In Rescue and Remembrance, Kobi Kabalek examines how the rescue of Jews during the Holocaust has been understood and represented in Germany from the Nazi period to the present. In many regions outside Germany, a small number of known Holocaust rescuers are often held up as exemplars of broad pro-Jewish sentiment among that country’s population during World War II, thereby projecting an image of national moral virtue. Within Germany, by contrast, rescuers are often presented in both scholarship and public commemoration as a small minority; their examples condemn the majority by showing what Germans could have done but did not do.  

Kabalek argues that such simplistic depictions of the majority versus minority obscure the complex motivations and situations that led people in Nazi Germany to help persecuted Jews. Against the view that the rescuers were “forgotten” after the war, he shows that portrayals and interpretations of helping Jews appeared in various media and social discourses in East, West, and unified Germany and were used to actively debate questions of collective morality. Rescue and Remembrance analyzes the varied and changing depictions of rescue in the distinct German polities from the Nazi period, examining how the very notions of “majority” and “collective” were articulated and reformulated.

Kobi Kabalek is an assistant professor of Holocaust studies and visual studies in the Germanic and Slavic languages and literatures and Jewish studies departments at the Pennsylvania State University.

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments

Introduction
1 Condemned: The Rescue of Jews and Nazi Concepts of Morality
2 Scattered: Individual and Group References to Rescue from 1945 to 1960
3 Collected: Framing and Institutionalizing Rescue from the 1950s to the 1970s
4 Expected: “Other Germans” from 1978 to 1988
5 “Silenced”: Debates over the Memory of Rescue from Schindler’s List to the Present
Conclusion

Notes
Bibliography
Index