Recounting,retrieving, rereading: approaches to the history of genocide

This essay, delivered at a conference that commemorated Primo Levi, asks about the continuing status of witnesses' testimony about the Holocaust and genocidal murder as their generation disappears. It finds their particular contribution to lie less in what they report than their claim to moral authenticity, as confirmed by their own suffering; and it points out the problematic aspects of subjective identification this may raise, especially by comparing witnesses' accounts with the alleged authenticity of Holocaust fiction. On the other hand, the limits of archival evidence, which are manifested almost as retrieved archaeological artefacts, are also highlighted, as are the difficulties of history centred on victims as collective protagonists. In the end, it is proposed, keeping witnesses present through continued re-examination and reading forms the historian's only recourse against the inevitable dilemmas of writing the history of mass atrocities.