Genocide is sometimes called the ’crime of crimes’. The word was coined by Raphael Lemkin in 1944, then declared an international crime by the United Nations General Assembly. In 1948, the Genocide Convention was adopted. As the first human rights treaty of modern times, it constituted a significant intrusion into what had previously been a matter exclusively of domestic concern. This explains the narrow definition of the crime of genocide. It requires proof of an intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group. Only a half century after its adoption did the Genocide Convention take on real significance with inter-State cases being filed at the International Court of Justice and many prosecutions at the International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. The Convention requires that States Parties punish genocide but they are also required to prevent it, even when it takes place outside their own territory. More than 150 States have ratified the Genocide Convention. Genocide is also prohibited under customary international law. It is generally agreed that the duty to punish genocide is a peremptory norm of international law (jus cogens).

The post-First World War minorities treaties regime was an initial attempt by international law to address the rights of national and ethnic minorities. Its shorcomings prompted Raphael Lemkin, in his book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, to propose a new category of international crime that he named genocide. The International Military Tribunal prosecuted acts of genocide using the category of crimes against humanity. Several of the defendants were convicted of acts aimed at destruction of Europe’s Jewish population. However, crimes against humanity were confined to acts associated with aggressive war. At the first session of the United Nations General Assembly in 1946, a resolution on genocide was proposed in order to address the peacetime atrocities that were neglected in the Nuremberg judgment. The resolution recognized genocide as an international crime and called for preparation of a convention.

Chapter 4 explores conceptualizations and aspects of peacebuilding, reconciliation, and dialogue, and their connection to personal narratives of genocide and war. Our understanding of peacebuilding synthesizes concepts and ideologies offered by major scholars and activists in the world, such as Jane Addams, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Leo Tolstoy. Furthermore, it emphasizes ideological nonviolence, creativity, and the use of personal narratives and Buberian-based dialogue in peacebuilding and sustainability. This chapter adds the final “piece of the mosaic” of the academic framework for understanding the roles that personal narratives of massive social-political trauma can play in sustainable peacebuilding and reconciliation (or in peace obstruction processes), presented in the preceding chapters.

Chapter 3 focuses on psychosocial coping and different mechanisms people use for dealing with stress, in general, and with traumatic situations of genocide and war, on the personal, family, group, inter-generational and community/national level, in particular. We look closely at three conceptualizations: Bar-Tal’s Ethos of Conflict, Bar-On’s working through, and Volkan’s chosen trauma, which address the relevance of genocide and war for direct victims and (in)direct descendants. We also explore the connections between elicitation and analyses of personal narratives in the context of genocide and war, in order to help understand how people live with the impacts of these traumas. We end the chapter with a focused look at how Germans and Jews cope with the horrors of the past genocide and how Jewish-Israelis and Palestinians cope with the ongoing intractable war between the peoples.

In Chapter 6, we present examples from the four different kinds of personal narratives that we conceptualized that connect to genocide and war, with this chapter focusing on the Holocaust. Our four types of personal narratives are termed: distancing, victimhood, ambivalence/paradoxes, and embracing the other while remaining in one’s pain. In this chapter, we present and analyze long quotes from narratives of Jews and (non-Jewish) Germans who are descendants of Holocaust survivors and Nazi perpetrators. Our examples come from a variety of sources – interviews that we undertook over the years with members of the first, second, and third generations, internet sources, YouTube, research books that present narrative interviews, and memoirs and autobiographies that exemplify the different kinds of narratives. This chapter, then, presents concrete examples of the different kinds of personal stories that we find in the context of speaking and/or writing about the Holocaust, mainly among the second and third generations, the children and grandchildren of the war generation.

Chapter 2 discusses major conceptualizations of collective/group identity and perceptions of the other in relation to conflict contexts, in general, and to the Holocaust and the Jewish-Arab/Israeli-Palestinian conflict, in particular. The chapter focuses on social identity theory and its evolution, the intersectional approach to group identity, and personal narratives as identity. We then explore the connections that exist between conceptualizations of collective identity and intergroup, political violence. These ideas are tied into personal narratives connected to atrocities of genocide and war. The chapter further addresses issues of stereotyping, delegitimation, and dehumanization, “us. vs. them” thinking, and conceptualizations of victimhood. We end the chapter with short overviews of the collective identities of generations of Germans, in relation to the Holocaust, and generations of Jewish-Israelis and Palestinians, in relation to the Israeli–Palestinian context.

By 1948, the trials had far exceeded estimates for their original time frame. This chapter looks at the effects the growing distance from the occupation had on court practice and the broader administration of the trials. It highlights how the unexpectedly long duration of the trials confronted the Ministry of Justice and the Director of Public Prosecutions with two specific challenges: firstly, it emerged that verdicts had been handed down unevenly over time; secondly, broader attitudes towards the trials in civil society had by now changed perceptibly. At the same time, the authorities in charge of the trials had a number of reservations against changing their legal parameters, as they were concerned for their long-term legacy should they be softened. This fundamental tension, along with the decision not to prosecute a number of wartime crimes such as economic collaboration, defined the later stages of the trials.

The chapter begins with a description of the multiple discriminatory legislation against the Jews enacted soon after the Nazi takeover in 1933. It then considers the ambivalent situation of the Jews in the following years, as told in the autobiography of the historian Peter Gay (Fröhlich), by then a high-school pupil in Berlin. While he and his family were only marginally affected by the Nazi acts of discrimination, most other Jews greatly suffered under this policy, as well as from the social exclusion associated with it and finally from the general economic hardship at the time. In fact, by the November (1938) Pogrom, Jews could no longer be seen as Germans. Could they still reflect German history – as they did throughout previous periods, according to this book? The chapter tries to handle this question by first briefly describing the history of the Holocaust and then dealing more fully with the historiography of this period, written since the end of the war till today.

This chapter begins by outlining the history and development of Yiddish, the traditional vernacular of Ashkenazi Jews, and it discusses how Yiddish went from being a vibrant language spoken by millions to being an endangered minority language with only a fraction of its original speaker population – primarily as a result of the Holocaust. The chapter explains how Yiddish came to be spoken in Britain from the 1880s onwards, when large numbers of Ashkenazim fled there to escape poverty and pogroms, and it details the initial tensions and subsequent cooperation between different waves and generations of Yiddish-speaking newcomers (which entailed shifting attitudes towards the Yiddish language). The chapter then provides an overview of the past and current geographical distribution of Yiddish-speaking communities in Britain, with a focus on the main urban centres, and it explores especially London’s thriving Yiddish culture between the two World Wars. This is followed by a discussion of the linguistic consequences of contact between Yiddish and English speakers, and particularly borrowings from each language into the other. Throughout, differences are explained regarding the language use and intergenerational transmission patterns of Yiddish among Haredi as compared to secular communities.

This chapter addresses the nexus between racism and return migration in the early 1980s, which marked the peak of anti-Turkish racism. As the call “Turks out!” (Türken raus!) grew louder, policymakers debated passing a law that would, in critics’ view, “kick out” the Turks and violate their human rights. During this “racial reckoning,” West Germans, Turkish migrants, and observers in Turkey grappled with the nature of racism itself. Although West Germans silenced the language of “race” (Rasse) and “racism” (Rassismus) after Hitler, there was an explosion of public discourse about those terms. Ordinary Germans, moreover, wrote to their president expressing their concerns about migration, revealing both biological and cultural racism. The simultaneous rise in Holocaust memory culture (Erinnerungskultur) is crucial for understanding this racial reckoning. While many Germans warned against the mistreatment of Turks as an unseemly continuity to Nazism, the emphasis on the singularity of the Holocaust offered Germans a way to dismiss anti-Turkish sentiment. Turkish migrants fought against this structural and everyday racism with various methods of activism. Turks at home, including the government and media following the 1980 military coup, viewed these debates with self-interest, lambasting German racism in the context of the 1983 remigration law.

This chapter presents Jewish and Christian documents leading up to and including the destruction of European Jewry, which reflect on the Christian contribution as well as those who were proactive in opposing Nazism. This period also witnessed the establishment of Jewish–Christian dialogue organisations, as well as the emergence of a small number of scholars who re-evaluated Jewish–Christian relations and helped establish the foundations of modern dialogue.