Holocaust Denial

The murder of six million Jews during the Holocaust is a crime that has had a lasting and massive impact on our time. Despite the immense, ever-increasing body of Holocaust literature and representation, no single interpretation can provide definitive answers. Shaped by different historical experiences, political and national interests, our approximations of the Holocaust remain elusive. Holocaust responses--past, present, and future--reflect our changing understanding of history and the shifting landscapes of memory. This book takes stock of the attempts within and across nations to come to terms with the murders.

In ruling against the controversial historian David Irving in his libel suit against the American historian Deborah Lipstadt, last April 2000, the High Court in London labeled him a falsifier of history. No objective historian, declared the judge, would manipulate the documentary record in the way that Irving did. Richard J. Evans, a Cambridge historian and the chief advisor for the defense, uses this pivotal trial as a lens for exploring a range of difficult questions about the nature of the historian's enterprise. For instance, don't all historians in the end bring a subjective agenda to bear on their reading of the evidence? Is it possible that Irving lost his case not because of his biased history but because his agenda was unacceptable? The central issue in the trial -- as for Evans in this book -- was not the past itself, but the way in which historians study the past. In a series of short, sharp chapters, Richard Evans sets David Irving's methods alongside the historical record in orderto illuminate the difference between responsible and irresponsible history. The result is a cogent and deeply informed study in the nature of historical interpretation.

Since unification, Germany has experienced profound changes, including the reawakening of xenophobic hate crime, antisemitic incidents, and racist violence. This book presents the most recent research conducted by a team of American and German experts in political science, sociology, mass communication, and history. They analyze the degrees of antisemitism, xenophobia, remembrance, and Holocaust knowledge in German public opinion; the groups and organizations that propagate such prejudice and hate; and the German, American, and Jewish perceptions of, and reactions to, these phenomena.

One of the distinctive features of the "Vichy Syndrome" -- the persistence of the memory of the Vichy regime in French political and cultural life -- is that it has been extremely difficult for an authoritative historical discourse to impose itself. Why does Vichy, and all that the name entails, fascinate and even obsess the French, inflecting not only discussions of the past but of the present as well?

In Vichy's Afterlife, Richard J. Golsan explores the complexities of some of the most provocative episodes of Vichy's curious persistence in France's national consciousness. He argues that each of these episodes, events, and scandals, constitutes a crossroads where history and "counterhistory" -- different or competing versions of the past -- encounter one another, often with explosive and even destructive consequences.

This volume, written by authorities on the legal systems of France, Britain, Germany, the United States, Israel, and Canada, explores the growing confrontation between democracy and racist incitement. The authors consider current and prospective laws as they trace the efforts to enact and enforce laws that can curb racism in the early stages of its growth without violating democratic freedoms.