Civilization Breaks: Colonialism, Slavery, and the Holocaust
In the late 1980s, following the famous Historikerstreit (Historians’ Debate) about the uniqueness and comparability of the Holocaust, the German-Israeli scholar Dan Diner proposed the concept of the Zivilisationsbruch, the “rupture in civilization.” With the concept of the Zivilisationsbruch, Diner sought to describe the singularity of the Nazi genocide of European Jews as a rupture with basic post-Enlightenment assumptions […]