I'm going to do a book report on how our understanding of the holocuast has developed from the 50's to the present. This is the prompt;
Discuss the memory of the Holocaust in the US (or any other country of your choice) from the 1950s up to the present. Why did this topic become common knowledge only in the 1960s and 1970s? Why not before? How did the memory of and the interest in the Holocaust develop? For this topic, you could rent the TV mini-series “The Holocaust” (1978 with Meryl Streep) and discuss its impact on popular interest in the Shoah in the US. Why, in your opinion, did it have such an enormous impact?
I can't figure out what keywords to google in order to find resources specific to this topic. Does anyone have any recommendations?
One of the keywords you are looking for is "historiography". Hope this does not get deleted, since OP will really need this at some point in his search.
More books have been written about the Holocaust than can be read in a lifetime. The historiography is vast. But without doing your assignment for you- I can tell you that you should begin with Peter Novick’s ‘The Holocaust in American Life’. You should also look at book reviews in academic journals of Christopher Browning’s ‘Ordinary Men...’ and Daniel Goldhagen’s ‘Hitler’s Willing Executioners’. These are two historians who used the same research materials to arrive at vastly different conclusions. Browning’s book has been embraced by the scholarly community, whereas Goldhagen’s thesis has been criticised, yet found some support amongst the German public interestingly enough. The titles alone show you an entry point into the ‘functionalist’ v ‘intentionalist’ debates. A term you’ll want to become familiar with is ‘Vergangenheitsbewältigung’ which has a history rooted in German ‘coming to terms with the past’ with the next generation of Germans (ie the children born/ coming of age just after WWII and encountering their inherited history). This will lead you into the Historikerstreit- a debate of right and left wing intellectuals regarding Holocaust historiography in the 1980s. Your assignment is US based, so Novick will take you far on the cultural impact of the Holocaust through the miniseries you’ve mentioned and Schindler’s List. But also have a look at this chapter too for a more global look at US Holocaust history: “The Revival of Holocaust Awareness in West Germany, Israel, and the United States,” in: 1968: The World Transformed (Cambridge 1998). This essay examines how the Holocaust became a talked-about event in three countries in the 1960s. ((Full Text)