Professor (1992)

Modern German and European History

On Leave: Fall 2009 - Spring 2010

Office Hours: Wednesday 2-4

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.

 

 

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).

·        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).

 

 

Articles:

 

·        “Interpreting the Holocaust after The Years of Extermination,” in Dan Stone, ed., The Holocaust and Historical Methodology (Berghahn Press, 2010, forthcoming).

·        “History and Memory,” in Axel Schneider and Daniel Woolf, eds., The Oxford History of Historical Writing (Oxford UP), 2010, forthcoming.

·         “A World Without Jews: A Study on Holocaust Historiography and An Essay in Interpretation,” German History (December 2009), forthcoming.

·         “Narrative Form and Historical Sensation: On Saul Friedländer’s The Years of Extermination,” History and Theory (October 2009), Forum with Christopher Browning and Amos Goldberg, forthcoming.

·         “Writing, Not only Remembering, the History of ‘67,” Yisrael 13 (2008): 295-310 (in Hebrew).

·        “Memory and the History of Mentalities,” in Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning, eds., Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook (Berlin/New York, 2008): 77-84.

·        “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): 219-231.

·        “Introduction: Death in Twentieth-Century Germany,” co-written with Paul Betts and Dirk Schumann. In Confino, Betts, Schumann, eds., Between Mass Death and Individual Loss: The Place of the Dead in Twentieth-Century Germany (Berghahn Press, 2008): 1-22.

·        “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): 133-154.

·        “On the Liberation from the Tyranny of the Past: Jews and Arabs in Israel,” Alpayim (An Interdisciplinary Publication for Contemporary Thought and Literature) 32 (December 2007): 49-59 (in Hebrew).

 

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.