“By articulating new conceptual categories and identifying unexpected connections, Omer Bartov has made a profound and original statement on the links between war and genocide, representations of violence and its enactment, industrial killing and the crisis of modern European civilization.”–Saul Friedlander, University of California, Los Angeles and Tel Aviv University
“Thoughtful and thought-provoking, Bartov’s essays offer disturbing reflections on the capacity for genocide in modern society.”–Ian Kershaw, Univesity of Sheffield
“In Murder in Our Midst, Omer Bartov provides a searching, informed, and impassioned view of the origins and aftermath of the Holocaust. Few other writers have brought to bear the combination of historical learning and contemporary social awareness with which Bartov addresses this subject.”–Berel Lang, State University of New York, Albany
“[T]his book is well worth reading, both for its originality and its capacity to provoke thought on a compelling subject.”–American Historical Review
“[A]bsorbing reading…”–National Forum
“[T]he essays in this work, taken together or read as discreet entities, are extremely valuable and persuasive…”–German Studies Review
From the Back Cover
Murder in Our Midst: The Holocaust, Industrial Killing, and Representation examines the emergence, implementation, and representation of industrial killing, an inherent and crucial component of modernity whose most extreme manifestation was the Holocaust. The mechanized, impersonal, and sustained mass destruction of human beings, organized and legitimized by states, scientists, jurists, and intellectuals, is rooted in the industrial slaughterhouse of the Great War. In Murder in Our Midst, Omer Bartov argues that the Nazi death factories are best understood in the context of modern warfare, beginning with the First World War. He shows how the way we understand ourselves reflects the ambivalent effects of the Holocaust on our perceptions of war and violence, history and memory, progress and barbarism. Analyzing a wide array of historical texts, works of fiction, films, and museums, Bartov leads the reader from ancient myths of heroism to the trenches of the Western Front, from Thomas Mann’s romantic vision of war to Primo Levi’s stark depictions of genocide, from colonial war museums to the visual art of the Holocaust. These representations of killing share some of the same important features. They attempt to form coherent images from horrific events, to draw didactic lessons from them, and to use them for political ends.
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