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.

Introduction; Aleida Assmann and Ines Detmers) PART I: THE POLITICS OF EMPATHY 1. The (Ambiguous) Political Economy of Empathy; Steven E. Aschheim 2. How Politics Can Block Empathy; Shelley Berlowitz 3. Empathy, Ethics and Politics in Holocaust Historiography; Amos Goldberg PART II: CHANGES IN HISTORICAL SENSIBILITY 4. Empathy in the Theatre of Horror, or Civilizing the Human Heart; Ute Frevert 5. From Sympathy to Empathy; Jay Winter 6. The Management of Empathy in the Third Reich; Peter Fritzsche 7. Looking Away in Nazi Germany; Aleida Assmann PART III: ETHICAL ISSUES 8. Empathy for Empathy's Sake: Aesthetics and Everyday Empathic Sadism; Fritz Breithaupt 9. The Aesth-ethics of Empathy: Bakhtin and the Return to Self as Ethical Act; Sophie Oliver 10. 'For ye know the heart of the stranger': Empathy, Memory, and the Biblical Ideal of a 'Decent Society'; Jan Assmann 11. Diaspora, Art and Empathy; Jacqueline Lo