Holocaust Studies in the Era of Climate Change

At first glance, the pairing of the Holocaust and climate change may strike one as odd. On the one hand, Holocaust studies, as an academic field, deal with the historical event itself and its cultural and societal aftermath, including but not limited to a philosophical reassessment of Western civilisation, literary and artistic representations of mass murder, the psychoanalytical treatment of mass trauma, and the sociology of violence. On the other hand, the reality of climate change has yet to dawn upon us, as its trajectory is at present an unfolding dark prophecy. While the full force of climate change is still to reveal itself in the future, there is no denying that Holocaust commemoration is a future-oriented cultural endeavour, since remembering the victims and identifying the causes of state-sponsored violence were meant, from the outset, to prevent a repetition of this historical trauma.