Sybille Steinbacher teaches at The University of Bochum. She is currently Visiting Fellow at Harvard University. Shaun Whiteside is a previous winner of The Schlegel-Tieck Prize for German Translations, and translator of The Birth of Tragedy and Musil's The Confessions of Young Torless for Penguin Classics. He lives in London.
"A thoughtful overview of a place terrible to remember--and one
that must always be remembered."--Kirkus Reviews
"The meaning of Auschwitz is in the details, which (Steinbacher)
provides with clinical precision."--Publishers Weekly
A thoughtful overview of a place terrible to remember and one that
must always be remembered. --Kirkus Reviews
The meaning of Auschwitz is in the details, which (Steinbacher)
provides with clinical precision. --Publishers Weekly
In this concise account of the Auschwitz death camps, German historian Steinbacher (history, Ruhr Univ.) offers a stark examination of the assembly-line extermination of 1.4 million Europeans. She follows the evolution of Auschwitz from a sleepy Polish village named Oswiecim into a complex network of prison camps and factories that marked the fulfillment of two basic tenets of the Nazi ideology: lebensraum (living space) and ethnic cleansing. Significantly, Steinbacher (Dachau) asserts that the Final Solution was not the product of a single directive from the Nazi hierarchy but the cumulative result of regional initiatives issued throughout what she describes as a polycratic regime; Hitler may have legitimized the overriding extermination policy, but culpability permeates the entire Nazi administrative structure. Steinbacher's final chapter, a riveting denunciation of the Holocaust deniers, is indicative of a new generation of German scholars who refuse to turn their backs on the monstrous dimensions of their country's Nazi past. Libraries with Laurence Rees's recent Auschwitz: A New History may be inclined to bypass this work, originally published in Germany in 2004. Yet this dispassionate but poignant study is a worthy addition to any public or academic library collection and is highly recommended.-Jim Doyle, Sara Hightower Regional Lib., Rome, GA Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.
"A thoughtful overview of a place terrible to remember--and one
that must always be remembered."--Kirkus Reviews
"The meaning of Auschwitz is in the details, which (Steinbacher)
provides with clinical precision."--Publishers Weekly
A thoughtful overview of a place terrible to remember and one that
must always be remembered. --Kirkus Reviews
The meaning of Auschwitz is in the details, which (Steinbacher)
provides with clinical precision. --Publishers Weekly
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