The Holocaust and Masculinities

Description

In recent decades, scholarship has turned to the role of gender in the Holocaust, but rarely has it critically investigated the experiences of men as gendered beings. Beyond the clear observation that most perpetrators of murder were male, men were also victims, survivors, bystanders, beneficiaries, accomplices, and enablers; they negotiated roles as fathers, spouses, community leaders, prisoners, soldiers, professionals, authority figures, resistors, chroniclers, or ideologues. This volume examines men's experiences during the Holocaust. Chapters first focus on the years of genocide: Jewish victims of National Socialism, Nazi soldiers, Catholic priests enlisted in the Wehrmacht, Jewish doctors in the ghettos, men from the Sonderkommando in Auschwitz, and Muselmänner in the camps. The book then moves to the postwar context: German Protestant theologians, Jewish refugees, non-Jewish Austrian men, and Jewish masculinities in the United States. The contributors articulate the male experience in the Holocaust as something obvious (the everywhere of masculinities) and yet invisible (the nowhere of masculinities), lending a new perspective on one of modernity's most infamous chapters.
Acknowledgments

Introduction
Björn Krondorfer and Ovidiu Creangă

Part I: Genocide

1. Hiding in Plain View: Bringing Critical Men's Studies and Holocaust Studies into Conversation
Björn Krondorfer

2. Masculinity and Death: De- and Resexualization in Nazi Concentration Camps
Robert Sommer

3. The Experiences and Behavior of Male Holocaust Victims at Auschwitz
Lisa Pine

4. "Higher Reasons for Sending People to Death?" Male Narrativity and Moral Dilemmas in Memoirs and Diaries of Jewish Doctors
Monika Rice

5. Muselmänner in Nazi Concentration Camps: Thinking Masculinity at the Extremes
Michael Becker and Dennis Bock

6. Tests of Manhood: Alcohol, Sexual Violence, and Killing in the Holocaust
Edward B. Westermann

7. Catholic Seminarians and Vernichtungskrieg: How Nationalism, Religion, and Masculinity Mattered
Lauren Faulkner Rossi

Part II: Aftermath

8. Contested Manhood: Autobiographical Reflections of German Protestant Theologians after World War II
Benedikt Brunner

9. Post-Holocaust Conceptualizations of Masculinity in Austria
Carson Phillips

10. Multiple Masculinities among German Jewish Refugees: A Transnational Comparison between Canada and Palestine/Israel
Patrick Farges

11. Redemptive Masculinity: American Images of Jewish Men from the Holocaust to the Six-Day War
Sarah Imhoff

Epilogue: The Holocaust and Masculinities
Thomas Kühne

Contributors
Author Index
Subject Index

Sujets

• The Holocaust

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 01 avril 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438477800
• Langue: English

Extrait

THE HOLOCAUST
AND MASCULINITIES
THE HOLOCAUST
AND MASCULINITIES
CRITICAL INQUIRIES INTO THE PRESENCE AND ABSENCE OF MEN
Edited by
Björn Krondorfer and Ovidiu Creangă
Cover image: Adam Zivner, Chimneys of collapsed buildings in Auschwitz II Birkenau. (2009). Wikimedia Commons.
Support for this publication was provided by the Martin-Springer Institute, Northern Arizona University
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2020 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Krondorfer, Björn, 1959– editor. | Creangă, Ovidiu, 1976– editor.
Title: The Holocaust and masculinities : critical inquiries into the presence and absence of men / Björn Krondorfer and Ovidiu Creangă.
Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, [2020] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019028960 | ISBN 9781438477794 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438477787 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438477800 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Masculinity—Congresses. | Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945)—Psychological aspects—Congresses. | World War, 1939–1945—Psychological aspects—Congresses.
Classification: LCC BF692.5 .H646 2020 | DDC 940.53/180811—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019028960
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Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Björn Krondorfer and Ovidiu Creangă
Part I: Genocide
1. Hiding in Plain View: Bringing Critical Men’s Studies and Holocaust Studies into Conversation
Björn Krondorfer
2. Masculinity and Death: De- and Resexualization in Nazi Concentration Camps
Robert Sommer
3. The Experiences and Behavior of Male Holocaust Victims at Auschwitz
Lisa Pine
4. “Higher Reasons for Sending People to Death?” Male Narrativity and Moral Dilemmas in Memoirs and Diaries of Jewish Doctors
Monika Rice
5. Muselmänner in Nazi Concentration Camps: Thinking Masculinity at the Extremes
Michael Becker and Dennis Bock
6. Tests of Manhood: Alcohol, Sexual Violence, and Killing in the Holocaust
Edward B. Westermann
7. Catholic Seminarians and Vernichtungskrieg : How Nationalism, Religion, and Masculinity Mattered
Lauren Faulkner Rossi
Part II: Aftermath
8. Contested Manhood: Autobiographical Reflections of German Protestant Theologians after World War II
Benedikt Brunner
9. Post-Holocaust Conceptualizations of Masculinity in Austria
Carson Phillips
10. Multiple Masculinities among German Jewish Refugees: A Transnational Comparison between Canada and Palestine/Israel
Patrick Farges
11. Redemptive Masculinity: American Images of Jewish Men from the Holocaust to the Six-Day War
Sarah Imhoff
Epilogue: The Holocaust and Masculinities
Thomas Kühne
Contributors
Author Index
Subject Index
Acknowledgments
This volume, like many books, has multiple sources of inspiration. It started with an accidental meeting between Ovidiu Creangă and Björn Krondorfer at the archives of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, when Björn noticed someone else’s pages on “masculinity in biblical studies” left at a photocopy machine. This “someone” turned out to be Ovidiu, and this is where and when our conversation started about the lack of awareness of masculinity studies in Holocaust history and historiography. In 2014, Björn presented this issue on a panel on gender at the international Holocaust conference Lessons and Legacies, after which we started in more serious ways to conceptualize the contours for this volume. In 2015, the Martin-Springer Institute, under Björn’s directorship at Northern Arizona University, organized a three-day, international symposium on “Colonial Conquest in the Nazi East and the American West: Value and Limits of Comparative Approaches.” This symposium included a panel on gender, and Ovidiu was one of the presenters. In 2016, the Martin-Springer Institute together with Misericordia University organized another three-day symposium, this time in Oxford, United Kingdom, on the theme “Thinking Critically about Masculinities in Mass Atrocity Crimes,” which broadened the scope of inquiry. The contributions written for this volume will, we hope, deepen our understanding and widen the conversation on gender and the Holocaust. We thank the Martin-Springer Institute for its generous support for the printing of this volume, which made possible the simultaneous paperback and hardcover publication of The Holocaust and Masculinities: Critical Inquiries into the Presence and Absence of Men .
Introduction
B JÖRN K RONDORFER AND O VIDIU C REANGĂ
Masculinities are everywhere in history, but rarely does scholarship investigate critically the experiences of men as gendered beings in relation to the Holocaust. Beyond the more obvious observation that it is mostly men who were engaged as perpetrators in the killing fields, issues of masculinities—understood broadly to relate to male identity, identifications, roles, and relations—are consistently assumed rather than interrogated. Men were perpetrators, for sure, but they were also victims, survivors, bystanders, beneficiaries, accomplices, and enablers; they often negotiated multiple roles as fathers, spouses, community leaders, prisoners, soldiers, professionals, lovers, authority figures, resisters, chroniclers, or ideologues. This volume seeks to critically investigate men’s variegated roles, behaviors, attitudes, conduct, and choices during the Holocaust. It will probe assumptions about masculinities and articulate the “male experience” as something obvious (the “everywhere” of masculinities) and yet invisible (the “nowhere” of masculinities).
The contributions to The Holocaust and Masculinities: Critical Inquires into the Presence and Absence of Men approach the history and legacy of the Holocaust through the varied experiences of men as gendered experiences. They aim to make visible experiences that pertain to the gendered character of male agency. Victimization, privilege, choice, accountability, authority, power, complicity, or culpability, when seen through the lens of gender, are some of the more obvious elements that help to explain and contextualize particular men’s words, narratives, habits, deeds, behaviors, and conduct under conditions of extremity. We thus seek to reveal and engage conceptual links between the fields of Holocaust studies and critical masculinity studies, and we hope that the case studies presented here can fruitfully be applied to other genocidal situations.
Three Areas of Gender Investigations
In a 2017 forum, five historians of gender and the Holocaust discussed the current state of affairs of integrating the study of sexuality and gender into the history of Nazism and the Holocaust. Among the many important issues they raised, the panelists voiced their concerns that a gendered perspective on the Holocaust often implicitly refers to women and that masculinity still constitutes a “significant lacuna” in this field—and this despite an increased student interest on “including masculinity(ies) and men’s experiences as well as more fluid and intersectional notions of identity in examinations of gender” (Forum 2017, 85, 92). 1 The observed scarcity of a critical men’s studies inquiry regarding the history and legacy of the Holocaust might be all the more surprising when we consider briefly three areas of scholarship: first, research on women and the Holocaust; second, research on perpetrators of the Holocaust; and third, research on Jewish pre- and post-Holocaust masculinities.
First, regarding the scholarship on women and the Holocaust, after an embattled and difficult start in the mid-1980s and pioneered by scholars like Joan Ringelheim (on the Holocaust) and Claudia Koonz (on Nazism), it has grown exponentially over the last twenty-five years. It now includes the groundbreaking works by Dalia Ofer, Lenore Weitzman, Marion Kaplan, Atina Grossmann, Lilian Kremer, Zoë Waxman, Carol Rittner, Rochelle Saidel, Elisabeth Baer, Myrna Goldenberg, and Marlene Heinemann, to name but a few. 2 Despite the fact that book or chapter titles often reference “gender and the Holocaust,” and despite the fact that gender historians understand, in principle, that gender necessitates the inclusion of the male gender, in almost all cases the focus in these works remains on women, with only a “perfunctory” and “limited” investigation of masculinity, as Maddy Carey argues in her recent book (2017, 5). As a result, the rich and productive research trajectory that prioritized women produced few studies of masculinity during the Holocaust.
This is understandable. Having to battle against an overwhelmingly male-dominated field and a scholarship that largely overlooked women’s experiences, feminist his