What do you think?
Rate this book
The Routledge Handbook to Auschwitz-Birkenau
This handbook examines Auschwitz-Birkenau as both a site and a symbol of Nazi genocide. Scholars from a range of disciplinary perspectives consider Auschwitz’s history by engaging with Holocaust historiography and its place in Holocaust memory and representation, illustrating their mutual influence.
The chapters bring new insights to topics that other studies of Auschwitz have explored before, such as the Sonderkommando, the Czech family camp, and literary representations of Auschwitz. Other chapters cover recent developments and more neglected areas, such as the experience and memory of Romani prisoners, the fate of Soviet prisoners of war, and Auschwitz’s presence on social media. The handbook also responds to a number of recent trends and new paradigms in Holocaust Studies, including contributions from the fields of Environmental Studies, Spatial Studies, and Gender Studies.
As a crucial overview of the topic of Auschwitz-Birkenau and an introduction to its most recent and fruitful scholarly approaches, this handbook will be a valuable resource for undergraduates from second year and up, as well as for graduate students and researchers seeking a survey of the field.
The chapters bring new insights to topics that other studies of Auschwitz have explored before, such as the Sonderkommando, the Czech family camp, and literary representations of Auschwitz. Other chapters cover recent developments and more neglected areas, such as the experience and memory of Romani prisoners, the fate of Soviet prisoners of war, and Auschwitz’s presence on social media. The handbook also responds to a number of recent trends and new paradigms in Holocaust Studies, including contributions from the fields of Environmental Studies, Spatial Studies, and Gender Studies.
As a crucial overview of the topic of Auschwitz-Birkenau and an introduction to its most recent and fruitful scholarly approaches, this handbook will be a valuable resource for undergraduates from second year and up, as well as for graduate students and researchers seeking a survey of the field.
449 pages, Kindle Edition
Published August 12, 2025
3 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
December 22, 2025
This handbook assembles a wide range of academic articles and perspectives on Auschwitz-Birkenau, offering a broad overview of how Holocaust studies is currently structured, and if that’s what holocaust studies are today, the picture it depicts is worrisome.
There are some good articles here, but many of the chapters remain strikingly introductory in nature, stopping at the level of cautious exposition rather than sustained intellectual engagement. Arguments are outlined but rarely pursued to their conceptual or philosophical consequences. For readers with substantial prior engagement with Holocaust literature, testimony, and theory, the overall effect can feel surprisingly shallow, closer to pedagogical scaffolding than to serious academic confrontation.
This intellectual thinness becomes particularly evident where contemporary theoretical post-structural frameworks that are applied without sufficient historical or conceptual justification. The imposition of gender-studies discourse onto the figure of the Muselmann, the camp inmate reduced to extreme physical and psychic collapse, feels especially misguided. To force such a state into gendered analytical grids risks emptying the concept of its meaning and turning theoretical fashion into practically an insult.Similarly, attempts to explore environmental or ecological theories such as discussions of how green were the Nazis feel especially cynical.
More broadly, if this book is supposed to be the 2025’s snapshot about the pioneering studies of auschwitz, this handbook exemplifies what seems to be a larger problem within Holocaust studies today. The field increasingly positions itself as custodial and pedagogical rather than intellectually daring. Its primary concern appears to be the management, safeguarding, and transmission of memory for high school kids rather than serious scholars, often at the expense of deeper inquiry into what Auschwitz did to our understanding of humanity, rationality, and modernity. The result is a body of quite shallow scholarship that explains, contextualizes, and categorizes, but rarely risks thinking beyond well-policed boundaries. As if this book was written for people with no pre knowledge about auschwitz.
This is not to deny the book’s usefulness. As a survey of the field and an entry point for readers seeking orientation, it has its value (the articles about Delbo, Brazil, china and site visitations were interesting enough). But for serious readers expecting sustained thought, philosophical pressure, or genuinely challenging interpretations, the volume may feel insufficient.
There are some good articles here, but many of the chapters remain strikingly introductory in nature, stopping at the level of cautious exposition rather than sustained intellectual engagement. Arguments are outlined but rarely pursued to their conceptual or philosophical consequences. For readers with substantial prior engagement with Holocaust literature, testimony, and theory, the overall effect can feel surprisingly shallow, closer to pedagogical scaffolding than to serious academic confrontation.
This intellectual thinness becomes particularly evident where contemporary theoretical post-structural frameworks that are applied without sufficient historical or conceptual justification. The imposition of gender-studies discourse onto the figure of the Muselmann, the camp inmate reduced to extreme physical and psychic collapse, feels especially misguided. To force such a state into gendered analytical grids risks emptying the concept of its meaning and turning theoretical fashion into practically an insult.Similarly, attempts to explore environmental or ecological theories such as discussions of how green were the Nazis feel especially cynical.
More broadly, if this book is supposed to be the 2025’s snapshot about the pioneering studies of auschwitz, this handbook exemplifies what seems to be a larger problem within Holocaust studies today. The field increasingly positions itself as custodial and pedagogical rather than intellectually daring. Its primary concern appears to be the management, safeguarding, and transmission of memory for high school kids rather than serious scholars, often at the expense of deeper inquiry into what Auschwitz did to our understanding of humanity, rationality, and modernity. The result is a body of quite shallow scholarship that explains, contextualizes, and categorizes, but rarely risks thinking beyond well-policed boundaries. As if this book was written for people with no pre knowledge about auschwitz.
This is not to deny the book’s usefulness. As a survey of the field and an entry point for readers seeking orientation, it has its value (the articles about Delbo, Brazil, china and site visitations were interesting enough). But for serious readers expecting sustained thought, philosophical pressure, or genuinely challenging interpretations, the volume may feel insufficient.
Displaying 1 of 1 review