The fragility of empathy after the Holocaust

Comprises four essays - "Empathy, Suffering, and Holocaust 'Pornography', " "Goldhagen's Celebrity, Numbness, and Writing History, " "Indifference and the Language of Victimization, " and "Who Was the 'Real' Hitler?" - that deal with the question of bystander indifference during the Holocaust and numbness afterward on the part of those who distance themselves from Jewish and other suffering. In both cases, indifference is seen as a socio-cultural and historical problem. Those Germans who accepted the brutality with which Hitler treated the Jews are seen as banal collaborators whose complicity was active. However, considers totalistic condemnations of Germans as eliminationist antisemites or wholesale attribution of Nazi behavior to latent homosexualism as reflecting the phenomenon of creating false alibis for the kind of bystander indifference that characterized many Germans during the Holocaust and people afterwards who assume that only others can manifest such prejudice-based attitudes as antisemitism. Includes bibliographical references (pages 137-195) and index. ix, 203 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm