Podcast — Episode 35
Rescue and Resistance: A Conversation with Mark Roseman
Our guest on this episode is Mark Roseman, the Pat M. Glazer Chair in Jewish Studies at Indiana University Bloomington and author of Lives Reclaimed: A Story of Rescue and Resistance in Nazi Germany.
In Part One:
How did the members of the Bund come to be part of such a cohesive and tightly-knit group? (3:00) — The charismatic style of leadership, and how such groups declined after 1945 in Germany (5:15) — The tension between democratic and authoritarian aspects of leadership in social groups (7:00) — How can small-scale actions, such as bringing flowers to the victims of an attack, or sending packages to a displaced-persons camp, have any effect in the larger society? (9:00) — What is the importance of exercise, and physical fitness, for the formation of the group? (13:00) — Writing the history of the Wannsee Conference: What if a key document such as the Wannsee Protocol had not survived? (18:30) — How do you deal with the different kinds of language used by the Nazi government in its planning? Rhetorically violent, vs. bureaucratically euphemistic and evasive (22:30)
In Part Two:
Why would Nazis use anodyne language? (1:15) — The effect of the defeat in 1918 and the Versailles Treaty on the younger generation of Germans at that time (4:00) — How Hitler’s anti-Semitism grew after 1919 (7:00) — How genocidal Nazi imperialism in Eastern Europe differed from earlier imperialism (9:00) — The influence of “national self-determination” after the Versailles Treaty (13:30) — How the imperative to “Never Forget,” although necessary, has also been instrumentalized by governments in the face of contemporary political challenges (18:30) — Current and future projects: Lives Reclaimed and the Cambridge History of the Holocaust (24:00)
This interview was recorded on October 21, 2019 at UT Dallas.