New models,new questions: historiographical approaches to the Romanian Holocaust

This essay surveys the historiography on the Romanian Holocaust, focusing in particular on four monographs published by Western historians within the past five years. Earlier research was limited both empirically and theoretically, and these works suggest new research paradigms and raise new questions about the genocide in Romania during the Second World War. Dennis Deletant assesses the rule of General Ion Antonescu in light of his responsibility for the Holocaust and attempts to explain why the General began and ended the Holocaust when he did. Vladimir Solonari argues that the Holocaust should be read in the context of plans for ethnic homogenisation which were implemented when the opportunity presented itself in 1941. Jean Ancel examines the expropriation of Jewish property and shows that, among other things, the Romanian perpetrators were motivated by a desire to enrich themselves at the expense of the Jews. Finally, Armin Heinen reads the Holocaust by looking at how different groups of perpetrators used violence and attempts to recreate the logic that shaped their actions. In addition, the essay discusses Holocaust denial, survivor memoirs and the state of primary-source collections on the Romanian Holocaust.     

THE POETICS OF ANCIENT GREEK MEMORY AND THE HISTORICAL IMPERATIVE

This book examines Greek engagements with the past as articulations of memory formulated against the contingency of chance associated with temporality. Based on a phenomenological understanding of temporality, it identifies four memorializing strategies: continuity (tradition), regularity (exemplarity), development, and acceptance of chance. This framework serves in pursuing a twofold aim: to reconstruct the literary field of memory in fifth‐century bce Greece; and to interpret Greek historiography as a memorializing mode. The key contention advanced by this approach is that acts of memory entailed an “idea of history” that was articulated not only in historiography, but also in epinician poetry, elegy, tragedy, and oratory. The book offers a rich account of poetic conventions and contexts through which each of these genres counterbalanced contingency through the use of exemplary and traditional modes of memory. This fine analysis highlights the grip of the present on the past as a significant feature of both historiographical and nonhistoriographical genres. The essay argues that this work fills a disciplinary gap by extending the reflection on memory to a new period, Greek antiquity. The retrospective positioning of this period at the outset of Western historical thought brings Grethlein's investigation to the center of debates about memory, temporality, and the meaning history. In engaging with the book's argument, the essay suggests that historiographical memory emerged in Greece not as a first‐order encounter with time, but as a second‐order encounter with forgetting. This confrontation marked a certain separation of historiography from other memorializing genres. Whereas poetic and rhetorical memories were posited against contingency, historiography sought to retrieve those aspects of the past that may otherwise have been irretrievably lost and forgotten. In doing so, it formulated the historiographical imperative as a negation of forgetting that problematized the truth‐value of memory and the very act of remembering the past.     

To Avenge the Burnt Statues and Temples of the Gods: The Religious Background of the Greek Wars with the “Barbarians”

Abstract

In The Clash of Civilizations (1996) Samuel Huntington placed the Persian Wars at the beginning of the long line of clashes between civilizations. To the modern reader the emphasis Huntington puts on the role played by religion in defining Athenian civilization and its conflict with the “barbarians” appears to be consistent with Herodotus’ position on these wars. However, this position overlooks the fact that the ancient polytheistic beliefs and cults implied a particular attitude to religion, unlike that of monotheistic religions. In the ancient Mediterranean world the temples and sacred places were to be universally respected and any violation of this rule was regarded as sacrilege that justified persecution of the wrongdoers, whose ethnicity was of no, or only of secondary, importance. The purpose of this article is to survey the main passages in Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon that treat the wars between the Greeks and Persians and between Greek city-states, and to demonstrate that the line dividing defenders (or avengers) of divine cults from offenders of the gods was not drawn between Greeks and barbarians, but between defenders and offenders.     

Genocide for “Sanitary Purposes”? The Bogdanovka Murder in Light of Postwar Trial Documents

Drawing on Soviet and Romanian postwar trial material, this study offers a renewed exploration of the Bogdanovka mass murder, while highlighting the extemporaneous character of the most deadly single episode of the Romanian Holocaust. As this case demonstrates, even when there was no initial intent to slaughter Jews in a given area, other local circumstances and actors linked up to cause the obliteration of over 45,000 Jews in a matter of days. In the winter of 1941, the Romanian authorities’ search for solutions to two separate problems—a man-made sanitary crisis and Bucharest's intention of removing Jews from the territories under its control—closely intertwined to spark a genocidal decision. The documentation reviewed for this study provides rare insight into Romanian and German micro-cooperation on the ground, and reveals the “double functionality” logic, which formed the basis of the Axis powers’ jointly planned and implemented murder operation. Simultaneously, the paper discusses the entanglements between the issue of Jewish property, “sanitary considerations,” and the rationale for mass killings.     

Heritage vs. History: Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy as a “Physician of Memory”

In a paper presented to the American Historical Association annual meeting in 1934, entitled “The Predicament of History,” Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy (1888–1973) argued that professional (or “scientific”) historians had lost touch with collective memory and were engaged in a free-floating enterprise connected to the vital past only arbitrarily or randomly. Historians should be the physicians of memory, he said. His admonitions relate closely to the stress, often discussed today, between popular heritage, or tradition and memory, on the one side, and critical history, on the other, each vying for influence and authority. Beyond his 1934 paper, Rosenstock-Huessy’s grammatical method opens the way for complementarity and balance, rather than antagonism, between the popular voice and critical history.     

Between Apartheid,the Holocaust and the Nakba: Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s Pilgrimage to Israel-Palestine (1989) and the Emergence of an Analogical Lexicon

ABSTRACT

On 22 December 1989, the anti-apartheid activist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Archbishop Desmond Tutu conducted a Christmas pilgrimage to Israel and the Occupied Territories. Tutu used his visit to relay political messages in support of the Palestinian liberation struggle and to criticize Israeli-South African ties, and his statements evoked sever criticism on the part of Zionist Jewish constituencies. Through a tighter focus on Tutu’s various public statements and their reception in the years leading up to the visit, this article traces the history of different sets of interlocking analogies in Tutu’s thought, positioning his 1989 visit to Israel-Palestine—neglected thus far in the critical literature —as a landmark in his thinking. In so doing, it offers a critical analysis of another instance of the Israel-apartheid analogy in the political struggle against the Israeli occupation. At the same time, it points to the genesis of the analogy in Tutu’s ongoing engagements with the suffering of Jews during the Holocaust.     

Ancient Greek Mercenaries: Facts,Theories and New Perspectives

This article presents an overview of the historiography of Greek mercenaries and the proliferation of the phenomenon during the fourth century BC. It evaluates theoretical approaches to the political, economic and military roles that mercenaries played in Classical Greece during that century. In doing so, it considers the ways that interstate relations between the poleis shaped the development and recruitment of this form of soldier. The article disentangles the mercenary from a rich body of scholarship in economic history, demonstrating that analysis of the roles and functions of this figure can shed light on other dimensions of the Classical period, including international relations. Finally, it signals paths that the study of Greek mercenaries might take in the coming years.     

THE FINAL PHASE?

This essay reviews the recent book by Carolyn Dean that seeks to elucidate the ways in which complaints about a “surfeit of memory” and the privileging of Jewish victimization during the Holocaust as unique and as the emblem of radical evil in our times has shaped discussions of victims in general, creating an environment in which groups vie for victim status as a means of validating their grievances and making claims for justice. The hostility to such claims has, Dean argues, created antivictim discourses that end up generating aversion toward victims, primarily by denying the validity of their claims to suffering and, in the case of Jews, projecting them as “perpetrators” in their neglect of the suffering of others. At the same time, Dean argues, the demand that victims narrate their suffering in the aesthetically constrained style of “minimalism” equally undermines the legitimacy of victims' memories by demanding that they be presented in an already mastered form, thereby erasing the very trauma that, in principle, such narratives seek to represent. At stake in the debates concerning Holocaust memorial consciousness and its proper modes of representation, this article suggests, are larger historiographical and ethical issues about how to integrate the horrors of the past and the traumatic experience of terror into the normal protocols of historical writing, which rely on distance, objectivity, and interpretive critique as governing procedures. To incorporate terror into historical representation will mean acknowledging and accepting as historiographically legitimate the differing status of analytically recuperated “facts” and victim testimony and finding a way to theorize the reality of “voices” from the past without assuming the necessary “truth” of what they convey.     

Traumatic echoes of memories in child survivors' narratives of the Holocaust: the Polish experiences of Michał Głowiński and Henryk Grynberg

Drawing upon the important contribution brought by literary testimonies to humanitarian work delineated by Susan Rubin Suleiman (2002) and Leigh Gilmore (2011), this paper analyses two Polish Jewish authors' autobiographical narratives, Micha? G?owiński's The Black Seasons (1999) and Henryk Grynberg's The Jewish War (1965) and Victory (1993), as instances of literary child-witnessing the Holocaust. The two authors' narratives represent two different cases of child survivors' testimonies given their situation during the Second World War: G?owiński being encamped in the Warsaw Ghetto, Grynberg living in hiding. The author argues that their narratives present the case of child survivors whose Holocaust experiences and aftermath memories in Communist Poland spring from their primarily scattered and painful memories foregrounding the importance of vulnerable lenses. In light of this, the main question the author addresses is: to what degree do these children's war memories take specific stances as a function of the age they were during the Holocaust and their location (either being encamped or living in hiding)? The main contention of the paper is that Second World War children's literary testimonies contribute to present-day scholarship by their complex understanding of the multi-faceted character of humans whose specific bulwarks are the simultaneous exposing and acknowledgement of individual occlusions, ambivalences, limitations or randomness.     

Holocaust Narratives: Second-Generation “Perpetrators” and the Problem of Liminality

Taking “second-generation perpetrators” to refer to the tension between the guilt of the parents who were actively involved in carrying out Nazi atrocities, and the innocence of their offspring, I posit the oscillation between these positions as a form of liminality. Underpinned by the work of Jacques Derrida and Marianne Hirsch, I discuss this form of liminality in relation to concepts of the ghostly, examining the ways in which Holocaust narratives, literary and cinematic, are haunted by the past. I argue that the family conflicts such second-generation narratives present run the risk of displacing the real victims of the Holocaust.     

少数民族史学的发展与多民族统一国家观念的形成

Chinese culture is established by bringing together many nationalities. Chinese historiography has recorded the development of this great culture. Among these records, ethnic minority historiography reflects one important aspect for identifying the historic trend of the formation of a united multiethnic nation. A comprehensive study on the development of Chinese ethnic minority historiography shows that it can be divided into six phases: the Pre-Qin period to the Qin and Han dynasties; the Wei, Jin, Southern-Northern and Sui-Tang dynasties; the Liao, Song, Xia, Jin and Yuan dynasties; the Ming and Qing dynasties (before 1840); the modern times (1840–1949); and the contemporary times. Deep analysis of these phases would inevitably improve the study of the history of Chinese historiography. Translated by Ding Haiyan from Hebei Xuekan 河北学刊 (Hebei Academic Journal), 2007, (6): 91–94     

2. THE VICTIM'S VOICE AND MELODRAMATIC AESTHETICS IN HISTORY1

Saul Friedländer's recent Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Extermination offers a brilliant new literary mode for historical representation of extreme events such as the Holocaust. He has produced an authoritative historical narrative of the Holocaust, within which he integrates the victims' authentic voices, as recorded (mostly) in their contemporary writings. This article offers a comparative assessment of Friedländer's achievement with regard to the integration of Jewish sources into the historical account. It begins with a contextualization of Friedländer's book within a framework that compares the ways in which Jewish sources are addressed by different historiographical approaches. In the second part it seeks to contextualize analytically and critically Friedländer's concept of “disbelief”—a concept by which he defines the role of the “victims’ voices” in his narrative. I claim that in our current “era of the witness,” set within a culture addicted to the “excessive,” the voices of the victims and the witnesses appear to have lost their radical political and ethical force. They seem no longer to bear the excess of history, and can thus hardly claim to be the guardians of disbelief. Excess and disbelief have thus become the most commonplace cultural topos. In our current culture, I contend, the excessive voices of the victims have, to some extent, exchanged their epistemological, ontological, and ethical revolutionary function for an aesthetic one. They operate according to the pleasure principle in order to bring us, the consumers of Holocaust images, the most expected image of the “unimaginable,” which therefore generates a melancholic pleasure and involves the narrative in melodramatic aesthetics. The article concludes by briefly suggesting some guidelines for an alternative approach to the study of contemporary Jewish Holocaust sources.