ABSTRACT
Growing up behind the Iron Curtain in East Germany, the communist German Democratic Republic profoundly influenced the course of the author's life and his scholarship on the Holocaust. During the international discussion about compensation of Nazi victims, one could often read that Eastern bloc countries had not accepted their responsibility for the Holocaust. In the 1990s, the opening of Eastern European archives, an expanding internationalization of Holocaust studies, and a new generation of scholars with questions of their own challenged simplistic understandings of the Shoah. Mark Granovetter’s approach could be productively applied to the analysis of actions during the Holocaust, especially regarding resistance and rescue. Recent efforts to explore the potential of digital humanities have opened further opportunities for Holocaust studies to raise new questions, including, for example, issues about the value of relationships for survival. Holocaust historians understood resistance primarily in terms of organized or armed group activities, and thus mostly neglected individual acts of opposition.
