Europe

She was, Hannah Arendt wrote, "my closest friend, though she has been dead for some hundred years." Born in Berlin in 1771 as the daughter of a Jewish merchant, Rahel Varnhagen would come to host one of the most prominent salons of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Arendt discovered her writings some time in the mid-1920s, and soon began to reimagine Rahel's inner life and write her biography. Long unavailable and never before published as Arendt intended, Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess returns to print in an extraordinary new edition.

Of one and a half million surviving photographs related to Nazi concentration camps, only four depict the actual process of mass killing perpetrated at the gas chambers. Images in Spite of All reveals that these rare photos of Auschwitz, taken clandestinely by one of the Jewish prisoners forced to help carry out the atrocities there, were made as a potent act of resistance.

In Dachau, Auschwitz, Yad Vashem, and thousands of other locations throughout the world, memorials to the Holocaust are erected to commemorate its victims and its significance. This fascinating work by James E. Young examines Holocaust monuments and museums in Europe, Israel, and America, exploring how every nation remembers the Holocaust according to its own traditions, ideals, and experiences, and how these memorials reflect their place in contemporary aesthetic and architectural discourse.

This study revisits the place of the Holocaust and the French revolutionary tradition in the birth of international human rights law, with particular reference to the genesis of the Universal Declaration and European Convention. It argues against conceptualizing the drafting of the Universal Declaration as an exceptional moment of Holocaust remembrance in the immediate aftermath of the war, positing instead that the framers' silence on the Jewish identity of the victims of Nazi genocidal acts functioned as an instrument of consensus politics.

This article explores the origins of the UN's commitment to human rights and links this to the wartime decision to abandon the interwar system of an international regime for the protection of minority rights. After 1918, the League of Nations developed a comprehensive machinery for guaranteeing the national minorities of eastern Europe. But by 1940 the League's policies were widely regarded as a failure and the coalition of forces which had supported them after the First World War had disintegrated.

Under the guarantee of the League of Nations, Jews in most of Upper Silesia— an area encompassing nearly 1.5 million residents and around 10,000 Jews in 1933—were subject to special minority protections that barred Nazi discrimination on the basis of religion.  League-enforced limits on antisemitism in this eastern corner of the Reich amounted to an accident of history, born of a Polish-German treaty after World War I. While these protections remain largely unknown to German historians today, they were far from obscure in their time and place.

Between Justice and Politics is a history of the first fifty years of the Ligue des droits de l'Homme—the League of the Rights of Man. This is the first book-length study of the Ligue in any language, and it is informed by the recently available archives of the organization. Founded during the Dreyfus Affair, the Ligue took as its mandate the defense of human rights in all their forms.

In the aftermath of the First World War, a so-called 'minority problem' loomed large in European politics. This problem was understood, moreover, to be peculiar to central and eastern Europe. In fact, however, linguistic diversity was not a unique feature of the east, but also an ongoing challenge in states that had long claimed to have a unified national culture. This article compares policies of national classification and minority rights in France and Czechoslovakia after the First World War.

Statesmen and scholars were inspired by a period after World War I (when the victors devised Minority Treaties for the new and expanded states of Eastern Europe) at the time that the Cold War ended between 1989-1991. This book is the first study of that period--between 1878 and 1938--when the Great Powers established a system of external supervision to reduce the threats in Europe's most volatile regions of Irredentism, persecution, and uncontrolled waves of westward migration.

By taking migrants seriously as subjects of national and transnational memory, this essay picks up where Haacke’s project leaves off. It re-envisions the ‘population’ parallax as an active bearer of memory, rather than as merely a passive object of commemoration.