Harold Marcuse, who teaches in the Department of History at UCSB, will discuss his new book, Legacies of Dachau: The Uses and Abuses of a Concentration Camp, 1933-2001 (Cambridge University Press, June, 2001) at 4 P.M. on Monday, November 19 in the McCune Conference Room, 6020 Humanities and Social Sciences Building. Courtesy of the UCSB Bookstore, copies of Legacies of Dachau will be available for purchase and signing at this event.

Auschwitz, Belsen, Dachau. Three generations later, these names still evoke the horrors of Nazi Germany around the world. This book takes one of these sites, Dachau, and traces its history from the beginning of the twentieth century, through its twelve years as Nazi Germany's premier concentration camp, to the camp's postwar uses as prison, residential neighborhood, and, finally, museum and memorial site. With superbly chosen examples and an eye for telling detail, Legacies of Dachau documents how Nazi perpetrators were quietly rehabilitated to become powerful elites, while survivors of the concentration camps were once again marginalized, criminalized, and silenced. Combining meticulous archival research with an encyclopedic knowledge of the extensive literatures on Germany, the Holocaust, and historical memory, Marcuse unravels the intriguing relationship between historical events, individual memory, and political culture, to offer the first unified interpretation of their interaction from the Nazi era to the twenty-first century.

Harold Marcuse is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he teaches modern and contemporary German history. The grandson of the German émigré philosopher Herbert Marcuse, he returned to Germany in the 1970s to trace family roots. He soon became interested in West Germany's relationship to its Nazi past, and in 1985 he co-produced an exhibition about monuments and memorials commemorating events of the Nazi era. That exhibition was shown in nearly thirty German cities, including Dachau. Marcuse has since published numerous articles on Dachau, German history, and memorial culture.

This event is sponsored by the UCSB Bookstore, Department of History, and Interdisciplinary Humanities Center.