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• W2474633265 abstract "Reviewed by: How Could This Happen: Explaining the Holocaust by Dan McMillan Alon Confino How Could This Happen: Explaining the Holocaust. By Dan McMillan. New York: Basic, 2014. Pp. xi + 288. Cloth $27.99. ISBN 978-0465080243. Dan McMillan wrote a useful book that delineates some key causes of the Holocaust as they have been generally understood by scholars and laypersons. McMillan exaggerates when he writes that “the best histories of this catastrophe tell us how it happened, but not why.” But his book has a solid, justified rationale: to collect in one short volume—written in an accessible language for students, scholars, and laypersons—what has been considered some of the key reasons for the Holocaust, in order to explain “how could this happen.” The focus on the causes of the Holocaust is the virtue of this book, and it also defines its limits. How Could This Happen “clearly defines each cause of the Holocaust, explains its historical origins, and clarifies how it combines with the other causes” (viii). In twelve short and incisive chapters, McMillan delineates causes such as antisemitism, the role of Hitler, the violent influence of World War I on German society, the absence of democracy in Germany before 1918, the failure of Weimar, the popularity of Hitler, the importance of racial science, and a final chapter about what the Germans knew about the Holocaust and how they reacted to that knowledge. An important linchpin in the narrative is that “the Holocaust happened above all because Germany did not become a democracy before the 1918 revolution” (205), which set it apart from other Western nations. McMillan points out the importance of circumstances and contingencies, but he also argues that “only a very long and violent chain of events” (xi) could have produced the Holocaust. The book thus provides a comprehensive analysis of causes of the Holocaust. Most are important in one way or another, and McMillan does a good job of elucidating them in a text that is not “an academic treatise” (xi) but for the general public as well. But this list of causes also raises some questions. It is a very long list, including many of the causes that have been attributed to the Holocaust over the years; and it is not quite clear which ones McMillan rejects. Explaining his position in these debates would have made his argument sharper. I also note that the causes he delineates are influenced by the idea that German history diverged from the history of the West; while he rejects the idea of a distinct German pathology, he does emphasize Germany’s divergent, pre-1918 antidemocratic politics. Very few historians of Germany would subscribe to this view these days. In addition, it is interesting that some new factors for the Holocaust, such as the importance of colonialism or the making of the Nazi empire that radicalized anti-Jewish policy during the war, are not mentioned. Still, this is an important book for the ways that it makes us think about the limits of the search for causes. The difference between origins and causes is not always clear; the search for origins often leads us to look for the event’s long-term roots, whereby origins stand as markers of historical significance. Yet some of the factors discussed in [End Page 415] the book look more like general conditions of the possibility for the Holocaust rather than elements that directly led to it. The historian thus “discovers” large patterns and regularities that “caused” something: lack of democracy since 1871, for example, thus leads to the Holocaust—although Germany was not less democratic than most European states in 1918. Perhaps more importantly, the search for causes has clear limits in current Holocaust historiography. Such a search has dominated, with good reasons, Holocaust historiography since its inception; and it will continue because it is a legitimate and insightful historical endeavor. But at this point, it reflects a historiography that has run out of interpretative steam. I am thinking of the notion of racial ideology that has been used, however sophisticated and complex it is shown to have been in the Third Reich, to explain almost everything in the motivations and culture..." @default.
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• W2474633265 title "How Could This Happen: Explaining the Holocaust by Dan McMillan" @default.
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