Hannah Arendt first argued the continuities between the age of European imperialism and the age of fascism in Europe in 'The Origins of Totalitarianism'. This text uses Arwndt's insights as a starting point for further investigations into the ways in which race, imperialism, slavery and genocide are linked.

Eddy de Wind’s Last Stop Auschwitz was written in a few weeks while de Wind was working as a survivor-physician with Soviet medics in post-liberation Auschwitz. The book, as well as de Wind’s subsequent prolific output in psychiatry journals, merit analysis not only because in his professional writing he adumbrated what later became known as PTSD and much of the underpinnings of trauma theory. He also advocated a theory of survival that offers a compelling contrast to well-known “self-help” theories put (...) forward by Bruno Bettelheim and, especially, Viktor Frankl. This chapter traces the ways in which de Wind’s theory of survival challenged the simplistic narratives that were already emerging about the Nazi crimes in the late 1940s, explains how his writing informed the changing field of psychiatry after the war, and considers the relevance of his work for the historiography of the Holocaust today. From the perspective of history of ideas, I argue that the reception and publication of de Wind’s book then and now—including the kitsch marketing of the latest English version—tells a story about the ways in which “Holocaust consciousness” has changed over the decades, sometimes in problematic ways. (shrink)

In 1948, psychoanalyst Hilde O. Bluhm published an article in the American Journal of Psychotherapy entitled “How Did They Survive?” Essentially a collective review of 12 books and articles that had been published on the subject up to that point (including Bettelheim, Frankl, and Rousset but also several other now forgotten works by, inter alia, Ernst Wiechert, Rudolf Kalmar, and Georg Karst), Bluhm used the books as a jumping-off point for her own psychoanalytically informed explanation. In this chapter, I pick (...) up on the themes of the first two chapters and reread the same texts in light of the last 80 years of historical research. Bearing in mind de Wind’s argument about “survival through stupor,” I ask to what extent the authors’ accounts have stood the test of time. I do so not to discredit or “unmask” them but to historicize them, asking why certain explanations seem more persuasive than others at different moments in time. (shrink)

One of the most noteworthy yet little-known markers of what we would today call “Holocaust consciousness” in Britain in the 1960s was the Dering v. Uris libel trial, in which former Polish inmate-physician of Auschwitz, Władisław Dering, sued American author Leon Uris for libel for comments he made about the number of operations Dering had performed in Auschwitz in his novel Exodus. The trial, held at the Royal Courts of Justice in London in 1964, attracted a good deal of attention (...) in the press. Not the least reason for this attention was the remarkable testimony given by three women who had been inmate-physicians in Auschwitz, albeit in very different circumstances to Dering: Dorota Lorska, Alina Brewda, and Adélaïde Hautval. This chapter analyzes their testimony in the context of the trial itself and asks what their cross-examination tells us about the state of knowledge about the Holocaust in Britain at this period. It then goes on to ask what we can learn from their writings prior to and following the trial, considering issues of gender, resistance, inmate society, and solidarity in Auschwitz, and the question—much debated in the 1960s thanks to the writings of Viktor Frankl and Bruno Bettelheim—of what facilitated survival. (shrink)

The origins of genocide have been sought by scholars in many areas of human experience: politics, religion, culture, economics, demography, ideology. All these of course are valid explanations, and go a long way to getting to grips with the objective conditions surrounding genocide. But, as Berel Lang put it some time ago, there remains an inexplicable gap between the idea and the act of mass murder. This article aims to be a step towards bridging that gap by adding a human (...) dimension to the existing explanations. Building on Roger Caillois’s anthropological analysis of ‘war as festival’, Georges Bataille’s concept of society’s ‘excess energy’, and Emile Durkheim’s idea of ‘collective effervescence’, and connecting these terms to those used explicitly in relation to the Holocaust by Dominick LaCapra (‘scapegoating’ and the ‘carnivalesque’) and Saul Friedl‰nder (‘Rausch’ or ‘ecstasy’), I argue that prior to and during any act of genocide there occurs a heightening of community feeling, to the point at which this ecstatic sense of belonging permits, indeed demands, a normally forbidden act of transgression in order to ‘safeguard’ the community by killing the designated ‘threatening’ group. This article is a theoretical starting point aimed at stimulating discussion, in which I refer to the Nanjing and My Lai massacres and the genocides in Nazi Germany and Rwanda to show where empirical research is needed to illustrate this concept of ‘genocide as transgression’. (shrink)

Reflecting on the intersections of historiography and psychoanalysis as set out in the previous chapters, I show that each discipline needs to be historicized but that when juxtaposed, they offer a vocabulary, an analytical approach, and a style of approaching past action that can provide powerful explanations for phenomena that appear to exceed the limits of rational assessment. Confronted with the massive trauma of Nazism and the Holocaust, some psychoanalysts argued that their discipline had nothing to offer; others suggested that (...) analysis could in some cases be used but only with great care. Similarly, historians debated whether their inherently empirical and rational discipline had the tools to explain the Holocaust. Although there will never be a completely satisfactory explanation, I argue here that employing psychoanalytic terms helps in grappling with the monstrosity of the Nazi crimes and their effects on the Nazis’ victims. (shrink)

Here I discuss the main developments in Holocaust historiography and psychoanalytic thought since the end of the war, especially in the ways that they intersect. Noting that psychohistory is (for good reason) unfashionable, I argue nevertheless that both disciplines have much to learn from each other. With respect to the Nazi movement, psychoanalytical vocabulary provides a useful way of engaging with the drives that underpinned Hitler’s rise to power and the crimes committed by the Nazi regime. And with respect to (...) surviving the Nazi camps—the main focus here—psychoanalytic explanations offer much food for thought. Although the main factor for survival was luck, inmates struggled on a daily basis to maintain their psychological poise sufficiently to withstand their ill-treatment. When it comes to the postwar psychoanalytical or psychotherapeutic treatment of survivors and, later, their children, the record is mixed and I discuss this history briefly too. But the main focus is on the historiographical debate surrounding the conditions that promoted survival. (shrink)

​In the postwar years, Dutch survivors Eddy de Wind, Louis Micheels, and Elie A. Cohen, who went on to become practicing psychoanalysts, penned accounts of their survival of the Nazi camps. Their sober assessments contrast sharply with those by Bruno Bettelheim and Viktor Frankl, which emphasized decisiveness, 'positive thinking', and resistance, missing the fact that many Holocaust victims with those characteristics or other qualities did not survive. De Wind’s, Micheels’ and Cohen’s accounts are more sober, (self-)critical, and shaped by analytical (...) practice. By analyzing them anew and comparing them with accounts by female doctors who survived Block 10 in Auschwitz, this book argues that their theories of survival accord with contemporary sensibilities in psychoanalysis and Holocaust historiography. Psychoanalytic concepts have changed over time in response to greater understanding of the Holocaust and recent Holocaust historiography makes us more receptive to insights that were unfashionable in the first postwar decades. (shrink)

This book aims to show the many resources at our disposal for grappling with the Holocaust as the darkest occurrence of the twentieth century. These wide-ranging studies on philosophy, history, and literature address the way the Holocaust had led to the reconceptualization of the humanities. The scholarly approaches of Pierre Klossowski, Georges Bataille, and Maurice Blanchot are examined critically, and the volume explores such poignant topics as violence, evil, and monuments.

From starting his intellectual career as a surrealist, communist and co-founder of the Collège de Sociologie in 1937, Jules Monnerot (1911?95) ended it as a candidate for the Front National in 1989.In this article I offer an explanation for the unexpected trajectory of this thinker whose work is little known in the English-speaking world. Without overlooking the idea that the infamous College encouraged such tendencies, I argue that the notion of ?secular religion?, as Monnerot developed it in his Sociology of (...) Communism (1949), goes some way to explain his gradual radicalization from Cold Warrior to fascist, a path that otherwise seems unlikely for a French intellectual after World War II. In order to emphasize the unusualness of Monnerot's case, I contrast it with that of his erstwhile collaborator, Georges Bataille. I show that accusations of fascism often levelled against Bataille should be more accurately directed at Monnerot, indeed that the fascism inherent within the College of Sociology was brought out not by Bataille but by Monnerot. Monnerot's case is unsettling first because his definition of ?secular religion? contributed to his pro-fascist stance; and second, because it forces us tore think what is meant by ?philosophy after Auschwitz.? This term usually brings to mind scholars such as T.W. Adorno, Emil Fackenheimor Emmanuel Levinas. Monnerot provides a rare example of a thinker whose fascism only developed after the Holocaust, a shocking response that demands the attention of all those interested in the relationship between religion and politics. (shrink)

Lorimer Douglas, Science, Race Relations, and Resistance: Britain, 1870–1914. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013. Studies in Imperialism series. xii + 344pp. ISBN 9780719033575.