INTRODUCTION

Sometimes during the 1980s it seemed as though historians of the Nazi period had exchanged the prosaic business of working in archives in favour of acrimonious ‘meta-debates’ which were as much about the present as the past. These included the ‘Historikerstreit’ (historians' debate); the related ‘debate’ over empathy and ‘historicisation’; and various discourses about the relationship of the Holocaust to memory, rationality, science or modernity. In many respects this was a salutary development, since the historiography of both Nazism and the Holocaust had become over-preoccupied with a series of increasingly technical questions, expressed in commensurately technical terms, which threatened to eclipse wider humane concerns. I stress the historiography, or rather the small corner of it that is represented in historiographical evaluations, since as the final chapter below seeks to show, there is an enormous variety of creative reflection on the Holocaust, which is regrettably treated as marginal to more mainstream scholarly work in that small corner.

Undistracted by these developments, an impressive number of non-professional German scholars, which is to say people not employed by universities, continued to research in archives and publish on the social history of the Nazi era. Much of this work was done by plain people keen to uncover the past of their own regions, towns, factories, schools and villages and to put human faces to anonymous victims.