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From History to Historical Remembrance in Holocaust Studies

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The Memory Phenomenon in Contemporary Historical Writing

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Abstract

I explain how the study of the Holocaust of European Jews has shifted since the 1980s from its realities to its remembered legacies. I review a succession of issues about Holocaust memory from the Historians’ Dispute in Germany over the limits of its representation during the 1980s, to strategies of German statesmen to find a symbolic compromise in its official commemorations during the 1990s, to reflections on moral responsibility in the passing of living memory of the Holocaust into written history in our times. I close with discussion of recent work on the globalization of Holocaust remembrance as a historiographical reference in the campaign for human rights in our times.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Charles Maier, The Unmasterable Past; History, Holocaust, and German National Identity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988).

  2. 2.

    For the debates themselves, see the collections by Peter Baldwin, ed., Reworking the Past: Hitler, the Holocaust and the Historians’ Debate (Boston: Beacon Press, 1990); James Knowlton and Truett Cates, eds., Forever in the Shadow of Hitler? Original Documents of the Historikerstreit (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1993).

  3. 3.

    Saul Friedländer, ed., Probing the Limits of Representation; Nazism and the Final Solution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 1–21.

  4. 4.

    Michael Marrus and Robert Paxton, Vichy France and the Jews (New York: Basic, 1981).

  5. 5.

    Pierre Péan, Une Jeunesse française; François Mitterrand, 1934–1947 (Paris : Fayard, 1994), 202–27, 317–25.

  6. 6.

    Eric Conan and Henry Rousso, Vichy, un passé qui ne passe pas (Paris: Gallimard, 1996). See also Joan B. Wolf, Harnessing the Holocaust; The Politics of Memory in France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004).

  7. 7.

    Alon Confino, Germany as a Culture of Remembrance: Promises and Limits of Writing History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 21.

  8. 8.

    Raul Hilberg, The Politics of Memory; the Journey of a Holocaust Historian (Chicago: Ivan Dee, 1996).

  9. 9.

    Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of European Jews, 3d ed. (1961; New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 3 vols.

  10. 10.

    Hilberg, Politics of Memory, 56.

  11. 11.

    Ibid., 59–66.

  12. 12.

    Ibid., 71–73.

  13. 13.

    See Hilberg’s historiographical study on methods of evaluating evidence, Sources of Holocaust Research; An Analysis (Chicago: Ivan Dee, 2001).

  14. 14.

    Hilberg, Politics of Memory, 123–37.

  15. 15.

    Raul Hilberg, Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders; the Jewish Catastrophe, 1933–1945 (New York: HarperCollins, 1992).

  16. 16.

    Ibid., 161–75.

  17. 17.

    Saul Friedländer, When Memory Comes (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,1979).

  18. 18.

    A provocative counterpoint to the psychoanalytic approach to the memory of the Holocaust was offered by University of Chicago historian Peter Novick in his The Holocaust in American Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), esp. 1–15. He introduced issues about the politics of memory into the discussion. Employing the Halbwachian model, he argued that Jewish-American leaders, responding to the identity politics of the 1980s, publicized Holocaust commemoration strenuously for fear it might otherwise be crowded from public attention.

  19. 19.

    One of Friedländer’s first books addressed this Freudian-inspired historiography, History and Psycho-analysis (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1978).

  20. 20.

    Saul Friedländer, Memory, History, and the Extermination of the Jews of Europe (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), is a collection of his scholarly articles on the topic over the previous decade.

  21. 21.

    Ibid., 22–23, 55,102–04.

  22. 22.

    Ibid., 51, 69.

  23. 23.

    Ibid., 35–36, 65–67, 75–79.

  24. 24.

    Ibid., 2–4, 16–17, 48, 103–20.

  25. 25.

    Ibid., 47–57, 120–30.

  26. 26.

    Ibid., 7, 47, 59, 61, 85–100.

  27. 27.

    Saul Friedländer, The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945 (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), 870 pp.

  28. 28.

    Friedländer, Memory, History, and the Extermination of the Jews of Europe, 62, 123, 133–34. For the continuation of the memory issue emerging out of Holocaust studies, see Wulf Kansteiner, In Pursuit of German Memory; History, Television, and Politics after Auschwitz (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006); Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts; Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003). On further reflections on the Vichy Syndrome, see Richard J. Goslan, ed., Fascism’s Return; Scandal, Revision, and Ideology since 1980 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), 182–99. For the Holocaust in Poland, see Jonathan Huener, Auschwitz, Poland, and the Politics of Commemoration, 1945–1979 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2003).

  29. 29.

    Eva Hoffman, After Such Knowledge; Memory, History, and the Legacy of the Holocaust (New York: Public Affairs, 2004).

  30. 30.

    Ibid., 82–84.

  31. 31.

    Ibid., 27–28, 90–97, 92, 96–98.

  32. 32.

    Ibid., 80–89.

  33. 33.

    Ibid., 127, 151, 205–20.

  34. 34.

    Ibid., 55, 60, 70–74.

  35. 35.

    So, too, Hoffman felt a distance from Catholic Poles. They had suffered too in their defeat and occupation by the German army. Though some three million Polish Jews died in their campaign, so too did three million Polish Catholics. After the war, they did little to acknowledge the suffering of their Jewish brethren. They showed no enthusiasm for honoring their memory in public acts of commemoration. Ibid, 14, 106–11, 117–33, 136–4.

  36. 36.

    Ibid., 66, 156–58, 160–70, 174–77, 180–81, 185–90, 229.

  37. 37.

    Ibid., 180, 192, 196–98, 242–43, 270–75. See also Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory; Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), who pursues the theme of legacies of remembrance from a broader historical perspective.

  38. 38.

    Hoffman, After such Knowledge, 112, 158–60, 178–79.

  39. 39.

    Gabrielle Spiegel, “Memory and History: Liturgical Time and Historical Time,” History and Theory 41 (2002): 149–62.

  40. 40.

    See Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Assassins of Memory; Essays on the Denial of the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 57, 102.

  41. 41.

    Paul Ricoeur, La Mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli (Paris: Seuil, 2000).

  42. 42.

    Ibid., 593–95, 646–50.

  43. 43.

    Ibid., 650–54.

  44. 44.

    Jeffrey K. Olick, The Politics of Regret; On Collective Memory and Historical Responsibility (New York: Routledge, 2007).

  45. 45.

    Ibid., 55–83, 139–51.

  46. 46.

    To make his case, Olick formulates a theory of genre memory. For him, a genre is the commemorative matrix of a memorable event. The first commemoration sets the chronological track that subsequent ones will follow. The memory of that event is modified over time, but there is a logic to the way it evolves into more abstract and idealized images of remembrance. In his terminology, the trajectory of the periodic commemoration of an event is “path dependent” upon its first formulation. Ibid, 55–57.

  47. 47.

    Ibid., 14, 121–38.

  48. 48.

    Ibid., 50–53.

  49. 49.

    109–15.

  50. 50.

    Ibid., 68–80, 100–01, 110–13, 142–43.

  51. 51.

    Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider, The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006).

  52. 52.

    Ibid., 6, 126–27, 179–88.

  53. 53.

    Ibid., 4–10, 26–30, 35–36, 39, 44–46, 127, 179–83, 191–203.

  54. 54.

    Levy and Sznaider note the writings of Hannah Arendt about Eichmann’s psychology and that of confederates who joined him in pursuit of the extermination of European Jews. Ibid, 16, 42–43, 142, 57–95, 105–08.

  55. 55.

    Ibid., 52–53, 68–81, 102–05, 120–21.

  56. 56.

    Ibid., 17–19, 176–81.

  57. 57.

    Ibid., 50–51, 156–62, 165–73.

  58. 58.

    Ibid., 203–07. See the sequel by Levy and Sznaider, Human Rights and Memory (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010) on campaigns for human rights.

  59. 59.

    Levy/Sznaider, Holocaust and Memory, 36–38, 59–63,109–116–17, 132–43, 152–56, 162–65, 188–89.

  60. 60.

    Ibid., 166–67, 173–79.

  61. 61.

    Ibid., 11–13, 83–95, 143–48.

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  1. University of Vermont, Burlington, Vermont, USA

    Patrick H. Hutton

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Hutton, P.H. (2016). From History to Historical Remembrance in Holocaust Studies. In: The Memory Phenomenon in Contemporary Historical Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-49466-5_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-49466-5_5

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