Jabotinsky and Jewish autonomy in the Diaspora

This article examines the customary assumption that ultra-Orthodox memory of the Holocaust is a counter-memory, which confronts, consciously and unconsciously, the dominant secular, Zionist memory of the Holocaust. However, in the early postwar period, the memory of the Holocaust in ultra-Orthodox society was variegated and multifaceted. The article shows that not only did some members of ultra-Orthodox society adopt part of the Zionist narrative on issues such as the lessons of the Holocaust and the centrality of the Land of Israel but that they even took part in its creation and consolidation. During the 1960s some of the ultra-Orthodox spokesmen shifted their commemoration efforts to within their own community for a variety of reasons. Nonetheless, the sectorial barriers between the secular majority and the ultra-Orthodoxy minority in Israel in the first decades were not as high or as rigid as they appear to be today.     

Life Is Beautiful : four riddles,three answers

Four riddles occur in the dialogue of Roberto Benigni's 1998 film, La vita è bella ( Life Is Beautiful ). Solutions to the first three are provided almost as soon as they are uttered, but a fourth riddle, spoken at the film's climax, remains unanswered. Exploring possible meanings of the fourth riddle illuminates the film's meaning. Although the riddles may seem to be relatively unimportant bantering between two of the major characters (Guido, the Italian Jew, and Captain Lessing, a German Nazi officer and physician), they are critical to the unfolding of the plot and significant in the portrayal of the two characters who employ them. Most importantly, they act as condensed expressions of the film's themes, complementing and giving deep texture to its narrative expression of the same ideas. Through the riddles and other folk and children's genres - such as game and folktale - La vita è bella asserts not only that art helps us survive, but that the humblest art is the daily weapon against the most formidable attacks on the human spirit.     

Symposium on Pope Pius XII and the Holocaust in Italy

The articles published in this section of JMIS were given at a symposium held early in 2001 on the role of Pope Pius XII in the rescue of Jews in Italy during the Holocaust. The discussion focuses on recent books on the subject by Susan Zuccotti and Ronald J. Rychlak. In the articles published here the authors and the panelists discuss the historical record (sources, facts and interpretations) and the nature of the obligations of the Papacy and the Catholic Church in the circumstances of the Second World War and the German occupation of Italy after the fall of Fascism.     

The Holocaust and the birth of Israel in British,Swedish and Finnish press discourse, 1947–1948

This article examines the way in which the Holocaust was linked to the process of the birth of Israel between 1947 and 1948 in the mainstream British, Swedish and Finnish press. By utilising a framework of comparative cultural history, this essay seeks to understand why different countries responded to the suffering of the Jews during the Second World War in such diverse ways. This essay also seeks to question the popular belief that the two events were intimately linked, and that the link was recognised in a straightforward manner. Hence, the study argues that although the press coverage sometimes managed to establish the connection between the two events, more typically the news was domesticated. In other words, the news had a transcendental and meta-historical character, working as an extension to each country's own self-understanding of Jews, Zionism and the Holocaust.     

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.”     

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.     

‘Dissidence’ in Holocaust Memorials in Literature: Jáchym Topol’s The Devil’s Workshop (Chladnou zemí)

Abstract

Established Czech precedent has made the town of Terezín an important literary symbol of Holocaust memory, used in the 1960s to construct myths of Czech innocent victimhood. Jáchym Topol’s novel, The Devil’s Workshop (2009), returns to the theme with great originality, avoiding such myths by using a compromised first-person Czech narrator, who is involved in setting up ‘dissident’ commemorative museums at Terezín and in Belarus. These draw on documented accounts of real atrocities for their authenticity. Competitive in national terms, commercialized, and ethically compromised, they are finally, arguably inevitably, silenced. Topol’s ‘truth-telling’ is discussed in the context of Theodor W. Adorno’s criticism of committed Holocaust literature, Benedict Anderson’s interpretation of museums as commercialized constructions of nationality, and Timothy Snyder’s historical account of the killings in Eastern Europe; the ambiguous pessimism of his novel stands up well to criticism and, it is argued, has lessons even for historians of the Holocaust.     

BETWEEN GENOCIDE AND “GENOCIDE”

The two books discussed here join a current pushback against the concept (thus also against claims for the historical occurrence) of genocide. Nichanian focuses on the Armenian “Aghed” (“Catastrophe”), inferring from his view of that event's undeniability that “genocide is not a fact” (since all facts are deniable). May's critique assumes that groups don't really—“objectively”—exist, as (by contrast) individuals do; thus, genocide—group murder—also has an “as if” quality so far as concerns the group victimized. On the one hand, then, uniqueness and sacralization; on the other hand, reductionism and diffusion. Alas, the historical and moral claims in “defense” of both genocide and “genocide” survive.     

Affective spaces,sensuous engagements: in quest of a synaesthetic approach to ‘dark memorials’

Although relatively recent, the concepts of ‘dark tourism’, ‘difficult heritage tourism’ and ‘Holocaust tourism’ have already been approached from historical, cultural, sociological, anthropological and managerial perspectives. The article offers a philosophical inquiry of ‘dark attractions’, inspired by Deleuze and Guattari’s work on aesthetics, with an aim of divorcing the term ‘dark tourism’ from its typically negative valance. It makes use of a synaesthetic understanding of experience and relies on an enlarged idea of perception conceptualised as a dynamic continuity between bodily/affective and intellectual cognitive faculties that are activated in the vibrant interaction with the architectural landscape of the ‘dark site’. The emphasis on immediate perception necessarily implies formulation of a concept of ‘affective aesthetics’ which refers to bodily process, a vital movement that triggers the subject’s passionate becoming-other, where ‘becoming’ stands for an intensive flow of affective (micro)perceptions. Such an approach sheds a different light on ‘Holocaust tourism’ and the ‘pleasures’ associated therewith, especially because it provides an explanation to a situation (common at many Holocaust memorials) when visitors are pleased, or positively affected, with representation/image/expression of sadness/atrocity. The synaesthetic operations of ‘dark attractions’ will be briefly illustrated with an example of the Holocaust memory site in Be??ec, Poland.     

1. NARRATIVE FORM AND HISTORICAL SENSATION: ON SAUL FRIEDLÄNDER'S THE YEARS OF EXTERMINATION1

Saul Friedländer's magnum opus, The Years of Extermination, has been received worldwide as an exemplary work of history. Yet it was written by a historian who in the last two decades has strenuously asserted the limits of Holocaust representation. At the center of this essay is a problem of historical writing: how to write a historical narrative of the Holocaust that both offers explanations of the unfolding events and also suggests that the most powerful sensation about those events, at the time and since, is that they are beyond words. I explore Friedländer's crafting of such a narrative by considering, first, the role of his attempt in The Years of Extermination to explain the Holocaust and, second, the narrative form of the book. The book is best seen, I argue, not primarily as a work of explanation but as a vast narrative that places an explanation of the Holocaust within a specific form of describing that goes beyond the boundaries of the historical discipline as it is usually practiced. This form of describing goes beyond the almost positivist attachment to facts that dominates current Holocaust historiography. By using Jewish individual testimonies that are interspersed in the chronological history of the extermination, Friedländer creates a narrative based on ruptures and breaks, devices we associate with works of fiction, and that historians do not usually use. The result is an arresting narrative, which I interpret by using Johan Huizinga's notion of historical sensation. Friedländer sees this narrative form as specific to the Holocaust. I view this commingling of irreducible reality and the possibility of art as a required sensibility that belongs to all historical understanding. And in this respect, The Years of Extermination only lays bare more clearly in the case of the Holocaust what is an essential element in all historical reconstruction.