Professor (1992)

Director of Jewish Studies

Modern German and European History

Office Hours: Wednesday 10-12

Office: 203 Randall Hall

Phone: (434) 924-6412

Fax: (434) 924-7891

Email: confinovirginia.edu

Education

Ph.D. History, University of California, Berkeley, 1992. M.A. History, University of California, Berkeley, 1986.
B.A. History, University of Tel Aviv, Israel, 1985.

Visiting Appointments

Visiting Professor, the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, 2007.
Visiting Professor, Tel Aviv University, 2006.
Visiting Professor, the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, 2006.
Visiting Professor of History, NYU/UVa program in London, 2003.
Visiting Professor of History, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris, 1999.

Works In Progress

A book manuscript: Foundational Pasts: An Essay on the Holocaust and Historical Understanding. A book manuscript: Pleasures in Germany: The Culture of Traveling under Nazism, Communism, and Liberal Democracy, 1933-1989.

Publications (Selected)

Books

Germany As a Culture of Remembrance: Promises and Limits of Writing History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006). http://uncpress.unc.edu/books/T-7341.html

The Nation As a Local Metaphor: Württemberg, Imperial Germany, and National Memory, 1871-1918 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997). (Reprinted, 2004). Winner of the Charles Smith Book Prize of the European section of the Southern Historical Association, 1998.

Edited Collections

Between Mass Death and Individual Loss: The Place of the Dead in Twentieth-Century Germany. Co-edited with Paul Betts and Dirk Schumann (Berghahn Press, 2008 forthcoming).

The Work of Memory: New Directions in the Study of German Society and Culture. Co-edited with Peter Fritzsche (University of Illinois Press, 2002).

Edited Special Journal Issues

“Histories and Memories of Twentieth Century Germany.” A special double-issue of History and Memory (vol. 17, nos. 1-2, 2005).

“Viewed from the Locality: the Local, National, and Global.” Co-edited with Ajay Skaria. A special issue of National Identities, vol. 4, no. 1 (March 2002).

“Regimes of Consumer Culture.” Co-edited with Rudy Koshar. A special issue of German History, vol. 19, no. 2 (2001).

Most Recent Articles

“History and Memory,” in Axel Schneider and Daniel Woolf, eds., The Oxford History of Historical Writing

(Oxford UP), 2009, forthcoming.

“1967 in History and Memory,” Yisrael, (lead article in a special issue on the 1967 Arab-Israeli war), forthcoming, 2009 (in Hebrew).

“Memory and the History of Mentalities,” in Ansgar Nünning and Astrid Erll, eds., Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook (Berlin/New York, 2008), forthcoming.

“Death, Spiritual Solace, and Afterlife: Between Nazism and Religion,” in Confino, Paul Betts, and Dirk Schumann, eds., Between Mass Death and Individual Loss: The Place of the Dead in Twentieth-Century Germany (Berghahn Press, 2008, forthcoming).

“On the Liberation from the Tyranny of the Past: Jews and Arabs in Israel,” Alpayim (An Interdisciplinary Publication for Contemporary Thought and Literature) 32 (2008): forthcoming (in Hebrew).

“The Travels of Bettina Humpel: One Stasi File and Narratives of State and Self in East Germany,” in Paul Betts and Katherine Pence, eds., Socialist Modern: East German Politics, Society, and Culture (University of Michigan Press), 2008, forthcoming.

“Freud, Moses, and Modern Nationhood,” in Ruth Ginsburg and Ilana Pardes, eds., New Perspectives on Freud’s Moses and Monotheism, (Niemeyer: Tübingen, 2006): 165-175.

“Lo local, una esencia de toda nación,” Ayer, 64, no. 4 (2006): 19-31. A special issue edited by X. M. Núñez, La construcción de la identidad regional en Europa y España.

“Intellectuals and the Lure of Exile: Home and Exile in the Autobiographies of Edward Said and George Steiner,” The Hedgehog Review (Fall 2005): 20-28.

“Remembering the Second World War, 1945-1965: Narratives of Victimhood and Genocide,” Cultural Analysis: An Interdisciplinary Forum on Folklore and Popular Culture, Vol. 4, 2005: http://ist-socrates.berkeley.edu/~caforum/volume4/vol4_article3.html

With responses by Robert Moeller (History: UC Irvine) and Jay Winter (History: Yale).

“Fantasies about the Jews: Cultural Reflections on the Holocaust,” History and Memory 17, nos. 1-2 (2005): 296-322.

Current Research

   My book, Germany As a Culture of Remembrance: Promises and Limits of Writing History, a collection of ten essays, was recently published.

    I am now completing a book entitled "Foundational Pasts: An Essay on the Holocaust and Historical Understanding," that proposes to treat the Holocaust as a problem in cultural history. The central explanatory problem of the Nazi persecution and extermination of the Jews, it seems to me, is no longer to account for what happened—the administrative process of extermination, the ideological indoctrination by the regime, and the specific context of a brutalizing war—because we now have sufficiently good accounts of these historical realities. Rather, the central problem is to account for what the Nazis thought was happening: namely, an apocalyptic, millenarian battle against “The Jew.” Via this investigation I also seek to uncover some of the basic, but often little considered, assumptions of present-day historians concerning historical narration, explanation, and understanding.

   I do it by looking at the Holocaust in association with the historiography of the other foundational past of modern European history, to my mind, the French Revolution. My aim is not to compare the two events, but to read the Holocaust against the historiography of the French Revolution in order to find some of the hidden assumptions, narratives, and modes of explanation that govern it. It proceeds by asking specific enough questions, and focuses on four topics:  the explanatory role of origins and outcome, of context, of culture, and of contingency.  

   What emerges is a view of Nazism that existed in political terms, but was a cultural work in progress. This work in progress should be treated as a cultural artifact, as a revolution of human imagination, consciousness, and morality. The Holocaust was part of a larger attempt to create a German-Nazi way of life; the fusion of German and Nazi identities and memories in contrast to their isolation or separation, stands at the center of our narrative and explanation.