Years of Persecution, Years of Extermination ─ Saul Friedlander and the Future of Holocaust Studies

Historians have long been confronted with the conceptual and moral difficulties inherent in trying to narrate the magnitude and monstrosity of the Holocaust. The questions that bedevil all historical undertakings about capturing the past take on particular urgency in the face of the Holocaust: how can past events be properly explained, or even satisfactorily communicated? What is to be learned? And what is it exactly that we wish to know, and how best to try to narrate it?

No one has grappled with these questions more profoundly than the distinguished historian, Saul Friedlander. This volume brings together leading international historians to address the manifold issues raised in his landmark history of the Holocaust, Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1933-1945. While evaluating Friedlander's book on its own merits, the authors also use his text as a means of exploring the contours and future of Holocaust historiography. They situate his work within the broader terrain of Holocaust studies and European history, as well as exploring the ways in which Friedlander's interpretation opens up new directions in the knowledge, study and understanding of the Holocaust in particular and twentieth-century genocide in general

Christian Wiese is Professor of Jewish History, Director of the Centre for German-Jewish Studies and Co-director of the Centre for Modern European Cultural History at the University of Sussex. He has published on European-Jewish history in the modern period, the history of Zionism and antisemitism.
Paul Betts is Reader in Modern German History and Co-Director of the Centre for Modern European Cultural History at the University of Sussex. He has published widely on various aspects of twentieth-century German history and culture