Want to create an interactive transcript for this episode?
Podcast: New Books in German Studies
Episode: Samuel Kassow, “Who Will Write Our History? Emanuel Ringelblum, the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Oyneg Shabes Archive” (Indiana UP, 2007)
Description: Scholars argue about whether the Holocaust was unprecedented. It’s a difficult question. On the one hand, slaughters litter the pages of history. On the other hand, none of them seem quite as calculated, systematic and horribly efficient as the Nazi murder of the Jews and other “Untermenchen.” One thing, however, is certain: the Holocaust is doubtless the best documented instance of mass murder in world history. The perpetrators were meticulous record keepers, and at the conclusion of the war many of their archives fell into Allied hands. The German record, however, is not the only record of the Holoca...