Empathy and its Limits

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xi

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2. Introduction

   1. Introduction

      • Aleida Assmann, Ines Detmers

      Pages 1-17

3. The Politics of Empathy

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 19-19

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   2. The (Ambiguous) Political Economy of Empathy

      • Steven E. Aschheim

      Pages 21-37

   3. Unequal Equals: How Politics Can Block Empathy

      • Shelley Berlowitz

      Pages 38-51

   4. Empathy, Ethics, and Politics in Holocaust Historiography

      • Amos Goldberg

      Pages 52-76

4. Changes in Historical Sensibility

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 77-77

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   2. Empathy in the Theater of Horror, or Civilizing the Human Heart

      • Ute Frevert

      Pages 79-99

   3. From Sympathy to Empathy: Trajectories of Rights in the Twentieth Century

      • Jay Winter

      Pages 100-114

   4. The Management of Empathy in the Third Reich

      • Peter Fritzsche

      Pages 115-127

   5. Looking Away in Nazi Germany

      • Aleida Assmann

      Pages 128-148

5. Ethical Issues

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 149-149

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   2. Empathy for Empathy’s Sake: Aesthetics and Everyday Empathic Sadism

      • Fritz Breithaupt

      Pages 151-165

   3. The Aesth- ethics of Empathy: Bakhtin and the Return to Self as Ethical Act

      • Sophie Oliver

      Pages 166-186

   4. ‘For ye know the Heart of the Stranger’: Empathy, Memory, and the Biblical Ideal of a ‘Decent Society’

      • Jan Assmann

      Pages 187-201

   5. Diaspora, Art, and Empathy

      • Jacqueline Lo

      Pages 202-216

6. Back Matter

   Pages 217-219

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This volume extends the theoretical scope of the important concept of empathy by analysing not only the cultural contexts that foster the generating of empathy, but in focusing also on the limits of pro-social feelings and the mechanisms that lead to its blocking.

• Empathy
• compassion
• pity
• sympathy
• evolution
• cognition
• emotions
• imagination
• art
• trauma
• attention
• spectator
• witnessing
• Holocaust
• media
• ethics
• recognition
• difference
• similarity
• indifference
• emotion
• empathy
• feelings
• Germany
• memory
• Nation
• politics
• society

• University of Konstanz, Germany

  Aleida Assmann, Ines Detmers

Steven E. Aschheim, Hebrew University, Jerusalem Jan Assmann, University of Konstanz, Germany Shelley Berlowitz, University of Konstanz, Germany Fritz Breithaupt, Indiana University, USA Ute Frevert, Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Germany Peter Fritzsche, University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign, USA Amos Goldberg, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem Sophie Oliver, University of London, UK Jacqueline Lo, ANU College of Arts and Social Sciences, Australia Jay Winter, Yale University, USA

Policies and ethics