Harold Marcuse
Professor of history interested in the reception of historical events--how different groups of people experience them as they unfold, how they imbue them with what meanings, how the events are interpreted and reinterpreted, and how they are disseminated through fiction and non-fiction, in documentary and feature films, museums, textbooks, schools, social media, commemorative events and so on. My research area is 20th century German history, in particular how Germans in the second half of the century look back on events in the first half (namely World War I, Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany).
Address: Department of History
University of California
Santa Barbara, CA 93106-9410
Address: Department of History
University of California
Santa Barbara, CA 93106-9410
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Books by Harold Marcuse
Marcuse's insightful narrative takes one of these sites, Dachau, and traces its history from the beginning of the twentieth century, through its twelve years as Nazi Germany's premier concentration camp, to the camp's postwar uses as a prison, residential neighborhood, and, finally, museum and memorial site.
With superbly chosen examples and an eye for telling detail, this absorbing book documents how Nazi perpetrators were quietly rehabilitated to become powerful elites, while survivors of the concentration camps were once again marginalized, criminalized, and silenced. The early postwar dodge "We didn't know!" became "We don't want to know," and German officials first rebuilt the camp as a huge housing project, then attempted to bulldoze it and the crematorium into oblivion. However, by 1965 camp survivors were able to ensure the preservation of some remains as a memorial site.
Always situating Dachau within the broader context of German history, Marcuse reveals the underlying dynamic of German memory debates from the 1968 rebellion to the "Holocaust" mini series in the 1970s, to Bitburg in the 1980s, to the Goldhagen and Berlin "murdered Jews" memorial controversies of the 1990s.
Combining meticulous archival research with an encyclopedic knowledge of the extensive literatures on Germany, the Holocaust, and historical memory, Legacies of Dachau unravels the intriguing relationship between historical events, individual memory, and political culture, enabling it to offer the first unifying interpretation of their interaction over the entire sweep of German history from the Nazi era into the twenty-first century.
Papers by Harold Marcuse