Genocide on the Local Level: Origins, Experience, and Memory Omer Bartov
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his chapter presents the main arguments and finding of my recent book, Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz1. While the book provides a heavily documented narrative of events in this locality, it largely refrains from explicitly discussing the theoretical and methodological concepts that undergird it. In the following I articulate these ideas, briefly summarize the gist of the book, and argue for its contribution to a new understanding of the Holocaust. I began thinking about this project in the first half of the 1990s. While the recent fall of the Soviet Union was presented by some observers as the «end of history»2, it was quickly followed by two genocides in Bosnia and Rwanda, in which people were often killed by their own neighbors3. Ironically, it was also at that time that the Holocaust was finally recognized by the international community as a major event in World War II and, indeed, in the history of the twentieth century4. But the conventional understanding of the Holocaust at the time set it apart from other genocides, presenting it as a highly organized undertaking of 1. O. Bartov, Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz, New York, Simon and Schuster, 2018. 2. F. Fukuyama, The End of History?, in «The National Interest», 16, 1989, pp. 3-18. 3. See, e.g., P. Gourevitch, We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families: Stories from Rwanda, New York, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1998; E. Neuffer, The key to my neighbor’s house: Seeking justice in Bosnia and Rwanda, New York, Picador, 2001. 4. See, e.g., https://www.holocaustremembrance.com/stockholm-declaration; http:// www.europarl.europa.eu/pdf/divers/eprs_briefingholocaust_en.pdf.
