Chronology of knowledge, or topography of care? Mass Observation and refugee memoirs for British readers during the Holocaust

Pilsworth, E. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7379-0996 (2027) Chronology of knowledge, or topography of care? Mass Observation and refugee memoirs for British readers during the Holocaust. In: Marrisson, K. (ed.) Mass Observation and the Holocaust: Traces in the Margins. Bloomsbury Academic. ISBN 9781350554450 (In Press)

Abstract/Summary

In this chapter, I use Mass Observation Archive (MOA) materials to explore the reception of German & Austrian refugee memoirs for British readers during the periods of appeasement and war. First, I explore how refugee memoirs fitted into the landscape of British publishing and reading trends regarding the genre of overseas explainers. I draw on MOA material relating to British reading habits to show how British interest in ‘explainers’ on Germany/Nazism rose and fell throughout appeasement and war, arguing that understanding ‘ordinary Germans’ was a key focus of explainers on Nazism, and that the experiences of Jewish refugees were marginal by comparison, even as news reports about the Nazi extermination of Jews became more widely available. I then use MOA to help us understand the complex relationship between Britishness and Jewishness during this period, which limited many British peoples’ capacity for empathy with Jewish victims of Nazism at the time. The widespread British failure to empathise with Jews in any significant way consequently hindered British engagement with the perspectives of Jewish victims of Nazism, affecting when, and how Jewish refugees’ memoirs could be presented for British readers, as the Holocaust was taking place.

Item Type	Book or Report Section
URI	https://centaur.reading.ac.uk/id/eprint/120666
Refereed	Yes
Divisions	Arts, Humanities and Social Science > School of Literature and Languages > Languages and Cultures > German Interdisciplinary Research Centres (IDRCs) > Centre for Book Cultures and Publishing (CBCP) Arts, Humanities and Social Science > School of Humanities > History
Publisher	Bloomsbury Academic
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