Reading the Holocaust

The events of the Holocaust remain unthinkable to many men and women, as morally and intellectually baffling today as they were a half century ago. Inga Clendinnen seeks to dispel what she calls the "Gorgon effect:" the sickening of imagination and the draining of the will that afflict so many of us when we try to confront the horrors of this history. Clendinnen explores the experience of the Holocaust from both the victims' and the perpetrators' points of view. She discusses the remarkable survivor testimonies of writers such as Primo Levi and Charlotte Delbo, the vexing issue of "resistance" in the camps, and survivors' strategies for understanding the motivations of the Nazi leadership. She focuses an anthropologist's precise gaze on the actions of the murderers in the police battalions and among the SS in the camps. Finally she considers how the Holocaust has been portrayed in poetry, fiction, and film. A Prize-winning archaeologist, anthropologist and historian of ancient Mexican cultures, Inga Clendinnen has spent most of her teaching career at La Trobe University in Bundoora, Australia. Ambivalent Conquests: Maya and Spaniard in Yucatan (Cambridge, 1989) and Aztecs: An Interpretation (Cambridge, 1995) are two of her best-known scholarly works; Tiger's Eye: A Memoir, (Scribner, 2001) describes her battle against liver cancer.

Clendinnen explores the Holocaust from both the victims' and the perpetrators' points of view.

Clendinnen explores the Holocaust from both the victims' and the perpetrators' points of view.

Exploring the experience of the Holocaust from both the victims" and the perpetrators" points of view, Inga Clendinnen seeks to dispel what she calls the 'Gorgon effect": the sickening of imagination and curiosity and the draining of the will that afflict many who try to understand the Holocaust.

More than fifty years after their occurrence, the events of the Holocaust remain for some of their most dedicated students as morally and intellectually baffling, as 'unthinkable', as they were at their first rumoring. Reading the Holocaust challenges that bafflement and the demoralization that attends it. Searching, eloquent, and elegantly written, Inga Clendinnen's book is an uncompromising attempt to extract the comprehensible--the practical, human reality--from the unthinkable. Reading the Holocaust has won the Premier's Award for General History in New South Wales.

More than fifty years after their occurrence, the events of the Holocaust remain for some of their most dedicated students as morally and intellectually baffling, as 'unthinkable', as they were at their first rumouring. Reading the Holocaust challenges that bafflement and the demoralization that attends it. Searching, eloquent and elegantly written, Inga Clendinnen's book is an uncompromising attempt to extract the comprehensible - the practical, human reality - from the unthinkable.

Inga Clendinnen is the author of Ambivalent Conquests: Maya and Spaniard in Yucatan, 1517-1570 (1989) and Aztecs: An Interpretation (1991). Reading the Holocaust has won the Premier's Award for General History in New South Wales.

1. Beginning; 2. Impediments; Part I. Victims: 3. Witnessing; 4. Resisting; Part II. Perpetrators: 5. Defining: inside the grey zone: the Auschwitz Sonderkommando; 6. Leaders; 7. The men in the green tunics: the order police in Poland; 8. The Auschwitz SS; 9. Representing the Holocaust.