The_Holokaust_-_origins,_implementation,_aftermath

EXTERMINATION OF JEWS IN HISTORIOGRAPHY
1984).
7. As far as the most general aspects of this position are concerned, see, for example,
from a conservative and apologetic angle, Michael Prinz and Rainer Zitelmann, eds.,
Nationalsozialismus und Modernisierung (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche
Buchgesellschaft, 1991). For an entirely different approach, see Zygmunt Bauman,
Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989). A leftistoriented
interpretation finds its most systematic presentation in a number of publications
by Götz Aly and different coauthors, as indicated below.
8. Each of the elements referred to in this sentence has been dealt with in an immense
historiography. For an altogether nuanced and precise illustration of these approaches,
see Philippe Burrin, Hitler and the Jews: The Genesis of the Holocaust (New York:
Routledge, Chapman & Hall, 1994). For an interesting distinction between Nazi
irrationalism and Nazi counterrationality see Dan Diner, “Historical Understanding
and Counterrationality: The Judenrat as Epistemological Vantage,” in Saul Friedländer,
ed., Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the Final Solution (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).
9. For the first aspect, see mainly Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann, The
Racial State: Germany 1933–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991);
for the second aspect, see Götz Aly and Karl-Heinz Roth, Die Restlose Erfassung:
Volkszählen, Identifizieren, Aussondern im Nationalsozialismus (Berlin: Rotbuch
Verlag, 1984); Götz Aly and Susanne Heim, Vordenker der Vernichtung: Auschwitz
und die deutschen Pläne für eine neue europäische Ordnung (Frankfurt/M.: S. Fischer
Verlag, 1991); Götz Aly, “Endlösung”: Volksverchiebung und der Mord an den
europäischen Juden (Frankfurt/M.: S. Fischer Verlag, 1995).
10. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York:
Herder & Herder, 1972 [1947]); Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust; Aly and
Heim, Vordenker der Vernichtung; also Peukert, “The Genesis of the ‘Final Solution’.”
11. This is to be the guiding theme of Ian Kershaw’s Hitler biography.
12. See Ian Kershaw’s indications in his The Nazi Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives
of Interpretation (London: E. Arnold, 1993); see also the synthesis of these
various approaches in Burleigh and Wippermann, Racial State.
13. For a discussion of “redemptive anti-Semitism,” see my Nazi Germany and the Jews,
vol. 1, The Years of Persecution, 1933–1939 (New York: HarperCollins, 1997).
14. Peukert, “Genesis of the ‘Final Solution’.”
15. Paul Lawrence Rose, Revolutionary Anti-Semitism in Germany from Kant to Wagner
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990); Paul Lawrence Rose, Wagner,
Race, and Revolution (London: Faber, 1992).
16. Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Messianism in Medieval
and Reformation Europe and Its Bearing on Modern Totalitarian Movements
(New York: Harper, 1961).
17. According to my interpretation it is in Bayreuth and within the “Bayreuth Circle”
that these tendencies converged. For an excellent presentation of the ideological po-
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