Podcast — Episode 35

Rescue and Resistance: A Conversation with Mark Roseman

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)

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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)


Mark Roseman visited UT Dallas to give the 2019 Burton C. Einspruch Lectures sponsored by the Ackerman Center for Holocaust Studies.

This interview was recorded on October 21, 2019 at UT Dallas.

Filed under HistoryAckerman Center for Holocaust StudiesGermany