About

Professor Harold Marcuse is a faculty member in the Department of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1992. His research primarily focuses on modern German history, utilizing the 'reception history' approach in his teaching methods. Professor Marcuse has a particular interest in the history and memory of the Holocaust, as evidenced by his publication 'Legacies of Dachau: The Uses and Abuses of a Concentration Camp, 1933-2001,' published by Cambridge University Press in 2001, and his work on the memorialization of the Holocaust in Germany. His academic work explores how historical events are represented and remembered, contributing to the understanding of German history and Holocaust studies. Additionally, he is interested in cognitive development and its impact on teaching history to students.

Research topics

• Political Science
• History
• Law
• Sociology
• Computer Science
• Literature
• World Wide Web
• Business
• Media studies
• Archaeology
• Art
• Classics
• Art history
• Philosophy

Selected publications

• Germany and the Holocaust

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2025-05-16

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Social and Digital Media Offerings about the Holocaust

  The Public Historian · 2024

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Computer Science

  Most educators know that social media platforms rise and fall in popularity faster than most middle-aged people can keep up with. People of particular ages and social groups who become familiar with one platform tend to stick with it long after newer platforms have been introduced. Students of various ages favor different platforms in ever-evolving cycles. Especially for institutional content creators this poses a dilemma: any educational material developed on one platform may appeal only to a specific demographic, and it may seem dated very quickly. Beyond that, some popular platforms may be better suited to delivering educational content than others. Educational research on the effects of certain content on specific platforms takes time and will almost certainly be outdated by the time it is published. Keeping in mind the complexity of evaluating social media as public history, this review essay assesses several recent attempts to use social media platforms to deliver content about Nazi persecution and the Holocaust, using established didactic and pedagogic principles. I examine several recent social media and digital offerings that aim to introduce Holocaust-related content to teens, focusing on the platforms they use the most: YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok.1Anne Frank is likely the best-known victim of the Nazi period among teens around the world, and the Anne Frank House (Foundation) in Amsterdam is at the forefront of creating content distributed via social media. As early as 2019 it debuted a twenty-eight-minute documentary on YouTube, “The Short Life of Anne Frank,” in seventeen languages from Arabic to Turkish.2 That video joins a long list of earlier interpretive visualizations of Frank’s diary, beginning with the 1955 play by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, which was adapted for film in 1959. After the publication of a “Definitive Edition” of the original diary in 1991, an updated stage adaptation by Wendy Kesselman premiered in 1997. A two-part, 190-minute miniseries “Anne Frank: The Whole Story” aired on ABC-TV in 2001. In addition, there have been literally dozens of other memoirs, interviews, plays, and films produced in many languages over the decades, targeted to specific audiences and focusing on specific aspects of Frank’s life story.In the spring of 2020, the Anne Frank House released a high-production-value, 15-episode, 131 total minutes series called “Anne Frank Video Diary” on YouTube.3 Unfortunately, because of copyright on extended quotes from the published diary, this series is not available in the United States. This offering was followed in August 2021 with a three-episode, 55 total minutes “second season” titled “After the Arrest,” featuring the same actor playing Anne Frank, narrating her post-diary life in Westerbork, Auschwitz, and Belsen. She speaks to the audience as if from the afterlife, dressed in white, posing in the sterile-white hallway of an early twentieth century house. Additional very realistic reenactments, now with the camera showing what Anne might have seen from her perspective, are interspersed with flashback clips from the initial “Video Diary” series. The three episodes divide Frank’s post-arrest life into three periods, corresponding to each of the camps she experienced.Three years later, between May and July 2024, roughly corresponding to the eightieth anniversary of the Frank family’s arrest, selected clips from these mid-length videos were pushed out via Instagram as “Anne’s Story: Videotour,” in a series of fifteen episodes of two-to-three minutes in length each (thirty-two total minutes).4 The first episodes frame Anne’s story by introducing the preserved House Museum, Anne’s early life in Germany, and the context of the German occupation of the Netherlands. Episodes 4–10 are spatially organized, reviewing various rooms in the hiding place and their occupants. The next three episodes wrap up the time in the “annex,” ending with “Discovered,” before fast forwarding to Anne’s odyssey through Auschwitz to her death in Bergen-Belsen. The final episode recounts the story of the diary and its publication.As a college professor who has taught the Frank diary and its reception in various forms many times in lectures, seminars, and professional development workshops, I can affirm that these short and medium-length videos are thoroughly researched, superbly produced, and very appealing for use in instruction. With the avoidance of violent scenes (as with the diary itself), the target audience would range from junior high to high school. I can recommend the content of all of the social media series produced by the Anne Frank House without reservation, for education as well as entertainment. The highly produced reenactments are easy to distinguish from documentary stills and video footage, as well as from contemporary views of the Anne Frank House’s exhibition.The problem arises with the site navigation. As one moves from one episode to the next, ads pop up. Depending on how one enters the series, the strip of alternative videos on the right can vary in terms of recommended content, based on a viewer’s previous viewing profile, offering appealing distractions from moving uninterrupted through the video series (See figure 1). While YouTube is a relatively robust and stable platform owned and managed by Google’s parent company Alphabet, this navigation problem is more acute with Instagram, owned by Facebook’s parent company Meta. Whereas the former originated as a video archive, the latter’s emphasis is on social interaction. TikTok, owned by the Chinese internet company ByteDance, is the youngest platform of the three. It combines features of the other two, with user-uploaded video content and many sharing features, and videos up to ten minutes long. Instagram’s videos have evolved from very short, more personal clips of just a fraction of a minute, to “reels” up to ninety seconds in length. On any individual creator’s account they can be interspersed with ultra-short clips, captioned photos, and even longer videos. Figure 2 is a screenshot of the Anne Frank House’s Instagram page.The Anne Frank House has aggregated all of its digital offerings, including YouTube and Instagram videos, and its own topical webpages, on one page, https://www.annefrank.org/en/museum/web-and-digital/link/. That page lists thirteen digital items, from a “Knowledge Base” to the “Anne’s Story: Video tour” and the “After the Arrest” series, to an “Anne Frank House VR” (virtual reality), to several topical webpages that could be described as a kind of in-depth FAQ about antisemitism, the family’s helper Miep Gies, and how the families were discovered.Most teens—the target audience—will not, however, access any of these offerings via a web browser, but through the YouTube or Instagram apps on their mobile phones. In that case the navigation is vastly more subject to detours and distractions, depending on whether a viewer—a “content consumer”—swipes vertically, taps one of the “suggested for you” offerings, or starts exploring “comments,” “likes,” or “tags” posted by dozens or hundreds of other users. As a “baby boomer” who uses but does not frequent social media apps, I soon find myself lost in a maze of the random interests of other viewers of these videos. Just what and how much any given teen viewer might learn about Anne Frank and the history she presents in her diary is open to question.What is not open to doubt, however, is that such high-quality historical material interspersed into their normal social media meanderings and related to topics that they have possibly been exposed to in school is likely to pique teens’ interest in learning more. Some viewers will swipe through multiple posts in the series, even if they don’t persist to the end. Given that many of even the more recent posts have recorded thousands of views, likes, and comments in just a few months, a fair number of teens have been directed to or stumbled upon these clips and series. If our goal as educators is to interest teens in this history, meeting them where they spend their time is a productive approach.One of the pioneering explorations of this strategy is the Instagram account of “Eva.Stories,” launched in Israel in 2019.5 Under the motto “What If a Girl in The Holocaust Had Instagram?,” the twenty-seven-episode series reenacts the diary of Eva Heyman. Heyman began her diary on her thirteenth birthday in February 1944, a month before the Germans invaded Hungary. Although she was murdered in Auschwitz in October, her mother survived, found the diary, and published it in Hungarian in 1948. Yad Vashem published it in Hebrew in 1964 and English in 1974 with scholarly notes. Israeli billionaire Mati Kochavi and his daughter Maya spent millions creating this ultra-high production value series of perhaps sixty to seventy-five minutes total length. (Instagram clips don’t have navigation or time codes, but simply loop over and over until a viewer swipes to the next post or delves into the comments.)The early clips in the series are ebulliently full of the animated emojis, hashtags, and captions presumably favored by young teens in the 2010s, but become more sober as the series progresses. Some critics have found it in bad taste. But with a million followers and individual episodes receiving hundreds of thousands of views and garnering 30–100,000 likes (this data is presented in the Instagram app view of the Eva.Stories homepage), clearly many teens have viewed this historical content, however ahistorically it may be presented. The fast pace of these short clips is likely to keep some teens swiping through the entire story of sixty to ninety minutes, perhaps posting an emoji “quick reaction,” writing a brief text comment, or even sharing with a friend.In fact, an important difference between an Instagram series and a feature film is that social media is interactive, with the possibility of responding on the site or sharing. In this case the responses are overwhelmingly brief. In contrast, the Anne Frank Instagram offerings contain longer responses with questions and comments, which often contain responses from other viewers or the Anne Frank account itself. For example, one viewer noted that Margot Frank’s call-up letter did not contain her name, and the response was that, indeed, this was a generic letter for illustrative purposes, as the actual letter was not preserved.Another Instagram series inspired by Eva.Stories is the (untranslated audio) German account “ichbinsophiescholl” (I am Sophie Scholl), produced by German TV channel SWR.6 It was launched in what it calls “real time” from May 9, 2021, the hundredth anniversary of Scholl’s birth, to February 18, 2022, the seventy-ninth anniversary of the German anti-Nazi student’s arrest in 1943. Each of the forty-three video episodes, along with photo posts, begin with a comment by the account creator, followed by generally serious and in-depth comments, at times with clarifying responses by moderators or other viewers. Unserious, off-topic and Holocaust-denier comments appear to have been deleted or excised by a moderator before they appeared on the site, enhancing its educational value.Another example of a high-quality Holocaust-related Instagram account is “HisNameMyName,” an eleven-reel, sixty-three-post account by the professional content creator Eline Jongsma, about her great-grandfather Gerrit Jongsma.7 Jongsma uses graphical animations to present her brutal and corrupt Jew-hunting ancestor’s story, and to explore questions of inherited responsibility. With “only” thousands of views of each of the ten chapters, this site has not reached nearly as many viewers as the preceding examples. It is, however, much more serious history, including meta-reflection on the process of creating history, making clear that “history” is a construction based on an imperfect and coincidental documentary and oral record.Yet another example of a series of short videos presenting the history of Nazi atrocities is offered by the Neuengamme concentration camp memorial site near Hamburg, Germany.8 The @neuengamme.memorial Instagram and TikTok sites have many dozens of short clips of younger German and international interns narrating in English a thematic background scene or slide show. Some of these are organized in ten series of a half-dozen to a dozen clips. The series topics include “Female prisoners,” “Last postcards,” “Family stories,” “Then and now,” and “Unboxing history”—the latter with each pair of clips focusing on an artifact found in the camp and preserved in the museum. TikTok, like Instagram, has a web interface and a mobile app that offer different experiences and information. Both loop short clips endlessly until the viewer swipes. In both cases the user comments are shown next to the clips in the web interface, but on a separate screen or on top of the videos in the mobile app. A major difference is that TikTok offers a timed navigation slider at the bottom, similar to YouTube. Viewers thus have slightly more control over content, perhaps reducing the temptation to swipe away when one can see that the video is almost over as attention or patience wanes.Other uses of digital media to present historical content include three-dimensional “virtual reality” tours of historical buildings or sites, such as the Anne Frank House.9 One of the most sophisticated and comprehensive websites presenting digital content is the Holocaust Museum Los Angeles, which uses virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) technology to allow remote “visitors” to tour the museum and explore a reconstruction of the Sobibor extermination center.10 One main difference between VR and AR is that the former is an interactive digital rendering of three-dimensional space through which a viewer can maneuver, while the latter overlays additional information or images over views of spaces or objects, such as a present-day view over the same scene in a historical photograph. With the firm Magnopus the LA museum created a Virtual Sobibor app that offers a guided digital rendering of a model of the camp created by survivor Thomas Blatt. Although technologically very sophisticated, the possibilities of making Sobibor truly “experiential” are still quite limited.Yet another digital media possibility is found in the USC Shoah Foundation’s “Dimensions in Testimony” project. It uses recordings of Holocaust survivors answering hundreds of pre-recorded questions to create an opportunity for viewers to pose their own questions and receive pertinent answers in real time.11What conclusions can we draw from such social media and new technology attempts to present the history of the Nazi genocide to contemporary younger generations? First, there is a tradeoff between flashy, slangy, attention-grabbing short videos, and nuanced, detailed, and referenced textual presentations that invite reflection and insight. Of the clips presented here, the Neuengamme TikToks succeed best making this balance for a more mature audience, and the Anne Frank series does an admirable job for younger teens.An important aspect, especially in our time of artificial intelligence-generated “fake” content, is that the video clips allow and promote a clear distinction between “the (actual) past,” and historical reconstructions of that past. With the exception of Eva.Stories, the various projects presented here do a passable job of that. The animations of His Name is My Name do this explicitly and implicitly, while the Anne Frank-actor speaking from the afterlife and the narrators of the Neuengamme series make this distinction explicit as well. Of the platforms reviewed here, YouTube is best at presenting coherent linear narrative clips, TikTok best for short, interactive clips, and Instagram varying widely in quality with lack of user navigation control and heightened distractions.Finally, how successful are these sites in evoking an emotional response and connection in viewers? The individual, personal stories and narrators in all of these examples aim to resonate with younger viewers and invite them to identify with the historical witnesses and their experiences. To what extent this cursory identification will develop into a more sustained engagement with the historical content and the questions it raises remains to be seen. However, to the extent that younger generations’ attention spans are growing shorter and their social media consumption is increasingly fragmented, hoping or expecting them to engage on their own with longer texts or feature films is a losing proposition. Better to “meet them where they are” with pushed social media content, than to expect them to seek out more in-depth material on their own. Or as the FAQ of the “I am Sophie Scholl” website answers the question, “Can history be conveyed via Instagram?”That is open to discussion and we welcome such a discussion. We wanted to take a different approach with @ichbinsophiescholl: to make history tangible and emotional, to show a young resistance fighter from a side that very few people know from history lessons. Of course the Sophie Scholl of the channel is a fictional character. We filled historical gaps and ambiguities creatively and in consultation with the experts. This concept can be criticized—for us it is a unique way of letting users participate in history. We believe that this project can lay the foundation for a deeper examination of our history.12Figure 10.Screenshot from the iWitness Dimensions in Testimony website showing the text from Pinchas Gutter’s repertoire selected to answer the reviewer’s question “What do you think about being a digital avatar talking to students long after you've passed away?”

  PublisherDOI

• Adolf Hitler: Die Jahre des Untergangs, 1939–1945Volker Ullrich

  Holocaust and Genocide Studies · 2021

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • History
  • Classics

  Since the publication of British historian Ian Kershaw’s standard-setting two-volume biography,1 dozens of new articles and source editions on Hitler have been published. In broad strokes Ullrich’s portrayal follows Kershaw’s, bolstering some aspects, correcting a few details, and most notably adding many anecdotes to counter the “empty shell” functionalist interpretation of Hitler as a weak dictator. Ullrich’s main source for these anecdotes are unpublished and newly published diaries, ranging from those by ordinary Germans and Hitler’s low-level personal assistants up to foreign diplomats, German generals, and particularly Goebbels, whose near daily entries guide the narrative through many of its eighteen chapters. These accounts reveal how ordinary Germans assessed Hitler’s actions, and how elites maneuvered around the temperamental tyrant. While Kershaw had already used diaries to good effect, Ullrich adds detail from the small-town judicial official Friedrich Kellner, the now well-known Victor Klemperer, and a host of foreign diplomats.2 The result is an engaging narrative offering an almost day-by-day account of Hitler’s activities during the war years.

  PublisherDOI

• Dachau:

  Northwestern University Press eBooks · 2018-08-08

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Jacob S. Eder. Holocaust Angst: The Federal Republic of Germany and American Holocaust Memory since the 1970s.

  The American Historical Review · 2018-09-06

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  The milestones of international recollections of the Nazi Holocaust from the 1970s to the present millennium are well known and have been examined in detail. In Holocaust Angst: The Federal Republic of Germany and American Holocaust Memory since the 1970s, Jacob S. Eder takes a look inside the international politics of some of the more salient public Holocaust memory prompts from 1978 to 1998. The first of five chapters is titled “Holocaustomania,” a term employed by Jewish religious figures critical of the increasing importance of the Holocaust in contemporary Jewish identity (19). Eder uses it more broadly to refer to the accelerating public interest prior to 1980, especially among non-Jewish Americans, in the Nazi genocide of Jews, as evidenced by the high viewership of the 1978 TV miniseries Holocaust. This chapter details how West German diplomats, while observing this trend and considering responses to limit possible damage to their country’s reputation, prudently decided that refraining from attempts to intervene would be the best response.

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• The Political Without the Personal

  Dapim Studies on the Holocaust · 2018-05-04

  article1st authorCorresponding

  What is there new to say about Hitler? The United States Library of Congress subject heading for Hitler's biography lists between 10,000 and 20,000 unique titles, depending on language and other fi...

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• Nikolaus Wachsmann. KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps.

  The American Historical Review · 2017-01-31 · 17 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  June 28, 2016 Harold Marcuse, Featured Review for American Historical Review, of: KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps, by Nikolaus Wachsmann, (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015), 865 pp., cloth $40. review: 2574 words with 130 struck through = 2444 (2500 max) The title of this prodigious but eminently readable work, KL, is programmatic. Instead of the more commonly known and used abbreviation for the German Konzentrationslager, KZ, Nikolaus Wachsmann has chosen the official Nazi abbreviation, which was guarded like a trademark by the system's potentate, Heinrich Himmler, who did not want competing camps outside of his system. KL reflects Wachsmann's attempt to roll back the veils of historiography and memory to reveal the system as seen by its contemporaries as it unfolded over time. This undertaking synthesizes numerous works of German scholarship, which since the 1990s have drawn upon a wealth of newly available sources to shed light on many aspects of the Nazi camp system. While a meticulous and innovative overview of the Nazi concentration camp system based on the latest scholarly research would already be a significant achievement, Wachsmann combines this scholarship with an encyclopedic knowledge of published and unpublished survivor accounts. The many corrective and illustrative anecdotes that lace this dense account also keep it engaging. Additionally, Wachsmann is attentive to the broader social, political and economic contexts within which the camp system evolved and operated. This enables him to revise longstanding preconceptions about the camp system, which have persisted because of its unique historiography. A look back at previous attempts to portray the entire system highlights the achievement embodied by KL. The first such attempt was made by Eugen Kogon, a non-party-affiliated anti-Nazi who was liberated from Buchenwald, where he had been imprisoned since 1939. Immediately after liberation the US Army commissioned the scholar-journalist to write a report about the camp system. Over the following months Kogon augmented and reworked his original Buchenwald Report, publishing it under the title Der SS-Staat in 1946. It was translated into English in 1950 as The Theory and Practice of Hell: The German Concentration Camps and the System Behind Them. Still in print today, the nearly 50 German editions and dozen translations of this book remained the only attempt at a comprehensive portrayal of Himmler's KL system until the 1990s. This is not to say that no scholars had written about the camps until then. Historians at the Munich Institute for Contemporary History (IfZ) compiled historical reports for the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial in 1963, soon published under the title Anatomy of the SS-State (1965, English 1968). Typical of works during this period, they were based almost exclusively on perpetrator-

  PublisherDOI

• Bringing the Dark Past to Light: The Reception of the Holocaust in Postcommunist Europe

  Holocaust and Genocide Studies · 2015-12-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This anthology brings together twenty essays on Eastern European perceptions of the Holocaust in Eastern Europe since 1989–90. The pieces are arranged alphabetically by country from Albania to Ukraine. The editors of the volume contributed essays on the countries they see as bracketing the range of post-Communist engagement with “the Holocaust” (p. 9). Michlic, who co-authored the essay on Poland, was then at Brandeis and is now a professor at the University of Bristol. She is perhaps best known as co-editor of a documentation of the debates triggered by Jan Gross's 2001 book about the July 10, 1941 massacre of Jewish Poles in Jedwabne.1 In fact, she sees that debate as having made Poland the country where the “second phase of restored memory has reached the most sophisticated level” (p. 9). Himka, now a professor emeritus at the University of Alberta, is a specialist in Ukrainian history. His assessment is that in Ukraine “the first phase of restored memory still has the upper hand,” with “the second civic phase trying to establish itself in public discourse … only with great difficulty.” This two-phase model of Holocaust recollection is implicit throughout the collection, and is discussed in greater detail below.

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• MICHAEL ROTHBERG. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. (Cultural Memory in the Present.) Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. 2009. Pp. xvii, 379. Cloth $70.00, paper $24.95

  The American Historical Review · 2012-06-01 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Journal Article Michael Rothberg. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. (Cultural Memory in the Present.) Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. 2009. Pp. xvii, 379. Cloth $70.00, paper $24.95 Get access Rothberg Michael. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. (Cultural Memory in the Present.) Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. 2009. Pp. xvii, 379. Cloth $70.00, paper $24.95. Harold Marcuse Harold Marcuse University of California, Santa Barbara Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 117, Issue 3, June 2012, Pages 820–821, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr.117.3.820-a Published: 01 June 2012

  PublisherDOI

• Michael Rothberg . Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization . (Cultural Memory in the Present.) Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. 2009. Pp. xvii, 379. Cloth $70.00, paper $24.95.

  The American Historical Review · 2012-06-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Thomas Spengler

  Technische Universität Braunschweig

  1 shared

• Ira Nowinski

  1 shared

• James E. Young

  University of Manitoba

  1 shared

• Michael Berenbaum

  American Jewish University

  1 shared

• Jürgen Habermas

  1 shared

• Heinz Lubasz

  1 shared

• Debórah Dwork

  1 shared

• Sybil Milton

  1 shared

Education

• Ph.D., History

  University of Michigan

  1992

• M.A., History of Art

  Universität Hamburg

  1986

• B.A., Physics

  Wesleyan University

  1978