study of Referat Diii of Obteilung Deutschland 1940–43 (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1978).
Yehuda Bauer and Nathan Rosenstreich (eds), The Holocaust as Historical Experience (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1981); Henry Friedlander and Sybil Milton (eds), The Holocaust: Ideology, Bureaucracy, and Genocide: The San Jose Papers (New York: Kraus International Publications, 1980).
Martin Broszat, ‘Hitler und die Genesis der “Endlösung”. Aus Anlass der Thesen von David Irving’, Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, 25(4) (1978), 739–75.
Christopher R. Browning, ‘Zur Genesis der “Endlösung”. Eine Antwort an Martin Broszat’, Vierteljarhshefte für Zeitgeschichte, 29(1) (1981), 97–109. For an expanded English version of this article, see ‘The Genesis of the Final Solution. A Reply to Martin Broszat,’ Simon Wiesenthal Center Annual, I (1984), 113–32.
Later published as Christopher R. Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939–March 1942 (London: Random House, 2005).
Christopher R. Browning, ‘The Decision Concerning the Final Solution’ in Francois Furet (ed.), Unanswered Questions: Nazi Gemany and the Genocide of the Jews (New York: Schocken, 1989), pp. 96–118.
Ian Kershaw, Hitler, the Germans, and the Final Solution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).
Daniel J. Godldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners (New York: Knopf, 1996).
Christopher R. Browning, One Day in Jozefow: Initiation to Mass Murder’ in Peter Hayes (ed.), Lessons and Legacies: The Meaning of the Holocaust in a Changing World (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1991), pp. 196–209.
Christopher R. Browning, ‘Law, History, and Holocaust Denial in the Courtroom: The Zündel and Irving Cases’ in Nathan Stoltzfus and Henry Friedlander (eds), Nazi Crimes and the Law (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 197–215. For the Irving trial, see also Deborah Lipstadt, History on Trial (New York: Harper Perennial, 2005) and Richard Evans, Lying about Hitler: History, Holocaust, and the David Irving Trial (New York: Basic Books, 2001).
Christopher R. Browning, Remembering Survival: Inside a Nazi Slave Labor Camp (New York: W.W. Norton, 2010).
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© 2015 Christopher R. Browning
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Browning, C.R. (2015). The Personal Contexts of a Holocaust Historian: War, Politics, Trials and Professional Rivalry. In: Holocaust Scholarship. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137514196_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137514196_4
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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