This scholarly study reveals how the Germans “received” the events of the Armenian genocide—and later whitewashed and even found motivation from it.
The attempted extinction of the Armenians by the Turks constitutes what Ihrig (Van Leer Jerusalem Institute) calls “the original sin of the 20th century,” not only by the Ottoman perpetrators, but also by the bystanders. In light of the later Holocaust visited upon the Jews and others by the Nazis, the Armenian genocide—the word was not actually defined by the U.N. until 1948—poses particular questions about guilt for the Germans, who were the Ottoman allies. They were knowledgeable about the massacres (both in 1894-1896 and in 1915-16) and were “inspired” (during the Third Reich) to use such methods and justification for purposes of “ethnic cleansing.” In this compelling narrative, Ihrig finds that the so-called Armenian Horrors were vigorously debated in the government and in periodicals of the time. Several important events would affect how the German public and private spheres came to view the “Armenian question”: the rise of the restive Young Turks in 1908; reports of Armenian rebellion and “treachery”; the strengthening of racial attitudes, especially during the 1920s; and the sensational assassination of the former Ottoman grand vizier in Berlin in 1921. Ihrig’s deep, scrupulous research reveals the official pattern set by the Germans “vis-à-vis the Armenians” as an “enabler” for the Ottomans, later giving way to open justification, denial, and whitewashing of the horrors visited on the Armenian people. In the final chapter, the author reveals how Hitler and the Nazis admired and were influenced by Ataturk and the new Turkey’s policies of ethnic cleansing based on a “foundation of national purity.”
A groundbreaking academic study that shows how Germany derived from the Armenian genocide “a plethora of recipes” to address its own ethnic problems.Pub Date: Jan. 4, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-674-50479-0
Page Count: 472
Publisher: Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: Oct. 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
Categories: CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | HISTORY | WORLD | GENERAL CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | GENERAL HISTORY
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Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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A master storyteller’s character-driven account of a storied year in the American Revolution.
Against world systems, economic determinist and other external-cause schools of historical thought, McCullough (John Adams, 2001, etc.) has an old-fashioned fondness for the great- (and not-so-great) man tradition, which may not have much explanatory power but almost always yields better-written books. McCullough opens with a courteous nod to the customary villain in the story of American independence, George III, who turns out to be a pleasant and artistically inclined fellow who relied on poor advice; his Westmoreland, for instance, was a British general named Grant who boasted that with 5,000 soldiers he “could march from one end of the American continent to the other.” Other British officers agitated for peace, even as George wondered why Americans would not understand that to be a British subject was to be free by definition. Against these men stood arrayed a rebel army that was, at the least, unimpressive; McCullough observes that New Englanders, for instance, considered washing clothes to be women’s work and so wore filthy clothes until they rotted, with the result that Burgoyne and company had a point in thinking the Continentals a bunch of ragamuffins. The Americans’ military fortunes were none too good for much of 1776, the year of the Declaration; at the slowly unfolding battle for control over New York, George Washington was moved to despair at the sight of sometimes drunk soldiers running from the enemy and of their officers “who, instead of attending to their duty, had stood gazing like bumpkins” at the spectacle. For a man such as Washington, to be a laughingstock was the supreme insult, but the British were driven by other motives than to irritate the general—not least of them reluctance to give up a rich, fertile and beautiful land that, McCullough notes, was providing the world’s highest standard of living in 1776.
Thus the second most costly war in American history, whose “outcome seemed little short of a miracle.” A sterling account.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-2671-2
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
Categories: GENERAL HISTORY | UNITED STATES | HISTORY
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