The Holocaust and Historical Methodology

Dan Stone, Dan Stone

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780857454935
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Geschichte des Holocaust

In the last two decades our empirical knowledge of the Holocaust has been vastly expanded. Yet this empirical blossoming has not been accompanied by much theoretical reflection on the historiography. This volume argues that reflection on the historical process of (re)constructing the past is as important for understanding the Holocaust—and, by extension, any past event—as is archival research. It aims to go beyond the dominant paradigm of political history and describe the emergence of methods now being used to reconstruct the past in the context of Holocaust historiography.

Part I

MEMORY AND CULTURE IN THE THIRD REICH

CHAPTER 1

A World Without Jews

Interpreting the Holocaust¹

ALON CONFINO

History exists only in relation to the questions we pose to it.

—Paul Veyne, L’inventaire des différences.

Lęon inaugurale au Collège de France

The recognition of the pastness of the Holocaust is a sort of a novelty in a culture where the presence of the event has been entrenched in the last generation. Recognition of its pastness is not equal to forgetting, nor is it simply a result of the passing of three-score years since 1945. Indeed, it is partly a result of the very intense public and professional preoccupation with the Holocaust, the cumulative effect of which has been to make the event not only an integral part of German, Jewish, and European history, but also into a central moral event in human history. Knowledge is a key to a new understanding. We know infinitely more about the Holocaust today than we did in 1970, 1980, or 1990. The shock of Holocaust representation—think for example of Claude Lanzman’s 1985 Shoah, Art Spiegelman’s 1986 Maus, or David Grossman’s 1986 Momik—has been absorbed and has given way to sombre reflection.² The startling revelations of historical studies have made their way into mainstream historiography.³ The Holocaust shocked and startled because it was so much a part of the present. It still shocks and is still part of the present, but it is also receding into the past. This sense of pastness opens up new ways for understanding and interpreting it.

It is my claim that a period of Holocaust consciousness stretching from the mid-1970s to the present is coming to an end. In this essay, I discuss three interpretative notions that up to now have dominated historians’ discussion of the Holocaust—racial ideology, radicalization of Nazi policy, and the context of war—and that in my view need to be rethought. The text shows how these notions were used in Holocaust historiography and how their use has been changing. I discuss future avenues of research, but, in particular, I suggest a new direction that builds on these notions and on new historiographical innovations but that diverges from them. I propose to treat the persecution and extermination of the Jews as a problem of culture, a term that is admittedly vague but interpretatively rewarding; that is, narrating the world the Nazis and some Germans built—a Germany, and later a world, without Jews—and what they thought they were engaged in, namely, a necessary battle against their enemy, “the Jew,” by placing memories, identities, fantasies, and symbols at the center of the explanation.

The Holocaust is Over

Scholars know how difficult it is to talk about the Holocaust while keeping a sense of historical perspective: that is, keeping at one and the same time the foundational aspect of the Holocaust without making the event into a unique, central point of history. In an attempt to address this difficulty I propose to think of Holocaust consciousness and historiography in tandem with the consciousness and historiography of another foundational event in modern European history, the French Revolution. When, in 1978, François Furet published his essay “The French Revolution is Over,” he knew well that in France this urevent of modern history would on some level never be over. “The Revolution does not simply ‘explain’ our contemporary history; it is our contemporary history,” he wrote. But that, he added, “is worth pondering over.”⁴ He called for a new interpretation that would go beyond the “revolutionary catechism” influenced by Marxism, beyond the Right-Left political divisions in France, and that would recognize that the passing of time, of memories, and of histories have now enabled a new understanding of 1789. The Holocaust, I would like to suggest, is over in a largely similar way. Of course, the Holocaust is still our contemporary history. Survivors are still alive and their nightmare will never be over as long as they live. The attempt to exterminate the Jews is and will remain a moral signifier of Judeo-Christian civilization. But as the Holocaust now becomes part and parcel of history, memory, and the wider culture, a stage in the process of internalizing it comes to an end.

Following a period of moderate engagement with the Holocaust between 1945 and 1975, Holocaust consciousness from the mid-1970s to the present has been characterized by two simultaneous trends. The first trend, prominent in diverse fields such as history, philosophy, the arts, and literature, has involved a strenuous attempt to acknowledge the Holocaust and to cope with the difficulty of representing it. This trend has required laborious effort and has been distinguished by a high degree of self-conscious reflection, as is evident in such book titles as Admitting the Holocaust and The Limits of Representation.⁵ The second trend, which might appear to stand in opposition to the intense discussion of the limits of Holocaust representation, is manifest in the massive cultural production of the Holocaust in history books, novels, films, plays, comics, and other artistic vehicles. In fact, the two trends are complementary, not contradictory. Historians, contrary to their theoretical trepidations about the limits of narrating the Holocaust, have been at the forefront of this cultural production: a lasting contribution of Holocaust studies has been its detailed recounting of the Holocaust in works that now add up to an immense specialized historiography. The result has been a vast new body of knowledge and a level of understanding and sensitivity that, I contend, anchors the Holocaust in the past in a way that was not previously possible.

The ending of a period in Holocaust consciousness comes into sharp focus when we call to mind Saul Friedländer’s 1989 essay “The ‘Final Solution’: On the Unease in Historical Interpretation.”⁶ In his doubts about the possibility of producing a historical representation of the Holocaust at all, Friedländer reflected the public and scholarly consciousness of an age. But precisely the development of Holocaust historiography in the last generation makes us see these doubts not as inherent to the event but as reflecting a specific perception bounded in time. As Dan Stone has observed, “it is not that with Auschwitz one encounters special problems of representation but rather that Auschwitz makes especially clear the problem of representation: the fact that there always exists a lacuna between the representation and what is represented.”⁷ This view opens up new ways of understanding the Holocaust. It entails a shift in historical sensibility from conceiving of the Holocaust not only in terms of the limits of representation but also—because of generational, professional, interpretative, and cultural changes—in terms of the possibilities and promises of historical representation.

A Dominant Interpretative Framework

The historiography of the Holocaust in recent decades, divided as it is among varied fields of research, methods, and languages, has been tremendously rich and complex.⁸ But like all historiographical bodies of work, it has given rise to several dominant conceptual categories that have informed, often imperceptibly and across interpretative differences, historians’ arguments and use of methods, categories that create boundaries of interpretative common sense. Saul Friedländer’s recent The Years of Extermination is a sort of a summa of Holocaust research of the last generation and therefore an excellent source for the identification of these categories.⁹ The book has been a major scholarly and public event, partly because it represents the apogee of an era of historical understanding of the Holocaust.¹⁰ The Holocaust, according to Friedländer, was determined by “the centrality of ideological-cultural factors as the prime movers of Nazi policies in regard to the Jewish issue, depending of course on circumstances, institutional dynamics, and essentially … on the evolution of the war.… The anti-Jewish drive became ever more extreme along with the radicalization of the regime’s goals and then with the extension of the war. It is in this context that we shall be able to locate the emergence of the ‘Final Solution.’”¹¹ This statement represents in a nutshell the main interpretative components currently used to understand the Holocaust: racial ideology, radicalization of Nazi policy, and the context of war.

There has been an agreement among scholars with respect to the explanatory centrality of these categories. To articulate this I use the excellent historiographical summaries by Ulrich Herbert and Ian Kershaw, who do not share my views as to the interpretative consequences of these categories.¹² The context of the war has been viewed as the breeding ground for the extermination. The war in general but especially the war on the Eastern Front, following the German invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941, was fought as a racial ideological struggle for life or death, whose prime enemies were the Bolsheviks and Jews. The barbarization of war on the Eastern Front, a cumulative result of the scale of the fighting, geographical conditions, and ideological indoctrination, led to killing and extermination.¹³

The notion of the radicalization of racial ideology has been important for capturing the contingency that ran through the making of the Holocaust. The radicalization is no longer understood as a realization of long-term plans, or as inherent in the system, but rather as the outcome of plans for the deportation of the Jews that were always being revised and extended. The scholarly “consensus,” writes Kershaw, is “that no single decision brought about the ‘Final Solution,’ but that a lengthy process of radicalization in the search for a solution to the ‘Jewish Question’ between spring 1941 and summer 1942—as part of an immense overall resettlement and ‘ethnic cleansing’ program for central and eastern Europe, vitiated through the failure to defeat the Soviet Union in 1941—was punctuated by several phases of sharp escalation.”¹⁴

Perhaps the central innovation of Holocaust scholarship in the last generation has been the emphasis on racial ideology. Previously, Nazi motivations were seen as emanating from long-term antisemitic beliefs, or were excluded altogether by emphasizing impersonal dynamics inherent in the Nazi system of government, whereas now the Holocaust is squarely placed within the context of the regime’s overall racial ideology. Vast scholarship has shown that the regime’s racial ideology penetrated well beyond a circle of Nazi true believers into all levels of society, be it institutions (the army or the churches), social spheres (cinema, architecture, or sport), or cultural artifacts (ranging from children’s board games to the Nuremberg party rallies). This ideology stands in current historiography in self-conscious contrast to the older understanding of Nazi ideas as a mixture of fuzzy beliefs, vague intentions, or sheer passion and madness.

The combination of the notions of racial ideology, the context of war, and Nazi radicalization has constituted, I argue, the dominant interpretative framework for understanding the Holocaust, a framework that allowed for different interpretative configurations. While the historiography of the Holocaust is too complex to be reduced to these categories, they have dominated, among other concepts, the two leading interpretative schools, intentionalism and functionalism. The crux of each interpretation has depended on different combinations of these factors. Over the years, the two schools have moved closer together. Few scholars subscribe to one school over the other, and most choose their position, explicitly or implicitly, somewhere between the two. If most scholars may not think of themselves as taking a position of either intentionalism or functionalism, it has however been much more challenging to think beyond the categories themselves of racial ideology, the context of war, and radicalization.¹⁵

Two recent magisterial studies encapsulate the ability of the dominant interpretative framework to produce starkly different interpretations. The Years of Extermination commingles intentionalism and functionalism with a tendency towards the former, while at the same time enriching it by crafting a story that provides “both an integrative and an integrated history” of the Holocaust. The narrative focuses on the Jews, without placing this genocide within the Nazis’ other exterminations. This narrative is told as a sort of a total history that “penetrates all the nooks and crannies of European space.”¹⁶ Friedländer thus c...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface to the Series
• Introduction: The Holocaust and Historical Methodology
• Part I: Memory and Culture in the Third Reich
• Part II: Testimony and Commemoration
• Part III: Another Look at a Classic of Holocaust Historiography
• Part IV: The Holocaust in the World
• Select Bibliography
• Contributors
• Index