Nation as a Local Metaphor
December 06, 2012
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/359118 Nation as a Local Metaphor: Wurttemberg, Imperial Germany, and National Memory, 1871-1918 by Alon Confino …
Alon Confino
Alon Confino, grew up in Israel and educated at Tel Aviv University and UC Berkeley. He is interested in the theory and practice of writing history displayed in particular in the topics of memory, culture, and nationhood. His work has often taken modern German history as a point of departure, yet has consistently cast its net wider. As a historian, He has sought to reach in my work the edges of the historical discipline, those areas of research and theory where the historical method meets ethnography, literature, anthropology, and cultural studies. In my writing over the years, he also has sought to craft a narrative weaving together story telling with critical analysis. But in recent years I have been particularly interested in probing into different possibilities of historical narration. He is the author of The Nation As a Local Metaphor: Württemberg, Imperial Germany, and National Memory, 1871-1918 (1997) and Germany As a Culture of Remembrance: Promises and Limits of Writing History (2006). In the last few years I worked on the Holocaust and the result is Foundational Pasts: The Holocaust As Historical Understanding (Cambridge University Press, New York, 2012) and A World Without Jews: Nazi Germany, Representations of the Past, and the Holocaust. It explores the German sensibilities in the Third Reich that underlie the persecution and extermination of the Jews, making them conceivable and imaginable; the project was awarded a 2011 Guggenheim Fellowship and is slated for publication by Yale University Press. I am also working now, with an eye to the future, on forced migrations in the 1940s in central and eastern Europe, India/Pakistan, and Palestine/Israel, focusing on issues of local history, memory, and human rights. He is the recipient, among others, of grants from the Fulbright, Humboldt, and Lady Davis Foundations, the Institute of Advanced Studies at the Hebrew University, the Social Science Research Council, the Israel Academy of Sciences, and the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.
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