Historical Distance and the Holocaust

Interactions Between Historians and Middle-Class Western Europeans in Memory Education
Erscheinungsjahr 2026
ISBN: 978-90-485-7321-9
Verlag: Pallas Publications

Buch, Englisch, 180 Seiten, Format (B × H): 156 mm x 234 mm

Reihe: Global Heritage and Memory Studies in the Present

What happens when Holocaust historians leave their academic bubble and start interacting with laypeople? This book investigates practices and discourses of historical distance and their effects on vernacular understandings of the Holocaust among white, middle-class Europeans. In five chapters, Historical Distance and the Holocaust describes and explains how historians, in interactions with laypeople, strip the Holocaust of its moral meaning and emotional load, narrate it as a ‘system’, and use sick Holocaust humour as distancing strategy.

A detailed interactional analysis and thick ethnographic description demonstrate how the temporal, moral and emotional distancing practices reenforce the lay moralities and political subjectivities of the white middle-class. This comes with (mostly unintended) consequences. Distanced approaches to the Holocaust in non-academic environments reduce empathy for victims and survivors, normalize violence, disconnect the meaning of the Holocaust from contemporary conflict, and re-activate stereotypes about groups who employ more ‘close’ approaches to the Holocaust.

Zielgruppe

Academic

Autoren/Hrsg.

Van de Putte, Thomas

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Deutsche Geschichte Deutsche Geschichte: Holocaust
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Weltgeschichte
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Soziologie Allgemein

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Acknowledgements Introduction. Distance and the Holocaust: Four Strategies. Chapter 1: A Morally Meaningless Holocaust Chapter 2: Holocaust Memory without Emotions Chapter 3: Narrating the Holocaust as System: Getting Rid of Actors and Experiences. Chapter 4: Distancing the Holocaust with Sick Humour Conclusion Bibliography Index

Über Autor(innen)

Thomas Van de Putte is assistant professor in Sociology at the University of Trento. He works on questions of collective Holocaust memory, combining perspectives from sociology, linguistics and cultural studies. He published his first monograph, Contemporary Auschwitz/ Oswiecim, in 2021, and his second monograph, Outsourcing the European Past, in 2024.