Catastrophe and Meaning ― The Holocaust and the Twentieth Century

How should we understand the relation of the Holocaust to the broader historical processes of the century just ended? How do we explain the bearing of the Holocaust on problems of representation, memory, memorialization, and historical practice? These are some of the questions explored by an esteemed group of scholars in Catastrophe and Meaning, the most significant multiauthored book on the Holocaust in over a decade.

This collection features essays that consider the role of anti-Semitism in the recounting of the Holocaust; the place of the catastrophe in the narrative of twentieth-century history; the questions of agency and victimhood that the Holocaust inspires; the afterlife of trauma in literature written about the tragedy; and the gaps in remembrance and comprehension that normal historical works fail to notice.
Contributors:
Omer Bartov, Dan Diner, Debòrah Dwork, Saul Friedländer, Geoffrey Hartman, Dominick LaCapra, Paul Mendes-Flohr, Anson Rabinbach, Frank Trommler, Shulamit Volkov, Froma Zeitlin

Moishe Postone is an associate professor of modern European history at the University of Chicago. He is the author ofTime, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx's Critical Theory.

Eric Santner is the Philip and Ida Romberg Professor of Modern Germanic Studies and chair of the Department of Germanic Studies at the University of Chicago. He is the author of four books, most recentlyOn the Psychotheology of Everyday Life: Reflections on Freud and Rosenzweig.