Europe as Scaffolding: On the Future of Holocaust History

This Spotlight argues that Holocaust historiography stands at a critical impasse. Decades of groundbreaking research have produced an era of unprecedented empirical richness – but also profound fragmentation: a tension masterfully documented in The Cambridge History of the Holocaust (2025). As the field has matured – dethroning German exceptionalism, re-centring victim experiences and expanding its temporal and methodological horizons – the frameworks that once provided coherence, from Berlin-centrism to national containers, have been exhausted. In response, this article proposes a new methodological scaffolding: relational Europeanism. This approach shifts the analytical focus from where events occurred to how they unfolded, privileging interaction over location, proximity over typology and the methodological practice of entanglement. By tracing these dynamics horizontally across borders, vertically through scales and temporally through pre-war and post-war periods, relational Europeanism rethinks the Holocaust as a continental process woven from irreducibly local contexts. It offers a viable path to hold the field’s dazzling plurality together without imposing a new synthesis. In an age of nationalist memory politics and eroding historical knowledge, this method is not merely an academic exercise but also an ethical imperative – providing the connective tissue to write European histories as transnational as the experiences themselves.