Holocaust Memorial Day Lecture
Professor Anson Rabinbach (Princeton University)
Raphael Lemkin (1900-1959) is best known as the creator of the term genocide and the author of the United Nations Genocide Convention. His admirers have emphasized his single-minded belief in the efficacy of both law and language to alter reality, as well as his conviction that the extermination of entire peoples and cultures was by no means a uniquely modern experience in history. Critics have pointed to the lack of means to enforce the convention, to Lemkin's almost naïve belief that language translated into law could prevent mass murder, and the difficulties of translating supranational principles into a world where law and sovereignty remain intimately linked. This talk takes as its starting point Lemkin's belief that genocide was an unpolitical concept and looks at how Lemkin's lifelong campaign was thwarted by the United States' failure to ratify the convention. Professor Rabinbach will look at the reasons behind the United States' obduracy and at the resulting stalemate which made genocide a lost cause until the break-up of Yugoslavia in 1994.
Anson Rabinbach is the Director of European Cultural Studies at Princeton University. He is a specialist in modern European history with an emphasis on Nazi Germany, Austria, and European thought in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He is the co-founder of New German Critique, the premier journal in German studies in the United States. He has published extensively and is the author of The Crisis of Austrian Socialism: From Red Vienna to Civil War 1927-1934 (1979), The Human Motor (1991) and In the Shadow of Catastrophe: German Intellectuals between Apocalypse and Enlightenment (1997). His current research is on Nazi Germany and on post-Second World War exchanges between European and American intellectuals.
