Final Report Summary - JUDGINGHISTORIES (Experience, Judgement, and Representation of World War II in an Age of Globalization)
The research project “JudgingHistories” was led by Prof. Dan Diner (the PI) and was hosted at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
“JudgingHistories” was probing a fresh approach in interpretation of World War II as a global event in combining supposedly different and even conflicting perceptions. Traditional scholarship of the war typically focuses on the horizontal West-East alignment of events, while looking at the European and the Pacific theaters of war as two separate spatially power spheres. “JudgingHistories”, however, interfaced the horizontal focus – that is, the continental European approach to the war – with a vertically North-South oriented colonial alignment. To generate an integrated history, the research project cross-linked the history of a multitude of events – events that had scattered around the globe, but had been joined together by common material needs of warfare, as seen, for instance, in world-embracing logistics. Indeed, the complex network of military supply established the spatial and thus the global domain of the war – its very framework. In addition to the geopolitical approach to WWII, “JudgingHistories” also dealt with its moral dimension. This dimension was scrutinized according to the different forms and modes of violence used by the parties involved in the war as well as according to various quests of material compensation and cultural commemoration in the post-war period. The project thus showed that by distinguishing between suffering caused by massacres, genocidal atrocities, and the ultimate genocide of the Holocaust, comparison becomes possible and critical, which in turn provides the sociological, normative and legal requirements for a universal morality, and thus, global judgement.
The project successfully established several platforms to encourage and ensure constant knowledge transfer between the project members as well as between project members and scholars from “outside”: It held several internal seminars where the project members presented both orally and in written reports on the progress of their research, a reading group where the project’s postdoctoral fellows and the research associate met on a regular basis to discuss scholarly literature and primary sources, as well as several project lectures where scholars from “outside” shared their expertise with the team. In addition, the project hosted five international events (conferences and workshops) dedicated to the war’s global and regional aspects and initiated a guest lectures series “Global History of World War II” to enhance knowledge transfer on the war to a wider audience.
“JudgingHistories” was probing a fresh approach in interpretation of World War II as a global event in combining supposedly different and even conflicting perceptions. Traditional scholarship of the war typically focuses on the horizontal West-East alignment of events, while looking at the European and the Pacific theaters of war as two separate spatially power spheres. “JudgingHistories”, however, interfaced the horizontal focus – that is, the continental European approach to the war – with a vertically North-South oriented colonial alignment. To generate an integrated history, the research project cross-linked the history of a multitude of events – events that had scattered around the globe, but had been joined together by common material needs of warfare, as seen, for instance, in world-embracing logistics. Indeed, the complex network of military supply established the spatial and thus the global domain of the war – its very framework. In addition to the geopolitical approach to WWII, “JudgingHistories” also dealt with its moral dimension. This dimension was scrutinized according to the different forms and modes of violence used by the parties involved in the war as well as according to various quests of material compensation and cultural commemoration in the post-war period. The project thus showed that by distinguishing between suffering caused by massacres, genocidal atrocities, and the ultimate genocide of the Holocaust, comparison becomes possible and critical, which in turn provides the sociological, normative and legal requirements for a universal morality, and thus, global judgement.
The project successfully established several platforms to encourage and ensure constant knowledge transfer between the project members as well as between project members and scholars from “outside”: It held several internal seminars where the project members presented both orally and in written reports on the progress of their research, a reading group where the project’s postdoctoral fellows and the research associate met on a regular basis to discuss scholarly literature and primary sources, as well as several project lectures where scholars from “outside” shared their expertise with the team. In addition, the project hosted five international events (conferences and workshops) dedicated to the war’s global and regional aspects and initiated a guest lectures series “Global History of World War II” to enhance knowledge transfer on the war to a wider audience.