Posted: September 13th, 2017

Write a historiographical essay answering questions in the order description. Full question is aslo attached for further details.

Write a historiographical essay answering questions in the order description. Full question is aslo attached for further details.

Order Description

Write a Historiographical essay about whether German Jews should be blamed for not seeing “the writing on the wall” about Germany’s antisemitism during the Second and/or Third reich. Was Germany a deeply antisemitic country- on the path towards the Holocaust, were German-Jews blind behind his fact? The scholars assigned and materials attached lends credence to either side of this debate. Choose a side and support it with the range of the given attachments.

1000 WORDS

“We were so German,” “We were so assimilated,” We were so middle class,” –these are the common tropes that emerge in the memoirs of German Jews who try to recall their prewar life before the Nazi onslaught. (Kaplan, 5).  It is for this reason—the perception that German Jews were deeply integrated into German society—that historians and contemporaries have castigated German Jews for not seeing the writing on the wall. In other words, German Jews from the Second to the Third Reich have been accused of allowing their loyalty to German culture and society to blind them from the rising and dangerous anti-Semitism in their midst.  Other scholars have an adopted an alternative position. These historians have argued that we cannot read history with the benefit of hindsight, and that pre-Nazi Germany looked “anything but a chamber of potential horrors.” Further, this scholarly school has stressed the hurdles confronted by German Jews both in leaving Germany and realizing the need for emigration. Please take a position within this scholarly debate and support your contention with the primary and secondary sources assigned in this class.

WORD LIMIT: 1000 words

RECOMMENDED SOURCES

Claudia Koonz, The Nazi Conscience (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 1-45.
Helmut Walser Smith, The Butcher’s Tale: Murder and Antisemitism in a German Town (New York: Norton, 2002), introduction.

Marion Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 3-49, 50-73, 119-145.

Memoirs by “Henry Buxbaum,” “Wolfgang Roth,” “Emil Schorsch,” and “Ottie Schonwald, née Mendel,” “Marta Appel,” “Max Daniel,” in Monika Richarz, ed., Jewish Life in Germany: Memoirs from Three Centuries (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991).

CRITERIA FOR ASSESSMENT
1.
WRITING GUIDELINES for assignments:

A)    Papers should be double-spaced and use Times New Roman font.

B)    Please learn the definition of plagiarism, one of the most serious forms of academic misconduct: “Presenting another’s words or ideas as your own.”  Always cite your sources (including books, articles, and web sites) AND USE QUOTATION MARKS WHENEVER YOU USE A PHRASE OF MORE THAN THREE WORDS IN SUCCESSION FROM ANOTHER PERSON’S WORK. Paraphrasing an idea does not make it your idea. You may use it, but give credit where credit is due. Remember that professors can find websites as easily as students.

Plagiarism can be defined as: “any attempt to misrepresent one’s performance on any academic exercise submitted for evaluation… Plagiarism is by far the most common form of academic dishonesty reported. Plagiarism is defined simply as attempting to represent the “words or ideas of another person as one’s own.” 1  At its core, plagiarism is a form of theft, the theft of the intangible property of another scholar. According to James D. Lester, author of several well respected works on writing research papers, the most common forms of plagiarism include:

Failure to acknowledge the source of borrowed words or ideas (footnotes or other equivalent forms of citation are required at any time another writer’s words or ideas are borrowed.)

Failure to put direct quotes in quotation marks. Even if footnotes or other citations are used, failure to set out direct quotes in quotations marks is considered academically dishonest.

Improper paraphrasing (with or without footnotes or other citations.) The mere rearrange-ment of another’s words will not suffice.

Failure to include in a bibliography or other list of works consulted listing every book, article, etc. that was used in the preparation of the assignment.”

C) A quick checklist of common writing mistakes:

1.Have you paginated?
2. Have you underlined all foreign words and book titles?
3. Does EVERY sentence have a subject and verb?  Have you read each sentence aloud to see if it makes sense?
4.Please do not use contractions in formal prose.
5. Quotations:  A short quotation – of fewer than 5 lines—should be enclosed in quotation marks and combined smoothly as part of your own sentence. A longer quotation should be single spaced, indented, have no quotation marks, and be introduced by you.  Quotations cannot stand by themselves.
6.  Quotations marks: “Quotation marks enclose punctuation.”
7. Citations:  Chicago Manual of Style format.
8.  Paragraphs start with a topic sentence, support its ideas, and end with a concluding thought that rounds up the paragraph. Watch out for extraneous ideas that don’t help you build your paragraph.
9.You need “transition” thoughts between paragraphs.  They have to follow each other in some logical order. This will be easy if you have outlined your paper logically.
10. Does your introduction contain a contention? Proper introductions include a thesis statement (an argument) as well as a sense of how you are going to support this argument.
11. Watch how you use tenses! You should refer to historical issues and events in the past tense. However, you will be working with literary texts and may use the present tense to describe what your author is writing.
For example:  Glickl of Hameln lived in Germany and worked very hard. In her memoir, she declares that she loves  … or     In her memoirs she writes …
It is easiest to stay in the past tense in all situations.
12. Strive for clarity of style. This means avoid extraneous words that only confuse your sentence structure and not using words you do not entirely understand. The thesaurus is not always your friend.
13. Avoid the passive voice.  Reread your paper and rewrite 80% of the sentences that use some form of the verb to be (including were or was).  If no one ever corrected your papers with regard to the passive voice, be forewarned and check out this website:

www.winthrop.edu/wcenter/handoutsandlinks/passive.htm