A01=Kobi Kabalek
Author_Kobi Kabalek
Category=JBSR
Category=NHD
Category=NHTZ1
collective morality
commemoration
East Germany
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
German reunification
Holocaust
Jews and Judaism
memory studies
Nazi Germany
Nazism
rescue
West Germany
Product details
- ISBN 9780299350505
- Weight: 454g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 07 Jan 2025
- Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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In Rescue and Remembrance, Kobi Kabalek examines how the rescue of Jews during the Holocaust has been understood and represented in Germany from the Nazi period to the present. In many regions outside Germany, a small number of known Holocaust rescuers are often held up as exemplars of broad pro-Jewish sentiment among that country’s population during World War II, thereby projecting an image of national moral virtue. Within Germany, by contrast, rescuers are often presented in both scholarship and public commemoration as a small minority; their examples condemn the majority by showing what Germans could have done but did not do.
Kabalek argues that such simplistic depictions of the majority versus minority obscure the complex motivations and situations that led people in Nazi Germany to help persecuted Jews. Against the view that the rescuers were “forgotten” after the war, he shows that portrayals and interpretations of helping Jews appeared in various media and social discourses in East, West, and unified Germany and were used to actively debate questions of collective morality. Rescue and Remembrance analyzes the varied and changing depictions of rescue in the distinct German polities from the Nazi period, examining how the very notions of “majority” and “collective” were articulated and reformulated.
Kabalek argues that such simplistic depictions of the majority versus minority obscure the complex motivations and situations that led people in Nazi Germany to help persecuted Jews. Against the view that the rescuers were “forgotten” after the war, he shows that portrayals and interpretations of helping Jews appeared in various media and social discourses in East, West, and unified Germany and were used to actively debate questions of collective morality. Rescue and Remembrance analyzes the varied and changing depictions of rescue in the distinct German polities from the Nazi period, examining how the very notions of “majority” and “collective” were articulated and reformulated.
Kobi Kabalek is an assistant professor of Holocaust studies and visual studies in the Germanic and Slavic languages and literatures and Jewish studies departments at the Pennsylvania State University.
