Dan Diner’s term Zivilisationsbruch (“Breach of Civilization”), was introduced in the wake of the German Historikerstreit (“Historians’ Controversy”) about the singularity of the Holocaust in the mid-1980s. While referring to earlier considerations of Hannah Arendt, Diner marked a caesura in our understanding of the Nazi politics of extermination of the European Jewry. His term influenced both the development of Holocaust historiography and the evolution of Holocaust memory. The lecture seeks to explore this impact by going back into the German and European history of research on and remembrance of the fate of the Jews in Europe during World War II – from its beginnings in the late 1940s up to the Stockholm Forum on the Holocaust in 2001 and to the years thereafter. The comprehensive assessment of efforts of making sense of the Final Solution demonstrates to what extent Holocaust memory and historiography have contributed to the rise of a new self-reflexive memory culture in the West, advanced the causes of postwar restitution and reconciliation, and could continue to play an important role as a touchstone of European politics and culture.

See the conference program here: http://conferences.au.dk/rr2017/program/