Rosenbaum Chapter 16

In Wulf Kansteiner's essay, "The Rise and Fall of Metaphor: German Historians and the Uniqueness of the Holocaust," Kasteiner presents the reader with a historiography of German scholarship about the Holocaust. Beginning with the end of WWII, there are four phases of German Holocaust scholarship. The first group of scholars in the 1950's -1960's did their research not for public consumption, but for the courts information on the "development of the Final Solution." (p. 276) The second group in the 1970's, looked at the theories of Nazism and heavily debated Nazism as a type of facism. The third group, which arrived in the later 1980's, began to look deeper into the role that Hitler played, Nazi policies, and the moral responsibility of the Final Solution. The final group which appeared in the later 1980's as well and continued through the 1990's, typically wrote in the narrative form about "regional studies of the origins of the Final Solution." (p. 284)