From award-winning historian Mary Fulbrook, a revisionist exploration into the creation of a society that gave rise to Nazism and its crimes.
In Bystander Society Mary Fulbrook takes on some of the same issues that were the subject of her previous prize-winning book, Reckonings: Legacies of Nazi Persecution and the Quest for Justice. Using the testimony of those who were victims as well as those observing their persecution after Hitler's rise to power, she explores the conditions that led progressively from conformity to complicity to active participation in a regime that eventually committed mass murder. The Third
Reich encouraged the creation of a "bystander society," both shaping the perceptions of German citizens and helping to create the horrors that were committed in their name during the Holocaust. Ignorance and indifference were, in this way, socially created and historically produced. With growing certainty of what was
happening both within Germany and outside its borders to "non-Aryans," mainly Jews, a bystander society was one in which Germans went from a condition of passivity to a conscious choice, initiating a process either toward active resistance (though rare) or willing engagement in crimes against humanity.
Based on an extraordinary archive of personal accounts, Bystander Society moves between the individual and the wider context, highlighting the significance of changing social and political circumstances over the course of the Nazi period in Germany and selected areas of Eastern Europe both before and during the Second World War. It explores how interpersonal relations in everyday life shifted, weakening emotional connections, such that former fellow citizens could be viewed as
outcasts. Tracing individual stories of experiences, Bystander Society offers the responses of ordinary people under Nazi rule, and reconceives the notion of "bystanding" both within the context of Nazi Germany in particular and the larger scope of history and current events.
- ISBN10 0197691714
- ISBN13 9780197691717
- Publish Date 8 November 2023
- Publish Status Forthcoming
- Publish Country US
- Imprint Oxford University Press Inc
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 496
- Language English