A normblog reader emails to ask me for some introductory reading on the Holocaust. I figure I might as well answer him by posting a few suggestions here. The literature is vast and though I've read only a small fraction of it, the amount I've read is also quite a lot. So what follows is very selective. It is also unsystematic. I just list some books that I've benefited from reading, without making any claim that these are the best or the most important or anything else. I offer half a dozen or so under each of these four headings: historical (and related); interpretative; testimony; fiction.
Update (at 6.12.12): I've decided to add some new headings and to enlarge the entries under the existing ones, so as to make this a more useful bibliography. I will be building it up gradually.
Historical (and related)
Yehuda Bauer, A History of the Holocaust
Yehuda Bauer, The Holocaust in Historical Perspective
Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men
Martin Gilbert, The Holocaust
Gordon J. Horwitz, In the Shadow of Death: Living Outside the Gates of Mauthausen
Michael Marrus, The Holocaust in History
Gitta Sereny, Into That Darkness
Interpretative
Jean Améry, At the Mind's Limits
Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem
Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust
Terrence Des Pres, The Survivor
Saul Friedlander, Reflections of Nazism
Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved
Anna Pawelczynska, Values and Violence in Auschwitz
Tzvetan Todorov, Facing the Extreme
Testimony
Gay Block and Malka Drucker, Rescuers: Portraits of Moral Courage in the Holocaust
Charlotte Delbo, Auschwitz and After
Saul Friedlander, When Memory Comes
Primo Levi, If This Is A Man
Primo Levi, Moments of Reprieve
Filip Muller, Auschwitz Inferno
Adina Blady Szwajger, I Remember Nothing More
Fiction
Martin Amis, Time's Arrow
Aharon Appelfeld, Badenheim 1939
Louis Begley, Wartime Lies
Tadeusz Borowski, This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen
Ida Fink, A Scrap of Time and Other Stories
Art Spiegelman, Maus
Jiri Weil, Life with a Star
Poetry
Primo Levi, Collected Poems
Daniel Weissbort (ed.), The Poetry of Survival
Useful collections
Berel Lang (ed.), Writing and the Holocaust
Alan Rosenberg and Gerald E. Myers (eds.), Echoes from the Holocaust
Reference
Israel Gutman (ed.) Encyclopedia of the Holocaust (4 volumes)
