ABSTRACT
Accounting for Genocide is fraught with the ambiguity of its ubiquity. It moves from innovation to recitation, from elegance to banality, from sociological imagination to methodological pedantry. Helen Fein attempts to provide an analytical measurement of the Holocaust. The Holocaust is an issue that has gripped historians, theologians, and every human soul concerned with questions of human survival in an atmosphere of official homicide. Fein argues that the more successful the prewar anti-Semitic movements, the greater the number of Jewish victims in the Holocaust. Maps, charts, and data are provided to express how cleavaged relationships in Europe led to a collapse in social solidarity within a nation and finally to Jewish decimation. Fein deserves a great deal of credit for her clinical analysis. Fein also imaginatively uses the concept of time, namely, the extent to which warning time in the less anti-Semitic stage was adversely related to the stages after 1941.
