ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author prefers to think that her personal life can be sealed off from the author scholarly work. Indeed, personal experiences can be the most powerful driver of scientific inquiry and exactitude. Von Humboldt developed an understanding of humanity and the natural world through scientific study and personal experience. The author personal experiences continued to intersect with global events and started to shape author intellectual interests in German language and modern history. In the 1990s, the author joined a post-1968 generation of young scholars, especially in Germany, who were looking anew at perpetrator studies as regional case studies of Nazi occupation and at the Holocaust in the former Soviet Union. The discipline of Holocaust studies is profoundly ethical, partly because one of its imperatives is to get the history right. So, Holocaust studies invites, even requires, reflection about Holocaust lessons.
