Abstract
As early as 3 February 1940, some five months after Warsaw had been occupied by the Nazis and some nine months before he was prisoned in the Warsaw ghetto, the Hebrew diarist Chaim Kaplan addressed the question of how Nazism could be understood and represented:
Descriptive literary accounts cannot suffice to clarify and emphasize its [Nazism’s] real quality. And moreover, no writer among the gentiles is qualified for this task. Even a Jewish writer who lives the life of his people, who feels their disgrace and suffers their agony, cannot find a true path here. Only one who feels the taste of Nazi rule in all his [body], only one who has bared his back to the lashes of his whips […] only such a writer, if he is a man of sensitivity […] might be able to give a true description of this pathological phenomenon called Nazism.1
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Notes
C. Kaplan (1973) Scroll of Agony, translated by A. I. Katsh (New York: Collier Books), p. 115.
S. Friedländer (2007) The Years of Extermination: 1939–1945 (New York: Harper Collins), p. 41.
Alexandra Garbarini suggests in her study on Holocaust diaries that such ‘postmodern’ issues of representation were extensively discussed by Jewish diarists during the Holocaust. A. Garbarini (2006) Numbered Days: Diaries and the Holocaust (New-Haven: Yale University Press).
For an extended discussion of historical Verstehen and Holocaust historiography, see: K. Ball (2008) Disciplining the Holocaust (Albany: SUNY Press), p. 35ff.
C. Browning (1992) Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: Harper Collins).
On this topic, see: A. Harrington (2001) ‘Dilthey, Empathy and Verstehen: A Contemporary Reappraisal’, European Journal of Social Theory, 4(3), pp. 311–29.
J. G. Droysen (1977) Historik (Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog).
R. G. Collingwood (1946) The Idea of History (Oxford: Clarendon Press).
D. J. Goldhagen (1996) Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York: A. Knopf). As is very well known, Daniel Goldhagen followed up on this case and came to very different conclusions. This was the most fervent debate in Holocaust historiography of the mid-90s. On this dispute, see
G. Eley (ed.) (2000) The Goldhagen Effect: History, Memory, Nazism—Facing the German Past (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press)
J. Heil and R. Erb (eds) (1998) Geschichtswissenschaft und Ōffentlichkeit: der Streit um Daniel J. Goldhagen (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag).
P. Winch (1990) The Idea of a Social Science and its Relation to Philosophy, 2nd edn (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul), p. 132.
C. Maier (1998) The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust, and German National Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), p. 98. See also a very similar notion in regard to the Wehrmacht soldiers
O. Bartov (2000b) Mirrors of Destruction: War, Genocide, and Modern Identity (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 27.
D. Diner (2000) Beyond the Conceivable: Studies on Germany, Nazism, and the Holocaust (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press), pp. 117–37.
D. Diner (ed.) (1988) Zivilisationsbruch: Denken nach Auschwitz (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch).
Carlo Ginzburg (1989) Clues Myth and Historical Methods (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press), p. 158.
B. Schlink (1997) The Reader, translated by C. B. Janeway (New York: Pantheon Books), p. 157.
A. Hillgruber (1986) Zweierlei Untergang: Die Zerschlagung des Deutschen Reiches und das Ende des europäischen Judentums (Berlin: Siedler).
See also R. Evans (1989) In Hitler’s Shadow: West German Historians and the Attempt to Escape the Nazi Past (New York: Pantheon Books) (especially pp. 57–65).
See R. Eaglestone (2004) The Holocaust and the Postmodern (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
J. L. Herman (1992) Trauma and Recovery (New York: Basic Books).
S. Felman and D. Laub (1992) Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York: Routledge)
G. Agamben (1999) Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (New York: Zone Books).
S. Felman (2001) ‘Theaters of Justice: Arendt in Jerusalem, the Eichmann Trial, and the Redefinition of Legal Meaning in the Wake of the Holocaust’, Critical Inquiry, 27(2), pp. 201–38; see also
L. Bilsky (2004) Transformative Justice: Israeli Identity on Trial (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press), pp. 105–13, 25–252.
D. LaCapra (2001) Writing History Writing Trauma (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press).
A. Confino (2009) ‘Narrative Form and Historical Sensation’ History and Theory 48 (October), pp. 199–219. See also
D. Stone (2003) Constructing the Holocaust (London: Vallentine Mitchell)
Friedländer, S. (1995) ‘Trauma, Memory, and Transference’ in G. Hartman (ed.) Holocaust Remembrance (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell), pp. 252–63.
For a stark critique of this tendency to limit historical understanding with regard to the Holocaust, see I. Clendinnen (1999) Reading the Holocaust (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press).
S. Friedländer (1997) Nazi Germany and the Jews, vol. I, The Years of Persecution: 1933–1939 (New York: HarperCollins)
S. Friedländer (2007) The Years of Extermination 1939–1945: Nazi Germany and the Jews, vol. II: (New York: HarperCollins).
S. Friedländer (1989) ‘The ‘Final Solution’: On the Unease in Historical Interpretation’, History and Memory, 1 (2), pp. 72–3. He makes very similar assertions in the introduction to Probing the Limits of Representation: ‘The Shoah carries an excess, and this excess cannot be defined except by some sort of general statement about something ‘which must be able to be put into phrases [but] cannot yet be’.
Friedländer, S. (1992) ‘Introduction’ in S. Friedländer (ed.), Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the ‘Final Solution’ (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press) pp. 3, 19–20.
A. Goldberg (2009) ‘The Victim’s Voice and Melodramatic Aesthetics in History’, History and Theory, 48, pp. 220–37.
D. LaCapra (2011) ‘Historical and Literary Approaches to the ‘Final Solution’: Saul Friedländer and Jonathan Littell’, History and Theory, 50 (1), pp. 71–97.
A term coined by the historian A. Wieviorka (2006) The Era of the Witness (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press).
E. Illouz (2007) Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism (Cambridge UK: Polity Press).
E. Illouz (2003) Oprah Winfrey and the Glamour of Misery (New York: Columbia University Press).
See A. Goldberg (2012) ‘The ‘Jewish Narrative’ in the Yad Vashem Global Holocaust Museum’, Journal of Genocide Research, 14 (2), pp. 187–213.
G. Aly (1998) ‘The Universe of Death and Torment’, Yad Vashem Studies, 26, pp. 365–75.
G. Aly (2007) Into the Tunnel: The Brief Life of Marion Samuel 1931–1943 (New York: Metropolitan Books).
C. Browning (2010) Remembering Survival: Inside a Nazi Slave Labor Camp (New York and London: W. W. Norton and Company).
Z. Bauman (1997) ‘The Dream of Purity’ in Postmodernity and its Discontents (New York: Blackwell Publishers), pp. 5–16. Quote from p. 12.
The ‘Jew’ appears to play such a role in Lyotard’s philosophy. See for example: J.-F. Lyotard (1990) Heidegger and ‘the jews’, translated by A. Michel (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press). See too Daniel Boyarin’s critique on Lyotard’s tendency to allegorize the ‘Jew’ as the ‘other’
D. Boyarin (1994) A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press) (Chapter 9).
Steven Aschheim claims in his chapter in this volume that it is comparatively simple to empathize with Jewish victims who are Europeans, after all. For a different view, see C. Dean (2004) The Fragility of Empathy after the Holocaust (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press).
As for example the German Chancellor Angela Merkel, representing the presidency of the EU, declared in a press conference in March 2007 to mark the signature of the Declaration of Berlin, commemorating the 50th anniversary of the founding of the European Economic Community, ‘the Judeo-Christian values … sustain the EU … we are marked by this Judeo-Christian past’, quoted in: H. Yilmaz (2007) ‘Turkish identity on the road to the EU: basic elements of French and German oppositional discourses’, Journal of Southern Europe and the Balkans, 9(3), p. 296.
I. Zertal (2005) Israel’s Holocaust and the politics of nationhood, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)
M. Zuckermann (1998) Zweierlei Holocaust: der Holocaust in den politischen Kulturen Israels und Deutschlands (Göttingen: Wallstein).
E. Benveniste (1971) Problems in General Linguistics (Coral Gables, Florida: University of Miami Press).
See, for example, Philip Friedman’s early work of 1957: P. Friedman (1976) ‘Problems of Research on the European Jewish Catastrophe’ in Y. Gutman and L. Rothkirchen (eds), The Catastrophe of European Jewry (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem), p. 643.
M. Palumbo (1990) ‘What Happened to Palestine? The Revisionists Revisited’, The Link, 23(4), pp. 4–7
N. Masalha (1991) ‘A Critique of Benny Morris’, Journal of Palestine Studies, 21 (1), pp. 90–7.
E. Khoury (2006) Gate of the Sun, translated by Humphrey Davies (London: Vintage).
A. Hoffman (2006) ‘Recollecting the Palestinian Past’, Raritan 26 (2), pp. 52–61, p. 56.
On the historical and analytically conceptual continuum of the Holocaust, other genocides and ethnic cleansings, see: M. Mann (2005) The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing (Cambridge University Press); M. Levene (2005) Genocide in the Age of the Nation-State (London: I. B. Tauris)
D. Bloxham (2009) The Final Solution: A Genocide (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
H. Arendt (1973) The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich), p. 290.
Best known in his famous 1952 poem ‘Passover over Caves’-See H. Hever (2012) ‘The Post-Zionist Condition’, Critical Inquiry, 38, pp. 630–48.
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Goldberg, A. (2016). Empathy, Ethics, and Politics in Holocaust Historiography. In: Assmann, A., Detmers, I. (eds) Empathy and its Limits. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137552372_4
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