Hannah Arendt's Ghosts: Reflections on the Disputable Path from Windhoek to Auschwitz

2009/05/15 by Robert Gerwarth, Stephan Malinowski · 3 citations
Social Sciences · Arts and Humanities · Psychology · #Hannah Arendt's Political Philosophy #Historical and Contemporary Political Dynamics #Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration

paper · doi:10.1017/s0008938909000314

Abstract

Historians on both sides of the Atlantic are currently engaged in a controversy about the allegedly genocidal nature of western colonialism and its connections with the mass violence unleashed by Nazi Germany between 1939 and 1945. The debate touches upon some of the most “sensitive” issues of twentieth-century history: the violent “dark side” of modern western civilization, the impact of colonial massacres on the European societies that generated this violence and, perhaps most controversially, the origins and uniqueness of the Holocaust.

Cited by

• Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck’s Career as a Colonial Officer: Learning the ‘Colonial Way of War’?
• Singularity by Other Means: Germany’s Colonial Question and the Bureaucracy of Memory
• American Indians for Saint-Domingue?

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• Hannah Arendt's Trains of Thought 1951 to 1955. A memorandum on the occasion of the publication of “The Modern Challenge to Tradition: Fragments of a Book” as volume 6 of Hannah Arendt, “Complete Works”
• Beyond the Nation State: Rereading Hannah Arendt’s “We Refugees” Eighty Years Later
• The Comforts of Provincialism: The History and Future of Colonial Memory in Germany
• Hannah Arendt, Feminism, and the Politics of Alterity: “What Will We Lose If We Win?”
• Modernity and the Holocaust