Legacies of Dachau: The Uses and Abuses of a Concentration Camp, 1933-2001 (Hardcover)

~ (Author) "This brief statement is set in a full-color glossy pamphlet between photographs of Dachau's city hall, parks and baroque castle, and Bavarians in traditional costumes..." (more)
Key Phrases: former persecutees, mythic resistance, denazification chambers, West German, New York, World War (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The title of this creative, dense book is slightly misleading: in fact, it casts a wider net over the ways in which Germany as a whole, not just Dachau, has dealt with the legacy of Nazism. Marcuse, a professor of history at UC-Santa Barbara, examines Germany's attempts during the past half-century to come to terms with its horrific wartime actions. Using a variety of sources, including interviews with survivors and Nazis, Marcuse shows how historical myths were constructed and how these myths affected the memorials built at places like Dachau, the first Nazi concentration camp; such memorials, says Marcuse, "generally reveal far more about the groups that create them than about the history they purport to represent." Marcuse, grandson of philosopher Herbert Marcuse, posits that the struggle to memorialize the events of the Holocaust is a generational one. The first generation, many of whom were complicit in Nazism, shielded themselves from the past by claiming themselves to have been the victims, and by claiming ignorance and by resisting attempts to memorialize the past. Dachau itself had no memorial for many years. Many in the second generation, who came of age during the tumultuous 1960s, reacted against their parents' denial, he argues, by launching a full-scale political critique of German society, European democracy and even the Vietnam War. Only in the past few decades, Marcuse concludes, has a synthesis been reached that is beginning to allow Germany to create memorials that promote the "experiential learning" he believes is most beneficial for its hundreds of thousands of visitors. What is most striking about Marcuse's complex analysis is his innovative look at history through a culture's acts of memorialization; still, this book will appeal more to those within the scholarly community than to lay readers.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Dachau was the first concentration camp to be set up. More than 200,000 prisoners were held there, and about 35,000 were documented to have died or been killed there. In the first 50 years since it was liberated, in April 1945, more than 21 million people visited the site. How did the Dachau memorial site come to be? What are the lessons it teaches, and who decided how to convey them? Marcuse wrote this book to provide answers to those questions. Part 1 recounts the history of Dachau, from its beginnings as a market town centuries ago through its repressive and genocidal phase, 1933 to 1945. Part 2 focuses on the decade from 1945 to 1955. Part 3 traces the images of Dachau embraced and propagated by the groups most involved in shaping its postwar history. Part 4 outlines the process of overcoming, since 1970, what Marcuse terms "the mythically distorted collective images of the Nazi era." This massive study is a crucial and definitive account of one important aspect of the Holocaust. George Cohen
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 612 pages
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press (March 26, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0521552044
• ISBN-13: 978-0521552042
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6 x 1.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,501,937 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Worth the Wait, July 25, 2001

By A Customer

Three generations after the horror of the Holocaust, the images that concentration camps like Dachau evoke are still the benchmark for man's inhumanity to man. The question this book seeks to address is what should be done with sites where hundreds of thousands of people were mutilated and murdered, abused and disposed of? Marcuse traces the history of Davhaufrom the beginning of the twentieth century through its time as the Nazis' 'flagship' concentration camp, to its current state as museum and memorial site. At pains to keep this history within the broader confines of German history, he goes to great lengths to make clear the relationship between historical events, individual memory and political culture. As he painstakingly documents the difference in post-war treatment of Nazi perpetrators and the survivors of the camp, it is clear that the questions of morality which first fuelled his interest (in West Germany's relationship with its Nazi past) have yet to be fully answered to his personal satisfaction. The early post-war 'we didn't know' became 'we don't want to know' and a collective amnesia materialised allowing the camp to be erased both physically and psychically. Apartments and stores were built, most notoriously a restaurant called AT THE CREMATORIUM, before being razed to the ground in preparation for a permanent memorial. In the meantime, there was plenty of bickering over who would manage the site and, by the way, have those pesky Bavarian survivors been repatriated yet?! The underlying dynamic of German memory regarding responsibility - read of the debates, the 1968 rebellion,the first Holocaust docu-drama in the 70s, Bitburg in the 80s and the memorial controversies of the 90s - is meticulously laid bare. It is not remotely enjoyable reading (this weighty, hefty tome) but it is necessary. Fortunatelu it's accessible history and historiography. The notes seem inexhaustible but are concise and user friendly, as is the index. Some of the post-war posters and postcards are bleakly amusing, others are graphic and unflinching in their apportionment of responsibility and all are compelling. I believe this is the first lomg-term aassessment of Dachau and the ways it has been made to serve the present. Perhaps a long time coming but certainly worth the wait.

2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Winner of Hans Rosenberg Prize, February 28, 2003

By	Harold Marcuse "professor of German history" (Santa Barbara, CA United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

In January 2003, the Conference Group for Central European History explained its selection:

To stand out among 49 submissions, the award-winning book had to be challenging and ambitious, theoretically informed, solidly researched, wellwritten, and nicely produced. The winner of this year's Hans Rosenberg Book Prize is Legacies of Dachau.- The Uses and Abuses of a Concentration Camp, 1933-2001 by Harold Marcuse, published in 2001 by Cambridge University Press. The title suggests only part of the sweep of this well-illustrated book. Marcuse traces the multiple transformations of the camp in Dachau from a concentration camp to a camp for displaced persons to an internment camp for Nazis to a heavily-visited memorial and museum site, but he also includes the adjacent site that housed first an SS garrison, then a US army unit, and then part of the Bavarian state police. These multiple uses, as Marcuse shows, point to the difficulty in fixing the memory of Dachau in both the professional and public understanding of the history of not just this site but also the broader histories of Nazism, the Holocaust, the postwar occupation, and the Federal Republic. The uses and abuses of Dachau illuminate how different age cohorts of postwar Germans selectively remembered and forgot parts of their history and how they created and challenged what Marcuse calls the founding myths of victimization by, ignorance of, and resistance to Nazism. Because these cohorts confronted each other as they evolved, Legacies of Dachau is a story of the intellectual growth of postwar Germany. Just as Dachau Concentration Camp is itself a site for education, reflection, and memorialization, this book will help readers better understand the events that transpired there and the complex, contested ways in which Germans have come to grips with those events.