In recent decades, historians have probed the kinds of narratives that they tell in constructing the past. In the process, we have devoted too little attention to the ways that historical actors themselves translate beliefs and ideologies into narratives of events, which themselves become causal factors of great importance. In this essay, and the longer work from which it is drawn, I examine this translation as it emerged in Nazi Germany's anti-Semitic propaganda campaigns during World War II and the (...) Holocaust. In so doing, I argue that the concept of totalitarianism, when applied to the Nazi dictatorship, remains an indispensable…. (shrink)

The Thought of Death and the Memory of War examines the career of Martin Heidegger’s concept of Being-toward-death. For Heidegger, the thought of death, the confrontation with the anxiety of death, reveals the path to a life authentically lived. His analysis of Being-toward-death exercised enormous influence over subsequent thinkers, from Sartre to Derrida, who both admired the power and originality of his thinking, but were confounded by its glaring oversight: the trenches and killing fields of a war that had reached (...) its culmination less than ten years before Being and Time’s publication in 1927. Even more glaring was Heidegger’s resolute and dismaying silence regarding the Holocaust in the years following World War II. Marc Crépon examines the efforts of philosophers and writers – Sartre, Levinas, Patocka, Ricœur, Semprun, and Derrida – to contend critically with Heidegger’s thought of death. But Crépon’s project is not simply or even primarily one of intellectual history. Critical engagement with Heidegger’s Being-toward-death reveals the extent to which political frontiers are grounded in mourning and in the demarcation between those who must be mourned and those whose deaths can be overlooked and ignored. The thought of death thus enables us to discern the contours of a moral and political community that, grounded in our shared mortality, is universal in its extension. The book concludes by examining how the media’s representations of death maintain the frontiers of mourning and thus “eclipse,” hide, or discourage the thought of death. (shrink)

Theologian. Conspirator. Martyr. Saint. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was killed in the waning days of World War II, having been implicated in the July 20th assassination attempt on Hitler. Since his death, Bonhoeffer’s life and writings have inspired contradictory responses. He is often seen as a model for Christian pacifist resistance, and more recently for violent direct political action. Bonhoeffer’s name has been invoked by violent anti-abortion protestors as well as political leaders calling for support on a ‘war on terror’ in (...) the aftermath of 9/11. Petra Brown critically analyses Bonhoeffer’s writing preceding and during his conspiracy involvement, particularly his recurring concept of the ‘extraordinary.’ Brown examines this idea in light of ‘the state of exception,’ a concept coined by the one-time Nazi jurist and political theorist, Carl Schmitt. She also draws on the existentialist philosopher Sören Kierkegaard to consider what happens when discipleship is understood as obedience to a divine command. This book aims to complicate an unreflective admiration of Bonhoeffer’s decision for conspiracy, and draws attention to the potentially dangerous implications of his emerging political theology. (shrink)

The Second World War was a watershed in history in many ways. I focus on the World War II discontinuity as it relates to the intersection of scientific and military enterprise. I am interested in how we should conceptualize that intersection and in offering a preliminary tracing of the “World War II regime” that has grown out of it—a regime that includes new forms of scientific and military practice but that has invaded and transformed many other (...) cultural spaces, including—my primary example here—the industrial workplace. I exploit the figure of the cyborg to thematize the social, material, and conceptual heterogeneity of the developments at issue; specify a distinct range of cyborg objects and sciences that emerged from the World War II matrix; and exemplify a historiographical approach that escapes the traditional master-narrative structures of science studies. (shrink)

Enlightenment thought and its contemporary followers usually support two contradictory principles simultaneously. The first is universality. Truth is universal because it is truth for all. Claims to universality are made in logic and science, but also in areas that are culturally or politically controversial. Recently, universalism has become a key term to express a fundamental critique of identity politics. For much of European history, Christianity provided such a universal truth. But with the decline of its cultural hegemony and the (...) rise of particular nation-states, conflicting truth claims became weapons in violent conflicts, leading Hobbes to argue that dangerous truth claims must be neutralized by robust political power. In the eighteenth century, rationalism became more optimistic, interpreting universalism as cosmopolitanism based on universal reason and progress through history. The second principle is historicism, which is the self-reflexive look at the historical origins of universal claims and theories. Historicism emerged in the nineteenth century as a response to the application of rationalism to history. It challenged the universal claims of the French Revolution, emphasizing instead the unique value of each historical entity. This revealed a fundamental paradox: when universalism becomes self-reflexive, it recognizes that it has non-universal historical origins, thereby undermining itself. After the devastation of World War II and the Holocaust, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) represented a significant effort toward a new universalism. It sought to establish human rights as universal principles for the emerging world order. But history repeated itself: Historicism once again weakened confidence in human rights. The enemies of human rights take advantage of this weakness. We therefore have to live with the paradox that universalism is necessary because humanity shares a single world, but that historical self-reflection is also unavoidable. In other words, the Enlightenment principle of universalism must accept historicism as an integral part of itself. (shrink)

_A renowned philosopher challenges long-held views on just wars, ethical conduct during war, why wars occur, how they alter people and societies, and more_ For residents of the twenty-first century, a vision of a future without warfare is almost inconceivable. Though wars are terrible and destructive, they also seem unavoidable. In this original and deeply considered book, A. C. Grayling examines, tests, and challenges the concept of war. He proposes that a deeper, more accurate understanding of war may enable us (...) to reduce its frequency, mitigate its horrors, and lessen the burden of its consequences. Grayling explores the long, tragic history of war and how warfare has changed in response to technological advances. He probes much-debated theories concerning the causes of war and considers positive changes that may result from war. How might these results be achieved without violence? In a profoundly wise conclusion, the author envisions “just war theory” in new moral terms, taking into account the lessons of World War II and the Holocaust and laying down ethical principles for going to war and for conduct during war. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Crises of Memory and the Second World WarPatrick HenryCrises of Memory and the Second World War, by Susan Rubin Suleiman; x & 286 pp. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006. $29.95.This excellent study deals widely and deeply with the crises of memory and World War II but generally focuses on France, Vichy and the Holocaust. The author defines a crisis of memory as "a moment (...) of choice and sometimes of predicament or conflict, about remembrance of the past, whether by individuals or by groups" (p. 1). In the crises of memory she examines, "individual self-representation overlaps with... collective self-representation" in such a way that individual remembrance takes on collective significance. In nine rich chapters of textual analysis of mostly self-consciously literary texts, Suleiman deftly analyzes writers from the left and the right, two films of tremendous import, the nature of Holocaust memoirs, experimental writing and the concepts of trauma, amnesia, amnesty, testimony and forgiveness.In the first three chapters, Suleiman studies French memories of the Occupation, the collaborationist Vichy regime and the Resistance from 1945 to the present. These chapters depict the relations between history and memory and highlight the intriguing process of the evolution of public remembrance. Chapter one, "Choosing Our Past," surprises even the most careful reader of Jean-Paul Sartre's plays and novels, for it demonstrates brilliantly that, in several of his very early post-Vichy essays where he conveniently passes over in silence France's collaborationist past—even the major role played by Vichy police in the roundup and deportation of Jews—he helped create, along with de Gaulle and others, the myth of "Resistancialism," the founding myth of the post-Vichy [End Page 204] Period, the idea that all Frenchmen resisted the Nazis. In the words of Pierre Nora, Sartre and de Gaulle were "writing history from the point of view of the future" (p. 17).In chapter two, the author analyzes the 1997 "Aubrac Affair," exposing the problems that the Resistance heroes, Lucie and Raymond Aubrac, encountered when they were suddenly suspected of having betrayed Jean Moulin, whose 1964 enshrinement in the Pantheon is examined in chapter three within the context of the politics of national memory in France. Whereas Moulin's enshrinement marked the apex of the myth of "Resistancialism" in France, the "Aubrac Affair" comes fifty-four years after the betrayal of Jean Moulin and twenty-five years after the myth of "Resistancialism" began to fade. In treating the charges and countercharges in the "Aubrac Affair," which continues to fascinate because it illustrates "the problematic relation between public and private memory, and between history and fantasy in the construction of both an individual and a collective past" (p. 61), Suleiman highlights the problems of narrative verisimilitude and the narrative tendency toward heroic aggrandizement as well as its opposite, the desire to topple heroes.In chapter four, Suleiman studies Marcel Orphuls's Hotel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie, a four-hour documentary of great significance that remains relatively unknown when compared with his earlier film, The Sorrow and the Pity. Barbie was the infamous Nazi war criminal, known as "the Butcher of Lyon," who tortured and deported hundreds of Jews and tortured to death the great French Resistance hero, Jean Moulin. He was extradited from Bolivia to France in 1983 where he was tried for crimes against humanity in 1987. Orphuls's film exposes the conflicted memories and partisanships produced by WWII and the Holocaust in public and private spaces throughout Europe and the Americas. This chapter will undoubtedly convince others of the film's importance. It will certainly convince the reader of Suleiman's ability to read film. She explains in detail Orphuls's method of "dialectical montage" (already evident in The Sorrow and the Pity) whereby he cuts up individual interviews and juxtaposes them with parts of others that often qualify or simply contradict what has been stated. This is why his films are "interactive documentaries" that "force the viewer into uncomfortable subject positions in relation to the material" (p. 87). No voice-over or "voice of God" commentary comes to aid the viewer who is forced to evaluate critically... (shrink)

Two Jewish families, the Langs and the Ottenheimers, settled in the two separate parts of Suessen, District Goeppingen, in 1902. The Langs established a cattle business in Gross-Suessen, the Ottenheimers established a branch of their weaving business, headquartered in Goeppingen, in Klein-Suessen. Based primarily on archival sources, the study gives an insight into everyday rural Jewish life, persecution and deportation during the Holocaust, an American soldier's World War II experience, experiences of liberation from concentration camps, the reparations process (...) and life after 1945. (shrink)

This paper explores how the "environmental turn" for the last 25 years has been shaping remembrance of the destruction of Europe's Jewish populations. I argue that climate change is not just one more catastrophe to pass into the broad analogical field of the Holocaust. In fact, international Holocaust consciousness and understandings of what we now call the Anthropocene have long been intertwined and mutually constitutive. The paper starts in the 1990s with acclaimed writers Anne Michaels and W.G. Sebald, (...) who sought to recast the Holocaust's significance to modernity against a long backdrop of geologic time. Their memorial fiction, which grounds the history of the Holocaust in the eroding landscapes of Europe, reflects a growing and urgent global concern for the vulnerability of the environment and a sense of man's responsibility for preserving human and biological life. The paper then moves through more contemporary examples of the sublimation of Holocaust memory in discourse about global warming—evident in terms like "climate change denial" and calls to "bear witness" to mass extinction events. For better or worse, journalists and scholars who write about environmental activism frequently call on memory of World War II and genocide in order to redefine what constitutes "grievable life." Example authors include historian Timothy Snyder, who has predicted that climate change may lead to new genocidal wars over Lebensraum ; scientist James Lovelock, who has urged nation states to consider how to limit the coming influx of climate refugees; theorist Bruno Latour, who has argued, via Nazi philosopher Carl Schmitt, that we must "name our enemies" in the new climate wars; and essayist Ari Brostoff who has attempted to think climate catastrophe through Walter Benjamin's meditations on the angel of history. The implicit question in all of their work is this: What histories and philosophical traditions can help us redefine humanity's entangled relationship to nature in order to take political responsibility for saving life on Earth? In other words, the Anthropocene requires "a usable past"—but what will that usable past be? (shrink)

The roles of small and great books, and passionate yet well-considered writings in the general education of a “college” or “university” trained teacher are questions which should be turned back upon the historian as teacher and writer. Where resides the historian's classroom? Who are the students and how do teachers come to be? What subject matter should be used to prod and provoke an often dormant humanity awake? Professor Marc Bloch's work, his passion for history's rôles and its voices (...) from the past speaking to the present, had a Renaissance in the cauldron of World War II. Bloch's commitment to teaching and writing history, teaching about the forceful, or surprising and shocking, “presences” of history's supposed past-tense experiences, remains seminal to the historian's craft. Bloch's own voice from the past was forged in an intensity of present-time experience. Reflection was searing experience. Memory was “now” and remembrance was an accident of preservation for futures then unknown. These futures need to know of the experiences of former, fragile, personal and generational memories if the very same futures were to be lived more surely and securely. Marc Bloch's The Historian's Craft, remains a vindication of the human-centred, purposive roles of history in a general education. Moreover, this general education can now be said to cover the broad sweep of “secondary schooling” experiences. This sweep of schooling and post-schooling experiences is beginning, however tentatively and problematically, to extend itself into worlds of work, the futures of work and the academic futures or courses of higher education: the arena of tertiary and university education. In a not dissimilar fashion but in an even more intense spirit, Bloch's work, L’étrange défaite, examines the explosion and implosion of France and, in effect, Western Europe in the years, months and days leading up to the German offensive in the West of 10 May 1940. Bloch recognized that education and the failures to harness intellect, true intellectual freedom and innovative teaching weighed heavily upon the disastrous course of events in 1940. Professor Bloch's texts can serve two complementary purposes. First, his works, Strange Defeat and The Historian's Craft remain as significant, contemporary records of personal thoughts, argumentative methodologies, and recollections of world-shattering events. They constitute, quite literally, an historian's craft in action. Second, Bloch's texts can serve an equally valuable role where the writer seeks to take his reader through and beyond the immediate historical question, methodology or series of unravelling events into an intellectual duel which stands upon the historian's engagement with worlds, past and present. Questions and actions, makings and doings matter in this world. Understanding is not only a prime responsibility of the historian; it is a duty which might well prove dangerous. Given the above observations, this essay will seek to emphasize that world history and the teaching of broad histories of humanity recognizes few, if any, borders which seek to block or hold at bay the presentation of the “passport” known as understanding. Teaching history is much more than teaching civics or recognizing civilizational variety and its barbarous opposites. Teaching history is an act, however imperfect, of recognizing ourselves in time. My brother “schoolmasters”—when it came to the point, you did, for the most part, put up a magnificent fight. It was your goodwill which managed to create in many a sleepy secondary school, in many universities—prisoners of the worse routines the only form of education of which, perhaps, we can feel genuinely proud. I only hope that a day will come, and come soon, a day of glory and of happiness for France, when, liberated from the enemy, and freer than ever in our intellectual life, we may meet again for the mutual discussion of ideas. And when that happens, do you not think that, having learned from an experience so dearly purchased, you will find much to alter in the things you were teaching only a few years back? Strange Defeat, 142).1 What was at stake was a geological upheaval of thought …2. (shrink)

The article discusses the immediate post-war persistence and subsequent rejection of eugenics in East-Central European socialist states, exploring the case of premarital medical certificates. Building our analysis on published and archival sources, we show that immediately after the war, policies formulated at the governmental level were informed by eugenic ideas in medical expertise. Premarital medical certificates were aimed at combatting contagious diseases and thus securing a healthy population. Their legal status varied: in Poland, they were formally introduced; in the Soviet (...) Occupied Zone and East Germany, Nazi law was abolished, but local officials still advocated for the introduction of certificates; and in Czechoslovakia, medical certificates were planned but not introduced. Despite these differences, after a short period between 1949 and 1950, the attempts to put a measure into practice ended in all three countries. We argue that the communist takeover and consolidation of power played a decisive role. After 1950, premarital medical certificates were not discussed again in Czechoslovakia or East Germany; in Poland, the debate re-emerged in 1959–60 during political liberalization. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Refugees of a Crisis in ReferenceHolocaust Memoir and the Deconstruction of Paul de ManPatrick Lawrence (bio)Since discovery of Paul de Man’s wartime journalism, the debate over perceived ethical deficiencies in the philosophies of postmodernism in general, and deconstruction in particular, has intensified. At times more or less vitriolic or persuasive, this debate has brought about a crisis of scholarship to accompany the crisis of reference that is one of (...) its central points.1 At the horizon of the discussion is the Holocaust and its potential to reform modes of representation. As Jeremy Varon notes in his essay “Probing the Limits of the Politics of Representation”:the premises and insights of a variety of discourses, notably postructuralism [sic], deconstruction, psychoanalysis in its newer versions, metahistory, and postmodern theory in general, have at once been applied to and checked against the Holocaust. Such discourses often approach the Holocaust as a kind of limit case that tests the strengths and weaknesses of their various interpretive strategies.(Varon 84)It seems natural because of its (perhaps incomprehensible) magnitude and significance that the Holocaust should occasion self-testing and soul searching on the part of a variety of discourses, notably those that already inclined to such activities.2 Because of its status as at once radically historical and radically ahistorical (in that its import for history cannot be denied, but that the scope of its horror may transform notions of historicity), the Holocaust calls for a reassessment of all aesthetic, poetic, and theoretical paradigms. In the context of such novel and difficult historicity, the problematization of reference that de Manian deconstruction occasions takes on new and complex implications that need particular attention. This is especially important because, like American deconstruction, artistic representations of the Holocaust also assert a new, problematic relationship with their referent.My intention is not to delve into this debate exhaustively. Rather, I attempt an understanding of the problems of some specific critical-theoretical tenets proposed by Paul de Man as they interact with Holocaust memoirs. Doing so may be a way to understand the larger issue by exploring its expression in a narrow vein: that of literature. Holocaust memoirs as a group have been read as making new claims about their relation to a particular referent—about the inability of fully representing the Holocaust in existing modes—but they also make simultaneous claims about the utter necessity of attempting to do so. It will be helpful to see how this revolution of the relationship of [End Page 17] writing to its referent is perhaps at odds with that other similar revolution, that of deconstruction. I also attempt to put this potential conflict into a frame that may elucidate the reasons for their disconnect, using Lyotard’s well-known attempt at establishing an order of postmodern ethics: The Differend, as well as approaches to trauma and memory suggested by Derrida.My aim here is also not to delve into judgments of guilt or innocence with respect to de Man himself and his activities during World War II. I instead venture into the ways, both positive and negative, but inherently problematic, that his writings come into contact with an event recognized by many as a limit event, one that demands recognition of its historicity, even as it engenders a body of literature that expresses the difficulty of understanding the event itself.There is much in de Man’s writings that forces us to consider the restraints and potential of the means of construction of written texts. Exploring this can lead toward a better understanding of the way that individual texts create and manipulate meaning. To this end, much can be gained from de Manian criticism that makes apparent the contradictory tendency of linguistic constructions to indicate something outside themselves (their referential potential), even while their structures and conventions cast in doubt the reality of this “something.” One makes use of this discourse, not in the hopes of destroying the privilege of referentiality that underlies the structures of testimony, victimization, and trauma, but in the hopes of finding a way for the discourse of memoir (and autobiography) to be reconciled with the discourse of deconstruction in such a way that... (shrink)

This book is at once a deeply learned and original reading of Heidegger and a primary text in its own right. It demonstrates the relevance of Heidegger’s thought in responding to the moral and religious challenges of 21st century existence. It shows that Heidegger’s project can be defended against many criticisms once its existential character is taken seriously. What emerges is a powerful exercise in thinking, not about Heidegger, but with and against him. As such, Atkins engages Heidegger as a (...) means of advancing a defense of spirituality in the modern world that holds spirituality itself accountable for its lapses into the mundane. Addressing the most influential figures in recent Continental philosophy, such as Emmanuel Levinas and Theodor W. Adorno, this is a work that will be of timely use to philosophers, theologians, artists, and seekers. (shrink)

During World War II, the Institute for Social Research conducted an innovative study of American working-class antisemitism. This article goes beyond existing literature by reconstructing the project’s evolving understanding of labor antisemitism—from ideology to psychopathology. This change, it argues, arose from the project’s methods, findings, and analytical concepts—especially the long-overlooked concept of the stereotype. The article documents this concept’s role in two better-known Institute works from the period: Dialectic of Enlightenment and Authoritarian Personality. Throughout, it traces continuities in the (...) Institute’s research program and reconsiders the balance between its empirical studies and its critical theory in the 1940s. (shrink)

Just Images: Ethics and the Cinematic charts current developments within the field of ethics and the role it plays in the study of moving images. It is the first collection of essays of its kind that brings together articles by film and media scholars from three continents, and provides multiple points of engagement of film with present and past histories, politics, myth making, and with core aspects of human subjectivity. The essays cover a wide range of topics, such as the (...) European Union; Europe during World War II and after; film genres; the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; early American history, and recent catastrophic events. The collection includes an introductory chapter by Thomas Elsaesser as well as chapters by Kristian Feigelson, Règine-Mihal Friedman, Nurith Gertz and Gal Hermoni, Anton Kaes, Gertrud Koch, Odeya Kohen-Raz, Lihi Nagler, Judd Ne'eman, Bill Nichols, and Janet Walker. The contributors offer different approaches to the issue of film and ethics and ask whether there are specific characteristics of the moving image, or of film scholarship, that relate to ethical issues; and how discussing the engagement of both narrative and documentary film with representations of the Other, trauma, terrorism, the Holocaust, and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict may contribute to the re-shaping of past and current thoughts on these subjects. (shrink)

When introducing a collection of essays on Yiddish, Joseph Sherman asserted, among other things, that: Although the Nazi Holocaust effectively destroyed Yiddish together with the Jews of Eastern Europe for whom it was a lingua franca, the Yiddish language, its literature and culture have proven remarkably resilient. Against all odds, Yiddish has survived to become a focus of serious intellectual, artistic and scholarly activity in the sixty-odd years that have passed since the end of World War II. From (...) linguistic and literary research in the leading universities of the world to the dedicated creativity of contemporary novelists and poets in Israel and America, from the adaptation of Yiddish words and phrases to the uses of daily newspapers in English to the elevation of Yiddish as a new loshn koydesh by Hasidic sects, from the publication of new writing to the translation of its established canonical works into modern European languages, Yiddish is continually reminding the world of its vibrancy, relevance and importance as a marker of Jewish identity and survival. (shrink)

During the first half of the twentieth century there was a marked decline in biological conceptions of man and society. This paper describes the development of the views concerning eugenics held by the Norwegian scientific expertise, from open racism before World War I to a moderate nonracist eugenic program in the 1930's. It is claimed that public criticism of the popular eugenics movement by the experts came earlier in Norway than in most other countries, including the United States. The (...) first attack in 1915 was directed at dilettantic and irresponsible handling of scientific ideas, data and arguments. The conflict was over different views of science and its social role rather than over different aims for social development. The strict methodological demands that the scientific expertise wanted to enforce, provided a barrier against extreme eugenic views and proposals, and a source for critical arguments against eugenics in general. The experts differed considerably in their political views, but united in the crusade against dilettantism. They all feared premature applications of science to social problems. John Alfred Mjøen was leader of the popular eugenics movement in Norway. He learned about race-hygiene in Germany and started a public campaign in Norway around 1908. Mjøen formulated the so-called « Norwegian program for racehygiene » and played a prominent role in the international eugenics movement, but he was ostracized by Norwegian genetic scientists. Mjøen's strongest critic was Otto Lous Mohr, medical doctor and biologist, trained in genetics under T. H. Morgan. Mohr led the attack on Mjøen in 1915. Besides being a human geneticist of international prominence Mohr was strongly involved in campaigns for birth control and sexual instruction. Important supporters of a moderate eugenic program were Ragnar Vogt, founder of modern Norwegian psychiatry, and Johan Scharffenberg, psychiatrist and central public figure. Both were clearly on Mohr's side in the conflict with Mjøen. (shrink)

The ArgumentEuropean ethology and North American comparative psychology have been the two most prominent approaches to the study of animal behavior through most of the twentieth century. In this paper I analyze sets of popular articles by ethologist Nikolaas Tinbergen and psychologist Frank Beach, in an effort to understand the contrasting rhetorical styles of the two. Among the numerous ways in which Tinbergen and Beach differed were with respect to expressing the joy of research, the kind of scientific approach adopted, (...) their treatment of animals, their sense of history, and the types of illustrations they chose. In general, Tinbergen‘s articles placed him closer to nature and Beach‘s more in the tradition of dispassionate scientific inquiry. These differences in rhetoric may have been one factor in the greater success of ethology after World War II. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Research Ethics after World War II: The Insular Culture of BiomedicineAllan M. Brandt (bio) and Lara Freidenfelds (bio)Human subjects research in the United States has only recently emerged as an important area of historical investigation. Over the last quarter century, scholars have begun the process of grounding within an historical context both the complex relationship between researchers and subjects and the processes by which biomedical knowledge is produced. (...) Their studies examine topics ranging from the impact of the anti-vivisectionist movement on human experimentation in the early twentieth century (Lederer 1995) to the development of the discipline of bioethics in the 1960s and 1970s (Rothman 1991) and the emergence of the legal concept of informed consent for human research (Katz, Glass, and Capron 1972). Many of the discussions focus on isolated incidents of scandal, such as the Tuskegee Syphilis Study (Jones 1993; Brandt 1978) and the Willowbrook School hepatitis study (Rothman and Rothman 1984). In doing so, they attempt to explain how such clearly unethical research could have been initiated and what consequences have resulted from public knowledge of such research.Nonetheless, the broader historical contexts and implications of human subjects research have yet to be fully delineated. This project will be of crucial importance, not only for historians, but also for those concerned with research policy and medical ethics. The historical examination of human subjects research will provide further insight into the details of research methods, the construction of protocols, and the historically specific interest in certain diseases. In addition, scholars will better understand the relationships of power and authority between researcher and subject, as well as the social and scientific mechanisms for the production of new biomedical knowledge. The process of enlisting research subjects illuminates the significance of class, gender, ethnicity, and race in science, in biomedicine, and in society. The fact that, historically, much research has employed research subjects from vulnerable populations, who participated in coercive contexts, has exposed powerful social assumptions embedded in the research enterprise. [End Page 239]The revelation of new documents indicating past abuses has sparked much of the investigation into human subjects research and the recent investigation of human radiation experiments during the Cold War era. One of the most important achievements of the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments was the uncovering of thousands of documents, a remarkable mine of archival data, that had been previously inaccessible to researchers. Jonathan Moreno and Susan Lederer’s article on the history of Cold War research ethics in this issue of the Kennedy Institute ofEthics Journal represents the first attempt since the publication of the Committee’s Final Report to analyze the Committee’s findings in a serious historical context.Historical accounts of the emergence of bioethics traditionally have left a great void in their discussions of human experimentation, generally ignoring the period between the writing of the Nuremberg Code in 1947 and the publication of Henry Beecher’s 1966 New England Journal ofMedicine article condemning systematic, unethical practices in human experimentation (Rothman 1991). The period from 1946 to 1966, however, was a time of vigorous research characterized by a fragmented community of medical researchers who applied inconsistent ethical standards and employed highly variable research practices. Both military and civilian medical researchers were intensely interested in radiation and thus conducted human subjects research along those lines, including examinations of the effects of plutonium injections and of total body irradiation, the use of trace radioisotopes to study various body processes, and observations of the effects of radiation intentionally released into the environment. The U.S. Government sponsored several thousand such studies (ACHRE 1995 [GPO, pp. 227–31; Oxford, pp. 135–38]), some of which were conducted on hospital patients, institutionalized children, military personnel, and prisoners. The Cold War scientific culture that produced this research must be examined from an historical ethical perspective.A central aspect of the culture of biomedical science after World War II was its insularity. Increasingly high standards of admission and challenging training had come to ensure that only a select group of individuals was admitted to the professions of medicine and research science. In this culture of experts, trustworthiness and ethical judgment were considered to be dependent upon expertise... (shrink)

Scholars working on the history of human experimentation have long puzzled over the neglect of medical research ethics in the first two decades after World War II, a period that saw a vast increase in human experimentation in medicine but that seems to have been characterized by a lack of moral leadership among physicians. This essay reexamines this notion by drawing on ethical debates about human experimentation in the Dutch medical profession between 1945 and 1971. In the international (...) literature, Dutch physicians are often singled out as having been exceptionally quick to note the need for better research ethics after World War II. This essay, however, shows that it is a mistake to identify these Dutch concerns as one of those exceptions that ultimately proves the rule. Instead, the Dutch ethics discourse developed in this period sought to carve out a legitimate space for “good medical research,” where “good” stood simultaneously for “methodologically valid” and “ethically just” and where research ethics committees were imagined to function as epistemic filters that would increase both the quality and the quantity of human experimentation in medicine. This connection between ethics and episteme has hitherto received little attention in the history of research ethics governance but remains a core element of medical research ethics today. (shrink)

The existentialist philosopher Karl Jaspers is the father of a discourse on the spiritual consequences of the Holocaust. First addressed as the Schuldfrage (the question of guilt) by Jaspers immediately after the Second World War in his famous Heidelberg lecture, it has reappeared in various forms in German life and letters. Post-unification Germany has witnessed the valorization of the German experience of the Second World War. This ongoing re-evaluation has its antecedents in the generational literature of the (...) 1970s and 1980s. Whereas the Vaterliteratur of the 1970s (by authors such as Christoph Meckel, Uwe Timm, and Peter Henisch) was often embedded in a left-wing critique of the establishment, recent contributions to this growing genre (by Marcel Beyer, Stephan Wackwitz, Wibke Bruhns, and Ulla Hahn among others) speak to the issue of collective identity and transgenerational family trauma outside distinct left- and right-wing interpretations of National Socialism. The current writings on the life during the Third Reich (filtered through the experiences of discrete generations) are a confluence of historical writing, memorial literature, biography, and fiction. They are closely related to the discussions that W. G. Sebald initiated in his 1997 lecture series on the silence of German postwar literature with respect to German suffering. The subsequent debate on how to bring closure to this ?German suffering? was intensified by Günter Grass's widening of the concept of German victimization beyond the air war controversy in his book Crabwalk (2002). As Grass distinguishes clearly between the various post-World War II generations (and their different perspectives on historical events), the question becomes whether these recent writings will bring about a final so-called ?zero hour? in German postwar history. (shrink)

This article penetrates the idealistic, Marxist concept of the 'new Soviet man', linking it with the notion of eugenics. Departing from a reconstruction of the history and specificity of the eugenic movement in Russia since the late 19th century until the installation of Joseph Stalin as the only ruler of the Soviet Union, Lysenkoism paradigm of Soviet natural sciences is being evoked as a theoretical frame for Soviet-specific eugenic programme. Through referring to a number of chosen – both theoretical (...) and practical – issues and cases, the concept of the 'new Soviet man' is being confronted with an original reading of eugenics, understood in neo-Lamarckian terms of direct shaping human beings through environmental conditions and intergenerational transfer of acquired traits. (shrink)

The aim of the research was to analyse the experience of medical volunteers during World War II in the context of nursing history. Oral history data used in the study consisted of 30 interviews with Finnish wartime medical volunteers, known locally as Lottas. Interview data were analysed both thematically and by using the oral history method. Based on the analysis, the Lottas' experiences during wartime nursing became the leitmotif of this study. The main themes consisted of (...) the following: ‘taking care of wounded and ill patients', ‘taking care of dying and deceased patients’, ‘taking care of mentally ill and psychoactive substance‐addicted patients’ and ‘confronting ethical and role dilemmas in nursing’. The interview results showed that the Lottas' duties were sometimes more demanding than basic nursing tasks and that their education was not adequate for the challenges that they faced. In this paper, the terms Lotta, medical Lotta or medical volunteer are used interchangeably and refer to people who were assigned to medical volunteer tasks, regardless of whether or not they were trained. It also includes junior members of the organisation who served as medical volunteers as minors, with special permission. (shrink)

Academics are falsely rumored to have a low regard for religion. Although Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, authors of The God Delusion and God Is Not Great , respectively, made atheism a best-selling subject in the United States, it is not coincidental that Hitchens and Dawkins are English. They were educated in a country where a strident antipathy toward religion is not unpatriotic. American atheists with as much brass are rare. Kicking religion around cannot be an American sport because, from (...) colonial to contemporary times, religion has been a central component of American culture. To be sure, a lot of scholarly criticism has been directed at right-wing Christian and Islamic movements. But scholars whose personal views on faith incline them to echo Hitchens's mordant formula that “religion poisons everything” should probably look for a country other than the United States to study. The recent books of historians and sociologists of American religion have taken a tone toward the subject that has ranged from gentle to friendly. (shrink)

This case is designed to help students analyze decision making from various ethical perspectives and to use stakeholder analysis. The case perspective is that of the CEO of Degussa AG, a multispecialty chemical company, headquartered in Düsseldorf, Germany. Degussa is considering whether to submit a bid to supply its anti-graffiti coating, Protectosil ® , for a new Memorial to the Murdered Jews in Europe being planned for Berlin. Degussa’s ethical dilemma is that a former Degussa subsidiary, Degesch, manufactured and supplied (...) the Zyklon B nerve gas used by the Nazis to kill Jews in the concentration camps during World War II. Although Degussa has made attempts both to acknowledge and to atone for its war-time Nazi collaboration, public disclosure of its bid has the potential to engulf Degussa in controversy when activists and Jewish leaders learn of it. Students are asked to evaluate the bid’s benefits and costs to Degussa’s stakeholders, to consider the relevance of a company’s historical legacy to contemporary decision making, and to explore how German corporate history during and after the Holocaust has parallels to human rights issues in other countries. (shrink)

In this major intellectual history, Ira Katznelson examines the works of Hannah Arendt, Robert Dahl, Richard Hofstadter, Harold Lasswell, Charles Lindblom, Karl Polanyi, and David Truman, detailing their engagement with the larger project of reclaiming the West's moral bearing.

Bergmann’s rule and Allen’s rule played important roles in mid-twentieth century discussions of adaptation, variation, and geographical distribution. Although inherited from the nineteenth-century natural history tradition these rules gained significance during the consolidation of the modern synthesis as evolutionary theorists focused attention on populations as units of evolution. For systematists, the rules provided a compelling rationale for identifying geographical races or subspecies, a function that was also picked up by some physical anthropologists. More generally, the rules provided strong evidence (...) for adaptation by natural selection. Supporters of the rules tacitly, or often explicitly, assumed that the clines described by the rules reflected adaptations for thermoregulation. This assumption was challenged by the physiologists Laurence Irving and Per Scholander based on their arctic research conducted after World War II. Their critique spurred a controversy played out in a series of articles in Evolution, in Ernst Mayr’s Animal Species and Evolution, and in the writings of other prominent evolutionary biologists and physical anthropologists. Considering this episode highlights the complexity and ambiguity of important biological concepts such as adaptation, homeostasis, and self-regulation. It also demonstrates how different disciplinary orientations and styles of scientific research influenced evolutionary explanations, and the consequent difficulties of constructing a truly synthetic evolutionary biology in the decades immediately following World War II. (shrink)

During the decades following World War II diverse groups of American biologists established a variety of distinctive approaches to organismal biology. Rhetorically, organismal biology could be used defensively to distinguish established research traditions from perceived threats from newly emerging fields such as molecular biology. But, organismal biologists were also interested in integrating biological disciplines and using a focus on organisms to synthesize levels of organization from molecules and cells to populations and communities. Part of this broad movement was the (...) development of an area of research variously referred to as physiological ecology, environmental physiology, or ecophysiology. This area of research was distinctive in its self-conscious blend of field and laboratory practices and its explicit integration with other areas of biology such as ecology, animal behavior, and evolution in order to study adaptation. Comparing the intersecting careers of Knut Schmidt-Nielsen and George Bartholomew highlights two strikingly different approaches to physiological ecology. These alternative approaches to studying the interactions of organisms and environments also differed in important ways from the organismal biology championed by leading figures in the modern synthesis. (shrink)

The concept of citizenship in Europe after World War II faces two major challenges: migration and European integration. This introduction precedes a group of articles examining debates and law-making processes related to the concept of citizenship in Europe after World War II. The introduction sketches the historical development of citizenship in European representative democracies, taking into account four basic dimensions for analyzing changes in the concept of citizenship.

Recently, I have proposed an extension of the framework of the ethics of collegiality (Berber & Subotić, forthcoming). By incorporating an anti-individual perspective and the notion of epistemic competence, this framework can reveal the epistemic virtue/vice relativism, which, in turn, charts the tension between being a good colleague and an efficient, loyal employee. In this paper, however, I want to sketch how the ethics of collegiality could be applied to practical domains, such as the historical accountability and atonement of corporations (...) that participated in the anti-Semitic policies of the Third Reich and contributed to the Holocaust by using slave or forced labor. New studies suggest that corporations ought to engage in deeper historical reflection and ethical dialogue between Shoah survivors and top managers to address the issue of industrial compliance (Federman 2021), whereas most of the work on this topic traditionally focused on the issue of reparations litigation (Kelly 2016, Neuborne 2003). Through the notions of collective institutional epistemic vice and institutional ethos (Fricker 2021), the upshot is to assess whether it is feasible for corporations to be genuinely repentant regarding their role in the Holocaust thanks to the ethics of collegiality instead of merely offering compensation. I will argue that instead of emphasizing ethical leadership and the top-down approach to the (re-)implementation of values in corporate conduct, the spotlights should be on the bottom-up approach grounded in collegial solidarity among all employees. (shrink)

The BiDil affair brought once again to the fore questions of race and medicine. As discussed in other essays in this collection, the emergence of BiDil as the first medication approved and marketed for treating specific racial groups raises important questions for medicine and society: How are race and ethnicity framing our understanding of health and illness? Should treatment decisions be based on the race and ethnicity of patients? Should we encourage the development of race-specific medical treatments in order to (...) reduce health disparities? Or is this approach dangerous, and can it lead to unwanted consequences including racial stigmatization? These questions are not new, and since the introduction of race as a scientific construct in the late-19th century, race has played an important part in the history of medicine, most notoriously during World War II and the Holocaust. Yet the identification of race medicine with Nazi science tends to obscure the vast use of race as a medical construct by a wide range of medical scientists and practitioners across the political spectrum. In many instances, racial minorities were preoccupied with race medicine in order to promote the health of their own communities. One such group was that of Jewish physicians. (shrink)

The War Inside is a groundbreaking history of the contribution of British psychoanalysis to the making of social democracy, childhood, and the family during World War II and the postwar reconstruction. Psychoanalysts informed understandings not only of individuals, but also of broader political questions. By asserting a link between a real 'war outside' and an emotional 'war inside', psychoanalysts contributed to an increased state responsibility for citizens' mental health. They made understanding children and the mother-child relationship key to (...) the successful creation of a democratic citizenry. Using rich archival sources, the book revises the common view of psychoanalysis as an elite discipline by taking it out of the clinic and into the war nursery, the juvenile court, the state welfare committee, and the children's hospital. It traces the work of the second generation of psychoanalysts after Freud in response to total war and explores its broad postwar effects on British society. (shrink)

This article discusses Hermann Levin Goldschmidt’s philosophical work, first published in 1976 as within the context of the field of futurology. Whereas his historical work seeks to restore a legacy that the Holocaust destroyed, his philosophical argument against the futurologists reclaims the future from the realms of forecasting and planning. Goldschmidt gains this unique philosophical position on the future from the perspective of German Jewish philosophers and scholars who shaped his historical work. The intersection of different lines of inquiry (...) and scholarship that informed Goldschmidt’s perspective took shape within the contexts of his experience of exile and as a witness of World War II and the Holocaust. For Goldschmidt, to take the future seriously was to remain open to its possibilities. (shrink)

Guilt and forgiveness, with their attendant philosophical and religious ramifications, permeate writing on the Holocaust and can also be related to South Africa’s recent history and present situation. Two controversial and provocative books (both possibly autobiographical) which tackle the question of guilt and forgiveness head on are Simon Wiesenthal’s The Sunflower and Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader, both of which have led to much debate. The central event in both texts is the slaughter of innocents, burned to death in (...) a building during World War II, while the perpetrators (an SS officer who tells his story in The Sunflower and a concentration camp warder who refuses to tell hers in The Reader) either kill those trying to escape or totally ignore the screams of the victims. The reader has to decide whether it is plausible that years later these murderers feel genuine guilt and, if so, whether they should be forgiven – and by whom. The Reader can be seen as the obverse of The Sunflower. The two should be read in conjunction for an intriguing view of the human psyche, the dichotomy in the soul of a person preceding and succeeding his/her horrific deeds, and the questions arising of whether death can be faced by the wicked with a clear conscience, whether the fear of meeting one’s Maker engenders belated remorse, whether one changes if found out, and whether ignorance of mind betokens evil of soul which can be overcome with learning and insight. (shrink)

Between 1935 and 1970, tens of thousands of people worldwide underwent brain operations due to psychiatric indication that were intended to positively influence their mental state and behaviour. The majority of these psychosurgical procedures were prefrontal lobotomies. Developed in 1935, the procedure initially met with fierce opposition, but was introduced in numerous countries in the following decade, and was employed up until the late 1960s. This article investigates why psychosurgery was widely accepted after World War II. It examines the (...) effects it was hoped psychosurgical intervention would have, the undesired outcomes in which the method could potentially result, and the significance these outcomes were given. The analysis of scientific articles of the period as well as one case study show that the goal of the operation was, first and foremost, to help the mentally ill adapt to the social order inside and outside the mental institution. After initial criticism, changes in personality, severe physical side-effects and death were accepted in order to reach this goal. Thus, with psychosurgical intervention the social adjustment of patients, also in their own interest, was rated higher than physical and psychic integrity. This widely held view shows that after World War II a post-bourgeoise order of the subject dominated, according to which an individual was to adapt and to function in the interests of the collective. According to the assumption, the triumph of lobotomy was related to the development of a new conception of the self that made possible a broad implementation of the procedure and that was consolidated through psychosurgery. (shrink)

This book presents the first comparative study of the works of Charlotte Delbo, Noor Inayat Khan, and Germaine Tillion in relation to their vigorous struggles against Nazi aggression during World War II and the Holocaust. It illuminates ways in which their early lives conditioned both their political engagements during wartime and their extraordinary literary creations empowered by what Lara R. Curtis refers to as modes of ‘writing resistance.’ With skillful recourse to a remarkable variety of genres, they offer (...) compelling autobiographical reflections, vivid chronicles of wartime atrocities, eyewitness accounts of victims, and acute perspectives on the political implications of major events. Their sensitive reflections of gendered subjectivity authenticate the myriad voices and visions they capture. In sum, this book highlights the lives and works of three courageous women who were ceaselessly committed to a noble cause during the Holocaust and World War II. (shrink)