THE HOLOCAUST IS OVER?

Alon Confino has issued a desideratum to other historians that they should bring questions and insights from cultural history to bear on the study of the Holocaust. Taking the work of Saul Friedländer as his point of departure, Confino nonetheless sets out on a path different from Friedländer's. He turns away from the goal of “integrated history” and instead seeks to investigate the realm of German culture, understood as encompassing much more than just Nazi ideology. By analyzing how the Holocaust has come to be perceived as unprecedented, as a rupture in human history, and furthermore by treating Jewish victims' sense of disbelief as an artifact of the past, one that has continued to inform unduly the historical understanding of the Holocaust up to the present day, historians will be able to account anew for what made the persecution and extermination of Jews imaginable and thus possible. With Confino's approach, a major historiographical question resurfaces, however: namely, what place an analysis of non‐Germans should occupy in the history of the Holocaust, and in particular what place should be accorded to Jewish voices? This essay argues that we cannot make sense of why Germans supported and carried out the Holocaust without also considering Jewish contemporaneous perspectives and imaginings.     

MAKING HISTORY BY CONTEXTUALIZING ONESELF: AUTOBIOGRAPHY AS HISTORIOGRAPHICAL INTERVENTION

This essay argues that, in their reflection of theoretical positions, autobiographies by historians may become valid historical writings (that is, both true narratives and legitimate historical interpretations) and, as a consequence and simultaneously, privileged sources for historiographical inquiry and evidence of its evolution. At the beginning of the twentyfirst century, following the model established by Carolyn Steedman, historians such as Geoff Eley, Natalie Z. Davis, Gabrielle M. Spiegel, Dominick LaCapra, Gerda Lerner, William H. Sewell, Jr., Sheila Fitzpatrick, and John Elliott created a new form of academic life‐writing that has challenged established literary and historiographical conventions and resisted generic classification. This article aims to examine this new historical‐autobiographical genre—including the subgenre of the “autobiographical paper”—and highlights its ability to function as both history (as a retrospective account of the author's own past) and theory (as a speculative approach to historiographical questions). I propose to call these writings interventional in the sense that these historians use their autobiographies, with a more or less deliberate authorial intention, to participate, mediate, and intervene in theoretical debates by using the story of their own intellectual and academic trajectory as the source of historiography. Traditional historians’ autobiographies, including ego‐historical essays, have provided us with substantial information about the history of historiography; these new performative autobiographies help us to better understand historiography and the development of the historical discipline. Interventional historians seek not only to understand their lives but also to engage in a more complex theoretical project.     

Toward a Received History of the Holocaust

In this article, I examine both the problem of so-called postmodern history as it relates to the Holocaust and suggest the ways that Saul Friedlander's recent work successfully mediates between the somewhat overly polemicized positions of “relativist” and “positivist” history. In this context, I find that in his search for an adequately self-reflexive historical narrative for the Holocaust, Hayden White's proposed notion of “middle-voicedness” may recommend itself more as a process for eyewitness writers than as a style for historians after the fact. From here, I look at the ways Saul Friedlander's reflections on the historian's voice not only mediate between White's notions of the ironic mode and middle-voicedness, but also suggest the basis for an uncanny history in its own right: an anti-redemptory narrative that works through, yet never actually bridges, the gap between a survivor's “deep memory” and historical narrative. For finally, it may be the very idea of “deep memory” and its incompatibility to narrative that constitutes one of the central challenges to Holocaust historiography. What can be done with what Friedlander has termed “deep memory” of the survivor, that which remains essentially unrepresentable? Is it possible to write a history that includes some oblique reference to such deep memory, but which leaves it essentially intact, untouched and thereby deep? In this section, I suggest, after Patrick Hutton, that “What is at issue here is not how history can recover memory, but, rather, what memory will bequeath to history.” That is, what shall we do with the living memory of survivors? How will it enter (or not enter) the historical record? Or to paraphrase Hutton again, “How will the past be remembered as it passes from living memory to history?” Will it always be regarded as so overly laden with pathos as to make it unreliable as documentary evidence? Or is there a place for the understanding of the witness, as subjective and skewed as it may be, for our larger historical understanding of events? In partial answer to these questions, I attempt to extend Friedlander's insights toward a narrow kind of history-telling I call “received history”—a double-stranded narrative that tells a survivor-historian's story and my own relationship to it. Such a narrative would chart not just the life of the survivor-historian itself but also the measurable effect of the tellings—both his telling and mine—on my own life's story. Together, they would compose a received history of the Holocaust and its afterlife in the author's mind—my “vicarious past.”     

The Modern State,the Question of Genocide,and Holocaust Scholarship

This review article asks: what defines mass violence in the twentieth century as particularly modern and how does the Holocaust figure in this history? The article compares the work of two path-breaking historians—Mark Levene and Timothy Snyder—while also discussing recent research by other scholars. It argues that the emergence of nation-states, together with technology and scientific knowledge to alter the environment, created the conditions for distinctly modern violence aiming to destroy diversity in societies and the environment. The article examines the relation between genocide, including the Holocaust, and the rise of twentieth-century nation-states. It follows the persistent idea that the Holocaust is unique in a way that establishes a hierarchy of Holocaust/genocide/other mass violence. As Levene argues, the contextualization of the complex set of events and processes called the Holocaust within the violent history of ethno-national and ethno-religious “homogenization” of nation-states challenges this framework. The article then turns to Snyder’s argument that, since Hitler’s worldview of racial struggle over land and food rejected agricultural science, genetic engineering in agriculture is one way to heed the Holocaust’s warning. A discussion of the devastating impact of genetic engineering in agriculture—in the frame of the violent implications of modern “development”—underscores how the destruction of societies perceived as “backward,” particularly indigenous groups in the Global South, follows the destruction of their biodiverse habitats and agriculture to make way for monoculture genetically engineered crops. A focus on case studies of such mass violence and the responses by indigenous groups facilitates, finally, a discussion of the recent turn to microhistories in Holocaust scholarship. These offer another contextualized view: of the societies that faced the assault of nation-states. The article concludes that the complexities on the social level, each rooted in specific circumstances and histories, challenge the analytical value of the general term “Holocaust.”     

Pioneering Leadership: Historical Myth‐Making,Absence, and Identity in the Churches of Christ in Victoria

This article explores the role of historiography in the developing identity of congregationally autonomous churches by examining the process and meaning behind the historical myth‐making associated with pioneering church leadership. In the absence of a clerical hierarchy or recognised historical expertise, four competing claims for the title of “first evangelist” emerged in the Churches of Christ (Disciples of Christ) denomination in colonial Victoria. Each of these claims is critically analysed in the light of rapidly developing church identity, the work of the evangelists in the 1860s, the influence of Australian nationalism, and historiographical portrayals which sought to make these four men heroes even in their absence. Finally the article examines absence of another kind — historiographical omission — and the question of the heroic in denominational church history.     

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.     

3. EVOCATION, ANALYSIS, AND THE "CRISIS OF LIBERALISM"

In The Years of Extermination , the second volume of Nazi Germany and the Jews , Saul Friedländer attempts to write an "integrated" history of the Holocaust that captures the "convergence" of German decisions and policies, the reaction of the surrounding world, and the perceptions and experiences of the Jews. Although several historiographical issues are studied in detail (the role of Hitler, the evolution of Nazi anti-Jewish policy, and the role of the Christian churches), the most innovative aspect of the book is its extensive use of excerpts from over forty diaries of Jewish victims, which are interspersed among the statements of Nazi leaders and officials, Wehrmacht soldiers, churchmen, and various collaborators and bystanders in order to juxtapose "entirely different levels of reality." What ultimately holds the book together, despite its intentionally disrupted narrative and Friedländer's disclaimer that the history of the Holocaust can be encompassed within any "single conceptual framework," is the overarching theme of the "crisis of liberalism."     

SIX QUESTIONS ON (OR ABOUT) HOLOCAUST DENIAL

Six questions are outlined and then responded to about Holocaust denial. These consider (1) Holocaust denial's view of the Holocaust counterfactually—if it had occurred; (2) the presumed adequacy of the binary choice between Holocaust denial and affirmation; (3) the status and credence of their own assertions among denial advocates; (4) the often implied historiographic uniqueness of Holocaust denial; (5) the contributions to Holocaust history of the denial position; (6) the measures—scholarly, legislative, practical—that have been or might be directed at the phenomenon of Holocaust denial.     

SUCCESS,TRUTH, AND MODERNISM IN HOLOCAUST HISTORIOGRAPHY: READING SAUL FRIEDLÄNDER THIRTY‐FIVE YEARS AFTER THE PUBLICATION OF METAHISTORY1

This essay provides a close reading of Saul Friedländer's exceptionally successful comprehensive history of the Holocaust from the theoretical perspective of Hayden White's philosophy of history. Friedländer's The Years of Extermination has been celebrated as the first synthetic history of the “Final Solution” that acknowledges the experiences of the victims of Nazi genocide. But Friedländer has not simply added the voices of the victims to a conventional historical account of the Holocaust. Instead, by displacing linear notions of time and space and subtly deconstructing conventional concepts of causality, he has invented a new type of historical prose that performs rather than analyzes the victims' point of view. Friedländer's innovation has particularly radical consequences for the construction of historical explanations. On the one hand, Friedländer explicitly argues that anti‐Semitism was the single most important cause of the Holocaust. On the other hand, his transnational, multifaceted history of the “Final Solution” provides a wealth of data that escapes the conceptual grasp of his explicit model of causation. Friedländer chooses this radically self‐reflexive strategy of historical representation to impress on the reader the existential sense of disbelief with which the victims experienced Nazi persecution. To Friedländer, that sense of disbelief constitutes the most appropriate ethical response to the Holocaust. Thus the narratological analysis of The Years of Extermination reveals that the exceptional quality of the book, as well as presumably its success, is the result of an extraordinarily creative act of narrative imagination. Or, put into terms developed by White, who shares Friedländer's appreciation of modernist forms of writing, The Years of Extermination is the first modernist history of the Holocaust that captures, through literary figuration, an important and long neglected reality of the “Final Solution.”     

IF: COUNTERFACTUAL AND CONDITIONAL HISTORIOGRAPHY

Conditionals are a feature of historiography. Despite this, historiographical research is focused predominantly on one kind of conditional, counterfactuals. New trans‐Atlantic contributions to this research by Catherine Gallagher and Richard J. Evans highlight the rich history of counterfactuals in Western thought, and their use by individuals and groups to imagine a present and a future that addresses regrets about the present. Their intimation of a flattening out of history through counterfactual nostalgia is not supported by the artistic expression of Tacita Dean, and new contributions to the philosophy of conditionals, building relations, and causal relations by Karen Bennett and Anthony Kwame Appiah. This review teases out the layered, causally tainted, and metaphysically agnostic world posited by Karen Bennett and conjoins it with David Lewis's reflections on possible worlds to suggest that conditional and counterfactual operators in historiography are building restrictors. This takes us away from Niall Ferguson's argument for the use of counterfactuals as a recognition of the underdetermination of history, and reminds us of the need to—as Appiah argues so succinctly—understand the pervasive role that idealizations play in helping us to manage the world and ourselves. The review rounds out by highlighting the computational implications of our conditional world, inviting historians to be at the table as fairness is debated and coded. In this way, the gap in research on the ethical need for historiographical conditionals in the twenty‐first century is highlighted.     

The Un-European Idea: Vichy and Eurafrica in the Historiography of Europeanism

Imperialist and collaborationist conceptions of Europeanisms have generally been excluded from mainstream historiography with reference to their alleged un-Europeanness. However, by discussing the ideas and writings of two French Europeanists—Louis Le Fur’s and René Viard’s—in the years 1940–41, I argue that it is precisely their Vichyite and imperialist conceptions of Europeanness that underpin their political ideas of a united Europe. Their works therefore call into question a prevailing historiographical narrative of Europeanism as a benign counterpoint to a dark European past. Since, as demonstrated in this article, French Europeanist visions have often been bound up with both collaborationist and imperialist interests, I argue for the need to develop a more inclusive and critical historiographical perspective on the history of Europeanism.     

DARWINIAN WE ARE NOT: COUNTERFACTUALISM AS THE NATURAL COURSE OF HISTORY

This article considers Peter Bowler's recent contribution to the genre of counterfactual history as exemplifying a “restrained” counterfactual framework, one that must downplay the role of contingency in the historical process in order to present what Bowler calls a more “natural course” of historical development. This restrained counterfactual methodology is discussed with reference to analogous debates within evolutionary science about the competing roles of contingency and convergence in the history of life, along with recent work done within the humanities about the more subtle nuances of counterfactual reasoning. Although there is little doubt that Bowler's study will help legitimize the genre of counterfactual history, it is argued that the role of contingency—once thought to be integral to the counterfactual—has been necessarily minimized in order to construct a narrative that is a plausible counterfactual history of science. It is in this way that Bowler's world without Darwin sheds light on our historiographical preconceptions about what makes for a plausible historical narrative.     

Establishing Connections,Restoring Relationships: Exploring the Historiography of Nursing in Britain

This paper provides a comparative historiographical framework within which to reconsider the history of nursing. It asks why nursing has remained largely sidelined within the history of medicine, while the latter has gained mainstream respectability in the wider field of historical research. Gender historians are challenged to look at the under‐explored aspects of nursing's history such as pre‐Nightingale nurses and nursing, and the multiple and international meanings of race, class and gender as experienced by this unique cohort of women and men. The paper draws upon key texts in the history of nursing and of medicine and includes a discussion about use of imagery within significant publications and what this says about intended readerships. It concludes that, unlike medicine, nursing professionals have to some extent hijacked the history of nursing, while the subject has been further hampered by Florence Nightingale's legacy and the subsequent emphasis on the professionalisation of nursing.     

3. THE EXPRESSION OF HISTORICAL EXPERIENCE

The theory and philosophy of history (just like philosophy in general) has established a dogmatic dilemma regarding the issue of language and experience: either you have an immediate experience separated from language, or you have language without any experiential basis. In other words, either you have an immediate experience that is and must remain mute and ineffable, or you have language and linguistic conceptualization that precedes experience, provides the condition of possibility of it, and thus, in a certain sense, produces it. Either you join forces with the few and opt for such mute experiences, or you go with the flow of narrative philosophy of history and the impossibility of immediacy. Either way, you end up postulating a mutual hostility between the nonlinguistic and language, and, more important, you remain unable to account for new insights and change. Contrary to this and in relation to history, I am going to talk about something nonlinguistic—historical experience—and about how such historical experience could productively interact with language in giving birth to novel historical representations. I am going to suggest that, under a theory of expression, a more friendly relationship can be established between experience and language: a relationship in which they are not hostile to but rather desperately need each other. To explain the occurrence of new insights and historiographical change, I will talk about a process of expression as sense‐formation and meaning‐constitution in history, and condense the theory into a struck‐through “of ,” as the expression of historical experience.     

INTENTIONALISM,INTENTIONALITY, AND REPORTING BELIEFS1

The dominant view of twentieth‐century analytic philosophy has been that all thinking is always in a language, that languages are vehicles of thought. The same view has been widespread in continental philosophy as well. In recent decades, however, the opposite view—that languages serve merely to express language‐independent thought‐contents or propositions—has been more widely accepted. The debate has a direct equivalent in the philosophy of history: when historians report the beliefs of historical figures, do they report the sentences or propositions that these historical figures believed to be true or false? In this paper I argue in favor of the latter, intentionalist, view. My arguments center mostly on the problems with translation that are likely to arise when a historian reports the beliefs of historical figures who expressed them in a language other than the one in which the historian is writing. In discussing these problems the paper presents an application of John Searle's theory of intentionality to the philosophy of history.     

Researching the Medieval Past between Catalonia and Romania. Josep Puig i Cadafalch,Nicolae Iorga,and the Transnational Writing of National History (1921‐1935)

This paper analyses knowledge transfers between Catalonia and Romania in the interwar period, in order to cast new light on the nature of national history writing in early‐twentieth‐century Europe. To do so, it discusses the historiographical works of the Catalans Josep Puig i Cadafalch (1867–1956) and, to a lesser extent, Antoni Rubió i Lluch (1856–1937) and of the Romanians Nicolae Iorga (1871–1940) and Constantin Marinescu (1891–1970). It pays particular attention to Iorga's and Marinescu's contributions on the history of medieval Catalonia in the Eastern Mediterranean and to Puig's studies on Moldavian painted churches. In doing so, the paper challenges the view that the historiography of foreign scholars regarding one's own national history was often disregarded as incompetent. At the same time, the paper also responds to the debate on the creation and validation of cultural knowledge across borderlands, outside of cultural cores. It builds on recent work on the creativity of cultural peripheries and argues that, while France continued to operate as a reference in the exchanges between Catalans and Romanians, their historiographical exchanges responded to local research and political agendas.     

The Environmental History of the Holocaust

ABSTRACT

The introduction conceptualizes environmental history of the Holocaust as a subdiscipline of Holocaust studies. The authors approach this emerging field of research through the context of environmental humanities with its current interest in the Anthropocene, soil science, forensics, multispecies collectives, and explorations of relations between ecocides and genocides. Proposed approach considers post-Holocaust spaces and landscapes as specific ecosystems and examines relations between its actors (human and non-human) in order to show the Holocaust’s spatial markers and long-terms effects. The article outlines existing literature on the subject, identifies the central research problems and questions, and discusses sources and methods. The authors demonstrate that the environmental history of the Holocaust applies a hybrid methodology that uses methods from various disciplines with the aim of creating new theories and interpretive categories and thus should be considered complementary to existing approaches in Holocaust studies. The authors follow the methodological principles of grounded theory in generating new concepts and seeking multidisciplinary methods for explaining nature’s role in the Holocaust and how Holocaust has changed nature. The authors claim that environmental history of the Holocaust broadens Holocaust studies as a field of research and opens up new questions concerning relations between nature and extermination in order to provide a more holistic perspective for exploring the relationship between culture and nature, genocide and ecocide. The approach proposed here shows Holocaust and post-Holocaust landscapes in terms of ecological/natural heritage, which might influence the way these spaces are commemorated, conserved and preserved, as well as used for tourist purposes.     

HISTORY GOES WALKABOUT

Could the methods of history—and not just its objects of study—be decolonized? This essay explores analogous areas of cultural production, such as painting, to determine how historians might begin to produce work that lies outside the Western, Euro‐Christian imaginary. It focuses on the case of Australia and the means by which Aboriginal artists have reanimated and recalibrated traditional forms of knowledge, offering new bases for thinking about the history and temporalities of Australia. The work of the painter Tim Johnson is then presented as an example for history in his demonstration of the ways in which indigenous methods and ways of seeing the world can be deployed by Others. The ethical, theoretical, and practical challenges that accompany such work are detailed, alongside a historiographical account of the way in which these discussions mesh with seminal debates in postcolonialism, subaltern studies, and settler colonialism as they relate to historical theory. Drawing on recent work in History and Theory, the article asks: what might be the consequences for history were it not to develop a meaningful “global turn,” arguing that a critical moment has been reached in which modes of understanding the world that come from outside the West need to be incorporated into historians’ repertoires for thinking and making.     

The History of Knowledge and the Future of Knowledge Societies

The new field of the history of knowledge is often presented as a mere expansion of the history of science. We argue that it has a greater ambition. The re‐definition of the historiographical domain of the history of knowledge urges us to ask new questions about the boundaries, hierarchies, and mutual constitution of different types of knowledge as well as the role and assessment of failure and ignorance in making knowledge. These issues have pertinence in the current climate where expertise is increasingly questioned and authority seems to lose its ground. Illustrated with examples from recent historiography of the sixteenth to twentieth centuries, we indicate some fruitful new avenues for research in the history of knowledge. Taken together, we hope that they will show that the history of knowledge could build the expertise required by the challenges of twenty‐first century knowledge societies, just like the history of science, throughout its development as a discipline in the twentieth century, responded to the demands posed by science and society.     

Beyond Holocaust Studies: rethinking the Holocaust in Hungary

This article argues that the ideological and emotional meanings of the terms ‘Holocaust’ and ‘antisemitism’ have obstructed their use as analytical concepts in Holocaust scholarship. It claims, specifically, that they frame the persecution and annihilation of Jews during World War II as unique, placing these events and processes apart from essential historical and political contexts. The destruction of Jews in wartime Hungary underscores how histories of state and nation building—in this case the drive to realize ‘Greater Hungary’ with a marked Magyar majority—generated multi-layered mass violence against non-Jews as well as Jews. Focusing on the multi-ethnic borderland of Subcarpathian Rus’ before the German invasion of Hungary in March 1944 illuminates the links in the state's multi-layered attack against the region's society and sheds new light on the particular victimization of Jews, also after March 1944. Almost all the scholarship on the Holocaust in Hungary has addressed the period after the German invasion, dealing with ghettoization and deportation to Auschwitz. This perspective has provided important insight, but it has also overshadowed significant dimensions in the history of wartime Hungary. The histories of the state's borderlands, which have received limited attention, challenge this account of ‘the Holocaust’ in Hungary. This article uncovers how anxieties about disloyalty and foreignness played crucial roles in the exclusionary campaign against Jews, Roma and Carpatho-Ruthenians in Subcarpathian Rus’. The Hungarian authorities planned and carried out discriminatory and violent measures against them and, whenever national and international opportunities permitted, mass deportations. The examination of these related processes of mass violence lays bare the meaning of ‘antisemitism’ in a specific political context, highlighting connections between anti-Jewish policies and the persecution of other groups. Viewing this violence as it unfolded, rather than backward from the ‘final solution’ and Auschwitz, opens new paths to rethink ‘the Holocaust’ in Hungary.