In Rescue and Remembrance, Kobi Kabalek examines how the rescue of Jews during the Holocaust has been understood and represented in Germany from the Nazi period to the present. In many regions outside Germany, a small number of known Holocaust rescuers are often held up as exemplars of broad pro-Jewish sentiment among that country's population during World War II, thereby projecting an image of national moral virtue. Within Germany, by contrast, rescuers are often presented in both scholarship and public commemoration as a small minority; their examples condemn the majority by showing what Germans could have done but did not do. Kabalek argues that such simplistic depictions of the majority versus minority obscure the complex motivations and situations that led people in Nazi Germany to help persecuted Jews. Against the view that the rescuers were "forgotten" after the war, he shows that portrayals and interpretations of helping Jews appeared in various media and social discourses in East, West, and unified Germany and were used to actively debate questions of collective morality. Rescue and Remembrance analyzes the varied and changing depictions of rescue in the distinct German polities from the Nazi period, examining how the very notions of "majority" and "collective" were articulated and reformulated.
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"This original and insightful account will be an essential addition to the library of anyone interested in the memory of the Holocaust, in particular the purposes to which the notion of rescue has been put since the war." - Mark Roseman, Indiana University "A complex and multifaceted understanding of the commemoration of 'rescue' in postwar Germany. This is an important contribution to our understanding of memory-and historiography-as a heterogenous, dynamic tool for understanding and shaping the present. Kabalek shows admirable tolerance for historical gray areas-for accepting ambiguity and flexibility not only in history but also in its actors and their deeds." - Stefanie Schu?ler-Springorum, Center for the Study of Antisemitism, Berlin