Of the three categories that Raul Hilberg developed in his analysis of the Holocaustperpetrators, victims, and bystandersit is the last that is the broadest and most difficult to pinpoint. Described by Hilberg as those who were once a part of this history, bystanders present unique challenges for those seeking to understand the decisions, attitudes, and self-understanding of historical actors who were neither obviously the instigators nor the targets of Nazi crimes. Combining historiographical, conceptual, and empirical perspectives on the bystander, the case studies in this book provide powerful insights into the complex social processes that accompany state-sponsored genocidal violence.

Christina Morina is Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Bielefeld. From 2015 to 2019, she was DAAD Visiting Assistant Professor at the Duitsland Instituut Amsterdam. She has also worked as lecturer at the University of Jena and was a research fellow at the Jena Center 20th Century History. Her dissertationLegacies of Stalingrad: Remembering the Eastern Front War in Germany since 1945 appeared in 2011. Since then, she has published a number of books and articles on modern German and European political-intellectual history and memory culture, among themDie Erfindung des Marxismus. Wie eine Idee die Welt eroberte (2017, forthcoming in English in 2022), andZur rechten Zeit. Wider die Rückkehr des Nationalismus (2019, with N. Frei, F. Maubach and M. Tändler).

List of Illustrations

Introduction: Probing the Limits of Categorization
Christina Morina and Krijn Thijs

PART I: APPROACHES

Chapter 1. Bystanders: Catchall Concept, Alluring Alibi or Crucial Clue?
Mary Fulbrook

Chapter 2. Raul Hilberg and His Discovery of the Bystander
René Schlott

Chapter 3. Bystanders as Visual Subjects: Onlookers, Spectators, Observers, and Gawkers in Occupied Poland
Roma Sendyka

Chapter 4. I Am Not, What I Am.: A Typological Approach to Individual (In)Action in the Holocaust
Timothy Williams

Chapter 5. The Many Shades of Bystanding: On Social Dilemmas and Passive Participation
Froukje Demant

Chapter 6. The Dutch Bystander as Non-Jew and Implicated Subject
Remco Ensel and Evelien Gans

SECTION II: HISTORY

Chapter 7. Photographing Bystanders
Christoph Kreutzmüller

Chapter 8. The Imperative to Act: Jews, Neighbors, and the Dynamics of Persecution in Nazi Germany, 19331945
Christina Morina

Chapter 9. Martin Heideggers Nazi Conscience
Adam Knowles

Chapter 10.Natura Abhorret Vacuum: Polish Bystanders and the Implementation of the Final Solution         
Jan Grabowski

Chapter 11. Defiant Danes and Indifferent Dutch?: Popular Convictions and Deportation Rates in the Netherlands and Denmark, 19401945         
Bart van der Boom

Chapter 12. The Notion of Social Reactivity: The French Case, 19421944
Jacques Semelin

SECTION III: MEMORY

Chapter 13. Ordinary, Ignorant and Noninvolved?: The Figure of the Bystander in Dutch Research and Controversy
Krijn Thijs

Chapter 14. Hidden in Plain View: Remembering and Forgetting the Bystanders of the Holocaust on (West) German Television
Wulf Kansteiner

Chapter 15. Stand by Your Man: (Self-)Representations of SS Wives after 1945
Susanne C. Knittel

Chapter 16. Bystanders in Exhibitions at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Susan Bachrach

Epilogue I: A Brief Plea for the Historicization of the Bystander
Norbert Frei

Epilogue II: Saving the Bystander
Ido de Haan

Index