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Raul Hilberg (1926-2007) was a pioneer of Holocaust historiography. After sifting through tens of thousands of perpetrators documents, he published The Destruction of the European Jews in 1961, with two revised editions to follow in 1985 and 2003. Hilberg’s magnum opus describes the persecution as a complex bureaucratic process involving the entire German society. The book has served as a foundational text and intellectual companion to the field of Holocaust historiography since its first publication.
The contributions in this volume explore the origins of Hilberg’s pioneering study, map out the debates in which it was implicated, highlight its unprecedented accomplishments as well as disturbing blind spots, and use “The Destruction” as a prism for an appraisal of eight decades of Holocaust research.
René Schlott is a freelance historian and associated researcher at the Centre for Contemporary History in Potsdam. He received his PhD in 2011 at the University of Giessen and is working on a biography of Raul Hilberg. He was awarded scholarships from the German Historical Institutes in Paris, Rome, and Washington, from the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung and from the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies. He published numerous papers about life, work, and legacy of Raul Hilberg and is coeditor, with Walter H. Pehle, of Raul Hilberg's The Anatomy of the Holocaust. Selected Works from a Life of Scholarship (2020).
List of Illustrations
Introduction: Raul Hilberg: Life, Work, and Memory: Some Introductory Reflections
René Schlott and Wulf Kansteiner
Part I: The Destruction as Text: Evolution, Rhetoric, Aesthetics and Blindspots
Chapter 1. Revisiting Hilberg’s Conceptual Model of the Development of the Destruction of the European Jews
Dan Michman
Chapter 2. Emigration and Expropriation in Raul Hilberg’s Work The Destruction of the European Jews
Peter Klein
Chapter 3. Law and History: Raul Hilberg, the Nuremberg Trial Documents, and Narrative Legacies of the ‘Final Solution’
Hilary Earl
Chapter 4. Raul Hilberg and the Discussion around the Führerbefehl
Jürgen Matthäus
Chapter 5. “Much is Unsaid”: Women in the Life and Work of Raul Hilberg
Doris L. Bergen
Chapter 6. “I Was Determined to Work on this Topic”. An Unpublished Interview with Raul Hilberg 1992
Eveyln Adunka
Chapter 7. Inside the Written Items: On the Laconism of Raul Hilberg
Nicolas Berg
Chapter 8. On the Moral Imprecision of Irony: Raul Hilberg’s Machinery of Destruction
Wulf Kansteiner
Conclusion I: Strengths, Weaknesses, and Blind Spots. The Work of Raul Hilberg in Historiographical Perspective
Olof Bortz
Part II: Hilberg and Holocaust Historiography
Chapter 9. After Destruction: Assessing Hilberg’s Mid-Career Scholarship
Christopher R. Browning
Chapter 10. Raul Hilberg and the Perpetrator Documents
Susanne Heim
Chapter 11. Precision, Severity, and Seriousness. Raul Hilberg’s Significance for Holocaust Research
Sybille Steinbacher
Chapter 12. Raul Hilberg, the Term Holocaust, and the Conferences from San José to Stuttgart
Magnus Brechtken
Chapter 13. Franz Neumann’s Behemoth and the Beginnings of Holocaust Research with Raul Hilberg
Alfons Söllner
Chapter 14. Two Different Fathers of Holocaust Research. Raul Hilberg and Philip Friedman
Elisabeth Gallas
Chapter 15. “Over and Over, She Returns Like a Ghost.” Reflections on the Conflict between Hannah Arendt and Raul Hilberg
Anna Corsten
Conclusion II: Raul Hilberg as a “First Mover”
Peter Hayes
Index