Probing the Ethics of Holocaust Culture: The Roots of Militarism, 1866–1945 9780674973244

Citation preview

PROBING THE ETHICS OF

H O L O C A U S T C U LT U R E

PROBING THE ETHICS OF

HOLOCAUST CULTURE

Edited by CL AU DIO FOG U WULF KANSTEINER TODD PRE SN E R

Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England 2016

Copyright © 2016 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First printing Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Fogu, Claudio, 1963– editor. | Kansteiner, Wulf, editor. | Presner, Todd Samuel, editor. Title: Probing the ethics of Holocaust culture / edited by Claudio Fogu, Wulf Kansteiner, Todd Presner. Description: Cambridge, Massachusetts : Harvard University Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016013948 | ISBN 9780674970519 (hardcover : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945)—Moral and ethical aspects. | Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945)—Historiography. | Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945)—Public opinion. | Holocaust memorials. | Culture— Study and teaching—Moral and ethical aspects. Classification: LCC D804.7.M67 P76 2016 | DDC 174/.994053186—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016013948

CONTENTS

Introduction: The Field of Holocaust Studies and the Emergence of Global Holocaust Culture

1

Wulf Kansteiner and Todd Presner

PART I: THE STAKES OF NARRATIVE 1. Historical Truth, Estrangement, and Disbelief

43 53

Hayden White

2. On “Historical Modernism”: A Response to Hayden White

72

Saul Friedländer

3. Sense and Sensibility: The Complicated Holocaust Realism of Christopher Browning

79

Wulf Kansteiner

4. A Reply to Wulf Kansteiner

104

Christopher R. Browning

5. Scales of Postmemory: Six of Six Million

113

Ann Rigney

6. Interview with Daniel Mendelsohn, Author of The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million

129

CONTENTS

7. The Death of the Witness; or, The Persistence of the Differend

141

Marc Nichanian

PART II: REMEDIATIONS OF THE ARCHIVE 8. The Ethics of the Algorithm: Close and Distant Listening to the Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive

167

175

Todd Presner

9. On the Ethics of Technology and Testimony

203

Stephen D. Smith

10. A “Spatial Turn” in Holocaust Studies?

218

Claudio Fogu

11. Interview with Anne Knowles, Tim Cole, Alberto Giordano, and Paul B. Jaskot, Contributing Authors of Geographies of the Holocaust

240

12. Freeze-Framing: Temporality and the Archive in Forgács, Hersonski, and Friedländer

257

Nitzan Lebovic

13. Witnessing the Archive

277

Yael Hersonski

14. Deconstructivism and the Holocaust: Peter Eisenman’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe

283

Gavriel D. Rosenfeld

15. Berlin Memorial Redux

304

Peter Eisenman

PART III: THE POLITICS OF EXCEPTIONALITY 16. The Holocaust as Genocide: Experiential Uniqueness and Integrated History Omer Bartov

vi

309

319

CONTENTS

17. Anxieties in Holocaust and Genocide Studies

332

A. Dirk Moses

18. The Witness as “World” Traveler: Multidirectional Memory and Holocaust Internationalism before Human Rights

355

Michael Rothberg

19. Fiction and Solicitude: Ethics and the Conditions for Survival

373

Judith Butler

20. Catastrophes: Afterlives of the Exceptionality Paradigm in Holocaust Studies

389

Elisabeth Weber

Epilogue: Interview with Saul Friedländer

411

Notes

427

Acknowledgments

496

Illustration Credits

497

Contributors

499

Index

504

vii

Introduction The Field of Holocaust Studies and the Emergence of Global Holocaust Culture W U L F K A N S T E I N E R A N D TO D D P R E S N E R

I

N SPRING 1990, Saul Friedländer hosted a major conference at the

University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), in which he asked a number of historians, philosophers, and literary scholars to reflect on the limits of representing the Holocaust in fiction and nonfiction. The resulting volume, Probing the Limits of Representation, arguably defined the theoretical and historiographic contours of the field of Holocaust studies for two and a half decades.1 In 2012, UCLA hosted a second such conference, organized by the editors of this book. We brought together some of the original protagonists, such as Saul Friedländer and Hayden White, but changed the format of the conference and the scope of the investigation to probe the ethical stakes of Holocaust culture writ large. The conference addressed questions on the representation and mediation of the Holocaust, not only through the analogic media of history, literature, and film but also the world of multimedia databases, digital archives, and geographic information systems. While we took up some of the original debates in Holocaust historiography, we did so in a more dialogical context through direct confrontations between critics and creators, involving a second generation of interlocutors using new methodologies, media, and critical works. The present volume is not a sequel to the original one, but perhaps a bookend insofar as it attempts to take stock of the salient forms of representation and the critical debates that have emerged in Holocaust studies in the intervening twenty-five years. When the original Probing volume appeared in 1992, the field of Holocaust studies was in the throes of 1

INTRODUCTION

self-definition, and public memorial cultures of the Holocaust were just emerging, especially in Germany and the United States (and were virtually nonexistent in other places such as Eastern Europe). That book addressed a significant void in academic scholarship, institutional formations, and cultural memory, a void that simply does not exist today. Without presuming to be exhaustive, the present volume interrogates some of the emblematic debates, memorial cultures, and new forms of representation that have emerged in the intervening decades as the field of Holocaust studies has matured and diversified. It considers how and why the Holocaust has remained the test or limit case for ethics, as well as disciplinary debates about various modalities of representation. The present volume also comes at a unique junction in the development of the field in which we see a generational shift marked by the passing of eyewitnesses, the ascendancy of digital archives, and the institutionalization of a global Holocaust culture. It also represents what is likely the last time that authors belonging to the “eyewitness” generation— many of whom created some of the central texts and artifacts of Holocaust culture—will come together to engage with and develop their critiques of one another’s positions. At the same time, this volume speaks decisively to contemporary and future generations of scholars and cultural agents. While the debates in the late 1980s and early 1990s that gave rise to the first Probing book might be considered as a referendum on postmodernism and the alleged pitfalls of historical relativism, the contemporary debates in this book center on the globalization, politicization, and digitization of the Holocaust. The authors in this volume probe the politics and ethics of Holocaust memory, including Holocaust historiography, from the diverse vantage points of comparative genocide studies, the digital humanities, and transnational media and memory studies. They redeploy certain tools of historical theory in general and Hayden White’s philosophy of history in particular to develop close, critical readings of contemporary Holocaust culture. In the course of twenty-five years, both the ethical terrain and focus of inquiry have subtly, yet decisively, shifted. In 1990, Holocaust historiography and Holocaust culture could serve as a testing ground for the ethical implications of the linguistic turn precisely because all the intellectual protagonists agreed on the centrality of the Holocaust for the interpretation of the history of the twentieth century and the centrality of Holocaust memory for the prevention of future human rights catastrophes. That consensus no longer exists. After several U.S.-initiated wars, 2

INTRODUCTION

the Second Intifada, a number of NATO-led military campaigns, and the remilitarization of German foreign policy, Holocaust memory has lost some of its moral weight. The large-scale institutionalization of Holocaust memory in Germany, Israel, and the United States does not seem to have helped political elites in those countries reach prudent decisions about the use of military force. Quite the contrary: Holocaust representation now appears to be part of a political problem, since the memory of Nazi perpetrators and the crimes of the Final Solution are routinely invoked to justify illegitimate or imprudent acts of collective violence. At the same time, few intellectuals nowadays are really worried about the possible negative ethical implications of poststructuralism, a debate that largely played out in the academy, even though its broader implications impacted Holocaust culture more generally and publicly over the last two decades. Indeed, our narratologically and iconologically inspired critiques of Holocaust and genocide representations reveal a considerable degree of contention. The disagreements are not linked to charges of denial or the factual misrepresentation of the Holocaust, as its facts by and large have been settled over the past decades of historical research, archival investigation, testimony collection, institution building, and cultural memory production. This stands in marked contrast to other genocides in which historical research has been comparatively meager, where archives and testimonies are almost nonexistent, where institution building is scant, and where cultural memory has been muffled or even erased. The decision of pitching authors and artists of specific Holocaust artifacts against their critics may have exacerbated the disagreements, but they were not caused by our research design. Instead, the discussions documented in the present volume, at times quite passionate, attest to the high moral stakes of the fields of Holocaust and genocide studies and, first and foremost, to the peculiar combination of aesthetics and politics inherent in all acts of cultural memory production, including historical scholarship. While we may hope that our books, films, memorials, and multimedia assemblages (which themselves reflect choices of metaphors, narratives, and iconographies) trigger self-critical reflections about humanity’s predilection for self-destruction and give rise to shared communities of belonging that will not be implicated in the kinds of mass crimes our ancestors and contemporaries have regularly committed, the interdisciplinary field of Holocaust studies displays an extremely wide range of political-moral convictions and has not produced a consensus about the 3

INTRODUCTION

best strategies to reach and educate audiences. Since the first Probing conference, the sheer number, the disciplinary range, and the media diversity of representations of the Holocaust have exploded, giving rise to intense disagreements about the aesthetic quality, didactic value, and political impact of cultural representations of past acts of collective violence. And that is hardly a problem. Quite the contrary: the heartfelt, publicly performed disputes about memory often seem to carry a significant didactic punch. In fact, in some cases, the process of public contestation appears to have inspired more self-critical reflections about human self-destruction than the artifacts themselves.2 This insight informs the structure of the current book. By agreeing to disagree in public about the accomplishments, shortcomings, and future development of Holocaust remembrance, the protagonists in this volume add a considerable degree of transparency to the self-reflexive and frequently emotionally taxing cultural practice of shaping the collective memory of violence. Consequently, the volume goes far beyond the question of Holocaust historiography, the focus of the original volume, and takes stock of the institutionalization of Holocaust representation at multiple levels of official and mass culture. In addition to some of the original contributors, we have involved a much wider range of thinkers and artists working across a multiplicity of media and methods in order to expose recent, pathbreaking work to the critical gaze of a new generation of scholars. We foreground academic and nonacademic creative works that have been produced in the wake of the initial Probing book, asking not only how some of the original questions might be taken up in new contexts but also how new contexts have given rise to entirely new sets of questions and ethical issues. The timing of the volume is essential, as we are entering an era in which we only have representations and narratives, archives and mediations, documents and databases. At the same time, we are witnessing a scholarly transition in the disciplinary and discursive practices of historians to undertake resolutely comparative investigations of genocide with a global orientation. Hence, it is more important than ever to figure out how these representations function and how they can help us craft truly self-critical forms of historical memory. The purpose of Probing the Ethics of Holocaust Culture is thus to articulate this specific intellectual landscape and the key ethical issues at stake in Holocaust culture and Holocaust representation today. The new paradigm marked by the globalization, digitization, and multimediation of knowledge promises representation without limits, something that 4

INTRODUCTION

presents a telling provocation vis-à-vis the original Probing volume, which was very much about the anxiety of poststructuralism leading to a relativization of the Holocaust. The paradigm that has emerged over the last twenty years is, in fact, deeply imprinted by poststructuralism, which can be seen in the hybrid genres of representation, infinite remediation of knowledge through digital forms, mixed methodologies, modernist narratives, and comparative, even relativist, frameworks for confronting and perhaps unmooring the uniqueness of the Holocaust. Our hope is that the two books, Probing the Limits of Representation and Probing the Ethics of Holocaust Culture, will not only function as bookends to one another but, more important, provide a useful conceptual and historical framework for debating the future of Holocaust and genocide studies. To that end, this introduction aims at a more general contextualization of the development of the field of Holocaust studies, with particular emphasis on the period between the two volumes, in order to clarify the intellectual and cultural stakes of our initiative. At the beginning of each of this book’s three sections, the editors have provided more specific introductions to the authors, works, and debates that are featured.

Postwar Historiography and the Emergence of Public Holocaust Culture Today it is a given that the scholarly perception of Nazism and the Holocaust is deeply connected to shifting political landscapes, historical contexts, and cultural values. To understand how this came to be, we might cast a gaze backward. Almost immediately after World War II, global power brokers deployed two transnational, political master narratives to craft meaningful connections between the Nazi past and the Cold War present: Marxism-Leninism in the East and antitotalitarianism in the West. The two narrative worlds featured dictators, Nazi thugs, heroic resistance fighters, morally unblemished soldiers, evil capitalists, and suffering civilians. Yet neither master narrative acknowledged Jewish victimhood.3 As in previous decades, historians swiftly adapted to dominant political trends by resurrecting historicist traditions or developing a Marxist intellectual habitus. In a number of places in the world such as New York, Lodz, Paris, and Israel, Jewish historians, mostly survivors themselves, began to document the history of the Final Solution and reconstruct the histories of the Jewish communities that the Nazis and their collaborators had destroyed. But their work 5

INTRODUCTION

attracted little attention outside of the closely knit networks of Holocaust survivors.4 The academic status quo did not change decisively in the 1950s and 1960s. The labor of documentation continued, for instance, in additional research institutions in Amsterdam and London. At the same time, the first comprehensive histories of the Final Solution appeared in print, sometimes against considerable resistance from the academic and print media establishment, as in the case of Raul Hilberg’s 1961 The Destruction of the European Jews.5 When glancing at the chronology of postwar memory events, one notices a strange disconnect. The year 1961 should have been a most fortuitous year for the publication of a history of the Final Solution. After all, the Nazi perpetrators were back in the headlines during the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem that very year and during the Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt in 1963–1965. For the first time, survivors of the Holocaust took to the public stage to talk about their experiences, and their carefully prepared witness statements were distributed across the globe via radio, television, and the print media. The courageous testimony triggered a wave of survivor memoirs and changed the memory of the Final Solution within the Jewish communities, especially in Israel and the United States.6 Along with the publication of Hilberg’s book, Hannah Arendt’s controversial hypotheses about Eichmann’s motives and the implication of Jewish leaders in their people’s destruction can plausibly be considered the founding moment of Holocaust studies.7 Arendt’s argument of Jewish collaboration and perfectly average, nonideological, and highly functional Nazi perpetrators provided a sharp—but hardly universally embraced— intellectual profile to an intense transnational discussion. For the first time, the Final Solution emerged as a key intellectual challenge sui generis that could no longer be easily integrated, let alone explained, within existing historiographic frameworks, political models, or aesthetic representations.8 In fact, Arendt and her few supporters and many detractors crafted a set of Holocaust metanarratives about the alleged normality of the Nazi perpetrators that have been circulated and amended ever since.9 But the impact of the discussions on the general public was short-lived. The survivors and their stories disappeared again from the headlines and from collective memories in very much the same way that the photographs and film footage of the liberation of the Nazi camps, which had been circulated widely after the war, disappeared from the public sphere in the 1950s.10 The puzzling dialectic of collective remembrance and for6

INTRODUCTION

getting catapulted Hilberg’s book into a void, despite the fact that it had been prominently mentioned in Arendt’s coverage of the Eichmann trial.11 Today, The Destruction of the European Jews is considered an unsurpassed classic; in the 1960s, it received scant public attention.12 It is therefore not surprising that only very few scholars pursued empirical research about the Final Solution in the decades after the trials and that these scholars moved in the margins of their academic disciplines.13 The explosive input that propelled Holocaust historiography into becoming the field of Holocaust studies and catapulted the latter to the center of theoretical-epistemological debates in the 1980s and 1990s was not a scholarly debate but a cultural event, namely, the broadcasting of the NBC television miniseries Holocaust (1978) around the world.14 Not only did this media event help establish a new and persistent narrative template that categorized the Final Solution as a Jewish event in need of public recognition and explanation, but it also triggered a debate over the limits of responsible representations of the Holocaust and gave rise to a powerful public paradigm marked by the aesthetics of entertainment. While Holocaust had been preceded by a number of relatively low-profile news stories and radio, film, and television productions about Jewish survivors, this Hollywood-produced television docudrama was broadcast and rebroadcast across the world, drawing 220 million viewers.15 It was followed by a wave of similarly structured, very successful international television and film fare, which led to the establishment of popular historical entertainment characterized by its consumable Holocaust iconography as well as its ability to generate broad public interest and empathy across geographical, cultural, and ethnic divides.16 These mass media representations of the Holocaust also spurred a significant strand of Holocaust criticism that attempted to delimit responsible representations of the Final Solution and occasionally even sought to establish the ineffability or indescribability of Auschwitz tout court. In the midst of the media event Holocaust, Elie Wiesel delivered one such trenchant critique of the miniseries: “To use special effects and gimmicks to describe the indescribable is to me morally objectionable. Worse: It is indecent. . . . Auschwitz cannot be explained nor can it be visualized.”17 Along parallel lines, Saul Friedländer voiced his concerns about “the obsession” with Nazism in the “kitsch aesthetic” of the contemporary filmic and literary imagination in his Reflections on Nazism: An Essay on Kitsch and Death.18 With regard to the fascination and attraction of Nazism by experimental filmmakers, most notably Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, Friedländer 7

INTRODUCTION

argued that Nazism has become “an unlimited field for a surge of the imagination, for a use of aesthetic effects” that yield “voluptuous anguish and ravishing images,” but in so doing, appear to have “[overstepped] some kind of limit.”19 From a twenty-first-century vantage point, Wiesel’s self-confident rejection of the Holocaust docudrama or Friedländer’s admonition about the limits of representation may appear misplaced. Of course, any aesthetic form can be easily integrated into superficial routines of cultural consumption. What is remarkable about the emergence of the aesthetics of Holocaust entertainment in the 1970s, however, is not only the fact that it has continued unabated through the present but also that it gave rise to the central intellectual debates about the limits of representation without undermining historical factuality. Instead, the broadly popular public resonance of such television docudramas and films spurred the historical imagination in significant ways, something that can be detected in the broader reception histories of later Hollywood films such as Schindler’s List (1993), Life Is Beautiful (1997), The Pianist (2002), and even counterfactual stories such as Inglourious Basterds (2009).20 After the media event Holocaust, the academic historical community followed suit and sought to bestow public recognition in the only way it knew how, namely, by providing compelling causal explanations. But the historical profession moves slowly and cannot quickly produce new empirical research. Consequently, historians first responded to the criticism and passions stirred up by Holocaust by engaging in emotionally and politically charged theoretical discussions, especially in Germany. In contrast to the film and television stories about the Holocaust, which gave center stage to the figure of the survivor, the scholarly efforts focused on the Nazi perpetrators and proposed two different theoretical-narrative frameworks to capture the origins of the Final Solution, intentionalism and structuralism/functionalism. These different frameworks were not developed ex nihilo. In fact, German historians had developed two similar competing narrative strategies since the mid-1960s, as they tried to understand Hitler’s position in the Third Reich from fundamentally different methodological and political points of view. After Holocaust, many of the same historians staged a series of intense public disagreements about Nazism, the Final Solution, and German national identity that climaxed in the Historikerstreit (Historians’ Debate) of 1986–1987.21 The majority faction of intentionalists applied traditional historical methods, focused on the men at the top of the Nazi regime, and quickly 8

INTRODUCTION

identified Hitler and his most prominent lieutenants as the cause of the Final Solution in the same way that the historical discipline had already found the top Nazis responsible for the Nazi catastrophe in general and World War II in particular. The minority faction of structuralists or functionalists advocated for a different research agenda, which reflected the prominence of social science history in the 1970s and 1980s. They suggested contextualizing Nazi genocide and its many perpetrators within the social and economic dynamics of modern European society. In essence, the intentionalist and the structuralist approaches resulted in two different, incompatible narrative worlds. In the intentionalist narrative universe, only powerful Nazis performed in the roles of important historical actors, reflecting conventional notions of historical agency that have long dominated the historical profession. Consequently, in the narratives crafted by scholars like Eberhard Jäckel, Klaus Hildebrand, and Yehuda Bauer, Hitler was pulling the strings to implement long-term ideological goals and strategic objectives.22 By contrast, the structuralist narrative universe, which existed primarily in the form of programmatic proposals rather than fully developed story lines, featured more complicated and less stable concepts of agency, highlighting the importance and responsibility of many lower-level perpetrators. Moreover and more important, the structuralist narrative vision introduced abstract entities like “rationalization” and “modernity”—with complex social structures, mediated communication networks, and intricate and integrated production processes—as historical actors in their own right. In an essay primarily dedicated to the task of proving that Hitler did not plan or micromanage but wholeheartedly supported the policies of genocide, Hans Mommsen defined the structuralist vision in a few perceptive passages.23 In his mind, the Holocaust emerged from political-bureaucratic mechanisms crafted by Heydrich and Eichmann that developed intrinsic radical dynamics in an independent process of perfect improvisation. These mechanisms were embedded in an overarching political-psychological structure that allowed perpetrators to maintain an illusion of passive noninvolvement. On closer examination, the body of structuralist interpretations of the Final Solution consists of a few pathbreaking programmatic essays by Mommsen and Martin Broszat and a handful of more or less innovative empirical studies only loosely associated with these programmatic texts and had been concluded many years before structuralists and intentionalists repeatedly clashed on the lecture circuit in Germany and France in 9

INTRODUCTION

the early 1980s.24 A look at structuralist writing reveals the history of a historiographical impasse with very productive consequences since the functionalist/intentionalist discussions raised the question of the limits of the discipline of history. Precisely because historians argued successfully for change but could not deliver on that promise they provided a lasting impetus for conceptual-narrative innovation and interdisciplinary curiosity. The intensity of the debates subsided in the 1990s as a result of a vast increase in empirical productivity in Holocaust history, a significantly broadened scope of empirical inquiry, and a marked methodological normalization that thwarted initial structuralist reform plans but nevertheless helped the discipline escape the gravitational pull of orthodox intentionalist thinking. The most compelling answers to Mommsen’s challenge have been crafted by social scientists, especially social psychologists, who are not constrained by the peculiar narrative conventions of the historical discipline.25 In the years that followed, Holocaust historians came to the conclusion— at least in theory—that functionalist and intentionalist approaches ought to be integrated.26 In practice, however, nobody has managed to write a history of the Holocaust that seamlessly integrates intentionalist and structuralist narrative worlds.27 Consequently, when historians finally pursued archival research about the Holocaust on a large scale in the 1980s and especially the 1990s, they sidestepped the toughest intellectual challenges related to the structuralist program and staked out a comfortable and practical compromise position halfway between the intentionalist and functionalist camps. A new generation of scholars, sometimes sifting through recently opened archives in Eastern Europe, followed the methodological framework and narrative strategies of the intentionalists and crafted conventional stories of human agency. At the same time, encouraged by structuralist theorizing, they shifted their analytical gaze from the top Nazis to the diverse perpetrators on the ground in Nazioccupied Eastern Europe without, however, trying to develop alternative narrative formats that could grasp and convey the agency of social structures. The search for conceptual and narrative middle ground is reflected in the contributions by Wulf Kansteiner and Christopher Browning in this volume. The impressive wave of empirical work started with a rigorous critique of Nazi expert culture whose members justified and helped organize the Final Solution.28 Within a few years, the unflinching review of the criminal behavior of the midlevel bureaucrats and academics of the 10

INTRODUCTION

Third Reich was specifically directed at the historical profession itself, leading to intense, intergenerational discussions about historians’ involvement in Nazi crimes and their own moral positions.29 The critique of expert culture was quickly overshadowed by a pathbreaking publication by Christopher Browning, who took a close, bottom-up look at average Nazi perpetrators exposing their disturbing normality from an interdisciplinary, social-psychological perspective, and Daniel Goldhagen, who proposed a monocausal, ideology-centered explanation for the Final Solution from the perspective of political science.30 The new perpetrator history following in Browning’s footsteps yielded a wealth of regional studies highlighting the relentless criminality of the National Socialist (NS) occupational regime in Eastern Europe31 and provided empirically saturated analyses of the Nazi leadership in Berlin.32 The extensive research about NS perpetrators laid the foundation for fruitful discussions about the role of ideology and the relationship between center and periphery in Nazi policies, thus revisiting key themes of the intentionalist/ functionalist discussions in a decidedly more empirically oriented setting. The wave of perpetrator research, more interdisciplinarily oriented in the Anglo-American context than in Germany, had helped fill some of the research gaps exposed by Holocaust and other critical media events such as Schindler’s List—but with one important exception: mainstream historians still had not paid sufficient attention to the experiences and perspectives of the victims of the Final Solution. While many comprehensive histories of the Holocaust cataloged the number of victims and the events leading up to their destruction, it was not until 1998 and 2007, respectively, that Saul Friedländer published victim-centered syntheses of Holocaust history.33 Unlike his predecessors, Friedländer inscribed the perspectives of the victims as key moral and narrative anchoring points for any attempt to write a comprehensive history of the Holocaust. With conceptual and ethical understatement, more through the way he writes than through an explicit criticism or programmatic claim, Friedländer delineated a scholarly subject position that called into question some of the research priorities of the last decades. Friedländer now appears to accept the poststructuralist argument that academic historians normalize and domesticate the past, for instance, by pretending to be able to prove conclusively why past events occurred the way they did. Moreover, by privileging human agency in questions of causation, Holocaust historians integrate the perspective of the perpetrators in the structure and language of their texts. In response to this ethical dilemma, Friedländer 11

INTRODUCTION

seeks to create a balance between the pursuit of causal analysis with its possible perpetrator affinities, on the one hand, and the reconstruction of the victims’ feelings and perceptions independent of any causal considerations, on the other hand. By systematically foregrounding the victims’ voices, Friedländer seems to advocate for a new moral imperative for the writing of the history of violence. The Holocaust historian ought to combine analytical ambition with emotional partisanship, making the reader understand why the catastrophe happened as well as what it meant for its victims. Historiography should abandon its naive claims to objectivity, deliver a complex and at times even semantically unstable package of objectifying insights and empathetic unsettlement, and thus play an important role in the moral education of postviolence generations.34 In this sense, Friedländer does not seek to transcend Holocaust historiography; he expands the limits of academic history by integrating themes of popular Holocaust memory within professional historical writing.35 Friedländer’s work has been followed by a series of transnationally oriented regional studies providing thick descriptions and everyday histories of multiethnic coexistence and the subsequent breakdown of multiethnic solidarity in Eastern Europe, thus integrating Holocaust history into the new field of borderland studies.36 The everyday histories of multiethnic borderlands and Friedländer’s syntheses, which pay as much attention to victims as perpetrators, embark on important projects of multiperspectival narration. Obviously, Holocaust historians, and perhaps historians in general, feel more comfortable now developing the kinds of complex narrative worlds that the structuralist/intentionalist divide already called for but that Holocaust historians could only adopt after much conceptual discussion and self-reflection. In the long run, the purposeful use of multiple narrative perspectives in one scholarly text might even prompt historians to assume a more charitable view of Hayden White’s work and embrace their role as ethical storytellers. Reconfiguring the Nazi crimes as a Jewish event—that is, as a crime that was primarily perpetrated against the Jewish people and impressing on academics and nonacademics alike that a proper acknowledgment of the event was overdue—required isolating it from its World War II context, releasing it from the powerful grip of the previously dominant transnational master narratives of antitotalitarianism and communism, and identifying it as a special type of occurrence. In many intellectual settings, that task was accomplished through rhetorics of uniqueness, incomparability, incomprehensibility, and exceptionality.37 The interlinked concepts 12

INTRODUCTION

have never been deployed consistently, were often empirically flawed, and could be easily perceived as an affront by survivors of other genocides and human rights catastrophes. But they have garnered great political and didactic popularity and become an integral element of the aestheticnarrative construct of the Holocaust as we know it today. During the historians’ debate in 1986, the German historian Eberhard Jäckel tried to grasp the uniqueness of the Holocaust by arguing that never before in history had a state tried to exterminate an entire ethnic group using all the resources at its disposal.38 Jäckel’s powerful appeal served as an appropriate reminder for German historians and German society that the Final Solution continued to demand rigorous self-critical attention. It is quite possible that his plea has proven all the more effective because many Germans have treated the uniqueness of the Holocaust as a fact. But Jäckel’s sweeping assessment, like so many other general statements by historians, quickly loses its unproblematic factual status once its factual base is called into question. One could, for instance, argue that state-sponsored genocides have occurred in numerous other settings and that the leadership of the Third Reich hardly mobilized all available resources for mass murder. After all, the Nazis committed genocide on a shoestring budget with a handful of mediocre, poorly trained, midlevel bureaucrats; at almost any point during the war, Hitler could have easily assembled a much more sizable and accomplished army of murderers. Hilberg’s assessment to that effect was widely available in print at the time Jäckel developed his definition: “One of the most striking facts about the German apparatus was the sparseness of its personnel, particularly in those regions outside the Reich where most of the victims had to be destroyed. . . . Upon closer examination, the machinery of destruction turns out to have been a loose organization of part-timers.”39 While Jäckel’s claim to Holocaust uniqueness proved compelling, particularly for political and ethical reasons, more recent attempts to follow in his footsteps have been less favorably received.40 But a negative sense of Holocaust exceptionalism has endured because it does not face similar empirical obstacles. The notion that the Holocaust poses extraordinary challenges for existing paradigms of historical interpretation and might even be altogether incomprehensible is also a symbolic and ethical statement, but it derives legitimacy from the perception of historiographical and philosophical shortcomings rather than empirical and interpretive success. In this vein, Saul Friedländer has argued that the Nazi genocide of European Jewry represents an extraordinary 13

INTRODUCTION

historical event because its causes have never been satisfactorily explained. None of the many concepts that have been brought to bear on the historical record—ideology, racism, obedience, modernity, instrumental reason, peer pressure, greed—can contain the semantic excess inherent in the Nazi campaign of mass murder.41 Moreover, in contrast to the great majority of his colleagues, Friedländer strives to integrate that sense of failure and the corresponding feelings of unease into the very fabric of his historical narratives.42 In seeking to convey to readers a feeling of intellectual discomfort, he explicitly deploys a gesture of radical self-reflexivity that has received insufficient attention in historiography. But the gesture represents a significant, independent tradition of Holocaust culture in philosophy, film, and literary studies that reaches back all the way to the end of World War II and calls into question the reliability of method and the stability of discipline. By the same token, negative exceptionalism has also become central to the theoretical work of Hayden White, whose conceptualization of “the modernist event” in the late 1990s provided an intellectual bridge between the philosophical propositions of Jacques Derrida and Jean-François Lyotard and the epistemological questions he had raised earlier about narrative realism, thereby making his work relevant again to current debates in Holocaust studies.

Hayden White and the Tribunal of Historians Considered from a poststructuralist perspective, the notion of negative exceptionality highlights the gap between any complex historical event and its narrative representation. Yet few, if any, historians think the Nazis have undermined their ability to explain and depict history in general and the crimes of the Third Reich in particular, despite the fact that many historians were also implicated in its crimes. For exiled Frankfurt School intellectuals such as Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, the Nazis exposed the self-destructive core in all human culture, including human language, thereby demonstrating an alliance between enlightenment and domination.43 Consequently, Adorno saw the thought constructs of philosophy and sociology implicated in the catastrophes of the twentieth century: “Our metaphysical faculty is paralyzed because actual events have shattered the basis on which speculative metaphysical thought could be reconciled with experience.” And, more famously: “If thought is not measured by the extremity that eludes the concept, it is from the outset in the nature of the musical accompaniment with which the SS liked to 14

INTRODUCTION

drown out the screams of their victims.”44 Adorno’s powerful condemnation of the complicity of culture with barbarism, of thought with violence, helped lay the foundation for generations of poststructuralist and deconstructive thinkers and cultural critics who believe that Auschwitz revealed the referential illusion at the heart of all human culture and that its legacy, therefore, demands radically self-reflexive cultural practices. The nexus of discipline and method, history and narrative, and poststructuralist philosophy and Holocaust historiography represented the intellectual core of Probing the Limits of Representation. In 1990, when Saul Friedländer invited prominent Holocaust historians, literary scholars, philosophers, and intellectual historians to Los Angeles, he wanted them to sort through competing claims of representational failure: Does the Holocaust precipitate the same problems of narrative explanation as any other complex series of historical events or does it belong to a category of a handful of special events—or a category all of its own—that poses extraordinary, perhaps unique challenges for historical interpretation? The context for this question was the heyday of postmodern thought in the academy, which, on the one hand, seemed to relativize all historical events by pointing to the infinite free play of linguistic signifiers and signifying practices more generally and, on the other hand, considered the Holocaust as “the decisive event” in world history that broke the very instruments (historical or otherwise) for measuring, comprehending, and narrating events themselves.45 In this regard, Holocaust exceptionality was fundamentally grounded in postmodern theory by both its proponents and its critics. As one of its critics, Friedländer characterized postmodernism as “the rejection of the possibility of identifying some stable reality or truth beyond the constant polysemy and self-referentiality of linguistic constructs.”46 For Friedländer and other historians such as Pierre Vidal-Naquet and Carlo Ginzburg, the truth and reality of the Holocaust must be upheld in order to allow historians to distinguish between fact and fiction. Postmodernism—somewhat facilely yoked to the work of Hayden White— seemed to deny this possibility and therefore opened up the door to Holocaust deniers. Although more than just a confrontation with a singular provocateur, much of the intellectual energy and ammunition was aimed at White and his contention that historical narratives, like literary narratives, are foremost problems of emplotment and that all authors choose various kinds of narrative strategies, tropes, and modes of figuration to construct their objects of study. But for Ginzburg, White’s position 15

INTRODUCTION

not only relativized historical events and their representations but also seemed to deny the very status of the reality of the Holocaust. Another way to consider the question of history and narrative is to uncouple it from White’s specific position and instead cast the question of “truth in history” as reflective of a broader crisis in the discipline of history itself.47 While the growth of Holocaust revisionism and the specter of relativism may have prompted the scapegoating of White, another challenge—largely ignored and forgotten—also emerged at the 1990 conference. It was in the conclusion of the lecture delivered by Jacques Derrida called “The Force of Law,” based on an interpretation of Walter Benjamin’s 1921 essay “Critique of Violence.” Although read at the conference, Derrida’s lecture was not published within the conference proceedings.48 In it, he argues that Nazism’s system of “mythical violence . . . went all the way to the limit” by, first, keeping the bureaucratically objective archive of its destruction and, paradoxically, producing “a system in which its logic, the logic of objectivity made possible the invalidation and therefore the effacement of testimony and of responsibilities, the neutralization of the singularity of the final solution.” In so doing, it gave rise to both the logic of Holocaust revisionism and “relativist objectivism” in which other, earlier exterminations either explain or “normalize” the Holocaust. In essence, Nazism created “the possibility of the historiographic perversion.”49 This perversion not only calls into question the operative logic of the discipline of history (which seeks facts) but, perhaps more startlingly, the status of genocide as a factual event. As Marc Nichanian argues, “genocide is not a fact because it is the very destruction of the fact, of the notion of the fact, of the factuality of the fact.”50 This is because something has occurred that negates facts and witnessing as much as possible. In Nichanian’s words, “the incredible power of the genocidal will” was to bring about an event that “denies in itself and by itself its belonging to history, that negates and denies its own factuality.”51 As such, the debate is no longer about securing the reality of the referent in order to distinguish history from fiction, as Ginzburg and other historians claimed White was undermining. Instead, the debate is about the status of history as a discipline vis-à-vis an event that negated its own factuality, in which something cannot be presented under the established rules of knowledge. While Ginzburg and other historians did not subscribe to this assessment, for thinkers like Derrida, Nichanian, and Lyotard, Auschwitz can only be a sign (and not a fact) that something new has happened in history, in which “historical knowledge sees its competence impugned.”52 And even 16

INTRODUCTION

more troubling is Derrida’s speculative conclusion that “all these discourses” of knowledge—whether philosophy, history, or others that seek truth—may have a “possible complicity” with “the worst (here the final solution).”53 In other words, the logic of objectivity practiced by historians and the logic of objectivity taken to its limit in Nazism might render the former complicit with the latter in giving rise to the historiographic perversion. Situating the arguments that White made at the 1990 conference within this context, which has deeper roots in Adorno and Horkheimer’s Kulturkritik, would provide a fairer framework to understand his interventions and lay out a challenge that by and large has gone ignored. Taking another step back, we might provide yet another set of markers for tracing out the intellectual lineage for White’s ideas, one that differs markedly from the “fascism” of neo-idealist philosopher Giovanni Gentile, which Ginzburg claimed was the determinant influence in the development of White’s thought.54 To begin with, White’s primary concern with the “reality” derived from the historiographical act found its roots in the concerns of structuralism, and specifically, in Roland Barthes’s notion of “the reality effect”—that is, the narrative strategies that nineteenthcentury authors such as Gustave Flaubert and Jules Michelet deployed to achieve a level of “aesthetic verisimilitude” in their descriptions of real events, objects, and people.55 The concern of both literary realism and historical realism, Barthes argues, was to produce a reality effect by “the direct collusion of a referent and a signifier,” such that “the signified is expelled from the sign.”56 The result is a verisimilitude in which what is written announces itself as and claims to pass for the real. Not unlike the historical novel, as Georg Lukács argues, this verisimilitude rests on a meaningful, coherent, and reliable relationship between the event and the narrative strategies used to emplot it realistically.57 The real event or happening—as in Geschichte or Das Geschehen—is seen to overlap with and even mirror the narrative means (Historie) to emplot it.58 This is because the realism of both the historical novel and nineteenth-century practices of historiography, most famously exemplified by Leopold von Ranke’s dictum that historians should represent the past “wie es eigentlich gewesen” (as it really was), demand a structural homology between real events and the narrative strategies used to represent, capture, and render them meaningful.59 This clearly was also White’s point of departure, and it would not be an exaggeration to say that the nineteenth-century historical imagination, as White has suggested,60 first solidified the reality effect 17

INTRODUCTION

as the cornerstone of history as a discipline and science (as both senses of the concept of “Geschichtswissenschaft” [science of history] convey). However, the injunction to represent reality realistically cannot, of course, be limited to the literary and historiographic practices of the nineteenth century, as Erich Auerbach has shown in Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature.61 It is a persistent intellectual topos that stretches back to Greek antiquity and up through the high modernism of Virginia Woolf. Far from being incommensurable categories, “modern realism” emerged, as White explains following Auerbach, because modernism was already “immanent in classical realism,”62 perhaps in the same way the modernist war event was already immanent in the nineteenth-century mass war described by thinkers such as Karl von Clausewitz, or, as White famously affirmed, “fascism” was already immanent in a liberal society saturated by a “realist culture of history.”63 White explains, therefore, that “modernism appears less as a rejection of the realist project and a denial of history than as an anticipation of a new form of historical reality, a reality that included among its supposedly unimaginable, unthinkable, and unspeakable aspects: the phenomena of Hitlerism, the Final Solution, total war, nuclear contamination, mass starvation, and ecological suicide.”64 White’s interest in the neo-idealist philosophies of history of Benedetto Croce and Giovanni Gentile doesn’t scandalize us today—as it did Ginzburg and many other readers of that exchange—for it simply recognized the modernist tenor of their philosophies of history and of the fascist phenomenon itself.65 Radically different from the Italian philosophers and new in White’s line of argumentation is the recognition that conventional modes of realist representation, with their clear oppositions between fact and fiction, subject and object, agent and patient, literal and figural, may not be sufficient or even appropriate for representing modernist events such as the Holocaust or the wholesale destruction of cities through firebombing or nuclear weapons. Therefore, the techniques of modernism, rather than outmoded conceptions of realism, might offer the necessary strategies for representing the reality of modernist events. Extreme history or “holocaustal events,” to use White’s term, such as the Shoah, the firebombing of cities, nuclear annihilation, and, we might add, 9/11 and the ensuing War on Terrorism “bear little similarity to what earlier historians conventionally took as their objects of study and do not, therefore, lend themselves to understanding by the commonsensical techniques utilized in conventional historical inquiry.”66 The nineteenth-century war 18

INTRODUCTION

event described by Lukács and Clausewitz—with a traditional, realist structure of beginning, middle, and end; with a definitive inside and an outside; and with a meaning that can be definitively adjudicated on a spectrum of true and false, fact and fiction, real and imaginary—has been supplanted, White argues, by a modernist event that resists traditional modes of spectatorship and witnessing as much as it betrays the limits of narrative to represent it realistically, truthfully, and definitively. As such, White wonders whether the “the kind of anomalies, enigmas, and dead ends met with in the discussions of the representations of the Holocaust are the result of a conception of discourse that owes too much to a realism that is inadequate to the representation of events, such as the Holocaust, which are themselves ‘modernist’ in nature.”67 As he points out, modernist events are no longer observed and observable, let alone scalable; agents are no longer singular and individually responsible; and representations can no longer be reduced to a single, authoritative story: “It is the anomalous nature of modernist events—their resistance to inherited categories and conventions for assigning meanings to events—that undermine not only the status of facts in relation to events but also the status of the event in general.”68 Modernist war events no longer unfold— as events—according to the stable unities of time, place, and action, and therefore cannot be captured, communicated, or emplotted by the traditional structures and coherences of realistic narration. Authors such as Hans Adler, Charlotte Delbo, Primo Levi, Georges Perec,  W.  G. Sebald and, more recently, Jonathan Safron Foer, Yann Martel, Daniel Mendelsohn, and others have probed the borderland between literature and history to great effect, undermining realist injunctions of a surrogate position of inviolable spectatorship and blurring the distinctions between fact and fiction, inside and outside, agent and object. In discussing the literature of Levi and Delbo in this volume, Judith Butler, for example, focuses on “the place of fiction in the communication of genocide or the sufferings of those who survived” in order to show how literary writing can be highly attuned to the ethical “by exercising a certain agency in language” and even while bearing witness to the collapse of language and narrative structure. Butler is interested in the “extra-judicial domain” of testimony, which may not hold in a court of law (or before the tribunal of historians demanding facts, documents, and archives), because such testimonial writings can function as acts of solidarity beyond “national or political frames for documentation, narration, and memorialization.”69 19

INTRODUCTION

Far from undermining factuality, then, fiction might contribute to an expressivity of traumatic historical events in ways that historical writing does not. In Austerlitz, for example, Sebald creates a periscopic form of narration that interweaves photography and narrative, biography and autobiography, and historical events and fictional characters to unlink history from the literal reproduction of the past and, instead, open up a space for an intersubjective ethical encounter between the Jewish protagonist and the German narrator, who becomes the steward of Austerlitz’s life story. With regard to witness literature in particular, White proposes the term “figural realism” to emphasize the ways in which figural language can convey the emotional reality of events through new aesthetic strategies and therefore approach real events in ways that historical discourses cannot.70 Here, he is speaking of Levi, but this concept could just as well apply to other authors, like Sebald and Daniel Mendelsohn, who were not experiential eyewitnesses and thus developed figural strategies to represent historical realities, including their own, marked by what Marianne Hirsch calls the experience of “postmemory.”71 For White, the graphic artist Art Spiegelman epitomizes the “figural” theory of language underpinning modernist realism in his multiply mediated survivor’s tale, Maus, while for Hirsch, Maus represents “the aesthetic of the testimonial chain,” in which the fragments of the past form a “narrative of unassimilable loss” as a traumatic marker of “postmemory” in the present.72 And yet the demand or desire for unmediated narrative realism has hardly disappeared, as attested by the case of Binjamin Wilkomirski, author of the 1995 best seller Bruchstücke: Aus einer Kindheit [Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood], 1939–1948.73 As it was billed by the author, the narrative was the true and arresting tale of a deeply victimized child of just three or four years old, retold by an adult more than fifty years later, “exactly the way my child’s memory has held onto it, with no benefit of perspective or vanishing point.” He tells of enduring years of savagery in Nazi death camps, of narrowly escaping his own death, of emerging in fragments from the war only to be given a false identity, a new name, and no history. Wilkomirski writes: “I can only try to use words to draw as exactly as possible what happened.”74 The controversy erupted when it became clear than Wilkomirski was neither a child survivor nor a Jew, and that his memories, as one critic put it, were essentially “second-hand, . . . borrowed, . . . and stolen.”75 Although now regarded as sham testimony—not much better than someone who might 20

INTRODUCTION

have testified to the exact opposite (that the Holocaust did not happen and he was there to witness its nonoccurrence)—prior to the controversy, the book was consistently heaped with adulation and prizes. One reviewer even declared that it was “so free from literary artifice of any kind that I wonder if I even have the right to offer praise.”76 While outright deception and calculated misrepresentation need to be recognized for what they are, perhaps Wilkomirski struck a chord because he offered the ultimate, unmediated, unadulterated, innocent thing-in-itself. The book claimed to be, and was dutifully interpreted as, a child’s naive gaze, uncorrupted by the passage of time, uncorrupted by the figures or tropes of narration, uncorrupted by the politics of representation. He offered the fulfillment of every realist historian’s greatest dream: “wie es eigentlich gewesen” [how it really was]. There was no longer any need to fill in holes, reconstruct the past, or piece together evidence. If nineteenth-century positivism gets closer and closer to reality without ever touching it, much like an asymptote, Wilkomirski offered the point of contact, the purest of the pure. He claimed to offer the truth of Auschwitz, that he “touched down,” that he “saw the Gorgon”—and that he lived to tell about it. It was as if the dead witness was testifying. This says much more about our present-day desires than it can ever say about the truth of Auschwitz.

After Probing the Limits of Representation More than two decades after the first Probing conference in Los Angeles, the outcome of the debates it engendered remains contested. For most historians, the conference confirmed their ability to establish complex events as historical facts, including events best represented as narrative processes and events best characterized as exceptional on the basis of comparative empirical analysis. In essence, history could go on functioning as a discipline. For others outside the discipline of history, Probing the Limits of Representation represented a legendary intellectual rift that highlighted the historical discipline’s inability to come to terms with narrative relativism, let alone an event that seemed to obliterate its own factuality. Depending on one’s perspective, the crisis of history either never happened or is hardly over and might only be addressed by techniques of representation coming from domains such as literature and the arts.77 But what neither camp could anticipate in 1990 were the new epistemological and ethical challenges of comparison and scale posed 21

INTRODUCTION

by popular memory cultures, globalization, and the digitization of the Holocaust. As the historians returned to the civilized world of facts, evidence, and objective narratives characterized by referentiality, many more than “just one witness” came forward to offer public forms of testimony. As Ginzburg suggestively pointed out in the last sentence of his article, referencing the work of Emile Benveniste, one of the definitions of the Latin word for “witness,” superstes, is survivor.78 Although recorded oral histories of survivor testimony had been collected almost immediately after the war in displaced persons camps and continued through various organizational efforts during the ensuing decades, it was not until the 1990s that we see a massive surge of interest in archiving and publishing survivor testimony in the form of video and oral histories as well as personal memoirs. It is this period that Annette Wieviorka characterizes as “the era of the witness,” marked by the “explosion of testimony.”79 While the concepts “witness,” “testimony,” and “survivor” are often triangulated and sometimes conflated, Nichanian continues to argue that the survivor is not the witness, precisely because genocide “destroyed the capacity of bearing witness.”80 Unlike Primo Levi, who differentiated between the “true witnesses” (those who “saw the Gorgon”) and those who survived and therefore might offer their testimony as “a discourse ‘on behalf of third parties,’ ”81 Nichanian is arguing something else, namely, that Nazism invented a logic of destruction in which witnessing became impossible. To the degree that Nazism gave rise to a crisis in history and engendered the historiographic perversion, it also produced a crisis of testimony, making it impossible to bear witness in the established registers of knowledge. Shoshana Felman argued with respect to Claude Lanzmann’s film Shoah, which she sees as documenting the breakdown of witnessing: “Shoah gives us to witness a historical crisis of witnessing.”82 The radical incommensurability of the testimonies of survivors, bystanders, and perpetrators, both with the actual events and each other’s testimony, has turned the Holocaust into “an event without a witness,” “an absolute historical event whose literally overwhelming evidence makes it, paradoxically, into an utterly proofless event.” It is not that the Holocaust lacked empirical witnesses; rather, it precluded the possibility of “any community of witnessing” and, therefore, “the commensurability between two different seeings.”83 For Felman, cultural artifacts such as Lanzmann’s Shoah or Paul Celan’s poetry convey the exceptional structure of “the proofless event” through this incommensurability by calling 22

INTRODUCTION

into question the very status of language and image making to bear witness in the first place: “It is beyond the shock of being stricken, but nonetheless within the wound and from within the woundedness that the event, incomprehensible though it may be, becomes accessible.”84 If language (or, we might argue, image making) survived after the Holocaust, it is only because it went through, in Celan’s words, its own “answerlessness, [having] passed through the thousand darknesses of death-bringing speech.”85 But this argument is not something that survivors or historians could (or should) easily accept because testimony—whether in the form of oral or written attestation—was aggressively put forward as proof, as evidence for the civilized world that this happened, in much the same way as the factual documents that were preserved in the archive or adduced in courts of law. Historians, like jurists, would find it difficult to agree with the idea of the Holocaust as a “proofless event” without witnesses since, in their self-perception, they have made great progress in analyzing the vast amount of documentary evidence left behind by the Nazis and integrating witness testimony into truthful historiographical analyses of the crimes.86 For thinkers like Derrida, however, testimony is better understood not as a proof but rather as a pledge or promise, one that has a precarious transactional, intersubjective component between the one who testifies and the one who listens. Bearing witness is not proving but appealing “to an act of faith,” as in a promise that is always open to betrayal, miscontrual, or even infidelity.87 In this regard, the ethical moment in testimony comes precisely at the moment of reaching out to the other, that moment of address in which the traumatized witness implores the listener that what he or she experienced actually happened. As such, the listener is not asked to know (since such experiential knowledge is impossible) but rather to believe and be open to the voice of the other. It is in this precarious nexus of bearing witness that trauma theory emerged as a discursive approach for thinking the limits of representation from the standpoint of survivors’ testimony. As Cathy Caruth has argued in her influential study of trauma, the question of representation is at the heart of testimony because it concerns how trauma is turned into narrative or how the wound is given voice.88 Centrally influenced by the Freudian concepts of belatedness, transference, the return of the repressed, and the idea of working through the past, literary and cultural theorists have shown how “we need all our memory-institutions”—from history writing and video testimonies to literature and art—to foster the transition 23

INTRODUCTION

from personal trauma to cultural memory.89 Testimony requires a social context and intersubjective ethical relationship, which includes the attentive presence of an interviewer or listener who is, in the words of Dori Laub, “party to the creation of knowledge de novo.” In this sense, “the testimony of the trauma thus includes its hearer, who is, so to speak, the blank screen on which the event comes to be inscribed for the first time.” As such, the listener to the trauma becomes “a participant and co-owner of the traumatic event.”90 In a similar vein, Geoffrey Hartman has argued that the ethical resides in the performative space of bearing witness and receiving testimony, in being open to the appeal of the other.91 Critics of trauma studies have pointed out that the interdisciplinary, deconstructive trauma paradigm, which announced itself with considerable pathos in the mid-1990s, was based on a selective reading of psychoanalytic and psychiatric scholarship, tended to conflate traumatic and nontraumatic experiences, showed little interest in the perspectives of actual trauma victims, and displayed a puzzling, apodictically negative view of narrative.92 In the meantime, the field of cultural trauma studies has shed some of the deconstructive orthodoxies and is addressing the important and intriguing question of how the Western notion of trauma can be responsibly deployed in the study of postcolonial violence. Despite certain shortcomings, the concept of cultural trauma remains an indispensable tool of cultural criticism, especially in the context of postcolonial and comparative genocide studies where the question of the implication of the routines of historiographical practice in the construction of collective frameworks of violence has been posed.93 The processual movement between individual trauma and collective trauma appears to evolve more easily into ethical practices of remembrance when institutional and social settings bring together the aesthetics of empiricism (history), the aesthetics of entertainment (media), and the aesthetics of testimony (trauma), which we have tried to do in the present volume. Indeed, these aesthetic registers are at play in many realms of Holocaust culture, including in the series of high-profile institutions founded during the era of the witness and designed to codify Holocaust and genocide memory for future generations. In the United States, for example, one might consider these three aesthetic realms triangulated in the mid-1990s through the opening of the  U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) in Washington, D.C., in 1993, the release of Schindler’s List that same year, and the establishment of the Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive in 1994. All three integrate the aesthetics of 24

INTRODUCTION

empiricism with the aesthetics of entertainment and the aesthetics of testimony. In Germany, a country with comparatively few survivors and, until 1990, two competing memory cultures divided between East and West Germany, public memory reflected global Holocaust culture but also took a different route. The relative absence of survivors and the real and symbolic presence of many perpetrators, coupled with the surge of national attention to the Holocaust through public debates and policy reforms, memorial sites, and commemorative practices, shifted the focus on figurations of memory marked by gaps, voids, and absences. The ubiquitous absent presence of victims and the present absence of perpetrators have often been captured in self-consciously ambivalent postmodern aesthetics. One sees the figuration of absence in memorials that obliquely marked space of destruction (such as Christian Boltanski’s “Missing House” in Berlin), outright disappeared from view (such as Jochen Gerz’s Hamburg Holocaust memorial), or sought to create permanent sites of emptiness through voids and architectural fissures (such as Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin). Peter Eisenman’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (2005) in Berlin has architectural and sculptural elements that figure absence in a way that destabilizes viewing and produces a sense of vertigo as the human body moves deeper into the center of the monument. More subtle memorials have also sprung up across Germany and Europe, perhaps most pervasively Gunter Demnig’s Stolpersteine (stumbling stones). As memorial plaques embedded in streets, they mark sites of destruction at the addresses where victims of National Socialism— Jews, Sinti and Roma, homosexuals, Jehovah’s witnesses, political dissidents, and victims of euthanasia—used to live.94 None of the larger cultural formations of Holocaust remembrance has avoided the pitfalls of routine reproduction and effortless consumption. TV and film producers have sometimes turned Holocaust iconography and survivor stories into disturbingly uplifting prime time television, especially in Germany.95 Holocaust historians have arrived in the historiographical mainstream, accumulated a great deal of knowledge, and thus also contained the horror of the Final Solution within the routines and rituals of their craft. Even the poststructuralist credo of self-reflexivity is not immune to academic standardization and ritualized replication, as some aspects of the field of cultural trauma studies illustrate. But, in particular, the popular forms of Holocaust culture that have been most often accused of misrepresenting the Final Solution have played a decisive role 25

INTRODUCTION

in the recalibration of historical culture in the West. In this vein, Holocaust and its precursor, the TV slavery epic Roots, helped shift the focus to the historical experiences of average people, demonstrating that ordinary people’s struggle for survival deserved the same attention as traditional historical topics like military history and high politics.96 The change of perspective, leading to a significant extension of the spectrum of legitimate historical topics and viewpoints, took place in nonacademic and academic settings, and was initially closely linked to the social movements of the 1970s. Through seductive images (such as the “little girl in red”) and classical story formats that rest on “principles of compositional unity, motivation, linearity, equilibrium, and closure” (such as individuated characters who overcome adversity; story-like narratives with a clear beginning, middle, and end; and the resolution of large-scale problems through the restoration of the family and conventional social hierarchies),97 film and television amplified, repackaged, and depoliticized the bottom-up perspective of everyday history, oral history, and microhistory as it was practiced in the history workshop movements and select academic institutions across Europe and the United States.98 And when the new history became popular with consumers, television and film exerted significant pressure on other cultural institutions to follow suit. The aesthetic-narrative framework of Holocaust history thus assumed its distinct shape when cultural elites and media consumers in the West developed an unprecedented, self-reflexive curiosity about the victims, underdogs, and antiheroes of history. The very same framework subsequently advanced into the position of a new transnational master narrative when it proved very useful in the shifting political landscapes after the end of the Cold War, when well-funded memory and heritage initiatives replaced the bottomup liberal historical visions of the 1970s.99 The confluence of political interests and entertainment patterns helped establish Holocaust memory as a “civic religion,” expressed in many official museums and memorials and for instance in the Stockholm Declaration of 2000.100 Consequently, by casting everyday NS perpetrators in the role of important historical actors, historians absorbed the paradigm of everyday history that had revolutionized the representation of history in the media. Historians responded to the unusual narrative worlds crafted by film auteurs like Edgar Reitz, Claude Lanzmann, Steven Spielberg, Ken Burns, and the seemingly inexhaustible series of powerful, professionally produced film and TV fare that emanated from Hollywood as well as British, German, and U.S. public television networks.101 With some delay, 26

INTRODUCTION

the academic research about individuals—from victims to everyday perpetrators—in turn influenced mainstream historical culture in an ongoing process of interpretive cross-pollination. Considered from this perspective, the internationally distributed 2013 German TV play Generation War integrates the well-established TV genre of survivor history with the bottom-up, social science approach to perpetrator history spearheaded by Browning.102 The media event that first exemplified the new stakes was without doubt Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List in 1993, and the ensuing establishment of what would become the Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive, which in its initial ambitions aimed to collect every living survivor’s testimony on video.103 The foundation proceeded by using the structural formula of the film itself, going back in time to capture the survivors’ stories according to the narrative logic of what happened before the war, what happened during the war, what happened after the war, and a future message in the context of family and survivorship. The more than 52,000 stories recorded by the Shoah Foundation pick up precisely where Schindler’s List left off, namely, in the full-color, commemorative spaces of the present, with the transition from actors, actresses, and stage sets to the real lives and voices of Holocaust survivors narrating their own stories of survival and hope. In four years’ time, another unlikely Oscar-winning blockbuster, Roberto Benigni’s Life Is Beautiful, would up the ante by exploding the taboo of a romantic-comic emplotment of the Holocaust. The film explicitly established a parallel between the fate of the Jews and the fate of Italian POWs, who, like Benigni’s father, had been imprisoned by the Nazis after the armistice of September 1943. Evidently, long gone were the times in which Andreas Hillgruber’s parallel between the fate of Jews in the Final Solution and the fate of displaced Germans after the war had inflamed German historians and still reverberated with the participants at the first Probing conference.104 Benigni’s film made clear that we were now in an age in which popular Holocaust culture characterized by an aesthetic of entertainment could give direction to Holocaust historical studies. But the definitive liquidation of the “factual” in Holocaust cinema would have to wait for the counterfactual world of Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds (2009), which not only shattered any limit imposed by the historical record on its representation, but also codified a broader political shift from the representation of the Jew as victim or survivor to the Jew as triumphant and avenging. 27

INTRODUCTION

But film is not simply tantamount to the aesthetic of entertainment, as it also participates in both the aesthetic of empiricism and the aesthetic of testimony, something that is exemplified, for example, by the documentaries of Peter Forgács and Yael Hersonski, discussed in this book. Both filmmakers use editing and montage techniques to select and recombine materials from existing archives of found footage—in the case of Forgács, the found footage is the home movies of the Peereboom family shot in the Netherlands before and during World War II; in the case of Hersonski, the found footage is an unfinished (and previously lost) Nazi propaganda film, Das Ghetto, shot in the Warsaw ghetto in the months before it was liquidated. Not unlike the argument proposed by media theorist Lev Manovich to analyze the database cinema of modernist filmmakers such as Dziga Vertov and Sergei Eisenstein, both Forgács and Hersonski utilize the combinatory medium of film to stage remediated narratives from existing archives while also calling into question both the authority of the archive and the certainty of the medium itself. Far from the classical narratives that emotionally suture the spectator to the screen, Forgács and Hersonski—as Nitzan Lebovic argues—denaturalize cinema by exposing its visual epistemologies, the tekhnê or dispositif of Holocaust representation, through the power of the archive.105 As such, their films lay bare the paradigmatic (selection) and syntagmatic (combinatory) elements at the heart of historical emplotment not in order to re-create a nonfictional historical universe, but rather to raise questions about the status of the archive, the authority of the image, and the ethics of spectatorship. On the one hand, they rely on digital reproduction technologies and even historical reconstruction sequences (in the case of Hersonski) to extract the patina of the past from the images they have reedited into their films; on the other, they affirm the importance of unintentional visual evidence to escape from the prefabricated narratives found in official documentary archives. Hersonski’s commentary on the expressions we see in the faces of Jews forced to “perform” in front of the Nazi cameras or Forgács’s decision to juxtapose Jewish and Nazi home movies regarding the fate of Dutch Jews are quite congruent with Friedländer’s choice of bringing the voices of the victims to take center stage in his integrated history of the Holocaust. But in no case do we encounter a synthesis; instead, we are witnesses to the fragmentary evidence and lost, individual stories that comprise an aesthetic of testimony through images and sounds evoking disbelief. 28

INTRODUCTION

Macrohistories: Scale and the Digitization of the Holocaust While much attention has been trained on the microhistories of the Holocaust as told through individual stories, survivor testimonials, and everyday perpetrators, another historiographic method and representational strategy, instigated in part by the development of digital technologies and computational visualizations, has also emerged: namely, macrohistory. Far from simply making synthetic or totalizing claims, macrohistory aims to model, map, and visualize large-scale dynamics that might not otherwise be visible, while simultaneously interrogating the assumptions governing these technologies and the data they use. On March 1, 2013, a New York Times article broke that upended scholarship on the scope and scale of Nazi atrocities.106 While it was common knowledge that the Nazis created an interlinking system of ghettos, transit camps, slave labor and concentration camps, and extermination camps, postwar estimates had put the total number of such sites at a couple of thousand. New research findings by a team of scholars at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum who were working to create a comprehensive encyclopedia of camps and ghettos established by the Nazis between 1933 and 1945 revealed a “vast universe” of more than 42,000 such sites, many of which were previously undocumented or unknown.107 In fact, this number was double an earlier one put out by a press release from the USHMM in 2009, which itself was already several times more than researchers had first thought.108 All told, as reported by the New York Times, the team had documented some 30,000 slave labor camps; 1,150 Jewish ghettos; 980 concentration camps; 1,000 prisoner of war camps; 500 brothels with sex slaves; and thousands of other camps used for euthanasia, many of which were dotted throughout major German cities. To compile, organize, and visualize this data, the team assembled vast databases of place names linked with historical records and other information such as the type of prisoners at the camp, the camp commanders and guards, the companies or other organizations affiliated with the camp, the dates of operation and liberation, and so forth. Much of this data could be visualized on maps using the analytic tools of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to track development over time or study certain networks and relationships between sites. The Geographies of the Holocaust project analyzed in this book is a convergent attempt, using some of the same data, to employ GIS as an analytical framework for creating “synoptic” views of the Holocaust.109 29

INTRODUCTION

As the Holocaust is steadily “digitized” through massive databases such as the ones created by the USHMM, the Geographies of the Holocaust project, Yad Vashem, the Shoah Foundation, and the International Tracing Service (ITS) at Bad Arolsen, questions of metadata (data about data) come to the foreground, precisely as a radical shift in scale seems to facilitate a different set of research questions. In the words of Johanna Drucker, a pioneer in the digital humanities: “Arguably, few other textual forms will have greater impact on the way we read, receive, search, access, use, and engage with the primary materials of humanities studies than the metadata structures that organize and present that knowledge in digital form.”110 This is because the primary materials that are digitized—whether video testimonies, camp records, pages of testimony, photographs, or other documents—only gain meaning in a computational environment when they are described and organized by data structures that algorithmic processes can recognize and read. While it is too early to say whether this will result in an epistemological shift in kind (or whether it will be enveloped into historical practices as a change in degree), the digitization of the Holocaust allows scholars to undertake approaches to historical study that can only be managed with computational tools, visualization, and information processing. While humans are, of course, responsible for the computational tools, the digitization, and the metadata structures, human comprehension is not sufficient to process the totality of a database of millions of linked records, such as the 7 million tables of metadata comprising the Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive, the 50 million records in the International Tracing Service archive that reference the fates of 17.5 million people, or the millions of individuals and life stories in Yad Vashem’s Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names. In a computational mode of representation, it is common to toggle between the singular and the global, the microhistory and the macrohistory, for example, the individual experiences of a particular eyewitness and a “holistic” experience derived from all the data in the database. Importantly, the latter does not represent the reality of “the Holocaust” (as a complete or total event) but rather the totality of the data in the database or archive. Claudio Fogu argues in his critique of the Geographies of the Holocaust project that this toggling corresponds to a “navigational” reconceptualization of both narrative and reference. Of course, it might be argued that historians already do this insofar as they emplot events at various levels of “zoom”—to use an apposite word—in order 30

INTRODUCTION

to convey different kinds of meaning. In fact, already in 1969, Siegfried Kracauer had theorized the historical universe in terms of camera work, distinguishing macrohistories, which he likened to panoramic shots, and microhistories, which he likened to close-ups.111 While Kracauer used this argument to highlight the incommensurability between the two, contemporary historians and geographers toggle back and forth between macrolevel accounts of the totality of the event (zoomed out) and microlevel accounts of individual experiences (zoomed in), which are, by their very nature, defined by specific locales and perspectives. With regard to the former, we might consider Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands, an attempt to create a macrolevel geographic and temporal framework that illuminates the overlapping workings of two systems of annihilation, Hitlerism and Stalinism.112 With regard to the latter, we might consider the work of Jan Gross on Jedwabne, Poland, or perhaps Christopher Browning’s study of Police Battalion 101.113 Deliberately moving between macro- and microlevel accounts of events in a way that appears quite modernist, Saul Friedländer’s “globally oriented inquiry” into the history of the Holocaust examines the encompassing “ideological-cultural factors” and mythologies of the Nazi regime by recounting the totality of events, actions, and numbers, while also calling on the individual voices and personal chronicles of diary and letter writers. In so doing, his aim is “to illuminate parts of the landscape . . . like lightning flashes,” and thereby “pierce the (mostly involuntary) smugness of scholarly detachment and ‘objectivity.’ ”114 The result is a relatively disorienting work of Holocaust historiography that continuously toggles between macro- and microlevel accounts of the Holocaust, events at a bird’s-eye level and individual eyewitnesses on the ground, whose perspective is limited to the capacities and contingencies of human apprehension at that time. Although organized into chronological sections, Friedländer’s narrative is crafted through spatial simultaneity and therefore seems to instantiate a modernist form of Holocaust historiography.115 However close these histories come in opening up a multiplicity of perspectives to account for the elements that represent the totality of the Holocaust, we have yet to see a comprehensive history of the Holocaust that uses computational modes of inquiry and analyses to radically shift the scale of artifacts, documents, witnesses, and events under consideration. Perhaps the work being undertaken by the team at the USHMM to create the seven-volume Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933–1945 31

INTRODUCTION

and the mapping projects described in Geographies of the Holocaust represent two forerunners of this kind of computational historiography. Of course, we are still in the very early stages of understanding what new research questions can be asked and answered using computational tools. A significant strand of research will certainly connect to the analysis of “big data,” which comes from the fact that the Holocaust is one of the most thoroughly documented and studied events of the twentieth century (something that owes, in part, to the fastidious documentation produced by the Nazis themselves and something that owes to the extensive empirical work carried out by the historical profession during the past several decades). With new tools such as information visualization, mapping, text mining, modeling, and network analysis emerging from the digital humanities, the Holocaust may become the historical “test case” for macroanalysis or what literary scholar Franco Moretti calls “distant reading.” Such a practice moves away from the close, hermeneutical reading of a small, representative selection of texts, witness testimonies, or artifacts in favor of large-scale, algorithmic approaches that reveal overarching structures, trends, networks, and patterns that are not discernable when the focus remains on a handful of close readings of individual texts.116 At the same time, as Fogu argues in his analysis, even in a project as driven by the digital as Geographies of the Holocaust, there remains a tension between the distant gaze of reading space on a map and the empathic scale of “place,” which brings the scholar back to the chimerical dream of capturing subjective experience. And there are other risks involved in such an enterprise, not least of all the possible reduction of complexity and loss of attentiveness to detail that large-scale, macroanalysis may engender. Another risk is the quantification of the Holocaust in ways that replicate or abstract the victims’ lives and partake in the same rationalized logic of modernity that Zygmunt Bauman identified in his seminal work, Modernity and the Holocaust, as the condition of possibility for genocide, namely, the impulse to quantify, modularize, distantiate, and technify.117 As Presner argues in his analysis of the database and information architecture of the Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive, the digitization of the Holocaust archive requires the development of an “ethics of the algorithm” that neither facilely adopts nor cavalierly dismisses computation. Rather than equating computational analyses with mere quantification or objectivism, we might productively tarry with a modernist form of computation that facilitates a multiplicity of perspectives and possible 32

INTRODUCTION

stories by exposing its conditions of possibility and structuring assumptions in order to raise questions and even doubts. The Geographies of the Holocaust project has created new maps and visualizations of the history of the Holocaust, which add to the aesthetic representations of the Holocaust in ways that are speculative, propositional, and hypothesisdriven. And, as Fogu underlines in his essay, these maps, models, and visualizations are also suffused by “artificiality” or “artfulness” in that they are snapshots of propositions or constructions of a state of knowledge. Quite appropriately, then, their call for a “synoptic” geography of the Holocaust finds echo in W. G. Sebald’s call to create a “synoptic and artificial view” (synoptische, künstliche Blick) of the totality of destruction (in this case, the firebombing of Hamburg).118 For Sebald, literature written by non-eyewitnesses ex post facto can create a “synoptic” view of the whole or totality of the destruction in a way that is “artificial” or perhaps even “artful,” since it can aggregate many different time periods (before, during, and after the event), many different views (inside and outside the event), many different perspectives (perpetrator, victim, bystander), and many different kinds of knowledge (experiential, qualitative, quantitative). The challenge—still unmet—is to develop computational forms of representation in a modernist register that are synoptic and artificial, realistic and modernist at the same time. And, finally, there is the question of media specificity, particularly since the representation of the Holocaust—prior to computational analyses and digital media—was a global moral yardstick in the era of linear media, particularly textual narratives, film, television, radio, and, to a certain extent, architecture. Each of these media forms is relatively sequential, additive, stable, and controllable in ways that delimit representations, define authorship, and control reception and dissemination in predictable ways. It was acceptable for the Holocaust to be a film, book, or television show because it could be presented as a stable, linear, and consumable story with a defined meaning and clear-cut modes of reception. This is hardly the case with interactive, web-based media (the Holocaust as video game or crowd-sourced models for tagging archival materials). As such, institutions of Holocaust memory, such as the Shoah Foundation and Yad Vashem, have played an admirable, even pioneering role in digitizing Holocaust culture and creating searchable databases, but they have kept a fearful distance from truly open, interactive, web-based media formats or exposing their data to the World Wide Web. In this regard, digital Holocaust culture is at odds with popular digital culture whose users are driven 33

INTRODUCTION

by the ability to shape content in the process of consumption. Of course, there are simple and powerful reasons for this disconnect: Holocaust culture has been erected against precursors that failed to acknowledge the historical relevance of the Final Solution and in competition with real and imaginary others who denied the Holocaust’s very existence. Therefore, Holocaust memory administrators and their funding agencies have shied away from crafting interactive digital historical worlds that give users a great deal of power, including counterfactual power, in the creation of digital universes.

Comparative and Colonial Genocide Studies The moral injunctions of Holocaust memory, such as never forget! and especially never again! contain a comparative impetus and seem to symbolize the interconnectedness between the memory of the Holocaust and that of other genocides. But the field of Holocaust studies has only recently developed sustained comparative interests that are sometimes quite contested, perhaps because the founding generation of Holocaust historians, theorists, and the experiential eyewitnesses were deeply invested in advancing Holocaust history and theory in ways that sought to understand or position the Holocaust as the defining event of the twentieth century. At the same time, the field of genocide studies has matured, partly due to the flourishing of postcolonial studies, and partly due to the global—geographic and historical—view espoused by the field. Yet much of the theoretical and popular culture associated with Holocaust studies was—explicitly or implicitly—developed by arguing for (or assuming) the Holocaust’s exceptionality: as a limit or test case, as a unique and absolute event, as the fundamental challenge to Western civilization, and, self-reflexively, as a unique field of study to “probe the limits of representation.” The serious challenge to this Holocaust paradigm is advanced by scholars who study genocide from a comparative perspective and integrate the history of the Final Solution into the history of modern colonialism.119 Clearly, the challenge is partly ethically motivated, and it is also inseparable from the political realities and alliances that define the present age. Many comparativists would side with Peter Novick, who pointedly argued in 1998 that “the assertion that the Holocaust is unique—like the claim that it is singularly incomprehensible or unrepresentable—is, in practice, deeply offensive. What else can all of this possibly mean except 34

INTRODUCTION

‘your catastrophe, unlike ours, is ordinary; unlike ours is comprehensible; unlike ours is representable.’ ”120 Like Novick, scholars in the field of comparative genocide studies have moral reservations about any kind of Holocaust exceptionalism and seek to develop a more balanced, more “democratic” perspective on past and present events of genocide, mass violence, and human atrocity. While few, if any, scholars would seriously contemplate constructing hierarchies of suffering based on the most egregious violations of the social contract, the proponents of the comparative genocide/colonialism paradigm strive to establish a conceptual point of view from which all human rights violations are equally deserving of scholarly recognition and situate that recognition within a broader, often politically inflected critique of disciplines, institutions, and national memory cultures. They start from the assumption that all victims are created equal.121 The transition in Holocaust historiography from a Holocaust-centered paradigm to a paradigm invested in the study of comparative genocide and, especially, colonial genocide thus raises fundamental questions for the future of the field of Holocaust studies.122 The founding generation of Holocaust historians who participated in the expansion of the field since the 1970s were not primarily interested in creating spaces for comparative approaches to flourish. Holocaust scholars generally assume that the genocide of European Jewry raises unique problems of explanation and interpretation. They feel that the Holocaust is more difficult to explain than the crimes associated with colonialism and want to maintain distinctions, for example, between the crimes committed by Germans in Poland between 1939 and 1944 and those committed by Germans against the Herero in 1904, or between those crimes committed by the Nazi Einsatzgruppen in the early 1940s and those crimes of famine committed by the Soviets in the Ukraine in the early 1930s.123 With few exceptions, Holocaust historians tend to argue that the latter crimes can be grasped by a fairly conventional range of motives, including material and political ambition coupled with racism. While Holocaust scholars like Friedländer continue to insist on an element of inexplicability inherent in the events of the Final Solution, comparative and colonial genocide scholars interpret that insistence as reflecting lingering sentiments of Western/European hubris, and therefore seek to push the Holocaust off its pedestal of exceptionality by arguing that it represents one genocide among many such crimes carried out by the West. These crimes, they argue, stretch back to centuries of slavery, 35

INTRODUCTION

imperialism, and genocidal racism perpetuated by the West. As Aimé Césaire provocatively wrote in his 1955 Discourse on Colonialism, the only thing new about Hitlerism, he argues, was the fact that it represented a “crime against the white man, the humiliation of the white man, and the fact that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India, and the blacks of Africa.” In other words, Césaire argues that the Nazi crimes of the Holocaust have not only been perpetuated across the globe repeatedly in the name of Western civilization (in the Americas, Indochina, German-occupied southwest Africa, the Belgian Congo, French-occupied Algeria, and Madagascar), but that these crimes have been “tolerated” up until now because they had been perpetuated against non-European peoples.124 This is the ethical and historical challenge at the heart of comparative genocide studies. It is also a challenge inextricably involved in political and generational memory politics in the field of Holocaust studies. A new generation of scholars like Donald Bloxham, Dirk Moses, Michael Rothberg, and Elisabeth Weber have highlighted how competing memory politics are deeply entangled in one another and often vie for legitimacy. As such, new comparative paradigms have begun to displace the one established not only by historians like Hilberg, Bauer, and Friedländer but also theorists, critics, and filmmakers such as Lyotard, Felman, Lanzmann, and many others. At the same time, critics have drawn attention to the ways in which the perception of the Holocaust’s exceptionality is yoked to collective memories codified through institutional formations, political power, research funding, and performative acts of commemoration that are themselves inseparable from feelings of national identity.125 The uniqueness paradigm is strongly upheld by key segments of Israeli, American, and German political and memorial culture and, as Weber and Moses separately argue, sometimes at the expense of acknowledging and confronting other atrocities. And by way of collective Jewish self-perception and criticism of Israel, all of the discussions receive an extra emotional charge when deployed—many times for diametrically opposing political ends—within the contemporary context of Israel-Palestine.126 Methodologically, the field of comparative genocide studies combines elements of moral and political critique with empirical integrity, particularly to integrate the history of the Holocaust into a broader story of colonial appropriation and ethnic cleansing. The German military and the security police were very aware of Hitler’s plan for a colonial empire in 36

INTRODUCTION

Eastern Europe long before the soldiers crossed the Polish border. As a result, the German troops, as yet without the help of indigenous collaborators, unleashed a campaign of mass murder and ethnic cleansing designed to turn the Polish people into a docile, leaderless, and ethnically homogenous caste of helots. The vast majority of German overlords very much enjoyed their power over life and death in Poland, settled in for the long term, and remained keenly aware of the fact that their role as Eastern European colonizers differed substantially from their role as Western European military occupiers. In France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Norway, and Denmark, the German troops brutally repressed any real or perceived political and military resistance, but refrained from subjecting the nonJewish populations to large-scale ethnic cleansing campaigns. By contrast, and coming from both Hitler and Stalin at the same time, it was the east that was to be colonized by conquering the vast arable lands in Eastern Europe and cleansing them of all undesirables.127 Empire building continued with the attack on the Soviet Union and until 1943, genocide was compatible with German colonial objectives. In fact, the Nazis initially launched the mass murder of Jewish civilians as part of their attempts to safeguard their long-term control of occupied Polish and Soviet territory. Considered with hindsight, however, the genocidal policies after 1943 are no longer as easily integrated into narratives of colonization. Did Eichmann’s deputies who deported Jews from Hungary in May 1944 really believe that they might still get a chance to exploit a colonial empire in Eastern Europe? Perhaps the colonial habitus survived a lot longer than anti-Semitic instrumental reason and the Brunners and Wislicenys kept murdering because that was their job and they did not know what else to do while avoiding frontline duty. Or maybe it was the other way around and their anti-Semitic passions topped their colonial ambitions. They pressed on because they hoped to succeed in their anti-Jewish mission, despite the fact that their dream of empire had failed. For Holocaust scholars like Friedländer and Bartov these kinds of questions raise doubts about the explanatory value of the colonialism paradigm for the interpretation of Holocaust history. Friedländer argues, in the epilogue to this volume, that colonial ambition cannot explain the far-flung deportation and mass-murder network that covered all of Europe. For him and many of his colleagues, other motives, particularly anti-Semitic ideology, played a more important role. While colonial ambitions may have existed, the Holocaust was fundamentally an 37

INTRODUCTION

anti-Jewish event and that subsuming it into a broader (comparative or even universalizing) context dilutes the pervasiveness of anti-Semitism and the specificity of Jewish suffering and Jewish victimhood. The Holocaust was certainly unique for its Jewish victims, a point that should not be obscured in the move to contextualize its violence, explain its events, and universalize its meaning. The challenge of comparative genocide memory (as opposed to comparative genocide studies) thus consists of developing cultures of remembrance that pay similar respect to victims of different mass crimes. Self-reflexive memory is not a zero-sum game, and, as Michael Rothberg argues in this volume, it is possible to craft narrative worlds about multiple victim groups without detracting from the specific suffering of any one group. These interpretive differences between the Holocaust and the genocide studies paradigms are further noticeable in the diverging assessments of specific episodes of Holocaust history. Friedländer believes, for instance, that the extraordinary speed and zealousness with which the Nazis deported Jews from Hungary in 1944 provides key insights into the events of the Final Solution in general.128 In contrast, for scholars such as Donald Bloxham, the deportation from Hungary has played an important role in conjuring up an inaccurate image of the Holocaust in the postwar imagination: “The murder of the Hungarian Jews was not representative of the murder of most Holocaust victims. . . . Contrary to popular conception, extermination camps complemented rather than replaced the more intimate method of murder.”129 With this argument, Bloxham emphasizes that most victims were killed by disease, starvation, killing squads, and relatively primitive gas chambers, and that the Final Solution consequently looked more like an “ordinary” genocide than people have assumed after the war. Moreover and more important, the two paradigms develop very different narrative worlds. Holocaust scholars increasingly try to grasp synthetically the full scope of the Final Solution, but they focus on the geographical expanse of Nazi policies within the years 1933 to 1945. By contrast, scholars who pursue a comparative genocide perspective regularly cast a much wider net both diachronically and synchronically. They insert the events of the Final Solution into a much broader, global history of European colonial empires and violence, ending with the intricate history of Holocaust memory;130 they study the Final Solution and Soviet crimes side by side, stressing the interactions between both campaigns of politically justified mass murder;131 and, in fact, they even leave behind 38

INTRODUCTION

the conceptual confines of genocide studies and analyze the record and interdependencies between a broad range of incidences of political violence committed by multiple actors in Europe’s long twentieth century.132 As such, the Holocaust is integrated into overarching, global-oriented narrative frameworks rather than singled out in its uniqueness and exceptionality as the challenge to Western civilization. Even more pointedly, scholars like Moses, building on the insights of postcolonial intellectuals like Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon, wonder why “it took the Nazi treatment of Europeans as colonial subalterns to shock Europeans” in the first place and thus ask why “Europeans [had] not been more shocked by their own colonial violence.”133 Far from simply rhetorical questions, they signal a fundamental reorientation of the field and its intellectual, political, and ethical priorities. At the same time, genocide studies have also shown how the Holocaust represents an unusual case of being, at one and the same time, both a colonial and subaltern genocide leading to especially destructive and persistent mass murder even after the project of empire had failed. As Moses has argued elsewhere, the Holocaust unified a number of “different, even contradictory imperial and colonial logics into one terrible paranoid mentality and praxis,” integrating conventional motives of ruthless imperial conquest and notions of racial superiority with extreme fears of Jews as colonizers.134 One can imagine Friedländer or Bauer following that logic—providing that this combination of genocidal motives is deemed a rare occurrence in the history of political violence. In this sense, integrating the Holocaust into the history of genocide is not altogether incompatible with complex notions of Holocaust exceptionalism. And yet, the field of comparative genocide studies lacks a champion of self-reflexive, modernist historiography and perhaps for this reason, the large-scale analytical models of genocide studies suffer from some of the same epistemological objectivism that befalls all historical master narratives. Perhaps this shortcoming has to be attributed to the fact that the field of comparative genocide studies is still quite nascent, with its own blind spots, biases, and internal battles, even while the field has greatly expanded to fulfill Raphael Lemkin’s comprehensive understanding of the concept of genocide to include the study of pre- and post-1900 colonial genocides (rather than remaining singularly focused on twentieth-century totalitarianisms or post–Cold War “failed states”). Or maybe the relative abundance of representational experimentalism and metahistorical curiosity, which we have acknowledged as an accomplishment of Holocaust 39

INTRODUCTION

studies, has an altogether different meaning. Perhaps these experiments mark a disturbing continuity of self-centeredness linking the exceptionalisms attributed to the event of the Final Solution to the exceptional self-reflexivity performed in the cultural and scholarly discourses of Holocaust memory. In putting together the third section of this book, the editors sought to assemble a set of responses that interrogate the exceptionality paradigm from all directions—methodological, disciplinary, cultural-historical, and theoretical—in order to expose a set of critical questions and issues that will likely define the intellectual contours of the fields of Holocaust and genocide studies in the coming decades. These chapters are at once speculative and provocative, each providing a pointed critique and ethical orientation at a time of tremendous transition in the cultural memories, intellectual landscapes, and political claims of the present. Far from definitive statements or prescriptive programs, they each open up a set of overlapping issues that might help form some of the groundwork for a shared future. The tour d’horizon of Holocaust studies raises intriguing questions about the illusive goal of self-critical cultural representations of past crimes. The answers to these questions depend on many things, including how one chooses to narrate the history of Holocaust remembrance, in what context, for whom, and to what ends. Obviously, there are disturbing parallels between dogmatic Holocaust exceptionalism and ideologies of national exceptionalism from manifest destiny to Jewish chosenness and the German Sonderweg (special path). But perhaps it was precisely these parallels that turned the Holocaust paradigm into the only transnational framework of remembrance that temporarily sustained a truly self-critical historical culture in the country of the perpetrators. Perhaps Germans required the rigid, even arrogant moral certainty of Holocaust exceptionalism and its forceful accusatory tone to begin serious conversations about the meaning of their crimes. None of the other transnationally circulating frameworks from Marxism-Leninism and antitotalitarianism to European Union (EU) memory and anticolonialism has, or promises to have, similarly productive effects on German collective self-perceptions. But this era of self-reflection and collective meaning appears to have reached an end or at least a saturation point. German historical culture in the new millennium occasionally seems to be more concerned with highlighting the moral achievement of having crafted an extraordinarily self-reflexive culture than with self-critically recalling the extraordinary 40

INTRODUCTION

crimes that required building that culture in the first place. What does it mean, then, when the Holocaust has become “unlimited,” freed of the limitations set by prior generations of historians, critics, filmmakers, and authors? What does such a landscape look like, what ethical challenges does it raise, and how do we responsibly probe it in the shifting intellectual and political terrains of the present? From what vantage points can we develop truly self-critical memories of collective violence today? That is the challenge of Probing the Ethics of Holocaust Culture. This book is arranged in three, interlocking parts that cross-reference one another in terms of theme, methodology, and disciplinary approaches. Part I, “The Stakes of Narrative,” examines “idioms” that blur the boundaries between fact and fiction by using a range of literary and filmic devices to both compose history and interrogate practices of representation more generally. Under consideration are three texts that could be productively characterized as works of literary nonfiction: Saul Friedländer’s The Years of Extermination (2007), Christopher Browning and Jürgen Matthäus’s The Origins of the Final Solution (2004), and Daniel Mendelsohn’s The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (2006). Each is an emblematic narrative of sense making that deploys a range of narrative devices and storytelling strategies to create a historical argument that raises questions about the limits of representation. Positioned as a hinge between the interrogation of “The Stakes of Narrative” and the “Remediations of the Archive,” the first part of the volume ends with an extended philosophical chapter by Marc Nichanian that raises fundamental questions about the reinscription of the exceptionality of the Holocaust into its field of representation—a troubling transference whose ethical stakes are explored throughout the volume from a number of different disciplinary angles. Nichanian’s critique—which might be characterized as the persistence of the differend—stands in the intellectual lineage of Lyotard and Derrida, but interrogates the key concepts of “survivor,” “archive,” “testimony,” and “history” in a broader, comparative genocide studies framework. In the final part of the volume, Rothberg and Weber return to these arguments, articulating similar challenges to foundational assumptions in the field of Holocaust studies through the comparative lens of postcolonial studies. Part II, “Remediations of the Archive,” turns to the formation and transformation of the archive—as concept, practice, and medium— through four salient case studies: The Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive; the Geographies of the Holocaust project; the documentary A 41

INTRODUCTION

Film Unfinished; and the Berlin Holocaust memorial. Not only is each project involved in the formation of a culture of public memory, but—as media artifacts—they raise critical ethical questions about the immediacy of the archive, the logic of remediation, and the limits of representation as a media-specific question. While an archive may harbor a vision of immediacy, transparency, and direct access to what is real, there is no “neutral” archive, just as there is no “neutral” information system, database, data, documentary, or memorial. The archives in question in this part operate between the desire for immediacy (something that also exists in narrative) and the possibilities of hypermediacy, realized through practices of remediation, or the representation of one medium in another.135 This happens not only in digital media and film but also in the built spaces of public memory, such as Eisenman’s Berlin memorial, where the documentary archive in the basement of the memorial can be considered in productive tension with the antinarrative stelen field of the memorial itself. Part III, “The Politics of Exceptionality,” interrogates the existence, persistence, and/or disappearance of the exceptionality paradigm and the ways in which it seems to have attached itself to the theoretical culture associated with Holocaust studies. The contributors focus on the vexing question of the extent to which the aesthetic forms, political priorities, and social routines of Holocaust culture and Holocaust historiography have set the terms of analysis for understanding and theorizing—or, perhaps, not understanding and not theorizing—other genocides. To what extent has the Holocaust cast its own shadow over the studies of other genocides, and to what extent has it been mobilized in the service of other (largely political) priorities? Has Holocaust remembrance turned into a cultural and/or political comfort zone that impedes rather than fosters truly self-critical forms of collective identity? Or does the mature field of Holocaust studies offer possibilities for self-critical methodological and ethical reflection? What are the theoretical breakthroughs associated with non-Holocaust genocide studies that have not been made part of larger cultural scholarly conversations, and why not? In what ways do the perspectives and experiences of other genocides inform—and also fail to inform—the theoretical-historical discourses on the Holocaust? These are questions addressed in the chapters by Bartov, Moses, Rothberg, Butler, and Weber, which also potentially reinscribe the debates in Parts I and II in new ways. The volume ends with an epilogue in the form of an interview with Saul Friedländer. 42

PART I

THE STAKES OF NARRATIVE

F

EW DEBATES in Holocaust Studies have had higher stakes, elicited

more passions, and ultimately been more field-defining than those over the limits of representation. For more than three decades, Hayden White and Saul Friedländer have been at the center of these debates, raising fundamental questions about the discipline of history, the claims of narrative, and the very nature of factuality. Their intellectual exchange was famously crystalized at the 1990 conference “Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the Final Solution,” where the epistemological and ethical positions associated with postmodernism and the linguistic turn in history were interrogated publicly. Since that conference, White has continued to refine his theories, particularly his argument that the Holocaust represents a paradigmatic—but hardly unique— “modernist event” that requires “modernist” means of representation to make sense of it. At the same time, Friedländer has taken up the challenge of producing a multiperspectival, “integrated history” of the Holocaust in two acclaimed volumes, Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution, 1933–1939 and The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945. Part I of this volume offers three close readings of texts that probe the stakes of narrative with regard to the Holocaust. These critical essays are followed by brief responses from the authors. The works in question— Friedländer’s The Years of Extermination, Christopher Browning and Jürgen Matthäus’s The Origins of the Final Solution, and Daniel Mendelsohn’s The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million—are emblematic

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narratives of sense making that raise questions about the status of Holocaust historiography, the limits of representation, and the ethics of Holocaust culture more generally. Each of the texts might be characterized as a work of literary nonfiction, to the extent that it makes use of a range of narrative devices and storytelling strategies to create a historical argument. As such, the critical essays and responses bear witness to a fruitful— though largely undetected—phase of dialogue between historical-literary theory and practice during the past two decades, as well as a transitional moment in Holocaust studies writ large, namely, the recession of the generation of experiential eyewitnesses (both victims and perpetrators) and the ascendancy of the archive. The final chapter in Part I by Marc Nichanian—itself a kind of “differend” with respect to the others—raises fundamental and arguably unassimilable questions for the discipline of history. He radicalizes the stakes of narrative by arguing that the perpetrators, by destroying the capacity of bearing witness, were also “destroying the possibility of writing history, of a fact to be a fact.”1 It is only literature, Nichanian argues, that can speak to the nature of the catastrophic event. In the first chapter, Hayden White presents a reading of Friedländer’s The Years of Extermination, attuned to what he identifies as the modernist literary techniques of Friedländer’s approach to historical writing. He argues that Friedländer’s modernist historiography “de-narratives” the Holocaust by frustrating “normal narratological expectations” for historical writing, creating effects of disbelief and estrangement, and using a compositional strategy that describes “constellations” of events, not unlike that of Proust, Woolf, Kafka, Stein, and Joyce. White’s close reading of Friedländer’s The Years of Extermination focuses on the literary aspects of his prose, including epigraphic choices, ekphrasis, synecdoche, and other tropological devices. In his response, Friedländer continues to insist on the difference between what he sees to be the “limited” truth claims of historiography and White’s conflation of the literary and the historiographical in reference to the modernist “tone” of The Years of Extermination. However, the body of Friedländer’s formal response and the interview with him conducted by the editors (presented in the epilogue) show more dialogue with, than rejection of, White’s positions.2 His own analysis of White’s reading of the epigraphs in his texts is insightfully literary and turns important questions back to White concerning his identification of modernism with certain “literary devices.” And while rejecting the three criteria by which White defines his text as modernist, Friedländer agrees on his use of the “middle 44

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voice” as a narrative strategy and ethical position, conceding that this might be a most appropriate “bridge between traditional historiography and the possibility of some new approach to the historical rendition of modern catastrophes.” It is precisely here—in this liminal space between White’s claim for modernist figuration in the representation of the Holocaust and Friedländer’s resistance to this claim in spite of the evocative power of his narrative—that we discern the persistent afterlife of a broader phenomenon that Jean-François Lyotard famously characterized as “the differend.”3 For Lyotard, the differend emerged from destruction that simultaneously negated itself and the means to make sense of it, marking “the unstable state and instant of language wherein something which must be able to be put into phrases cannot yet be” (13). It is the injunction to speak about what happened and the inability to find the words to put it into phrases, the failure of methods and disciplines to make sense of it, and the insufficiency of narrative practices to render it meaningful and comprehensible. This double bind spoke to a moment in the history of the representation of the Holocaust where idioms had not yet been developed to adequately articulate what had happened and thus seemed to open the door to the possibility of Holocaust denial. When Lyotard argued that “something new has happened in history . . . that can only be a sign and not a fact” (57), he was not denying “the most real of realities” (58); instead, he was arguing that Auschwitz was not a historical event that could be “put into phrases” in the ways historians typically treat events. Auschwitz was a sign that the very authority of historical knowledge had been undermined by the genocidal will to obliterate the possibility of testimony and even the facts themselves. For Lyotard, the name Auschwitz signaled “the confines wherein historical knowledge sees its competence impugned” (58), an idea that was taken up in various ways by a generation of intellectuals, including Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Derrida, Shoshana Felman, Marc Nichanian, Hayden White, and others. The only thing the historian can do is “[lend] his or her ear to what is not presentable under the rules of knowledge” (58). It is “in a literature, in a philosophy, in a politics perhaps” that one might “bear witness to differends by finding idioms for them” (13). When Derrida read part of his essay on “the force of law” at the 1990 conference organized by Friedländer, he concluded by raising similar concerns about the status of truth in history and law; however, Derrida’s intervention was largely forgotten in the standard historiographies of the 45

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Holocaust (at least in most historical circles in the United States) since his essay was not included among the conference volume proceedings.4 Instead, the conference came to be seen as a kind of referendum on postmodernism and the pitfalls of relativism that needed to be avoided in order to defend the integrity of history as a discipline. It was about keeping the border between fact and fiction, history and literature as absolute as possible so as not to undermine the objective reality of the Holocaust as a historical event. And yet, it was through the media of literature, philosophy, and possibly politics that Lyotard imagined new idioms might be found for bearing witness to the differends in knowledge and narrative wrought by the Holocaust. Perhaps unexpectedly, then, especially when considering the fever pitch of the defenses of history as a discipline by certain practitioners, some of the most influential “idioms” that have emerged out of the post1990 context are ones that blur the boundaries between fact and fiction by using a range of literary and filmic devices to both compose history and interrogate practices of representation more generally. They come from narrative approaches that blend literature and history, that interrogate and remediate the archive, and sometimes also reinscribe the “exceptionality” of the event into its field of representation—a troubling transference whose ethical stakes are explored in the second and third parts of this volume. Indeed, all three of the primary works analyzed in Part I use a range of literary devices and storytelling strategies to create a historical argument. In this regard, even Friedländer, particularly in the epilogue to this book, admits to finding inspiration in modernist literature and film, specifically the cutting and editing techniques of literary montage, for the narrative structure of The Years of Extermination. Of course, the dialogue between literary theory and historical practice goes much further, impacting both academic and popular narratives of the Holocaust. In Chapter 3, Wulf Kansteiner delves into the semantic strategies utilized by Holocaust historians at large and the ethical stakes of their narratological work. On one end of the spectrum, Kansteiner sees Peter Longerich’s Politik der Vernichtung (Politics of Annihilation), a book that painstakingly reconstructs the decision-making processes of different collectives of Nazi perpetrators, as coming problematically close to performing a Nazi point of view through its closed semantic architecture, analytical precision, and narrative homogeneity. On the other end of the spectrum, he situates the work of Friedländer, whom he sees as developing a complicated and contradictory narrative universe that creates 46

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“analytical unease for the explicit ethical purposes of capturing a weak echo of the feelings of the victims of the Final Solution” and thereby elicits a sense of disbelief in its readers. In the middle of the spectrum, Kansteiner places The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939–March 1942 (2004), a historical synthesis realized in collaboration between Christopher Browning and Jürgen Matthäus. Kansteiner argues that the Browning-Matthäus text features an intriguing dialogical structure that reveals the complex narrative-semantic operations informing professional historical writing. As a result, the book makes a great case for multiperspectival historical narration and, in that sense, approaches the sort of historiographical modernism advocated by White and practiced by Friedländer by virtue of juxtaposing “two incompatible narratives” of the same event. Browning responds that the two narratives are not incompatible but simply “stem from different perspectives that in turn are derived from different vantage points.” Kansteiner, however, argues that more is at stake than a disagreement between two historians about the interpretation of source materials; the book reveals, he maintains, how little control facts exert over the multitude of ways they can be emplotted as narratives. The third work analyzed in this part is not an academic history, but the best-selling epic family memoir by Daniel Mendelsohn, The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (2006). Ann Rigney characterizes the work as “literary nonfiction,” and probes the cultural effects of a narrative situated on the border between history and literature, biography and memoir, academic scholarship and popular culture. She highlights the “hyperbolic” form of Mendelsohn’s narrative, which spans the globe, in more than five hundred pages, to recount a long-lasting and far-ranging search for six of his distant relatives—his great-uncle Shmiel, his wife, and their four daughters—that ultimately results in extremely few, fragmentary certainties. Blending archival materials, autobiographical reflections, imaginative creations, photographs, intertextual references, and philosophical reflections, Rigney examines Mendelsohn’s memoir in the context of other authors, such as Jonathan Safran Foer and  W.  G. Sebald, who have also emplotted catastrophic historical events through hybrid literary means. She argues that The Lost represents a paradigmatic narrative of “postmemory,” a form of testimony that is neither derived from experiential witnessing nor about reconstructing a surrogate point of view that attempts to place us “there” in the past. Instead, it is about Mendelsohn’s witnessing in the present and his affective searching for 47

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facts and source materials that, in Rigney’s words, produce a work that functions as a “connector between singular stories, individual readers, and the broader history of the Holocaust and genocide.”5 The choice to focus on a third-generation memoir, and one specifically centered on the futility of the search for evidence of lost relatives, speaks both to the signal importance of the formation of popular memories of absence in discussions of Holocaust representation and to the biological fact that memoirs and testimonies composed by the generation of eyewitnesses to the events of the Holocaust are coming to an end. As such, Mendelsohn’s memoir represents an emblematic document of “postmemory,” a term first introduced by Marianne Hirsch to describe “the imaginative investment” and efforts of creation by subsequent generations who have grown up under the shadow of the trauma of the Holocaust.6 Connecting this concept to Michael Rothberg’s articulation of “multidirectional memory,” Rigney attributes the success of The Lost to its capacity to function as an “interface between the six and the six million Jewish victims of the Holocaust; between the Holocaust and the millions of other victims of recent dictatorships; between victims, perpetrators, and bystanders; between an American, a European, and a global frame.” In essence, the narrative performs multidirectional memory in a global framework by giving rise to the possibility of new acts of adoptive witnessing. In an interview with Mendelsohn, Kansteiner uses Rigney’s analysis to probe deeper into the many parallels between The Lost and certain narrative techniques used by historians to make sense of the past in the form of a story. Marked by narrative discontinuities, interruptions, and gaps, Mendelsohn insists on the status of his book as a tragic search with neither historical nor narrative closure. The ethical moment in his work is to be found, he argues, in avoiding facile reconstructions that claim to represent what really happened (a hopeless and fruitless task), underscoring the tensions between image and experience, entertainment and suffering, imaginative construction and factual knowledge. Part I closes with an extended philosophical essay by Marc Nichanian, written in a style that not only evokes the seminal writings of Lyotard, Derrida, and Blanchot but also connects their ideas on philosophy after Auschwitz with the specific debates over the limits of representation and the crisis of history as a discipline. Building on the ideas he expounds in The Historiographic Perversion,7 Nichanian argues that it is “the very factuality of the fact” that the perpetrators wanted to destroy by eliminating the human capacity to bear witness, and hence “the very possibility 48

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of writing history, the possibility for a fact to be a fact.” They did this by evacuating death of any meaning, making martyrdom impossible (as Hannah Arendt observed), and suppressing the witness through torture. And when there are survivors, they are either overcome by shame and rendered mute, or they offer their testimony, according to Nichanian, as proof to tribunals of law or history, seeking to preserve it in archives. In the latter case, the catastrophic event is transformed into something historical, objective, and “factual” for the “civilized world” to see and adjudicate, the very antithesis of the radical nature of the event that destroyed its own factuality and the human capacity to bear witness. The absolute survivor, he argues, is but a “relic” (a term adopted from Hagop Oshagan), a “dead witness” rendered mute, who cannot testify to genocide in the world of the living, in the discourses of truth. Again, we are confronted with the persistence of the differend: the injunction to testify and the failure of language to adequately narrate. Nichanian’s ideas recall the radical demands of poststructuralism and its intellectual style of relentless self-reflexivity. His argument that the obliteration of the capacity to bear witness both brought about the death of history and precipitated the “holocaustic” crisis of historiography represents a persistent and troubling provocation for a historical profession that has embarked on a stunning and stunningly successful project of Holocaust research and Holocaust explanation since the 1990s. In many ways, this impressive wave of empirical research has resulted—perhaps not unexpectedly—in a kind of disciplinary normalization of the events of the Holocaust. How have historians internalized the arguments passionately repeated and reframed by Nichanian, and previously advanced by Derrida, Adorno, Blanchot, and especially Lyotard? With a few exceptions, their arguments appear to be ignored, although we could suggest that this group of continental philosophers helped shape, for instance, Friedländer’s decision to try to capture and convey the sense of disbelief about the Shoah by way of a particularly modernist aesthetic, narrative strategy. As editors, we decided to solicit and include Nichanian’s piece as a testament to the exceptional moment of interdisciplinary reflection that stood at the beginning of the first wave of successful Holocaust research, but whose ethical, philosophical, and historiographic demands have been all too easily swept aside or forgotten by historical business as usual. This timely reminder helps us reacquire the ability to detect differends between and within disciplines, methodologies, and texts, as, for instance, in the 49

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different scholarly voices assembled in this part (and the book as a whole). Considered from this perspective, the communications between the authors, critics, and editors constitute negotiations about the differend, and the responses of the authors to their critics can be interpreted as different reactions to the contradictory expectations of sense making at work in their respective disciplines, including expectations of fact production, narrative strategies, and intellectual self-reflexivity. Mendelsohn—the writer of postmemory literary nonfiction—partakes in what we could term the routinization of the differend. While collecting and engaging extensively with eyewitness testimony, relating historical facts is not the primary purpose of his writing. Instead, he is using the story of a fact-finding mission to reflect on the nature and effects of narrative, “about how we tell stories and how we transform the past into ‘history.’ ” In reflecting in circular ways about “the disparity between ‘what happened’ and ‘the story of what happened,’ ” he focuses on the making and unmaking of stories, not the making of facts. In this fashion, Mendelsohn, like other authors of postmemory, has developed a sophisticated, self-confident style of narrating the failure of finding historical truth. Sidestepping rather than directly engaging with the differend, the historian Browning stresses “the need for differentiation, nuance, and above all fidelity to the diverse and frustratingly contradictory and confusing evidence,” but he does not seem concerned about how to differentiate between different degrees of fidelity to evidence in historical narration, as long as the discipline manages to keep Holocaust deniers at bay. Since “reality is messy,” as he puts it, Browning is comfortable with the fact that “honest historians working within accepted methods of their craft can and will select and evaluate evidence differently, pose different questions, choose different emphases and strategies of emplotment, make different arguments, and reach different conclusions.” Browning, like many historians, deproblematizes the tensions between different expectations and strategies of sense making at work in his discipline. The historian Friedländer—pursuing another set of goals, including conventional explanation and affective simulation—presents more conflicted insights in his work. On the one hand, he feels comfortable “within the limits of traditional rules of historical research, conceptualization and narration,” while, on the other hand, seeks distance from the profession because “traditional history writing tends to domesticate the unbelievable.” In a similar vein, Friedländer acknowledges the notion of historical 50

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facts as a central, regulative idea in his work, but also emphasizes that the most innovative element of his synthetic history has little to do with facts. As he remarks in this volume’s epilogue: “You don’t really listen to them [the victims’ voices] in order to get the facts; you listen to them to get a sense of the atmosphere.” Friedländer internalizes the differend. He integrates it into his work by purposefully engaging with contradictory expectations directed at professional historians as a way to communicate with his readers and colleagues. Finally, by presenting Nichanian’s reflections on the death of the witness and the subject of history at the end of the part on the stakes of narrative and the beginning of the part on remediations of the archive, we hope that his text—which both writes about and performs the differend— will open up spaces for probing the ethics of Holocaust culture that allow us to recognize and tarry with the many differends that comprise the disciplines, narratives, and memorial practices of Holocaust and genocide studies.

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1 Historical Truth, Estrangement, and Disbelief H AY D E N W H I T E

Blissful is the nonbeliever who hides the future’s misfortune beneath the protective covering of the present moment, for now everything is obscured by darkness. No one seeks protection when hope and silence alone mark the passing of time and make it believable. —H. G. Adler, The Journey

I

N AN EARLIER ESSAY ,1 I presented Saul Friedländer’s Nazi Germany

and the Jews as an example of one way of dealing with the putative “unrepresentability” of the Holocaust.2 I suggested that the Holocaust was not only a novel event in the history of the West and the history of antiSemitism but also a new kind of event that effectively brought under question the representational practices and modes of explanation both of modern historiography and the modern human sciences in general.3 I maintained that the older conventions, which presumed that a factually truthful account of events of the past constituted the only valid historical interpretation of them (any other kind of interpretation, such as the meaning of the factualized events, being considered a questionable addition to a properly historical account), had to go by the board when it came to events like the Holocaust.4 This event, I argued, demanded representational modes, explanatory models, and ethical attitudes that could not be provided by conventional professional historiography, with its fetishism of the facts and nothing but the facts. I went on to consider the possibility that as a modernist event, the Holocaust might be treatable by the use of specifically modernist techniques of literary writing, which, in 53

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my view, provided both a perspective on “history” and a mode of presenting the complex relationships between past and present in modern culture and especially lent themselves to the solution of the kinds of “practical” (by which I meant “ethical”) questions that motivated historians searching for the meaning of the Holocaust in history. And I concluded by arguing that in his Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution, 1933–1939, and especially in volume 2, The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945, Saul Friedländer had produced something like the kind of modernist historiography particularly required—technically and ethically—by the Holocaust and all other historical events even vaguely resembling it.5 This chapter continues my inquiry into the relation between history and literature or, more specifically, historiography and literary writing, to show how Friedländer utilizes literary techniques, devices, tropes, and figures in order to close the gap between truth and meaning in Holocaust historiography without fictionalizing, aestheticizing, or relativizing anything. It is an exercise in “close reading,” the kind of hermeneutic conventionally used in the treatment of sacred, legal, and literary texts rather than historiographical or scientific texts. The aim is to identify the literary devices, tropes, figures, and techniques used in Friedländer’s text to generate ways of mediating between the corpus of facts known about the Holocaust and the various meanings that our ethical interests in this event demand of us. In earlier discussions of this issue, I have drawn on Michael Oakeshott’s distinction between “the historical past” and the “the practical past.” The latter kind of past is that which we turn to when our interests are as much ethical as they are cognitive. I think that Friedländer’s book—like Toni Morrison’s Beloved—falls into the latter category.6 It is less interested in adding new information to the “data bank” of the Holocaust than investigating what of an ethical nature is still “left over” after we have collected all of the factual information contained in the historical record. Friedländer has long advocated the need for a “stable integrated narrative” of the Holocaust by which to identify and measure deviations from the truth in the directions of fictionalization, on the one hand, and aestheticization, on the other. Fictionalization is regarded as a threat to belief in the reality of the Holocaust and aestheticization as a threat to belief in its moral or ethical significance. At the same time, he insisted that there was something uncanny about it. In 1992 he spoke of the Holocaust as having some kind of “excess” of the inexpressible left over 54

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after all the facts of the matter had been recorded.7 In volume 1 of Nazi Germany and the Jews, this excess would manifest in the feeling of “estrangement” he hoped to effect in his readers. Then, in volume 2, whose topic is the program of extermination launched by the Germans against the Jews, he stated that he wished to produce the effect of “disbelievability.” I believe he undertakes to gain these effects—and affects—by the use of literary techniques, devices, figures, and tropes that undermine (perhaps even deconstruct) on a figurative level the stability of the narrative unfolding on the literal or proper level of the text. Let me begin by trying to characterize the general look or appearance of Friedländer’s volume 2, The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945. First, there is a lot of front matter before we get to the narration proper. This alone distinguishes Friedländer’s text from the abrupt opening of a conventional narrative history such as Richard Evans’s The Third Reich in Power.8 More about this front matter later. Once we make our way through it, the core narrative looks more like a chronicle than a history. It is made up of ten chapters (with dates instead of titles) divided into three parts, each of which has both titles and dates: “Terror (Fall 1939–Summer 1941),” “Mass Murder (Summer 1941–September 1942),” and “Shoah (Summer 1942–Spring 1945).” If we thought of this as a skeleton of a story of the Holocaust, the three parts might be identified as acts of a classical drama, in which a central subject (driven by pathos) undergoes a trial (agon) that results in his destruction (sparagmos) on the way to a recognition scene (or anagnorisis) in which the mystery motivating the action from the beginning would be cleared up with more or less moral loss or gain to the community to which the hero belongs. But although the events related by Friedländer might be thought of as tragic, there is no central subject undergoing a trial of the spirit, no conception of fate or providence to link the destruction to a cosmic plan, and virtually nothing to suggest the existence of some fundamental nobility of the human spirit in spite of all. The events of the Holocaust are not emplotted in order to suggest a discernible trajectory from beginning to end that would allow some sense of satisfactory moral or ethical closure for the whole. Friedländer’s history of the Holocaust is presented in such a way as to frustrate normal narratological expectations in order to produce the effects (and affects) of “estrangement,” on the one hand, and “disbelief,” on the other. How does all this square with Friedländer’s repeated assertions of his desire to create a “stable integrated narrative” of the Holocaust? 55

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The choice by any historian to cast his or her work in the mode of a “narrative” is already to move it out of the discourses of science and into the domain of “literature.” Although narrative has long been thought of as a “natural” mode of historiographical presentation, its origin in myth, fable, and allegory has long rendered it suspect as a mode of scientific discourse—ever since logos was disjoined from mythos in philosophy of science.9 So too, to narrativize real events is often thought of as tantamount to “fictionalizing” them, as in the historical romance. But Friedländer narrates his history of the Holocaust without narrativizing, in other words, without using one or another of the classic plot structures by which Western culture has endowed life with meaning in myth, religion, and literature since its beginnings. But I would suggest that we must distinguish between narration (a mode of speaking) and narrative (story, the product of this mode of speaking). Friedländer launches his narration from within a justified confidence in his knowledge of his subject matter, on the one hand, and his adequacy to the understanding of that subject matter, on the other. But there is nothing stentorian or even very assertive about his delivery. His mode is “middle-voiced”—a manner of speaking or, in this case, writing in which the speaker deploys neither the active nor the passive voice predominantly but takes up a position from within the act of writing itself, so as to foreclose any possibility of distinguishing between what is said or spoken and the how of its saying. Thus, in middle-voiced discourse, the gap between the presentation of the referent (the Holocaust) and the meaning being attributed to it is closed or at least narrowed. In this instance, the meaning of the events depicted and their truth—the fact of their occurrence when, where, and as they did—are fully congruent. But this is because, among other reasons, Friedländer narrates without narrativizing, maps a field but does not emplot a single course of events, and resists the imposition of stereotypical structures of meaning that would allow any “domestication” of the facts. It is impossible to forget or ignore the fact that the author of The Years of Extermination is himself a survivor of that “Holocaust” from within the experience of which he writes. Whence Friedländer’s resistance to endowing the Holocaust with the coherence of a conventional story, with a central subject, beginning, middle, and end, and a neat resolution with a clear and unambiguous meaning. Whence the preference for the chronicle form that tends toward parataxis and anecdotage, rather than for the fleshed out history that explains “what happened” by emplotting it as 56

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having the form of a recognizable archetypal structure of meaning (tragic, pastoral, comic, satiric, and so forth). Whence, too, the relatively “weak” line of argument that might seek to explain why the Holocaust happened in order to allow its happening to “speak for itself.” Thus, although narrated with the full authority of the one supposed to know and, indeed, of one who has experienced the events of which he writes, Friedländer effectively denarrativizes and destorifies the series of events he relates. This process of denarrativization, I submit, puts Friedländer in the category of modernist writers of the ilk of Proust, Woolf, Kafka, Stein, and Joyce. The loose chronological pattern of his elaboration allows him to use the technique of presentation very close to that recommended by Walter Benjamin for modernist historiography: namely, the genre of the “constellation” and the preference for the verbal image over the concept in the depiction of experiences more “modernist” than “realistic” in kind. This puts us in the domain of a specifically artistic writing that is both different from and consonant with the scientific ideal of objective representation. Let me explain what I mean by citation of a few characteristic passages in Friedländer’s work to show how his distinctive interpretative effects are earned more by literary than by scientific discursive means. A literary narration is a verbal whole that asserts more or says other than through figuration what is literally asserted in its parts taken distributively. This is the case with all literary devices, genres, figures, and tropes, as against the devices and turns of scientific discourses that, by the use of technical and quantitative terminology, can hope to avoid the kind of parapractical irruptions that indicate the presence of an “unconscious” in the text that the literal level of expression is intended to cover up and repress. The difference, of course, between artistic parapraxis and the kind found in everyday ordinary speech is that the former is consciously exploited as a way of endowing the discourse with depth as well as extension. So, how does one represent the history of an event that destroyed a wide variety of kinds of Jewish communities (as well as other kinds of communities, races, and groups) more or less unconnected with one another in space, time, and culture and in different kinds of relationships with the host countries in which they had come to reside, and their reactions and responses to a machine designed primarily for the purpose of exterminating them? Here, Friedländer’s problem was to provide a coherent but nonlinear account of the facts and their meaning without 57

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emphasizing argument or explanation at the expense of concreteness and particularity of detail. But since a written discourse is necessarily consumed as a linear process, he had to find a way of shifting attention from the “before and after” axis of the diegesis to a “surface-depth” axis where “meaning” is deposited at each “turn” of the discourse. Although Friedländer’s text comes to us loosely organized on the temporal axis, the temporal units do not have the same function and meaning that they conventionally have when used to parse organic or biological processes (birth, youth, maturity, old age, and so forth). After all, each of the two volumes of Nazi Germany and the Jews covers only six years, and as at least one reviewer noted, does not provide any significant temporal “contextualization” of the events covered in the text. There is a general thematic continuity, produced by repetition, reduction, and nominalization of the notion of “extermination,” but a thematization is not an argument. It is a literary (or rhetorical) strategy by which a series of events can, by varied kinds of redescription, be endowed with “substance.” However, thematization requires discourse time and what some critics call “phrasing” or segmentation by which to transform series into sequence, a process of layering in which what appears on a literal (or proper) plane is shown on a figurative or allegorical plane to have meaning that is at once revealed and concealed as such. These effects—disemplotment, middle-voiced narration, thematization, sequentiation, and the like—are produced by identifiable literary or rhetorical devices, techniques, genrification, and tropes. Thus, The Years of Extermination opens with a cascade of literary devices. This is the front matter I refer to earlier. It begins with an epigraph that is a quotation from a diary written by a victim of the Holocaust. This is followed by an “Introduction,” which itself begins with an ekphrastic analysis of a photograph of a ceremony, David Moffie’s graduation from the University of Amsterdam School of Medicine on September 18, 1942. Next, part  1 of The Years of Extermination begins with an epigraph taken from the diary of Victor Klemperer, while chapter 1 (of part 1) is followed by an anecdote recounting Klemperer’s response to the news that Germany had invaded Poland on September 1, 1939. The Klemperer anecdote, which consists of two paragraphs, is followed by three more anecdotes relating the ways in which certain Jews in Warsaw and Lodz responded to the same news. The last of these anecdotes tells of the original enthusiasm of Adam Czerniaków for his new post as chairman of the Jewish Citizen’s Committee for the defense of Warsaw. It ends with the 58

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ironic remark of the narrator: “Four days later Poland surrendered.” (I say narrator and not author because, in fact, one does not know who speaks these words.) I would like to point out that the passages I have cited are all literary genres or devices: epigraph, ekphrasis, anecdote, commentary, and figure. This means, to me at least, that all of these passages by (the substance of) their forms alone and quite apart from any factual “information” they may be thought to contain, emit messages of a particularly poetic, by which I mean symbolizing, kind. Thus, for example, every epigraph not only has to be written but, by its placement and structure, also refers primarily to the writing it introduces or prefigures, rather than to something outside the text. An epigraph is placed on the border of the text it introduces, but its function is intratextualizing, to link the thematic content of the work to follow with the title of that work. So it is not by chance that the first epigraph in Friedländer’s book, the epigraph that introduces the whole volume, is explicitly about writing and, moreover, about writing in a state or condition of extremity, in the face of death. It begins: “The struggle to save myself is hopeless. . . . But that’s not important. Because I am able to bring my account to its end and trust that it will see the light of day when the time is right.” Moreover, the epigraph is not only about writing under conditions of extreme travail, it is about the impossibility of writing “the truth” about the grotesque (“fantastyczna”) event that was happening in Warsaw, as viewed from “the ‘Aryan’ side of the city,” sometime in 1943. The epigraph (which has been edited by Friedländer)10 ends by saying: “And they will ask, is this the truth? I reply in advance: No, this is not the truth, this is only a small part, a tiny fraction of the truth. . . . Even the mightiest pen could not depict the whole, real, essential truth.”11 The opening words (“The struggle to save myself is hopeless. . . . But that’s not important”)12 are startling—they are not surrounded by scare quotes—and we might take them for the words of our author, that is, until we recognize that they begin an epigraph, which excuses us from treating this statement as a properly historiographic one. That is, we will not ask whether it is true or false, whether what it says is a matter of fact or whether it is simply an aid to reading the text to follow. But we might wish to reflect on the theme of the epigraph, since according to the rules of genrification, this passage is supposed to foreshadow or anticipate or enliven us to the theme of the book to follow. 59

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On reflection, I note that this epigraph (at least as it has been edited by Friedländer)13 consists of a kind of affirmation—of the task the writer has set for himself, which is to “bring my account to its end,” and a denial or more properly a disavowal: “No, this is not the truth, this is only a small part, . . . Even the mightiest pen could not depict the whole, real, essential truth.”14 In fact, the epigraph can be read as an emblem featuring an image of the writer in extremis and wagering everything on the possibility that his “account” will see “the light of day” sometime in the future, so that “people will know what happened” in spite of the fact that what he writes is “only a small part, a tiny fraction of the truth.” So if Friedländer used the passage from Ernest’s diary to say that his own text is “not even a fragment of a fragment of the truth,”15 he must also take ownership of the other part of the passage that is about writing in extremis—writing in the face of death, writing on the wager that what one writes is worth the candle, in spite of its inadequacy to the “whole, real, essential truth,” that, in some sense, the effort to tell “what happened” will find a kind of redemption “when the time is right” and “people will know what happened.” Condensed into this small fragment of text is a whole allegory of the truth of writing as the writing of truth and the impossibility of that charge. And this makes it a comment on the whole book that it introduces. We should note also that the writing in this passage is literary writing, and it has nothing at all to do with either fiction or aesthetics. Friedländer uses it as a literary device to mark the inauguration of an account that will be as much about the travail of writing (his writing) as it is about the kind of truth that can be expected in a narration of the Holocaust. Did Friedländer consciously intend all this? I do not know, but the fact is that he chose this passage from Ernest’s diary as his epigraph. He edited it to say what it says and not something else. And he placed it at the start of his book to do what epigraphs are supposed to do: indicate a theme of the book to follow. This passage is not meant to be a contribution to the “database” of the Holocaust—an epigraph is not a contribution to the factual record. Of course, the book has a rich and varied thematic content, but the thematic content of this epigraph, placed as it is, at the head of this text, has a special function. It tells the reader that the text to follow is as much about the stakes of writing, the difficulty of telling the truth, and the necessity of testimony in situations of extremity as it is about the facts of the matter.16 This small fragment of text alone would be enough to demonstrate that we are in the presence of “literature” as 60

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well as “historiography.” The writing in this passage is literary writing, and it has nothing at all to do with either fiction or aesthetics.17 In The Years of Extermination, epigraphs are used to introduce the volume as a whole, and each of the three parts (“Terror,” “Mass Murder,” and “Shoah”) into which the narration is divided. There is a kind of “line” of development in the events laid out for our inspection, but the line is only that of the “this happened here or there” of the chronicle. Friedländer calls this “loose” chronological arrangement a “temporal” line, but actually time does not order this text or the events about which it speaks. The turns from “Terror” to “Mass Murder” and from “Mass Murder” to “Shoah” do not mark transitions between different phases of a single process of development. The events are not “emplotted” in such a way as to represent the development of some central subject, such as Nazi Germany, the Jews, or the Holocaust. There is no plot structure informing the whole chain of clusters or constellations of facts, anecdotes, epigraphs, quotations, and theories, or speculations about why the Holocaust occurred. The only relations between one part of the text and another is the “before and after” and “here and there,” which allows the clustering of events related only by similarity and contiguity rather than by equivalence and identity. Thus, although “Terror” precedes “Mass Murder,” which, in turn, precedes “Shoah,” there is no spatial or temporal connection or causal chain posited in this sequence. Nor is any “plan” being implemented. It is a matter of “furor Teutonicus,” on the one side, and descent into a condition of “patiency” on the other, which makes me want to grasp the whole text as a kind of modernist Walpurgisnacht, satura, or pastiche, rather than as a story. There are lots of anecdotes or petits récits in this book, but they do more to impede the movement of the narration than to help it along. In fact, Friedländer uses the genre of the anecdote to do most of the heavy work of commenting on and interpreting the events he relates.18 I could make a case, I think, for the idea that Friedländer’s is a modal text, that its principal explanatory effect is produced by modalizations, transitions from one structure of deprivation to another. This would imply an interest less in conceptual and categorical characterizations of the referents (“Nazi Germany” and “the Jews”) than in figurations of persons, places, and events in terms of feelings of “strength to world,” mood, atmospheres, and “humors.” Thus, Friedländer chooses as the epigraph to “Part I: Terror,” a statement from Victor Klemperer’s diary: “The sadistic machine simply rolls 61

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over us.” By using Klemperer’s figure of Nazi Germany as a “sadistic machine” as an epigraph, Friedländer can at once present an image of oppression, register a judgment on “Nazi Germany,” project the feeling of helplessness felt by the oppressed, and indicate the power of the Nazi war machine, but without having to document or establish the adequacy of the judgment. In fact, whatever judgments are rendered in this text are rendered by the voices of those caught up in and being destroyed by the “sadistic machine.” All reviewers note the evenhandedness, calm, fairness, and objectivity of Friedländer’s account of how the “sadistic machine” operated. He leaves the judgments to the victims. All of this is reinforced by the anecdote that opens chapter 1 of the text proper, another quotation from the diary of Victor Klemperer: “On Friday morning, September 1, the young butcher’s lad came and told us . . . the war with Poland was underway, England and France remained neutral. . . . I said to Eva [that] a morphine injection or something similar was the best thing for us; our life was over.”19 Friedländer has been praised, and rightly so, for admitting the “voices” of ordinary people—especially the victims, but also the perpetrators and bystanders—into his account of the Holocaust, thereby injecting a sense of personal experience and humanity into the presentation, but at the same time risking violating the demand for established fact rather than opinion in the historian’s text. In his response to my suggestion that artistic images might be more effective than statements or numbers for presenting the shock of events like those of the Holocaust,20 Friedländer said that “the only solution . . . for keeping to the strictest historical practice and nonetheless giving expression to those moments of shock, amazement, or denial, was to turn to the reactions of the victims as they were confronted by the events as expressed mainly in diaries and letters, . . . in memoirs, etc.” Here, he says he did not look for “ ‘statements’ by the victims, . . . but for their raw ‘voices,’ for the cries and whispers of the downtrodden and oppressed.” Fair enough, but I would point out that the quotations chosen for use as epigraphs in The Years of Extermination are rather more “artistic” and “literary” than “raw” and “spontaneous,” and that, in fact, it is their fashioned rather than their spontaneous nature that gives them their force and power. After all, they were written after the events of which they speak or the experience of the emotions they wish to express. Moreover, the quotations chosen for epigraphs in Friedländer’s text are cast much more in figurative than in literal (or proper) terms. Why would they not 62

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be, given the fact that they report reactions to events too monstrous to believe? My point here is that Friedländer’s text is replete with different literary, rhetorical, or discursive genres—epigraph, ekphrasis, anecdote, constellation, irony—which at once punctuate his narration and impede narrativization and, at the same time, create a level of figurative meaning alongside of and modulating the facts given in the chronological record— these genres serve perfectly well Friedländer’s stated aim to produce the specific effects of “estrangement” and “disbelief” that would protect his account from “domestication.” How else could you create these effects in writing other than by “literary” means? But I want to caution against a tendency to confuse all literary writing with fictional writing or to identify poetic utterance with fictionalization. Factual writing (writing about matters of fact) can be just as literary as fictional writing (writing about imaginary things) without being necessarily fictionalizing. I would point out that the fiction-nonfiction distinction is based on the nature of the referent of a discourse, while the literary-nonliterary distinction has to do with the formal features of an utterance.21 The same formal features (generic, modal, tropical) may appear in both fictional and nonfictional (or factual) texts. Real events can be presented as describing trajectories of tragic or comic stories, real people can be configured as characters of the kinds met within a novel or play (as heroes or villains, as kings or beggars), and “contexts” can be described as threatening or benign, supportive or hostile, as the case may be. By the same token, all of these effects can be reversed by the same techniques and instead of the story one had expected, one can find story parts that refuse to come together as a whole. The point is that meaning can be imputed to real events by both conceptualization and figuration, but pathos and especially the pathos of suffering is more effectively produced by images than by concepts. Benjamin believed that “history does not break down into stories, it breaks down into images.”22 It is a succession of images (rather than an argument, thesis, or explanation) that sums up, gives meaning to, and provides the principal “understanding effect” of Saul Friedländer’s great work. I mentioned that the first chapter of The Years of Extermination is introduced with an epigraph that quotes Klemperer’s figure of “the sadistic machine,” and that the chapter itself begins with an anecdote that features the figure of Klemperer contemplating suicide. The anecdote ends with the Klemperers’ toasting Eva Klemperer’s birthday and the British 63

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entry into the war. This is followed by an anecdote that shows Chaim Kaplan of Warsaw had “grasped the peculiar threat that the outbreak of the war represented for the Jews,” and had gained little solace from the efforts of the Warshavians to fortify their city against the attack to come. Then the action suddenly switches to Lodz, where Dawid Sierakowiak, “a Jewish youngster, barely fifteen,” writes in his diary about the sudden enthusiasm of the Poles for everything German. And back again to Warsaw, where Adam Czerniaków is organizing a Jewish Citizens Committee for the defense of the city. These four anecdotes about four different “ordinary” people in Dresden, Warsaw, and Lodz on the eve of World War II—together with their lapidary comment—are notable in the way that they stand in for the narrator, the way they permit him to draw back behind his text and let his subjects speak for themselves and for him. It is this authorial retreat that I wished to indicate as middle-voicedness in my earlier remarks on the narrator’s seemingly passive objectivity. Even before the “historiography” has begun, Friedländer uses anecdotes to block the impulse to narrativize, to block the emplotment of events, in order to let in a bit of reality in the form of the feelings of confusion, bewilderment, and, yes, “disbelief” of the patients of “the sadistic machine.” Friedländer prefers to hear these voices as “raw” and spontaneous, rather than as “art.” But his use of these voices is nothing if not artistic. And it takes art to conjure up a world with millions of Jews but no place for them. Perhaps you may think that I am overreading in a way that only a pedant or a Derridean deconstructor would do, that I am making more than even a critical reading calls for of what is, after all, only a convention, the convention of placing an epigraph at the head of a text or opening a chapter with an anecdote. But I would ask you to consider another anecdote, one that opens the introduction to The Years of Extermination (we are still in the paratext of the narrative). It begins with a statement of fact: “David Moffie was awarded his degree in medicine at the University of Amsterdam on September 18, 1942.” Then follows a longish description, not of this event but of a photograph of this event, somewhat in the manner of the description I have been giving of the opening epigraph of Friedländer’s text.23 We are not shown the photograph in Friedländer’s text; rather—and this is the tropological move—an ekphrasis (verbal description or “word picture” of an image) is presented in lieu of the photograph. The referent of the passage (the photograph) is withheld (Friedländer certainly could have had 64

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it reproduced),24 but in its stead we are presented with a description of it. There is factual information about the event recorded in the photograph, who is in the photograph, when it was taken and where, and why the photograph can be interpreted as a record of an “act of defiance” on the part of university authorities against the German occupiers of the Netherlands.25 But having interpreted the manifest meaning or information of the photograph, Friedländer adds, “there is more.” On the surface, he says, we have “a common enough ceremony, easy to recognize,” in a “festive setting, a young man received official confirmation that he was entitled to practice medicine, etc.” However, “as we know, the Jood pinned to Moffie’s coat carried a very different message. Like all members of his ‘race’ throughout the Continent, the new MD was marked for murder.” This statement is glossed by a look “inside” the photograph, “faintly seen,” and in “characters specially designed for this particular purpose, . . . in a crooked, repulsive, and vaguely threatening way, intended to evoke the Hebrew alphabet and yet remain easily decipherable,” are the Jewish star and the word “Jood.” It is “in this inscription and its peculiar design,” that Friedländer discerns “the quintessence” of “the situation represented in the photograph” and its sinister meaning: “The Germans were bent on exterminating the Jews as individuals, and in erasing what the star and its inscription represented—‘the Jood.’ ” I hope it will not be considered inappropriate to point out that what we have here is a kind of mis en abyme or a representation of a representation of a representation, and so forth. Thus, in his (ekphrastic) representation of a representation (a photograph) that represents an event (“a common enough ceremony),” Friedländer perceives a further representation (a sign) that he now interprets as the “quintessence” of that complex of events called the Holocaust. In the inscription of the star and the word “Jood,” Friedländer says: “We perceive but the faintest echo of a furious onslaught aimed at eliminating any trace of ‘Jewishness,’ any sign of the ‘Jewish spirit,’ any remnant of Jewish presence (real or imaginary) from politics, society, culture, and history.”26 Friedländer’s reading of this photograph is allegorical: the photo seems to represent two things or two or more levels of meaning simultaneously. In fact, however, there is no way that the photograph of Moffie’s graduation ceremony can be said to emit the message Friedländer purports to find in it. The allegorical dimension is provided by Friedländer and his 65

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own knowledge of the fate that had awaited the Jews of Amsterdam in that time, all unbeknownst to them. Friedländer reads back into the photograph a meaning that could hardly have been known to Moffie and the others at the time the photograph was taken. The result is to produce that effect of “estrangement” that Friedländer had described as his aim in volume 1 of his masterpiece.27 But the effect is produced not so much by a recitation of the facts as, rather, by their figuration. Thus, in his description of the star and its inscription as “characters specially designed for this particular purpose, . . . in a crooked, repulsive, and vaguely threatening way, intended to evoke the Hebrew alphabet and yet remain easily decipherable,” Friedländer has already built into his description the interpretation that he sees as “easily decipherable.” The decision to substitute an ekphrasis for the photograph is a specifically literary or, as I would prefer, a tropological move: it puts a verbal image in place of a visual image, proceeds to interpret the latter, and thereby substitutes the photograph for the event as the referent of this passage of the discourse. This is not a criticism because—in my opinion—every historian must do something like this in order to “work up” past events as objects of possible historical analysis. This kind of move does not diminish but rather heightens the reality effect of the text. Why? For the simple reason that photographs are mute. They do not say, assert, or affirm anything. They need captions or texts of some kind to give them voice. This is the purpose of the ekphrasis, to transform a visual into a verbal image. But the discussion of the David Moffie image serves another purpose as well: placed as it is, as the opening of the introduction of the body of the text, Friedländer provides his readers with insights into the compositional choices he will make in order to move from event, to description of the event, to interpretation of the event. The narratological function of the whole passage is to reveal the literary tools that will be used to bring to life a panorama of brutality, suffering, and death. The analysis (or description, or interpretation) of the Moffie photograph can serve as paradigm (or what Kenneth Burke called a “representative anecdote” and Peirce the “interpretant”) of how to read historical artifacts symbolically.28 The Moffie photograph opens the introduction and serves as a figure (schema) of reading (allegorically) that will be “fulfilled” at its end. That is to say, at the end of the introduction. 66

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Thus, the last paragraph of the introduction, which comes eleven pages later, begins: Let us return to Moffie’s photograph, to the star sewed to his coat, with its repulsive inscription, and to its meaning. Once its portent is understood this photograph triggers disbelief. Such disbelief is a quasivisceral reaction, one that occurs before knowledge rushes in to smother it.29 Although the passage states that “once the portent [of the photograph] is understood,” it “triggers” disbelief, it cannot possibly mean this; what it must mean is that, once understood, the photograph should trigger disbelief. Did it trigger disbelief in Friedländer? Disbelief in what? Disbelief in the photograph? In the reality of the event it records? In the “portent” of the star and the word “Jood”? In the situation of which the symbol on Moffie’s coat is a synecdoche? These questions are answered by Friedländer’s immediately proffered definition of what he means by “disbelief” in this context: “ ‘Disbelief,’ he says, “here means something that arises from the depth of one’s immediate perception of the world, of what is ordinary and what remains ‘unbelievable.’ ”30 This definition is, to say the least, idiosyncratic: syntactically and semantically. I believe that it is a bit of parapraxis—a moment of confusion and disorientation in the text—over which we must linger and try to identify what is seeking to emerge from the text in addition to what it says. Read syntactically or literally, the definition says: “disbelief . . . means [1] something that arises from the depth of . . . immediate perception of the world, [2] of what is ordinary and [3] what remains ‘unbelievable.’ ” Disbelief, Friedländer goes on to say, is a “quasivisceral reaction” by or in which something of what is given in “immediate perception” remains “unbelievable.” On this view, unbelief is a quality of some aspect of “immediate perception” that, because it is not unbelievable, can be disbelieved. But why should we wish that the truth—which so many have labored so hard to cover up or deny and others have labored so hard to bring to light—be disbelieved? The usual definition of “disbelief” is something like a conscious rejection or denial of an idea, assertion, or perception offered not only as “believable” but also as actually “believed.” Disbelief differs from unbelief by the element of will or voluntativeness motivating it. In unbelief, I simply 67

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do not believe what others see or hear or feel to be the case. Friedländer wants his readers to have the “quasivisceral reaction” of “disbelief” to what he will be telling them about the Holocaust in order to experience the feelings of very many Jews of Europe, not only when they heard news of the death camps and the Nazi program of extermination but also while they were experiencing what happened to them in the camps and while they were recounting what had happened in the camps after they had returned home.31 But disbelief is very close to the psychoanalytical notion of disavowal, which in Freud’s classical formulation, consists of the denial of an absence or lack where one had expected to see something. In denial, I can deny what I perceived; in disavowal, I deny what I did not perceive. Disavowal is a product of a moral repugnance, a “quasivisceral” feeling of disgust arising from the perception of what is difficult to believe because it ought not to have happened. “Why did the heavens not darken?” Arno Mayer’s question receives a believable and compelling answer in Friedländer’s account of the Holocaust: because of the disquieting realization that, under the Nazi regime, the last vestige of what had formerly undergirded any sense of human solidarity had been erased. All very well, but what is the import of the remark about the feeling of disbelief being threatened by a “knowledge” rushing in immediately to swamp it? This question is answered by the “metahistorical” comment: “The goal of historical knowledge is to domesticate disbelief, to explain it away,” and the explanation of what will be grasped immediately by his critics as his deviation from the normal expectations of the normal reader of a normal historical narrative. “In this book I wish to offer a thorough historical study of the extermination of the Jews of Europe, without eliminating or domesticating that initial sense of disbelief.”32 Friedländer repeats this characterization of conventional historical knowledge as domesticating and disarming of a moment of “disbelief” in the face of events or actions that, although grotesque, bizarre, or scandalous, are rendered quite believable by historical knowledge and have their moral or ethical import neutralized or canceled out as a result. I want to comment on two other devices used by Friedländer to break up his account into discrete temporal and spatial fragments and reassemble them under relatively underdetermined assemblages that admit no overarching emplotment, summary, or narrativization. These are the anecdote and the constellation. In conventional narrative historical writing, the transformation of a chronicle of events into an emplotted story is supposed to be the inter68

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pretation of the events. Grasping the series of events as a story, being able to recognize that the story taking shape before one’s eyes is a story of a particular kind (genre), and that it is cast in a certain register or tone (mode), this is the interpretation of events produced by narrativization. In The Years of Extermination, Friedländer uses epigraphs as hinges between one section of his discourse and another. By narrativization, a complex of condensed (imaginal) materials is transferred from a horizontal (before-after) axis onto an axis of vertical (surface-depth) combination. Condensation on a vertical (or surface-depth) axis can be exemplified in the structure of the epigraph chosen by Friedländer to negotiate the transition from the end of part 2 (“Mass Murder”) to the beginning of part 3 (“Shoah”) of his text. Thus, we turn the page ending part 2 to find a page (357) that in its entirety looks like this: Part III Shoah Summer 1942–Spring 1945 “It is like being in a great hall where many people are joyful and dancing and also where there are a few people who are not happy and who are not dancing. And from time to time a few people of this latter kind are taken away, led to another room and strangled. The happy dancing people in the hall do not feel this at all. Rather, it seems as if this adds to their joy and doubles their happiness.” —Moshe Flinker (sixteen years old), Brussels, January 21, 1943

We learn a great deal more about Moshe Flinker later on in the text, but for the moment, I want to fix our attention on this passage from his diary used by Friedländer as an epigraph to part 3 of his text, “Shoah (Summer 1942–Spring 1945),” and try to explain why I wish to characterize it as a literary device that adds “interpretation” to the assemblages of “facts” comprising the two chapters it at once separates and joins.33 First, the quoted passage itself contains nothing factual. We are invited to entertain what we would in another context regard as a purely imaginary scene in which some people are happy and dancing and others are not, and from which, “from time to time,” some of the latter kind of people are taken away and “strangled,” while the “happy dancing people 69

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in the hall” do not “feel this” except as an increase in own their joy and happiness. The caption, which tells us that it was written by Moshe Flinker at a certain time, can be questioned as to its veracity, but the passage itself posits a scene more fantastic or grotesque (“a great hall”) than realistic; it is a simile (“It is like . . .”) that analogizes a situation (of Jews in Brussels, we know from the context only) to a wild dance party where “many people are joyful” and “a few people . . . are not happy,” where some are taken away and strangled and some are not, and where, finally, those who are not strangled apparently become happier and more joyful in response to, or as a result of, the murders of the less happy lot. I say that the epigraph negotiates the transition from part 2 to part 3 and from chapter 6 to chapter 7. How so? And what happens during this process of transition? First, it continues a metaphor that has been used to close chapter 6, which ends with an anecdote about objections to a party planned for Jewish children in the Warsaw Ghetto. The anecdote serves to introduce another metaphor for the characterization of the situation of the Jews of Europe during the years of extermination. Thus, the head of the ghetto, Adam Czerniaków remarking on objections to certain “play activities” that had been organized for the children of the Warsaw Ghetto, writes: “I am reminded of a film, a ship is sinking and the captain, to raise the spirits of the passengers, orders the orchestra to play a jazz piece. I have made up my mind to emulate the captain.”34 The next page takes us from the image of the jazz orchestra on the sinking ship to the image of a dance party conjured up by Moshe Flinker in which, “from time to time . . . a few people . . . are taken . . . and strangled.” The image of the jazz orchestra playing as the ship goes down is (ironically) replicated in the image of the dancers at a wild party where some are murdered while others ignore them and, at the same time, are stimulated by their fate. The second image can be taken as a “fulfillment” of the first, and the two taken together can be seen as an allegorical structure that adds meaning to the account quite in excess to whatever “facts” are reported in the conventional historiographical mode. Let me now conclude, as I could go on like this throughout the entire book, to show the advantages of “close reading,” even of nonliterary texts. My point would be to try to show that the literary devices, tropes, genres, and figures found in Friedländer’s book are not just a function of the inevitably “figural” aspect of natural languages but, in fact, in addition to their denotative function they come laden also with a wide variety of connotative significances. But the use of literary devices—such as epi70

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graph, ekphrasis, anecdote, constellation, and commentary—by a writer, whether of factual or fictional prose, is not simply a way of clothing unpalatable “facts” with a glossy veneer in order to make them more ingestible to a resistant reader. Such devices have the effect of drawing attention to the means and modes of literary production themselves (effecting what Roman Jakobson calls “the poetic function”) and of endowing the putatively “plain speech” parts of the text with specific affect (the conative function of the speech event, in Jakobson’s terms). But they are also parts of the “content” of the text. Thus, Friedländer’s substitution of his description (ekphrasis) of the photograph of Moffie’s graduation ceremony for the photograph itself draws our attention—draws my attention, at least—to a fundamental trope of historiography: the creation of the subject of the discourse by the description of the putative referent. A photograph of a historical event is a good illustration of this principle because its substitution by a description shows how any historian’s gesture toward a real referent in the past must already presuppose a description of that referent to serve as the referent’s discursive stand-in. This does not make the events being described less real or more fictional. It is simply that the description of any historical phenomenon is a way of constituting it as a possible object of historiographical representation. But I have suggested that although the devices, tropes, and figures identified here are those known to traditional criticism, Friedländer uses them to produce the specifically modernist (literary) effects of estrangement and disbelief in—not so much the truth, as instead the “reality” of—the events he recounts. And in the representation of historical reality, this constitutes the principal difference between traditional nineteenthcentury realism and its modernist alternative.

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2 On “Historical Modernism” A Response to Hayden White S AU L F R I E D L Ä N D E R

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T ISN’T EASY to disagree with Hayden White given the subtlety of his

stepwise argumentation and the wealth of literary and historical erudition that bolster his arguments. Moreover, I feel grateful for the generosity of his comments about my work. I also recognize that White’s reading of my book The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945 is as legitimate as my own. Thus, the comments that follow mainly point to the divergences in our readings. And divergences there are. According to White, some specific characteristics of my text turn The Years of Extermination into a “modernist” historical work, different in essence from “realist” historiography exemplified, in his view, by Richard Evans’s massive trilogy, The Third Reich. The distinction between these two categories of historical writing has been White’s basic argument during the last two decades at least, an argument outlined, for example, in his 1992 essay, “Historical Emplotment and the Problem of Truth.”1 Modern catastrophes demand a specific form of historical representation: “Modernist modes of representation may offer possibilities of representing the reality of both the Holocaust and the experience of it that no other version of realism could do. . . . This is not to suggest that we will give up the effort to represent the Holocaust realistically, but rather that our notion of what constitutes realistic representation must be revised to take account of experiences that are unique to our century and for which older modes of representation have proven inadequate.”2 72

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In his earlier criticism of historical realism and the search for historical objectivity, White essentially argued that the constraints imposed on the historian by a limited and unavoidable choice of rhetorical modes of emplotment put in question any “objective” representation of historical events; then, the quest for historical representation of modern catastrophes has led him to the notion of “modernist” history, which he perceives as akin to literature and thus allows for a depth of historical perception otherwise missing. In my view, White’s conflation between literature and history is unacceptable to the historian even in the rendition of a lived individual past, as in H. G. Adler’s The Journey, which White has cited as exemplary in his chapter in this volume.3 But Adler himself defined The Journey as fiction, as a “novel,” even in the title. In fact, it is a supporter of White on many issues, philosopher Paul Ricoeur, who, in Temps et Récit, may have found the most precise way of defining the crucial distinction between literary and historical rendition of past events: “The past event, however absent it may be from present perception, nonetheless governs the historical intentionality, conferring on it a realistic note that literature will never equal, even if it makes a claim to be ‘realistic.’ ”4 I agree with White on the necessity of finding an adequate historical representation of modern catastrophes. For me, however, it doesn’t mean abandoning historical intentionality and historical methods as we know them, but rather adding some new elements to the existing ways of writing history within the limits of traditional rules of historical research, conceptualization, and narration. Using statistics or econometric models does not invalidate the basic procedures of economic history as history; it enriches them. The issue that remains unclear, however, is whether modernist history, as White understands it, represents a new set of rules for the writing of history. In other words, does historical narration that occasionally uses a literary turn become thereby a different category of history? What about Jacob Burckhardt, Johan Huizinga, or Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s Montaillou? Regarding The Years of Extermination, White has emphasized its quality as a modernist history on the basis of three criteria: the limits of conceptualization; the absence of clear temporal unfolding; and, mainly, the abundant use of literary devices. The perception I have of these criteria is, of course, entirely different. On the issue of conceptualization, I argued that no single conceptual framework would fit the integrated history that I tried to write—in other 73

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words, no single concept allows us to interpret the history of the perpetrators, that of the bystanders, and that of victims as intertwined processes with entirely diverse origins and dynamics that converged at a given point in time. They shared part of the same context, but the forces that determined their evolution were thoroughly different. Most of the conceptual frameworks used up until now in the historiography of the Shoah apply essentially to Nazi policies (and, even within these limits, none of these frameworks has been recognized as the most plausible one) and thus relegate the other dimensions of this history to marginality. That is the very opposite of what I tried to achieve in my work.5 This lack of a single master framework, however, does not exclude the use of more limited conceptualization to interpret major facets of the events. I suggested “redemptive anti-Semitism” to interpret the ideological drive; I suggested the collapse of liberalism in continental Europe to account for the political/social context that allowed this drive to engulf the occupied countries; and I suggested material benefits both at the policy level and as individual motivation (resulting from the persecution, then disappearance of the Jews) to explain the economic incentives behind the Shoah. For White, my supposedly loose utilization of temporal sequences is a second proof of distanciation from historical realism. This argument is particularly puzzling, as the precise and systematic utilization of a succession of short periods of time is the very basis of my narration, with each chapter encompassing one of such periods. The complexity and diversity of initiatives and responses occurring simultaneously in a great number of countries or regions did not allow for “unity of action” (that would have meant dealing only with decisions taken at the political center), nor, obviously, for “unity of place.” Thus, my only recourse was to strictly adhere to the “unity of time” as the foundation of the narrative— that is, to a succession of temporal frameworks. Of course, within each chapter, the different events described could not be absolutely simultaneous or build perfect sequences; but within the overall narration, the sequences regarding each country or area—and each aspect of an array of intersecting policies and attitudes—are as closely related as the facts allowed. The entire process evolved through the three phases I used as the major divisions of my narrative (terror, murder, Shoah), and—contrary to what White suggests—these phases follow each other in a “logical” crescendo toward total extermination. In order to reach total extermination, the 74

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perpetrators had to move through the two preceding stages; these stages could have been shorter or longer, but they were preconditions for the ultimate phase. The process could have been stopped beforehand, but it was not. I explained the connections between Hitler’s successive decisions regarding the fate of the Jews, his ideological goals, and the course of the war in the clearest possible terms within the framework allowed by the available documentation. Regarding the ultimate decision (its date and the surrounding circumstances), that of total extermination, the documents can be read differently, but the stages leading to it are generally accepted.6 Finally, the literary “devices” that White uncovers in and around the narration that unfolds in The Years of Extermination are stylistic accessories, peripheral to the detailed rendition of the events. In other words, the stylistic accessories that are central to White’s analysis are entirely secondary in my view and do not impinge on the historical narration, while the cumulative process of events and the trends appearing in this history become peripheral in White’s presentation. Let me take one example to illustrate the difference in perception between White and myself regarding the meaning and centrality of literary devices: the epigraphs. I focus on the first epigraph, the one that introduces the entire volume, Stefan Ernest’s text. I chose Ernest’s lines to express what I considered from the outset as the most important contribution I wished to make in The Years of Extermination: introducing the voices of the victims as chroniclers of the “unbelievable,” as striving with all their remaining strength to leave an account of what they experienced and saw, knowing that what they experienced and saw was but a tiny fragment of boundless horror (“a tiny fraction of the truth”), that none of them or anybody else “could depict the whole, real, essential truth.”7 Ernest is stating that no form of writing will be able to depict the whole truth of the events: in the face of such events, the hope of giving a full account is bound to fail. In choosing these lines as the epigraph to the entire volume, I also wished to stress that I had no illusions about the possible scope of my own contribution. At first glance, White’s reading of Ernest’s text seems very close to my own: “Condensed into this small fragment of text is a whole allegory of the truth of writing as the writing of truth and the impossibility of that charge. And this makes of it a comment on the whole book that it introduces. . . . [The Years of Extermination] has a rich and varied thematic content, but the thematic content of this epigraph, placed as it is, at the 75

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head of this text, has a special function. It tells the reader that the text to follow is as much about the stakes of writing, the difficulty of telling the truth, and necessity of testimony in situations of extremity as it is about the facts of the matter. This small fragment of text alone would be enough to demonstrate that we are in the presence of ‘literature’ as well as ‘historiography.’ The writing in this passage is literary writing, and it has nothing at all to do with either fiction or aesthetics.”8 White’s reading of the epigraph is close to mine “at first glance” only. The key sentence in his text is manifestly the following: “Condensed into this small fragment of text is a whole allegory of the truth of writing as the writing of truth and the impossibility of that charge.” The “writing of truth” is what the historian aims at; whereas I used the epigraph to convey that I hoped, at best, to describe “a tiny fraction of the truth,” White pushed Ernest’s statement beyond its explicit meaning, to the impossibility of telling the historical truth. Ernest stresses the difference between a “tiny fraction” and “the whole, real, essential truth”; in White’s comment, this distinction has disappeared and we are back at his earliest stance regarding history (not an enumeration of facts, but an interpretation of facts) as a futile search for a nonexistent truth. The quest for a truthful interpretation, even as an incremental and discursive process, becomes an “impossible charge.” It may be, of course, that I am reading too much into White’s sentence. Yet, his use of a quote from Adler’s The Journey as an epigraph to his text (The Journey being fiction) gave me the feeling, from the outset, of déjà vu. Then, however, the core of White’s text, the distinction between modernist and realist history, would mean that realist history represents illusory objectivity and modernist history is not only literary but is akin to fiction or at least to some kind of fictionalized narration. Or, am I giving too much significance to the choice of the epigraph? Allow me to consider my arguments about White’s reading of Ernest’s epigraph and his choice of Adler’s text as overinterpretation on my part. It raises the incidental question whether the close reading of a text, the meaning of which depends on context (as everything does in the work of history, even an epigraph), doesn’t necessarily lead to a skewed overinterpretation. Regarding one point—a point that was, in fact, considered as the main characteristic of modernist historiography in White’s exposé of 1992—namely, the use of the “middle voice,” I do agree with him. In his present text, White points out that the first chapter of The Years of Exter76

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mination starts with four successive quotes (from the diaries of four Jews in Nazi Germany, in conquered Lodz or in about to be conquered Warsaw). He then adds the following comment: “These four anecdotes . . . are notable in the way that they stand in for the narrator, the way they permit him to draw back behind his text and let his subjects speak for themselves and for him. It is this authorial retreat that I wished to indicate as middle-voicedness in my earlier remarks on the narrator’s seemingly passive objectivity.”9 In our previous discussion, White expanded the interpretation of my use of the “middle voice”: “Friedländer seems to me to grasp this new condition for a possibility of a historiography that narrates (in a mode or manner of speaking, with a certain kind of “voice”) that does not narrativize [that is, “emplot”], that, in fact, works to denarrativize the events and things about which it speaks. He eschews the view of the omniscient narrator, gives up control of the storyline, collects accounts of what happened here and there under rough chronological categories, allows things to happen that challenge our capacities to believe what our ears hear and eyes perceive.”10 White overstates the seeming haphazardness of the sequences of events, as I previously mentioned, and does not indicate that the “middle voice” takes over only in limited segments of the work. But “middle voice” there is in part, and it may create a bridge between traditional historiography and the possibility of some new approach to the historical rendition of modern catastrophes. At the level of the overall thrust of White’s chapter about The Years of Extermination, our differences cannot be overcome. This reappears clearly in White’s final point stating that the stylistic effects I supposedly use create “effects of estrangement and disbelief in—not so much the truth, as instead the ‘reality’ of—the events” I narrate. “And,” White concludes, returning thereby to his fundamental argument, “in the representation of historical reality, this constitutes the principal difference between traditional nineteenth-century realism and its modernist alternative.”11 Had I intended to use literary devices to create a derealization effect, Hayden White would be right. But, as I mentioned repeatedly, I merely used the accepted stylistic possibilities of any narration, somewhat like Molière’s “Le Bourgeois gentilhomme” who, quite naturally—as he discovered late in life—was speaking in prose. Then again, to create estrangement or disbelief, I did use genuine historical documents: the voices of 77

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the victims, first and foremost, but also those of the perpetrators and of the bystanders, as we know them from letters or diaries (and, regarding the perpetrators and bystanders at a higher level, as we know them from an immense array of sources). These voices, mainly when they are juxtaposed in the text—and even more so in the mind of the reader—are meant to create a momentary reaction of “disbelief” in the very possibility that the events history recorded really happened. One cannot in any way consider the use of these voices as a mere literary device: they are discrete components of this history and add a supplementary facet to a reality that is not questioned, of course; they may create momentary “disbelief” because they confront the reader with events that appear unthinkable, even in the context of the most extreme genocidal horror.

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3 Sense and Sensibility The Complicated Holocaust Realism of Christopher Browning WULF K ANSTEINER

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HE ARRIVAL of the linguistic turn in historical studies, by way of

Metahistory, caused sustained discussions across disciplines.1 Historical theorists welcomed the opportunity to engage in conceptual debates about poststructuralism and the referential illusion of historical writing;2 literary scholars and narratologists reconsidered the differences between fictional and nonfictional texts and returned to the analysis of fiction with a new appreciation of fiction’s unique ability to mimic human consciousness;3 and historians took a closer look at their own texts, while insisting that their books maintain a referential relationship with past reality.4 Hardly anybody took the linguistic turn as an opportunity to delve into close readings of contemporary history from a narratological point of view.5 The reasons for that omission are neither sinister nor difficult to understand. Close reading entails trying to figure out how the terse language of professional historical writing is put together and how it initiates meaningful communication about the past. Close reading requires understanding the semantic operations in passages like the following from Christopher Browning’s synthetic work of Holocaust history, The Origins of the Final Solution:6 By the beginning of August 1941, all factors were in place for passing the threshold to the murder of all Jews in the occupied Soviet Union. The German army had occupied the Baltic states and Belorussia, and in Ukraine had reached the Kiev-Kirovograd line; 79

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the encirclement battles of Uman and Smolensk/Roslawl were to add almost another half a million Soviet POWs to those already starving in German camps. In mid July, Heydrich had issued guidelines for the screening of camps for Soviet POWs that called for the identification of “all Jews.” At the end of the month, Göring had authorized Heydrich to prepare a “total solution of the Jewish question in the German sphere of influence in Europe.”7 At first glance, the passage appears to be a straightforward enumeration of narrative events. The segment begins with a programmatic summary followed by four statements, which explicate the opening sentence and refer to a series of concrete occurrences. The four statements provide ministories consisting of generally accepted factual events. The movements of the German military, the number of Soviet prisoners taken and mistreated by the Wehrmacht, as well as the guidelines issued by Heydrich and the authorization extended by Göring, are narrative kernels that the community of scholars of modern German history for good reasons considers real events because they have been culled from archival records in original historical research and deployed countless times as historical facts in professional historiographical publications.8 The four narrative statements serve the purpose of giving analytical credibility to another, more abstract statement—“all factors were in place”—which is part of a narrative semantic operation because it implies a state of affairs before and after all factors were in place. This abstract statement assumes meaning by being immediately linked to another set of narrative events that, at this point in the plot of the book, have not yet occurred, that is, “the murder of all Jews in the occupied Soviet Union.” Clearly, the short phrase “all factors were in place” plays an important role in this passage. On closer examination and with just a slight, yet significant, shift in analytical perspective, one could argue that the passage does not serve the primary semantic function of delivering a story. The five narrative components are deployed to advance an important analytical argument that describes a status quo, does not have much narrative depth, and implies a theory of genocide: the potential for genocide in the Soviet Union required the presence of military success, ideologically motivated mass murder, practices of anti-Semitic identification, and political-bureaucratic authorization. The primarily argumentative-analytical function of the passage might explain why chronology is intentionally marginalized in the quoted text. For the purpose of offering a comprehensive description of the state of 80

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affairs in late summer 1941, the segment subsumes events under the heading “August 1941” that had not yet concluded (the battle of Smolensk did not end until the beginning of September—indicated by the phrase “were to” in the text). On an almost microscopic level, the passage thus illustrates fundamental questions about the nature of historical writing: Do historians primarily narrate or argue? Or, to phrase it differently, do they narrate for argument’s sake or argue to tell a good story? Perhaps they accomplish both objectives with different text elements and thus also manage to connect to diverse audiences whose members have different interests concerning their encounter with complex nonfiction narrative worlds and their appreciation of intricate arguments of historical causality. So the seemingly innocuous passage offers a glimpse into the complexities and depths of professional historical labor and writing. These kinds of passages bring together different semantic operations. They are made possible because historians dedicate time to the process of proposing, disputing, and confirming historical events, often as a result of spending time in real and virtual archives. That kind of inductive analytical labor is, for instance, performed in the context of the preparation and production of dissertations and monographs. The results of that inductive labor are immediately implicated and integrated into a different type of semantic operation pertaining to the crafting of large-scale analytical models and argumentative conclusions that are especially, but by no means exclusively, performed in synthetic texts like The Origins of the Final Solution. All of these tasks happen simultaneously and are hopelessly intertwined with, and can only be properly expressed through, acts of story making and storytelling. For example, even the seemingly straightforward, midrange narrative and argumentative semantic operations in the quoted passage are purposefully oriented toward a more important and complex analytical objective. In the present case, as we will see, the passage forms one of many analytical stepping-stones supporting the narrator’s assessment that the decision for Nazi genocide happened in early fall 1941 and not in winter 1941, or even later as other experts have argued.9 According to current professional historiographical standards, that argument can probably only be delivered in the form of a story with all the problems of epistemological relativity that narrativization entails. In 1988, the narratologist Seymour Chatman published a short, minimalist essay on what he considered the three basic text types of narrative, 81

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argument, and description. He emphasized that only narratives “have an internal time sequence,” and thus differ from atemporal arguments designed “to persuade an audience of the validity of some proposition” and similarly atemporal descriptions that explicate the properties of things, including abstract things.10 But Chatman immediately added that the three text types constantly intermingle. The classification of a given text does not depend on the relative presence or absence of descriptive, narrative, or argumentative components, but on its overriding textual intention or function. Purely argumentative and descriptive passages might advance a text’s overall narrative trajectory and intensely narrative segments might serve an overriding argumentative objective. Some narratologists have concluded from this observation that professional historical writing features extensive narration for the purpose of argumentation and therefore does not belong to the family of narrative texts at all.11 I have serious doubts about this conclusion. Classifications like Chatman’s are primarily focused on textual properties, but they raise important questions of interpretation and reception. Professional historical writing features a great deal of narration, both on the level of large-scale, overarching story lines and on the level of small-scale narrative tableaux. Therefore, it is reasonable to assume that the relation between argumentation and narration in historical texts varies greatly with regard to textual properties and reception processes.12 Some texts might be primarily appreciated as narrative restagings of the past, while others are finely tuned analytical exercises in persuasion. In fact, the uneasy relationship between narration and argumentation might turn historical writing into an interesting special case, one in which narration and argumentation coexist, compete, and potentially derail each other. I suggest that professional historians accomplish at least two different intellectual tasks that are hopelessly intertwined in the academic pursuit of historical research and writing, but which nevertheless represent two very different semantic construction principles. Close reading of historical prose reveals the complicated balancing act between narration and argumentation that takes place in historical journals and monographs. Close reading also shows that historians produce intriguingly complex and intellectually challenging cultural artifacts. So historians and narratologists are absolutely correct when they emphasize the importance of argumentation in the work of professional historians. A great deal of what historians do consists of analytical work for 82

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the purpose of creating discrete semantic units that are carefully related to each other to attain specific interpretive objectives. This process entails deductions, inductions, comparisons, counterfactuals, and so forth, and results in texts that exhibit relatively simple narrative surface structures undergirded by complex and often nonnarrative argumentative operations.13 By focusing on the small-scale analytical work of historians and the discrete narrative units emerging from that work, some philosophers of history have compellingly highlighted historians’ ability to make truthful statements about the past.14 But historical texts have additional important properties. Depending on their argumentative and narrative contexts, the discrete units can be reshaped to take on different meanings. That flexibility is linked to the complex semantic structures of historical writing. In addition to a great deal of analytical work and relatively well-circumscribed factual-narrative concepts (the battle of Smolensk), historians provide far-flung story lines that, simply because of their scale, have relatively unreliable argumentative foundations. Let us consider another passage from The Origins of the Final Solution: But ultimately Europe’s second great “modernization crisis” was fraught with even greater danger for the Jews than the first, nearly a millennium earlier. Once again the “social losers” of the modernization crisis—traditional elites and small-scale producers in particular— could find in the Jews a convenient symbol for their anguish.15 These sentences represent, in highly compressed form, the results of a lot of analytical labor—fraught with significant aesthetic, political, and emotional interference. Producing these statements is an important part of the historians’ profession, but the sentences have a different epistemological status than the small-scale, incrementally developed language cited above.16 Moreover, the vast conceptual space between “the battle of Smolensk” and the “ ‘social losers’ ” of the “second great ‘modernization crisis’ ” is not a continuous, consistently structured conceptual terrain filled with stepping-stones of roughly equal size, as some philosophers of history wants us to believe. Instead, writing history requires its producers to pursue more than one language game at the same time (pace Lyotard)17 and combine the safe ground of textual exegesis with the treacherous topography of social-political commentary. Both games depend on each other—no purposeful analytical research without narrative program and 83

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vice versa—but any given segment of historical prose rarely reveals on first sight which game has played the dominant role in its creation. Plus, depending on the communicative setting, the perception of the status of any specific textual component can change after the fact. On closer examination, as in a new reception context, for example, even the straightforward analytical language of the first quote could be revealed to be narratively ‘corrupted’ and analytically instable. In this chapter, I am not interested in exploring possible epistemological shortcomings in professional historical narration. Instead, I like to focus on the question of how historians and their texts handle the analytical distance and linguistic proximity of their different language games. What strategies do they employ to traverse the gaps between argumentation and narration, fact and interpretation, event and story, and chronicle and history? Hayden White is the foremost theorist of the gap. He has studied historians’ attempts to fuse narration and argumentation, analyzed other philosophers of history in their efforts of conceptualizing that process, and tried to bridge the gap both conceptually and empirically.18 Moreover, White has emphasized all along, often by invoking the task of coming to terms with the Nazi crimes, that self-conscious and responsible ways of integrating historical analysis and historical narration constitute a serious ethical challenge.19 Finally, while White’s provocative ideas caused a lot of consternation among historians, he nevertheless influenced the writing of history, especially in the field of Holocaust studies. In my view, the selfreflexive writing of Saul Friedländer in Years of Extermination would not be possible without Metahistory, The Content of the Form, and Probing the Limits of Representation.20 And traces of the linguistic turn and White’s influence are also noticeable in the sensible, perceptive, and modest realism of Christopher Browning. I am particularly intrigued by the way in which authors like Friedländer and Browning not only acknowledge the gap but also use it as an additional, self-reflexive channel of communicating with their readers. The historiographical context has most decisively shifted through the publication of Friedländer’s synthetic work of Holocaust history that artfully arranges the discrete units of historical narration in a dualistic, contradictory pattern.21 On first glance, the story elements of Friedländer’s The Years of Extermination appear to support the explicitly announced macrothesis concerning the primacy of ideological factors. A closer 84

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examination reveals, however, that the basic parameters of historical storytelling—time, space, and causality—have been manipulated in such a way that the parameters themselves, as well as the story line they carry, become unreliable and ever so slightly destabilize the reader’s sense of narrative control.22 In a process of cumulative aesthetic radicalization, the book delivers homeopathic dosages of analytical unease for the explicit ethical purposes of capturing a weak echo of the feelings of the victims of the Final Solution. In Friedländer’s The Years of Extermination, the gaps between different narrative perspectives and analytical objectives have been made to talk; they deliver one of the book’s central messages.23 Friedländer’s unusual strategy of safeguarding semantic instability through narrative design and analytical understatement—the narrator in Years of Extermination curbs his significant analytical ambition for the purpose of developing a complicated, contradictory narrative universe that carries an ethical punch—contrasts sharply with the type of Holocaust history that maintains through its narrative format that no meaningful gaps between narration and argumentation exist and that all narratively presented conclusions have seamlessly emerged from previous analytical-argumentative work. In Holocaust historiography, that kind of book has been written by Peter Longerich, who reconstructs the decision-making process from the perspectives of different collectives of Nazi perpetrators.24 For my taste, in its relentless analytical and narrative homogeneity, the book comes frighteningly close to performing, and not just discussing, a Nazi point of view (which is a statement about the text, not its author). From a post–Years of Extermination perspective, Longerich’s Politik der Vernichtung highlights a serious dilemma: the more the book succeeds as an analytical-argumentative exegesis of the available sources and literatures, resulting in a factually saturated, tightly argued narrative reconstruction of the Nazi decision-making process, the more it seems to lose sight of the ethical responsibilities that can be legitimately attributed to the writing of history: Den Einsatzgruppen wurden, wie wir gesehen haben, in der Anfangsphase des Ostkrieges die Aufgabe gestellt, die Angehörigen einer wage umschriebenen jüdischen Führungsschicht zu liquidieren (und sich dabei eben nicht auf die in der Weisung Heydrichs genannten “Juden in Partei- und Staatsstellungen” zu beschränken). Dabei gingen die Einsatzkommandos in dieser Phase meist relativ schnell dazu über, unmittelbar nach der Eroberung von Städten 85

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und Dörfern Massaker unter der (männlichen) jüdischen Bevölkerung anzurichten (oder durch einheimische Kollborateure zu organisieren), um entweder Juden als “potentielle Gegner” zu beseitigen oder auf diese Weise “Strafe” oder “Vergeltung” für tatsächliche oder angebliche Massnahmen des sowjetischen Staatsapparates zu üben. Ein ähnlicher Modus operandi lässt sich in den ersten Wochen für eine Reihe von Polizeibattallionen feststellen.25 I do not think it requires delving into the writing of Adorno, Lyotard, or Levinas to grasp what is disturbing about this passage and what I would put into the following narratological terms: the text stages—and invites the reader to join—a complicity between the narrator of the story (not the author!) and the main characters of the story, that is, the perpetrators. The narrator frequently highlights the perpetrators’ brutality, but his conceptual-narrative perspective and the presumed perspective of the perpetrators are nevertheless too closely aligned for my comfort, since the narrator is single-mindedly concerned with their motives and his narrative-analytical project appears to derive its interpretive cohesion from the vantage point of the characters of his story. That is a perfectly normal and unproblematic state of affairs in many narrative worlds, but the relationship between narrator and characters should probably be constructed in more conflicted and self-reflexive ways in a nonfiction reconstruction of the narrative universe of the Holocaust.26 A comparative perspective on Holocaust historiography thus yields an interesting set of contradictory hypotheses. The incremental, small-scale fusion of argumentation and narration, which appears all the more objective since it seems to render the gap between the two meaningless, leads to an unrealistically clean model of historical development and impedes ethical self-reflexivity. Rather than constituting a hindrance to successful historical writing, complex, self-conscious narration emerges as an indispensable empirical and ethical counterweight to narrative-analytical consistency. Politik der Vernichtung thus inadvertently illustrates the need for acknowledging the coexistence of different, even mutually incompatible narrative and analytical perspectives within the same narrative universe. When it comes to managing the gap between narration and argumentation, Christopher Browning stakes out a carefully constructed middle ground—as he does in so many aspects of his work. Especially Ordinary Men is a stroke of genius in this regard because Browning decisively sep86

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arates narration from causal analysis.27 The body of the book consists of terse, often short sentences that apparently simply relate what happened and derive additional semantic stability from the fact that the story is a chronologically and spatially well-defined microhistory. The narration and the small-scale analytical infrastructure supporting it are so closely attuned to each other that the task of prying them apart seems like a fool’s errand. In contrast, the final chapter of the book provides plenty of largeand small-scale interpretations of historical causality. But the wideranging, comparative reflections about the motives of perpetrators of mass atrocities are openly speculative and frequently delivered in a nonnarrative key. So Browning highlights rather than hides the gap, relegating the narrative reconstruction of the events and the analytical disputation about its causes to different segments and genres within the same book. A second look at Ordinary Men demonstrates that its narrative world anticipates and lines up very nicely with the interpretive preferences of its conclusion, but the clear differentiation between the two realms of representation opens up significant interpretive space both for the narrator and the reader.28 The narrator uses that space to create suspense; sideline other more conventional explanations for the behavior of the perpetrators; and finally deliver his own, innovative social psychological explanatory framework. The readers may use the space between narration and explanation to insert their own viewpoints, and their interpretive agency is further enhanced in the book’s second edition. The narrator now creates an even more complex dialogical setting by acknowledging the work of the critic/ competitor Daniel Goldhagen.29 Naturally, the primary purpose of the new afterword consists of refuting the critic, but the new sequence of the book—narration, explanation, refutation—further complicates the communication setting and provides yet another illustration of the disparity between fact and interpretation.30 Right at the beginning, in the preface of The Origins of the Final Solution, readers are informed that they are entering a nicely complicated communicative setting. The Origins of the Final Solution is not a conventional monograph because the story of the decision-making process is told by two narrators. Browning and Matthäus collaborated on the preface of the book and the last part of chapter seven. Browning wrote all the other chapters in The Origins of the Final Solution with the exception of chapter seven which was contributed by Matthäus.31 The narrators immediately admit in the preface that they disagree about interpretations 87

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“in some small ways,” and hence abandon aspirations of “interpretational uniformity.”32 Moreover, the book is part of a multivolume, comprehensive history of the Holocaust.33 As a result, the narrators announce that they will focus on the decisions of the perpetrators and not consider the perspective of the victims, whose experiences are the subject of other publications in the series. For the same reason, they will stick closely to their realm of chronological responsibility, covering Nazi Jewish policy from September 1939 to March 1942. After these two prolepses, the reader is in for a surprise. The narrative in chapter I does not begin in the 1930s, or in the twentieth century for that matter, but instead sets in with a discussion of the politics of religion “40 to 60 years after the death of Jesus” (1).34 The narrator in chapter I clearly entertains significant narrative ambition and, in immediately breaking his own rules, develops an impressive eleven-page panorama reaching from antiquity all the way to the Nazi attack on Poland. He lays out a three-stage dialectic of enlightenment that has Christians and Jews, “illiterate, impoverished, and huddled in isolated villages” and under attack from Vikings and Magyars living a life of miserable coexistence in the European Dark Ages (2). The shared misery is blown apart by “Europe’s first great ‘modernization crisis’ ” (2), when significant demographic, economic, cultural, and political change prompted European societies to embrace anti-Semitism and “ ‘social losers’ ” (2) in the form of “roving gangs of knights” (3) launched violent attacks on the Jewish minority. The third stage of the dialectical tragedy highlights Europe’s “second great ‘modernization crisis’ ” of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that hit Germany particularly hard, causing it to careen along its own fateful path to modernity. The narrator cites the most important contributors to the Sonderweg narrative and elegantly captures the thesis in a nutshell when he calls Germany “a ‘schizophrenic’ nation—an increasingly modern society and economy ruled by an autocratic monarchy and traditional elites—incapable of gradual democratic reform” (6).35 The narrator then zooms in on his primary subject matter of Holocaust history, highlighting along the way that Germany in crisis, especially the “ ‘social losers’ ” (5) in the ranks of the traditional elites, adopted and institutionalized particularly virulent forms of anti-Semitism and thus helped to usher in the Nazi catastrophe, even if the Nazis’ extreme anti-Jewish hatred initially proved not particularly popular with German voters. Having summarized 2,000 years of European history and identified a successful path through the historiographical maze that is the Sonderweg 88

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debate, the narrator proves equally skillful at integrating intentionalist and structuralist viewpoints into a balanced and reasonable story line without recalling the acrimonious discussions of past decades.36 The summary highlights the anti-Semitic obsessions of Hitler and the Nazi elite, as well as the self-propelling polycratic nature of the Nazi bureaucracy replete with Jewish experts eager to launch yet another vicious attack on European Jewry. The “ ‘machinery of destruction’ ” (pace Hilberg, 11) thus emerges at the end of a carefully calibrated master narrative that rules one thought out of bounds: The dialectic of modernization with its extensive web of long- and short-term causal linkages renders notions of chronological, spatial, and causal discontinuity implausible and unreasonable—as one might perhaps expect from a book that is exclusively focused on the prehistory of an event that is itself not part of its narrative universe. The first chapter of The Origins of the Final Solution teems with master narratives about progress and modernization and stereotypes of the Dark Ages. As a result, the text is an easy target for narratological analysis. It does not take much critical acumen to recognize that the introduction, qua narrative design, simply posits what the text is unable to demonstrate, that is, that the events of the past millennia, some of which can be conclusively determined as facts, are indeed part of an overall narrativecausal trajectory that can be confirmed with a similar degree of epistemological certainty. In these eleven pages, the existence of the gap is clearly denied. But it also does not take much reflection to realize that the narrator never claims to have provided such a factual foundation for his large-scale narratives in the first place. Moreover, the subsequent chapters could easily stand on their own; they do not derive much support from the far-flung narrative trajectory of the introduction. So while the first chapter is all large-scale narrative, the subsequent chapters consist of a series of so many finely tuned arguments that it seems impossible to detect the ordering hand of epistemologically arbitrary aesthetic judgments, political convictions, and narrative commitments. Halfway through the book, however, the small disagreements of interpretation set in that have already been announced in the preface. As a result, the gaps between narration and argumentation become blatantly obvious. Here are two top experts in the field, Christopher Browning and Jürgen Matthäus, who respect each other’s work and decided to write the book 89

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together. But the two intellectual collaborators, who probably kept an open mind and open lines of communication throughout the project, also agreed to disagree “in some small ways.” In a spirit of full disclosure, they inform the readers about their disagreements and tell the story of the origins of the Final Solution from two different points of view and with the help of two different narrators. The disagreement raises some interesting questions. If two scholars working from the same set of sources, equipped with the same high level of expertise, and sharing similar points of view cannot settle their differences of interpretation on the basis of a detailed study of the sources, how can we trust the sources to settle any differences of opinion, especially differences of opinion between scholars who consider each other’s work from more critical perspectives? What are the origins of the differences, how do they manifest themselves in the texts, how could they possibly be settled—or should they perhaps not be settled at all? Inadvertently, a sizable hole opens up in the smooth surface of The Origins of the Final Solution, inviting the reader to take a closer look at the inner workings of the historian’s craft. The two narrators agree on the parameters of Holocaust historiography and suggest similar lines of interpretation. They acknowledge the dearth of source material caused by the fact that the perpetrators amassed vast collections of data about their crimes, but also managed to destroy most of it before the collapse of the Third Reich. They warn against the temptations of hindsight, which prompts us to perceive a straight, coherent succession of events that are more appropriately depicted as complex, contradictory constellations of happenings. That caveat applies first and foremost to our attempts of understanding the deeds and motives of past actors. Finally, both narrators reject monocausal explanations of the Holocaust. Instead, they favor a dialectical model of explanation that carefully relates and integrates decisions reached by Nazi leaders in Berlin with actions launched by local and regional German officers in a multitude of settings and agencies in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe. In essence, both narrators report how they interpret the relatively few surviving sources in an effort to reconstruct the patterns of communication between the Nazi center and the Nazi peripheries, hoping to be able to identify the key factors that triggered the radicalization of Nazi anti-Jewish policies in the summer and fall of 1941. In light of all these agreements, one would expect that the two narrators deliver compatible explanations and indeed only disagree with each other “in some small way.” And in many respects, that is the case. Concep90

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tually, they are on the same center-periphery page, identify the same range of causal factors, and find similar words whenever they step forward and explicitly discuss questions of causality in general terms. But when they begin to tell their stories in detail, the situation changes decisively. Through the act of historical narration, the minor conceptual discrepancies between the perspectives of both narrators are exacerbated to the point of narrative incompatibility. Since conventional professional historical prose puts a premium on narrative coherence, an initial state of relatively harmonious conceptual coexistence gives rise to considerable narrative tension. The narratively enhanced differences between Matthäus’s and Browning’s historical worlds are best illustrated by their conflicting casts of characters. The characters have the same names—Hitler, Himmler, Heydrich, and Bach-Zelewski, among many others—but they do not seem to speak, feel, or act in the same way. They certainly do not live up to our expectations about character development in an integrated, monographic work of historical writing. In fact, holding the two worlds and sets of characters side by side creates an intriguing, conflicted, and open-ended dialogue between the two competent and competing narrators. In the narrative world of the minority report in chapter 7 (Matthäus), the figure of Hitler is largely absent from the scene and prefers “the role of observer to that of decision maker” (300). Moreover, he “is less interested in the Jewish question than in other broader problems,” (265) contemplating, for instance, the “ ‘Garden of Eden’ ” he is about to create in the East (267). Hitler occasionally dispenses with general words of encouragement and might issue some sweeping, impractical pronouncement (“non-Germans should never be allowed to bear arms,” 273) that his subordinates ignore because the declarations are at odds with the practical demands of empire building in occupied Eastern Europe. According to the narrative logic of the minority report, which temporarily adopts the perspective of local and regional Nazi leaders, Hitler advances his grandiose vision of empire most effectively by trusting his men to make the right decisions and preferring not to be bothered (265, 267, 302). The narrator of the minority report also paints an interesting picture of the historical figures of Himmler and Heydrich. Hitler’s experts for anti-Jewish policy, who act as liaisons to the units in the field, are worried about “going too far too quickly” (263) in the persecution of the Jews because “excessive zeal” might antagonize the army, destroy the “veil of secrecy” (263) and the “quiet on the home front” (264), and, most 91

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important, cause long-term psychological harm to their men (258, 263). In this narrative setting, Heydrich and Himmler obsessively hover over their troops, visiting them repeatedly in the field to offer moral support and general words of encouragement (257). Yet, despite the frequent trips to the front, which they take as an opportunity to sanction crimes after the fact (255) and, less frequently, reign in particularly excessive violent outbursts especially of non-German perpetrators (272), the two have only an insufficient grasp of what is going on (301, 307) and fail to provide the kind of support that their subordinates would have appreciated the most, that is, clear guidelines about their murderous task. Repeatedly, Heydrich and Himmler issue vaguely worded directives, failing to settle the key question of how to treat Jewish women and children (253). As a result of such “ambiguity” (283), the various Nazi agencies have a considerable “communication problem” and adopt “an incoherent, locally and regionally varied sequence of measures” (258–259). The narrator raises the possibility that Himmler’s and Heydrich’s reluctance to intervene decisively might have been part of a master plan of “foment[ing] the local killing process . . . in more subtle ways than by direct ordering” (257) because Heydrich, for one, should have known from past experiences during the assault on Poland that “the likelihood of his officers in the field committing acts of violence against the civilian population increased with the vagueness of the guidelines issued to them” (253). The resulting contradiction is never resolved; consequently, two of the main characters of the story are variously described as fearful, indecisive, and ill-informed, as well as deviously cunning (253 versus 256). The administrative vacuum is filled by another set of actors who are of particular interest to the narrator. In his story line, the rapid escalation of violence in the occupied territories in July and August 1941 is primarily accomplished by local and regional officers who develop “their own interpretation of what needed to be done” (252) and thus implemented the long-term objectives of their Berlin superiors despite missing guidelines. When repeated requests for clarification go unanswered (304), they are “taking the initiative” (256, 284) and embark on a killing spree at their own pace with “fervor and adaptability” (283) in a context in which “traditional elements of hierarchy lost their importance” (256). Neither “specific orders from Berlin” (258) nor the presence of superiors is necessary for the violence to reach the threshold of genocide, notwithstanding the fact that a uniform policy does not develop for several months. As late as November 1941, some units are still refraining from indiscriminately 92

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murdering women and children (282, 299). For all these reasons, the narrator reaches the important conclusion that the attack on the Soviet Union caused a considerable shift in “the balance of power from the center to the periphery” (293). The narrator suggests that the “ ‘little Himmlers’ ” (251) committed their crimes primarily for ideological reasons, but he concedes that their precise motives are difficult to fathom given the fragmentary and evasive nature of the existing source material. In the course of the story of local activism, the narrator introduces a number of intriguing counterfactual arguments designed to circumvent some explicit statements in that fragmentary record that seem to contradict his story line. Faced with documents referring to unequivocal, explicit orders having been issued by Himmler, the narrator maintains that such orders by Himmler or Hitler, if they had existed, would indeed have ended all discussions among the troops. The assumptions of the distribution of explicit orders about the killing of women and children can therefore not be reconciled with the fact that even after the orders were allegedly issued and after Himmler repeatedly visited the frontlines of the war against the Jews, confusion about the killing of women and children persisted in some units (281, 305). In another nice rhetorical twist, the narrator cites Browning and then refutes Browning by emphasizing that a famous meeting of Hitler, Göring, Rosenberg, Lammers, Bormann, and Keitel that took place on July 16, 1941, revealed that in the mind of the Nazi leaders, the anti-Jewish campaign in Eastern Europe was linked to far-flung plans of ethnic engineering. The narrator hastens to add, however, that having systematically linked “inclusion and exclusion,” the leaders failed to decide many key issues including how to accomplish the removal of the Jews from their envisioned “ ‘Garden of Eden’ ” (267). The minority report pursues a program of interpretive excess. In its narrative universe, the increasingly radical actions of the local Nazi leaders cannot be causally reduced to the motives and orders of the Nazi leaders in Berlin and, therefore, said actions are likely to reflect a range of motives that differed from setting to setting. As a result of this interpretive strategy, which leaves key questions unanswered, the minority report displays a great deal of argumentative integrity. It can afford to acknowledge a lot of historical data that escape the grasp of a more explicitly developed, consistently implemented narrative model of explanation. But the text also pays the price for this analytical-argumentative integrity by failing to identity and narratively articulate a definitive set of historical 93

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actors and motives. In the minority report, analytical diversity tops narrative coherence at the expense of explanatory satisfaction. The narrator of the majority report (Browning) tells a very different story about the escalation of violence in the occupied territories of the Soviet Union, especially in chapter 8. In this narrative universe, we meet another Hitler who “inaugurated the decision-making process” (314, also 309, 325) and was not only “directly involved” but actually “controlled the pace of events” (321). Sometimes he edged on his underlings and sometimes he curbed the “zeal of his followers” (318). Either way, major “decisions . . . could only be taken by him” (321). The narrator identifies a distinct pattern underlying Hitler’s course of action. Whenever the German military was rapidly advancing on the Eastern Front, he accelerated the mass murder of Soviet and European Jewry and only pulled back when the army hit roadblocks on their way to Moscow. The Final Solution, as the narrator emphasizes repeatedly, was born from “the exhilaration and euphoria of victory” (318, 326). The thesis is elegantly captured in a succinct metaphor. The narrator compares the decision-making process to a set of expanding concentric circles radiating outward (317), with Hitler at the center of events and Himmler and Heydrich representing the first tier of experts implementing his decisions. Like Hitler, Himmler and Heydrich are very much hands-on perpetrators who quickly jump into action to fulfill the führer’s wishes. In response to Hitler’s euphoria, they rapidly build up the ranks of the Schutzstaffel (SS) troops in the East and personally relate the change in policy—with devastating results. Shortly after Himmler’s visits, the respective units start murdering women and children and report higher numbers of victims. As a result of this efficient communication, “by midAugust the results were virtually everywhere the same” and there was “no gap between what was happening in the field and what was either known or desired by the top leadership of the Nazi regime” (313). Having painted a decisive picture of top-down implementation, the narrator adds a number of important qualifications, for instance, conceding that there never was “a single, comprehensive killing order issued on a single date and disseminated by a single uniform method” (313); that Hitler usually did not give explicit orders (310); that Hitler’s important decision of September 1941 to begin the genocide of European Jewry was not quickly related to the Nazi officers and bureaucrats concerned with anti-Jewish policies all over Europe (329); and that large-scale mass 94

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shootings of Jewish civilians in a number of locations, for instance, in Serbia as late as December 1941, were caused by local factors and “not a conscious part of a European-wide Final Solution to the Jewish question” (346, also 352). The two stories are thus most compatible in their characterization of local actors. The second narrator can also think of many examples of local initiative and “local experimentation” and many settings in which “the perceptions and desires of local officials . . . dovetailed perfectly with the visions and goals at the center” (366). In this sense, “by September and October gassing as one possible method for the mass murder of Jews was an idea waiting to be institutionalized” (354). Despite all these caveats that acknowledge the other narrator’s point of view, the majority report delivers a very different intellectual product than the minority report. There are no important local decisions and actions whose causes remain elusive and demand additional explanation. Such irritating details are acknowledged in footnotes and prolepses, but they do not derail a clearly articulated narrative program of Berlin hegemony. In the majority report, narrative coherence tops analytical diversity for the purpose of establishing semantic, argumentative consistency. Chapters 7 and 8 of The Origins of the Final Solution offer an unusual and unusually honest look at the inner workings of professional historical narration. The important discrepancies between the two narrative worlds are linked to long-standing conceptual traditions in the field of Holocaust historiography. In programmatic statements and their choice of terminology, both narrators signal an inclusive, ecumenical approach concerning the old interpretive divide between structuralists and intentionalists. In this vein, for instance, the second narrator repeatedly acknowledges “the polycratic nature of the Nazi regime” (317). But in one key respect, the two different stories about the Nazi leadership nevertheless align with the conventional divisions between both camps. In the context of the dialogue between the two narrators in The Origins of the Final Solution, the plot of chapter 8, featuring a Hitler closely attuned to events, defining key turning points, and wielding a veto power about important decisions corresponds to intentionalist thinking about his historical character. This story line is particularly compatible with the kind of moderate intentionalism represented by Friedländer, among others.37 The Hitler of chapter 7—aloof, fickle, at times deluded and uninterested— echoes structuralist narrative strategies first invented by Mommsen and 95

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Broszat in an effort to redirect analytical attention from Hitler and his entourage to the many lesser-known perpetrators and the social contexts within which they operated. Both lines of interpretation hark back all the way to the Nazi era. The intentionalists sifted through the rubbles of the Hitler myth and the self-serving postwar defense strategies of former Nazis, retaining from both an axiomatic belief in Hitler’s central role in the unfolding of the Nazi crimes. The structuralists, in their wholesale rejection of these lines of interpretation, sought to establish social structures and average individuals as historical agents in their own right, thus introducing a new set of axioms for the successful study of modern European societies and advocating for different guidelines for the moral assessment of perpetrator behavior.38 Today, the two concepts are softer around the edges than they were in past decades, but it is still difficult to imagine narrative worlds in which they are really seamlessly integrated. Perhaps with that recognition in mind, seamless integration is consciously avoided in The Origins of the Final Solution. With Browning’s and Matthäus’s help, we can now better appreciate how little control events collectively established as facts exert about their emplotment. Consider, for instance, the already-mentioned meeting of Nazi leaders on July 16, 1941. On the Browning hand, there is the image of Hitler setting everything into motion by gathering his closest advisers and, by way of a speech whose tenor was “unmistakable” (310), informing them about his long-term goals and the necessary shortterm measures to accomplish these. On the Matthäus hand, there is the image of Hitler who, on that very occasion, celebrates pie-in-the-sky racist utopias, spews forth completely unrealistic practical guidelines (no arms), and does not care about key anti-Jewish policy decisions. These interpretive divisions cannot easily be conceptually and narratively reconciled with each other. In this case, as probably in many others, events established as fact have no chance to escape from the grasp of deeply held narrative commitments that, in this concrete instance, posit the primacy of central agency against the primacy of peripheral agency.39 In this context it is again useful to differentiate between author and narrator. In Ordinary Men, the author Browning crafted a narrator and a narrative world primarily reflecting a functionalist point of view. The book’s subject matter and conceptual focus, an everyday history of Nazi perpetrators interpreted from a social psychological point of view, resulted in a narrative trajectory emphasizing the relevance of local decision making and collective psychological processes of self-radicalization. 96

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In the narrative world of Ordinary Men, Hitler was a marginal figure and Nazi anti-Semitism was not explicitly mentioned.40 The commitment to the genre of synthetic history, and perhaps also some critical comments about Ordinary Men, prompted the author Browning to assume a different narrative voice and craft a moderately intentionalistically structured narrative universe in The Origins of the Final Solution. Hitler is an omnipresent figure in The Origins of the Final Solution—as one would expect in a synthesis. Moreover, with the exception of the narrative enclave of chapter 7, Hitler is also a powerful figure exerting efficient control over the peripheries on the Nazi empire by way of his loyal subjects Himmler and Heydrich and by way of the fact that the führer and his anti-Semitic obsessions played such an important role in Nazi culture.41 In the course of a long career, scholars can craft different narrator identities and engage in dialogues with themselves, for purposes of self-reflection and the benefit of their readers. The dialogical performance of alternative emplotments in The Origins of the Final Solution thus sharpens our perception of the line of demarcation that separates fact from interpretation and raises our awareness for the price that has to be paid for narrative homogeneity. Let us consider, for example, the following passage from the minority report: In the large cities Einsatzgruppe C and the Wehrmacht would kill some Jews on arrival, register the remaining persons, and coordinate the modus and date for their murder with the HSSPF [Höhere Schutzstaffel und Polizeiführer], the Security Police, or the Order Police. Guidance from higher authorities was not required. In Zhitomir, Blobel held a conference with the local military commander on September 10 to discuss what to do with the more than 3,300 Jews in the city. (292) The first and the third sentences reflect the kind of statements of facts about which historians can often reach agreement. The second sentence relates an interpretation that, as we now know, could be contested.42 Given the fragmentary nature of the surviving documents and the pervasiveness of personal communication among the perpetrators, it seems to be difficult to prove either the negative conclusion that no guidance had been forthcoming from Berlin or to prove the negative counterfactual conclusion that such guidance, regardless if it had been forthcoming or not, was not required. So the passage could be used to demonstrate, once more, that statements of fact and statements of interpretation do 97

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not necessarily overlap in any logical sense. But it is much more interesting to raise the question of why the second sentence is there in the first place since it appears somewhat out of place in the context of the surrounding sentences and paragraphs. In my reading, these types of markers attest to our habitual thinking in terms of integrated, linear analytical structures and narrative worlds. Through that marker, the narrator is telling us that he is aware of the fact that the text is in danger of wandering off into uncharted semantic terrain and needs to be put back on the predetermined tracks of narrative coherence. The Origins of the Final Solution is honest and conflicted about the problems of historical representation and, in its conflictedness, full of creative irony. Having opened the Pandora’s box in chapters 7 and 8, the text returns to business as usual, while the reader might no longer be in the same position that he or she was at the beginning of chapter 7. The conclusion contains, for instance, an expertly put together summary of state-of-the-art moderate intentionalist thinking, featuring memorable sentences advocating semantic homogeneity: “If one wants to know what Hitler was thinking, one should look at what Himmler was doing” (425). But in light of the complex dialogue that the two narrators had conducted earlier, the Hitler figure that takes center stage in the conclusion appears wanting in important respects. It seems somewhat wooden, one-dimensional, and inauthentic. By the end of the book, some readers, including this one, have come to appreciate diverging story lines and explicit interpretive disagreements as signs of historical authenticity and scholarly integrity. From my perspective, the dialogue at the center of the book raises key questions about the discipline: Given the nonlinear complexity of the archival record and historians’ sophisticated nonlinear strategies of analyzing these complex records, do we really want to keep creating onedimensional, linear narrative worlds? And do we want to keep producing these worlds in a cultural context of interactive social media and vast digital archives in which narrative linearity represents only one of many narrative options and very likely not the most interesting one?43 The Origins of the Final Solution as well as The Years of Extermination demonstrate that integrating truly dialogical elements in writing about very sensitive subject matter does not call into question the empirical foundation and ethical integrity of historical studies. In fact, dialogical, multiperspectival forms of representation seem to be a particularly honest way 98

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Synchronic Standards of Non-Contradiction

Figure 3.1. Stage 1: Historians establish and describe past events (three, in this case) with the help of inductive analytical-argumentative rules of synchronic noncontradiction. The meeting of July 16, 1941, is an example of such an event. The primary sources directly describing the meeting show that Hitler met with his entourage on that day, but did not develop clear policy guidelines.

to record our encounters with the past and to engage with our doubts and differences in a more transparent fashion. The close reading of The Origins of the Final Solution gives us a better sense of the inherent instability or multidimensionality of professional historical writing that could be exploited for nonlinear strategies of representation. Conventional historical narratives follow diachronic standards of noncontradiction. According to these standards, historians seek to construct consistently structured narrative worlds that are, for instance, inhabited by characters who either behave in the same way at different points in time or whose altered behavior can be attributed to compelling, explicitly acknowledged causal factors. At the same time, historians routinely wield analytical methods of text criticism that are primarily designed for the purpose of attaining synchronic standards of noncontradiction. These methods help historians triangulate sources in order to determine as accurately as possible what Hitler did on July  16, 1941. Often, both standards of noncontradiction do not yield compatible results (Figure 3.1). 99

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In most professional historical writing, diachronic noncontradiction trumps analytical noncontradiction. Consequently, the diversity inherent in the results of synchronic analysis tends to be reduced in the process of implementing a given narrative program. Historians are very adept at covering their tracks, but on closer analysis, their texts nevertheless reveal the scars of the struggle for interpretive coherence and supremacy. Close reading reveals a whole new set of characters. On the one hand, there are more or less complicated narrative plans striving to impose continuity over synchronic analytical diversity. On the other hand, there is the “underdog” of analytical rigor pushing back, testing the limits of “realistic” narrative representation, and occasionally causing narrative inconsistencies and confusion. The push back is particularly noticeable when a literal reading of the language of the sources appears to contradict the chosen narrative program, for instance, when Hitler’s behavior seems to contradict the narrative figure of a controlling führer. Luckily, these contradictions can always be resolved through a similarly plausible, less literal reading of the sources precisely because the results of synchronic and diachronic rules of noncontradiction, which need to be embedded in the same narrative text, belong to different language games and possible tensions between the synchronic and diachronic axis of analysis cannot be resolved through generally agreed upon logicalargumentative rules of engagement. For example, historians do not concur that literal readings of the sources relating to a specific event are epistemologically superior to nonliteral readings since they insist, for good reasons, that the record related to any one event might have to be read against the grain in light of contradictory evidence pertaining to other closely related events. Consequently, the second narrator’s less literal reading of the meeting of July 16, 1941, has the same epistemological integrity as the first narrator’s more literal reading (Figure 3.2). The results of both protocols of noncontradiction are related in a dynamic, sometimes competitive environment and do not follow any particular stages or research protocol. Whenever specific constellations of data points (police battalion 101, the meeting of July 16, 1941, the battle of Smolensk) become the battleground between competing interpretations, the constellations lose their status as unproblematic facts closely fused with a given narrative trajectory and emerge as narratively overdetermined clusters of events. They retain their bare analytical integrity (the meeting took place with Hitler present) but lose their narrative directionality (it becomes unclear if Hitler was aloof or engaged, and what role 100

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Synchronic Standards of Non-Contradiction

Diachronic Standards of Non-Contradiction

Figure 3.2. Stage 2: Historians link the events to a conventional linear narrative explanatory model and thus subject them to diachronic standards of noncontradiction that, in this case, cannot easily accommodate two of the analytically established three events. For example, Hitler’s discourse on July 16, 1941, does not reflect the notion of an intentionalist Führer closely attuned to and fully in charge of Nazi anti-Jewish policies. As a result, a detailed description of the meeting, which derives a great deal of analytical-argumentative integrity from the fact that it reflects the language of the sources directly describing the meeting, cannot be featured prominently in a conventionally structured intentionalist narrative of the Holocaust.

the meeting played in the overall process of implementation). The semantic disintegration occurs because synchronic, analytical rules of noncontradiction cannot prove the existence of a narrative trajectory once the latter’s facticity is rigorously questioned. But the same synchronic analytical rules can produce enough factual diversity to shoot holes in any conventional realistic narrative program—if a critic/competitor is inclined to undertake the analytical labor required (Figure 3.3). Friedländer’s and Browning’s publications indicate that we have a very interesting time ahead of us. The methodologically conservative field of Holocaust studies appears to be poised to reverse the traditional historiographical hierarchy, with synchronic noncontradiction and related diverging story lines increasingly taking precedent over rigorous standards 101

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Synchronic Standards of Non-Contradiction

Diachronic Standards of Non-Contradiction

Figure 3.3. Stage 3: Historians develop alternative versions of the events that might have less literal analytical-argumentative integrity (indicated by the lighter color) but are easily integrated into available narrative explanatory schemes. These versions derive credibility from other sources and/or their attractive narrative coherence. For example, rather than highlighting the specific details of Hitler’s relatively incoherent discourse on July 16, 1941, which are reflected in several sources, the narrator of the majority report chooses to attribute importance to the fact of the meeting in itself by conjuring up the image of a tightly knit group of perpetrators who understand Hitler intuitively. That image fits nicely into more intentionalistically oriented accounts.

of narrative noncontradiction. The field seems to be willing to imagine the past as a nonlinear world and develop nonlinear modes of historical narration. Once again, Browning’s writings are remarkable in this respect. On the one hand, Browning classics, from Ordinary Men to The Origins of the Final Solution and the most recent Remembering Survival follow conventional patterns of realistic emplotment.44 On the other hand, all three books display an extraordinary sensitivity to analytical diversity by integrating thoroughly dialogical minority reports in their overall design. With this decision, Browning transfers a great deal of interpretive agency from the narrators to the implied readers of his texts, hoping—perfectly reasonably, in my assessment—that the actual readers can handle that much freedom of interpretation. 102

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In the end, nonlinear forms of narration appear feasible and perhaps even desirable in academic historical writing because they reflect the complex semantic dynamics inherent in the historical profession. The potential for narrative innovation and diversity is ingrained in the everyday analytical practices of the discipline and does not need to be justified by way of abstract philosophical arguments that are of little relevance to most historians. Moreover, less rigorously narratively integrated texts appear to offer greater opportunities for moral and analytical self-reflexivity, as both Friedländer and Browning have demonstrated in their work. In fact, nonlinear and dialogical formats of narration might be particularly useful for writing multidirectional histories that take their cue from the field of memory studies and the concept of multidirectional memory.45 The analysis of the narrative worlds of The Origins of the Final Solution also indicates that the narratology of historiography could become a very interesting field, especially if the dogmatic divide between narrativists and empiricists can be overcome. In the end, although difficult to imagine at the moment, we might even be able to develop flexible concepts of historical truth that more accurately capture the complicated interplay between narration and argumentation in professional historical writing and allow us to determine the relative truthfulness of narrative histories in specific social and communicative contexts.46

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4 A Reply to Wulf Kansteiner C H R I S TO P H E R   R . B R OW N I N G

I

AM VERY GRATEFUL to Wulf Kansteiner for his careful, insightful,

and generous reading of The Origins of the Final Solution. Kansteiner asks us to focus on what strategies historians employ “to traverse the gaps between argumentation and narrative, fact and interpretation,” and suggests that “when it comes to managing the gap,” I have staked out a “middle ground” between what he calls the “relentless analytical and narrative homogeneity” exemplified by Peter Longerich, on the one hand, and the conscious destabilization of narrative reliability by Saul Friedländer, on the other. In Ordinary Men in particular, he credits me with highlighting rather than hiding the gap by radically separating the narration contained in the body of the book from the causal analysis and open speculation delivered in a “nonnarrative key” in the concluding chapter. The Origins of the Final Solution is more complicated to assess in this regard, however, for it contains a fourfold, not just twofold, division of labor. The first part, what Kansteiner deems “a surprise,” is the introduction that sweeps over nearly two millennia in eleven pages, in which the “far-flung” narrative “simply posits” much that it is unable to demonstrate. Here, I would simply note that I did not conceive of this introduction as either an adequately informative narrative or persuasive analysis and argument. Rather, it was intended as a courtesy to readers to let them know where to situate me concerning the large questions about any history of the Holocaust—Why the Jews? Why the Germans? Why in the twentieth century?—before I asked them to follow me through 433 pages of dense text covering two and a half years of evolving Nazi Jewish policy. 104

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I have always strived for the dual goals of transparency and coherency, and I thought such an introduction was useful to the reader on both of these counts. Kansteiner notes that, with two exceptions to which I shall return in detail, the subsequent chapters of Origins consist of “finely tuned arguments,” in which the detailed narrative and “small-scale analytical work” are so tightly interwoven that my “ordering hand of epistemologically arbitrary aesthetic judgments and political convictions”—in Kansteiner’s words—“seems impossible to detect.” Here, I have refrained from the “far-flung story lines” of the introduction, but I have also not highlighted the gap between narrative and interpretation through radical separation, as in Ordinary Men. Insofar as I have acknowledged that gap in these chapters, it is in the conventional form of noting the alternative and opposing interpretations of my colleagues in the footnotes. I have claimed neither omniscience nor infallibility, but it requires a reader trained in reading footnotes and familiar with the historiography fully to appreciate this. Clearly, these chapters constitute more conventional history writing than either Ordinary Men or, more recently, Remembering Survival, in which I resort frequently to the first-person narrator to emphasize my position as a struggling but well-intentioned interpreter of problematic and contradictory evidence. Nonetheless, in Origins I did make interpretative choices that determined—how out of a very large mass of documentary evidence—some documents were selected, some events emphasized, and some arguments presented rather than others. The narrative and analysis that emerged were not simply discovered by chronologically assembling the facts but constructed through a process of selection, and it is worthwhile noting what shaped my choices in this regard. In light of the different possible historical contexts within which I could have framed my examination of the Origins of the Final Solution, I chose to emphasize Nazi population or demographic policy and the overall vision of a racially restructured empire in Eastern Europe. From autumn 1939 through 1941, the relationship between military victory, territorial expansion, war aims, and Jewish policy, as well as broader policies of racial imperialism was both complex and in flux. Military victory brought both more territory and more Jews under Nazi control, and Poland above all became the “laboratory” for Nazi experimentation in “ethnic cleansing” of both Jews and Poles as a means to realize their demographic revolution. Ultimately, the expulsion schemes 105

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specific to Jews were not put into effect because they clashed with both other Nazi programs, on the one hand, and logistical, economic, and military realities, on the other; but each successive failure not only increased frustration among the demographic engineers but also advanced the conclusion that, ultimately, it was easier to kill Jews than expel them, thus lowering the threshold to and building the consensus for genocide. One red thread of my narrative, in effect, is the story of how other components of this overall vision of racial engineering, envisaged most extravagantly in Generalplan Ost, were expanded exponentially in theory but deferred for the most part in practice, while Nazi Jewish policy in the form of the Final Solution broke loose from its earlier confines, gained an autonomy and priority it had hitherto been denied, and was ready for implementation in March 1942. Parallel to my story line of frustrated demographic revolution is a second one concerning the treatment of Polish Jews awaiting expulsion, specifically ghettoization. Beginning in the 1990s, following the period in which the intentionalist-functionalist controversy dominated Holocaust historiography, the authors of numerous regional and local studies of the Holocaust in various parts of Eastern Europe have conceptualized their work in terms of center and periphery. Not unnaturally, they have emphasized the vital role that hitherto unknown local initiatives and decisions uncovered by their research often played in their respective regions and localities. One resulting tendency has been to portray the center as relatively passive or reactive, and occupation authorities at the periphery as the driving and radicalizing force. I would like to stress the need for differentiation, nuance, and, above all, fidelity to the diverse and frustratingly contradictory and confusing evidence. In my opinion, one pattern such a radicalization emanating from the periphery simply does not fit all times and places, as ghettoization in Poland in 1940–1941 demonstrates. Concerning ghettoization, I make two arguments. First, it was implemented at different times, in different places, and in different forms for a variety of reasons by local German occupation authorities in Poland, precisely because there was no direction from Berlin, which had set the ultimate goal of expulsion but provided no uniform guidelines as to what to do with Polish Jews in the meantime, other than impose Jewish councils as a conduit of German orders. Here, my focus is on local decision making. Second, left to themselves, local authorities not unnaturally fought over conflicting policies, but in general, those whom I have dubbed “productionists,” who favored putting Jews to work and establishing 106

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ghetto economies in order to sustain ghetto populations at no expense to the Reich, prevailed over “attritionists,” who preferred to see the ghetto populations simply perish from starvation and epidemic. In short, at this particular time and place, local decision making was determinative, but I argue that it led to the more moderate and utilitarian rather than the more radical temporary solution. That the same period of 1939–1941 and the same topics of population policy and ghettoization can be treated with both different emphasis and different interpretation by different historians goes without saying, as a quick comparison of my own work demonstrates, with that of Götz Aly, on the one hand, and Peter Longerich, on the other.1 But the issue of center and periphery brings us to the third part of The Origins, on which Kansteiner has focused most of his comments, namely chapters  7 and  8, wherein two narrators—Jürgen Matthäus and myself— have written about the same time period of summer/fall 1941 from two different vantage points: the German forces on the ground in the occupied Soviet territories, on the one hand, and the leadership of the Third Reich, on the other. Here, I should clarify that I had already written the initial draft of the other parts of Origins when my relationship with an earlier envisaged contributor of chapter 7 on the emergence of the Final Solution on Soviet territory became dysfunctional, and I turned to Jürgen Matthäus. He had no input on how I had written the other parts of the book, and I, in turn, exercised the most minimal and restrained editorial hand in integrating his chapter into the larger project. Our collaboration was based on a long-standing friendship and great mutual respect, but not on any prolonged interaction in working on this particular text. At the beginning of the book, as Kansteiner notes, Matthäus and I acknowledged that our interpretations would differ “in some small ways,” and, in principle, we accepted such differences as normal to the practice of writing history and would make no attempt to hide our differences in a homogenized text. Kansteiner argues that our differences turn out not to be so small after all and are “exacerbated to the point of narrative incompatibility.” Thus, he poses the rhetorical question as to whether the sources “which allegedly wield a veto power over the range of acceptable interpretations” can “settle any [italics mine] differences of opinion.” Ultimately, he implies that they cannot, and credits our book with offering “an unusual and unusually honest look at the inner workings of professional historical narrative” by providing a “performance of alternative emplotments” that “sharpens our perception of the line of demarcation 107

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that separates fact from interpretation” and simultaneously demonstrates that such an approach “does not call into question the empirical foundation and ethical integrity of historical studies.” Needless to say, I am very gratified with the positive spin that Kansteiner puts on the juxtaposition of these two narratives in The Origins. But I will nonetheless quibble with it. In one sentence, he uses the phrase “narrative incompatibility,” while in another he writes of “multiperspectival forms of representation.” I am much more comfortable with the latter phrase than the former. In this case, I think that some of the differences between Matthäus and me stem from different perspectives that in turn are derived from different vantage points. In Ordinary Men, I worked with the testimonies of 210 different former policemen, and in Remembering Survival, 292 different survivors. I am acutely aware that different people experienced the same time and place specific events in very different ways, depending on the vantage point they had. Often their differing narratives were not incompatible with one another. Rather, taken together, they constitute a fuller composite representation and allow the historian to construct a richer, more complex, and complicated picture of those events. The same battle looks very different from different foxholes as well as from headquarters, to say nothing of the other side of the lines, and the historian should try to capture all of these vantage points. In the case of Nazi Jewish policy in the summer and fall of 1941, the confusion and lack of uniformity, the uncertainty of what was to be done and seeming hesitancy of the leadership, as seen through some documents originating on the periphery is not necessarily “incompatible” with the view from above of Hitler sending the key signals and making the key decisions but simultaneously balancing between pressures from impatient subordinates, his own concerns about the enormity of what he was about to do and the shifting tide of the military campaign, and his desire for consensus before committing himself beyond the point of no return, especially when such signals and decisions were filtered and disseminated through a highly unstructured and personalized form of governance in which Hitler placed a high priority on remaining the “teflon dictator,” to whom nothing negative should stick. Moreover, those on the periphery displayed no uniform response or pattern of initiative vis-à-vis the center. A quick look at two key incidents reveals how different individuals perceived and reacted to the situations in which they found themselves on the “periphery” in September 1941. On August 12, Himmler had visited Höhere SS und Polizeiführer (HSSPF) 108

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Jeckeln in the Ukraine and complained about the inactivity of the 1st SS Infantry Brigade.2 According to the postwar testimony of Erwin Schulz, head of Einsatzkommando (EK) 5, there was a second consequence of Himmler’s visit as well, in that Dr. Dr. Otto Rasch, commander of Einsatzgruppe C, then relayed to his subordinates a Himmler order via Jeckeln to commence the systematic mass murder of Jewish women and children.3 Shortly thereafter, Jeckeln carried out the first five-figure massacre of the Holocaust at Kamenets Podolski, and in September, the killing in the Ukraine accelerated even further. Uneasy about the expanded killing policies, Schulz obtained reassignment.4 Disturbed by the potential economic consequences, Rasch complained to Berlin that the reconstruction of the Ukraine would be impossible “if the Jewish labor force is entirely destroyed.” He thus argued for a more “gradual liquidation,” permitting the temporary use of Jewish labor.5 In comparison to the reluctant Schulz and cautious Rasch, the zealous Paul Blobel of EK 4a proceeded to help perpetuate the great Babi Yar massacre at the end of month, the single largest Holocaust killing action by bullets until the Erntefest massacre of November 1943. In the very same month in the Warthegau, where the killing had not yet begun, Rolf-Heinz Höppner, hitherto in charge of ethnic cleansing, chaffed impatiently. In a letter to his superiors in Berlin, he offered his services to plan for the deportation of all undesired populations from the German sphere to newly conquered “reception territories” in the east. However, he could not proceed further until “basic decisions” had been made and “total clarity” prevailed “about what finally shall happen to those undesirable ethnic elements deported from the greater German resettlement area. Is it the goal to ensure them a certain level of life in the long run, or shall they be totally eradicated.”6 Here, Höppner was perfectly willing to take part in the “total eradication” of the Jews and took the personal initiative to ask for clear authorization, but he would not act without that clear authorization. The juxtaposition of these two incidents, I would argue, shows how difficult it is to make any sweeping generalizations about the “periphery.” In the Ukraine, where under pressure from the center, the killing was accelerating, Schulz quit and Rasch urged that the killing be slowed out of economic considerations, while Jeckeln and Blobel proceeded with ruthless determination. In the Warthegau, where the killing had not yet begun, Höppner was openly impatient about the absence of basic decisions and total clarity that he deemed necessary to allow him to plan for “total 109

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eradication.” And these are just two examples from a much wider spectrum of behaviors and reactions in the German-occupied East. Depending on which documents or parts of documents a historian chooses to emphasize and how he or she interprets these documentary fragments and fits them into a particular pattern, different narratives and emplotments result that—to quote Kansteiner again—“do not question the empirical foundation and ethical integrity of historical studies.” There are also cases, as Kansteiner notes, when Matthäus and I simply read and interpret the very same documents differently and thus tell very different stories. Kansteiner notes in particular our different treatment of Hitler’s speech to Nazi leaders on July 16, 1941. In the context of Himmler’s immediate response to his private meeting with Hitler the day before, which quickly led to the massive reinforcement of killers behind the lines, the approval for the official recruitment of native auxiliary police, and the key retargeting of the shooters to focus on Jewish women and children, I characterize mid-July—as exemplified by Hitler’s July 16 speech—as the point at which others understood a clear signal. Matthäus, in contrast, sees the relationship of this speech to Jewish policy as still “undefined.” Kansteiner could just as well have pointed to our contrasting interpretations of the infamous Stahlecker position paper of August 6, written in response to Hinrich Lohse’s initial guidelines for the treatment of Jews in the Ostland. Here, Matthäus summarizes my interpretation of the document, charitably challenges that view as “debatable,” and then proceeds as if it were just plain wrong.7 But do such incompatible readings of the same documents mean that “a detailed study of the sources” cannot be trusted “to settle any [italics mine] differences of opinion,” as Kansteiner suggests? Here I cannot agree. I have been involved as an expert witness in two Holocaust denial trials. In one, the opposing attorney proclaimed that all history was opinion, there was no such thing as a historical fact, and there was no privileged reading of any document so that anyone’s interpretation—his client Ernst Zündel’s, in particular—was as valid an opinion as any other. In the second, the plaintiff acting as his own attorney, David Irving, consistently subjected the reading of documents to predictable distortion or a blatant double standard, depending on the interpretational outcome desired. These were, of course, extreme cases, but surely documents set some parameters and, before the jury of our fellow historians and common sense of informed readers, provide little or no support for some purported interpretations as opposed to others. 110

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In addition to the varied behavior of historical actors and the documents they left behind, and the varied interpretations of these documents in the hands of different historians, there is yet another major variable, namely, the reader. Kansteiner portrays the interpretive difference between chapters 7 and 8, as one in which Matthäus emphasizes radicalization and initiative from the periphery, and I emphasize Hitler as the key pacesetter and decision maker. Ironically, when I was writing the initial draft of chapter 8, I was among the historians interviewed by Ron Rosenbaum while he was preparing his book, Explaining Hitler.8 Rosenbaum ultimately opted to explain Hitler not through the approach of any of his interviewees, but rather embraced the ultraintentionalist approach of the late Lucy Dawidowicz. Instead of seeing my interpretation as bolstering Hitler’s status as pivotal decision maker, as Kansteiner does, he dismissively mocked what he dubbed my “Hamlet Hitler”—an indecisive and hesitant leader in the tradition of Hans Mommsen’s “weak dictator.” Clearly, every attempt at a historical representation of Hitler is to no small degree a kind of Rorschach test, in which the identification of the image depends not just on a wide variety of historical evidence and on the historian’s choices of emplotment but also on the eye of the beholder. For Kansteiner, the fourth part of the book, the conclusion, constitutes a disappointing retreat into “state-of-the-art ‘reformed’ intentionalist thinking” expressed through a “one-dimensional, linear narrative” with a “semantic homogeneity” that backs off from the “honest and conflicted” dialogue of chapters 7 and 8. Given that two different readers have judged and labeled me the misguided portrayer of a “Hamlet Hitler,” on the one hand, and a “reformed internationalist,” on the other, I would suggest that my conclusion and the interpretation summarized therein are not so “onedimensional” as Kansteiner suggests. As in dealing with a multifaceted concept like the “periphery,” Hitler too does not fit well into broad and easy generalizations. In domestic affairs, I see him acting largely as the “absentee landlord,” anxious not to be bothered. In foreign policy and military matters, I see him as a micromanager, all too often interfering haphazardly in various minutiae. In racial policy, in my opinion, a third style of leadership or mode of operation emerges. To make his wishes known, Hitler would give signals in the form of relatively vague and inexplicit statements, exhortations, and prophecies. More than anyone else, Himmler seems to have best anticipated and understood these signals and translated them into proposals and programs ahead of his rivals. Hence, one generalization I did venture was: “If one wants to know what Hitler 111

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was thinking, one should look at what Himmler was doing.” Seeing Hitler as fixated on the vague goals of obtaining Lebensraum and solving his self-imposed “Jewish question,” I also found changeability concerning how these concepts were understood and volatility in his mood and scope of ambition vis-à-vis the changing circumstances he encountered. Thus, I ventured a second generalization that it was coincident with the four peaks of victory euphoria of September 1939, May/June 1940, July 1941, and September/October 1941 that Hitler was most emboldened to radicalize Nazi Jewish policy. Such a set of conclusions does not, I think, either portray a weak and hesitant “Hamlet Hitler,” on the one hand, or constitute a “reformed intentionalist” stance, on the other. If I had to assign myself a label, I would still prefer that of “moderate functionalism” to the alternatives. But more important than labels is the dialogue that Wulf Kansteiner has highlighted. Whether such a dialogue is contained internally (as in chapters 7 and 8) between two narrators in the same book, or less explicitly between my book and the books of other historians whose work and differing conclusions are respectfully acknowledged in various footnotes, it does indicate that honest historians working within the accepted methods of their craft can and will select and evaluate evidence differently, pose different questions, choose different emphases and strategies of emplotment, make different arguments, and reach different conclusions. Reality is messy, and however much the individual historian strives for transparency and coherence in his or her own work, the practice of history that accepts and reflects that messiness is to be welcomed. Sometimes the dual goals of transparency and coherence are not mutually reinforcing; on the contrary, the more transparent the historian is, the more visible are the contradictory and problematic challenges to coherence. Finally, how, if at all, do these issues concerning the writing of history contribute to “probing the ethics of Holocaust culture”? Here, I would turn once again to my experiences in the courtroom dealing with Holocaust denial. Historians of the Holocaust bear an unusual burden, in that there are some people out there who do not wish us well and stand ready to capitalize on any mistakes or misjudgments that we make. I do not wish to make their dishonest task any easier. That does not mean we must confine ourselves to the most cautious and conventional kind of history writing, but it does mean we must constantly strive to set a standard— both respected within the profession and comprehensible to a general readership—against which the deniers and distorters can be measured and found wanting. 112

5 Scales of Postmemory Six of Six Million ANN RIGNEY

A world, an entire world with its people and their possessions, has been destroyed. . . . Someone found a poem, someone else found bones in the depths of caves, but no names, no signs. . . . How can I reconstruct this history with such miserable pickings? —Jules Michelet (1847)

A

FEW YEARS after the publication of his best-selling family memoir

The Lost (2006),1 Daniel Mendelsohn recalled how he had initially doubted his right to tell the story of his great-uncle Shmiel, who had died in the Holocaust, because it wasn’t his to tell. Since Mendelsohn himself had not been born in Europe and he had never known his uncle and his family personally, his relationship to the story was “angled” rather than direct: So it was always at an angle to me. And that angle is precisely what the book is about . . . I think the primary issue that I struggled with in the book is how do you access something that doesn’t belong to you, in fact . . . So that’s what I’m interested in in the book: how do you know about something that isn’t your “property” so to speak, except in the most abstract possible sense.2

How do you access a memory that does not “belong” to you? And, indeed, what does it mean to “acquire,” “own,” or “inherit” someone else’s 113

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experience? These questions sum up the condition that Marianne Hirsch has described as “postmemory.”3 Postmemory is a “belated or inherited” relationship to the past that is not based on the personal experience of trauma, but on its indirect transfer. It involves later generations having to live with the “resonant aftereffects” of things that happened before their time to which they are morally compelled to bear witness.4 If the (un)representability of the Holocaust was the central issue in cultural theory for decades, seventy years after the end of World War II, this has become compounded by the issue of accessibility: the moral and imaginative difficulties of later generations in overcoming the experiential gap between “then” and “now.”5 In discussing the phenomenon of postmemory, Hirsch takes the family as her principal frame and focuses on the transgenerational transmission of embodied memory in the family sphere. Putting the family central stage thus implicitly privileges filiative relations (based on face-to-face contacts and biological inheritance) above the affiliative ones (based on culturally mediated connections and voluntary effort) that are necessary in any large-scale collective solidarity. Hirsch does recognize the importance of “affiliative” postmemory in describing the horizontal kinship among members of the same generation who share a common sense of involvement in, and distance from, the Holocaust as it affected an earlier generation.6 While this horizontal kinship is in the first instance among Jewish descendants of Holocaust victims, Hirsch also indicates that it might be extended to include “adoptive witnesses,”7 people who become involved in other families’ stories even if they have no prior (biological, ethnic, religious) relation to them. As time passes and transmission shifts more and more from embodied contact to mediated representations, “adopting” someone else’s memory in the sense of becoming an implicated witness to it becomes increasingly relevant. Although Hirsch does not spell this out, her figurative extension of the familial model to include “adoption” and affiliation suggests that the boundaries of the family, and hence the scales on which postmemory operates, can shift; and that as time passes, and the transmission of memory becomes increasingly dependent on media and narrative, the difference between filiative, affiliative, and adoptive witnesses becomes less strict. We are all at an “angle” now, though the line of approach and the distance to be covered varies from case to case. Mendelsohn’s sense of having become involved in a story that did not “belong” to him can be extended to describe the position of his own reader. For whoever opens the book is invited to become party to the 114

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story of someone else’s family: the mere fact that this family memoir was published turns it into “public” property. Or, to put this differently, publication turns a family story into an interface between the story of this one family and whatever other narratives readers bring to bear on it. In light of these considerations, I examine Mendelsohn’s The Lost as an example of third-generation postmemory in order to reflect on its power to act as a connector between singular stories, individual readers, and the broader history of the Holocaust and genocide. The Lost is not without its flaws, and has been rightly criticized as overly long and at times self-indulgent. But it is also a highly crafted and compelling narrative that, precisely because it has found a large and broadly constituted readership, deserves closer examination. What is the role of the literary in the cultural work it performs? How does it engage publics who, even more than the narrator himself, are at an “angle” to the events depicted?

Family Stories As the accolades printed on the cover of recent editions suggest, The Lost (2006) has been both a commercial and, with some notable exceptions, a critical success.8 According to the New York Times Book Review, it is “a work of awful, heartbreaking, tragic suspense. A book of the decade, easily, and likely a book of the century.”9 It was chosen as “Book of the Year” by multiple newspapers and acclaimed by reviewers across the media world. It was a recipient of multiple awards, including the National Book Critics Circle Award, the National Jewish Book Award, and the Prix Médicis in France. It has been translated into fifteen languages. To date, it has generated Wikipedia pages in French, Hebrew, and Ukrainian, as well as English. The front cover of my paperback copy also carries the approval of Elie Wiesel, who describes it as “rigorous in its search for truth, at once tender and exacting.” All of this suggests that The Lost, despite being described by many nonprofessional readers as a demanding book, has generated a broad appeal. This is all the more remarkable since it has a very narrow, if not indeed a private, focus: the story of one American’s attempt to reconstruct the fate of six of his relatives who were murdered as Jews in Nazi-occupied Ukraine. The starting point of The Lost is a family story about the death of Mendelsohn’s great-uncle Shmiel, his wife, and their four daughters. Initially, nothing more is known of these relatives than that there were six of them and that they had been “lost,” presumed “murdered by the 115

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Nazis.” A letter and a photograph are the only material traces of their existence. They represent the “other,” European side of the family’s history, to which the narrator is connected not only imaginatively (through the stories told by his grandfather and other family members who had immigrated to the United States) but also genetically (through his physical appearance). The opening pages describe graphically how his physical resemblance to the dead uncle he had never met triggered the memory of those who had known him personally: “Some time ago, when I was six or seven or eight years old, it would occasionally happen that I’d walk into a room and certain people would begin to cry” (3). This strong sense of an embodied connection with an earlier generation is enhanced by his intimacy with his grandfather, who passed on to him the basics of his great-uncle’s story, as well as his awareness as a child of the palpable silence among his U.S. relatives regarding the “disappeared” others back in Europe. To the extent that it is focused on a great-uncle rather than a grandparent, however, this connection with the disappeared is filiative only in an “angled” or collateral way. The murdered daughters of his great-uncle are his first cousins “once-removed,” whom he “adopts” since they have had no direct descendants. The five-hundred-page narrative is essentially an account of the author’s painstaking search for more information about the fate of these lost family members, involving multiple travels around the world to interview witnesses; in particular, the twelve surviving members of the Jewish community of Bolechow, the shtetl in present-day Ukraine where the family originated. The Lost appeared in a climate of heightened interest in family history. At a time of advanced globalization, genealogy has become one of the most important small-scale alternatives to the nation-state as a framework for collective memory. But, of course, Mendelsohn’s book is more than an inquiry into family secrets (something that always has narrative appeal), but a work with the added gravitas of addressing the fate of a Jewish family in the Holocaust. As such, it is one of a kind with Edmund de Waal’s best-selling The Hare with Amber Eyes (2010) and the more academic work by Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer, Ghosts of Home: The Afterlife of Czernowitz in Jewish Memory (2010). Like The Lost, these later memoirs are tightly wrought narratives of detection involving travel to original locations (always an appealing narrative ingredient) in search of material and archival traces of particular individuals and true stories. Written at a remove of at least one generation, their concern is as much with the process of reconstructing a lost world 116

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as it is with depicting that elusive world itself, wie es eigentlich gewesen (how it really was). Highly wrought narratives, yet nonfictional ones, they transcend the traditional opposition between the literary and the documentary, between the autobiographical and the historiographical, and between the collective and the private, which once shaped our understanding of the cultural field and the genres that populate it. The closest fictional analogue to The Lost is arguably Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel Everything Is Illuminated (2002), which also revolves around an attempt on the part of an American to reconstruct the story of a murdered Jewish family by traveling to Eastern Europe and interviewing (imaginary) survivors. The comparison is revealing: where Foer selfconsciously deploys fictionality to thematize the impossibility for later generations of ever truly recovering the stories of their murdered ancestors,10 Mendelsohn resolutely chooses the path of nonfiction and archival evidence. His narrative draws its moral authority from the integrity and perseverance of his search for the vestigial traces of his lost relatives. It insistently dramatizes its own genesis as it is reaches out to reconstruct the lives of the disappeared from the distance of two generations. Although it eschews invention, The Lost can nevertheless be considered a distinctively literary work since, as I show in what follows, it is a self-consciously crafted narrative with the power to command and hold the attention of its readers. Although Mendelsohn’s work can be seen as participating in multiple literary trends (a predilection for family memoir, for a Sebald-style combination of word and image, and of history with travelogue), it also stands out as something sui generis. Its distinctive patterning of information combined with the particular story it tells gives it some of that quality of “singularity,” which has recently come to the fore in definitions of the literary.11

Singularity “Singularity,” as it has been defined by Jacques Derrida and Derek Attridge, is a function of the power of writing to mobilize a particular quality of response on the part of readers. Where twentieth-century literary theory in the tradition of the Russian Formalists had linked literature to defamiliarization and to the loss of certainties, “singularity” links it instead to a positive movement toward something: a way of connecting to new possibilities and (sometimes discomforting) demands on our attention. Attridge has referred in this regard to the “event of literature” and 117

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described it as an aesthetic experience not in the sense of mere pleasure, but of a highly individualized encounter with alterity.12 Crucially, singularity is not the fact of an experience or artifact being unique, but rather of people becoming aware of something incommensurable at the threshold between the same and the different. As David Grossman once put it, good writing “extracts the single reader out of the masses.”13 It is difficult to prove that the prominence of the concept of the singular in contemporary aesthetics is a by-product of the Holocaust. Yet, like the rethinking of representation and its limits twenty years ago, the recent emergence of “singularity” as a conceptual tool seems to be linked to the particular challenges posed by the problem of recognizing the exceptionality of the Holocaust while still relating it to other events in a nonreductive way. One way or another, discussions of singularity in cultural theory have gone in tandem with attempts to rethink the relations between the exceptional and the commensurable, the local and the universal, by stressing the movement between these poles and the spaces between them. Reflecting such preoccupations, The Lost also thematizes the relations between uniqueness and commensurability in its depiction of the murder of six individuals, who all meet their fate in different ways and yet belong together, both as family members and as Jewish victims of the Holocaust. The narrator has to continuously negotiate his way between the scale of the unique individual, the scale of the family, and the largescale canvas of the “six million victims,” so as to depict their lives and deaths as being both incommensurable and statistically significant.14 As I show in what follows, moreover, the specifically literary characteristics of Mendelsohn’s narrative—the qualities that make it singular rather than merely derivative of larger trends—reside in the particular way in which he captures our attention while negotiating between these different scales.

Hyperbolic Narration As many readers have noted, the overall structure of The Lost can best be described as a quest narrative. The New York Times likened it to a Greek myth: “Like some mythical hero who pays a visit to that realm of shadows the Greeks call the underworld, Mendelsohn has brought back stories of the dead that we are not likely to forget long after we close his book.”15 This analogy with Greek myth may have been inspired by Mendelsohn’s reputation as a classicist, but it was surely also elicited by the book itself. In a way that recalls Ryszard Kapuściński’s Travels with 118

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Herodotus (2004) and Amitav Ghosh’s In an Antique Land: History in the Guise of a Traveller’s Tale (1994), Mendelsohn combines travelogue with historical commentary so as to amplify the historical resonance of his story. Italicized sections from the Hebrew Bible and later commentaries are intercalated into the narrative so as to give a mythical foundation to the quest for information about the lives of his relatives. This overt and somewhat heavy-handed intertextuality does not always add fresh meaning to the family history in specific ways, but at the very least, it flags a desire to root these individual lives in the deep time of myth and cultural memory, and offers an invitation to see them within a larger frame. These intertextual interludes aside, the book is above all a plot-driven narrative organized as a drama of detection regarding the lives of the six relatives and the truth about their disappearance. It is driven by the overriding question whether Mendelsohn, as he travels around the globe from one archive and interview to another, can find out exactly how his six relatives died. However, with its elaborate sentences and winding structure, The Lost is not only a page-turner but also demands an effort. Its five-hundred-page bulk literally reflects the great lengths to which the narrator has gone to retrieve information about his family; it is not afraid to include detail. The book’s materiality thus becomes a measure of the narrator’s emotional and ethical commitment to reconstructing their story and to making his readers complicit in this search and a witness to its difficulties. Mendelsohn’s work, while highly narrativized, is above all a story about a search for a story.16 The desire to narrate and, in doing so, to bear witness to the lives of these six relatives, continuously exceeds the information available. Indeed, the stylistic figure that best describes its design is that of hyperbole: there is a structural disproportion between the intensity of the expression and the paucity of information.17 It is a measure of Mendelsohn’s ingenuity and commitment that, without venturing into fiction, he hyperbolically generated a story so that his readers will be held captive for hours to the quest for information about six people of whom so little is known that their story might, in other hands, have been reduced to a footnote in a larger history. Using a variety of narrative techniques, Mendelsohn proceeds through repetition and multiplication, constantly looping back to earlier revelations and summing up the disparate items of information he has so far managed to piece together. The narrative is generated by the rhetorical technique of amplification and all its variants, including enumeration, 119

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correction, commoratio (using multiple words to say the same thing), and other figures of repetition. Mention has already been made of the passages relating stories from the Hebrew Bible that help both to extend the family history in time and to augment its cultural resonance. Working together, these various forms of hyperbole maximize the discursive presence of tiny fragments of information and, in the process, our involvement as readers with the obliterated lives that are the book’s main concern. In tightly modulated sentences (which are distinctly Jamesian in their postponement of key terms), revelations are orchestrated and minor discoveries turned into moments of high drama. Occasionally preceded by the exhortation “Listen” (61, 69), long digressions keep the reader waiting (sometimes for as much as twenty pages) for the next installment on what may be itself a comparatively minor point.18 Regular flash-forwards anticipate revelations that are to come later (“It wasn’t until Sydney that I realized how wrong we were,” 136). Reflecting the dynamics of postmemory, Mendelsohn thus shifts the center of gravity from the past itself, as it was experienced, to the impossibilities and difficulties of reconstructing it sixty years later because of a lack of information that is itself symptomatic of the violence perpetrated on the subjects of his narrative.19 In thus negotiating the tortuous line between knowledge and its impossibility, the text generates an effect, linked to the sublime, that can best be described as an “aesthetics of ignorance.”20 In such highly wrought passages as the following, for example, Mendelsohn reflects continuously on the limits of his knowledge alongside the small advances he has made into the unknown: And for a long time, that’s what we knew. It wasn’t a great deal, but it was a great deal more than Killed by the Nazis. For a long time, it was as much as we ever thought we’d know; and given the extent of annihilation, given how many years had passed, given that there was, now, no one left to ask, it seemed like a lot. (54–55) While the story of Mendelsohn’s search is given in full and often in minute detail, the story of his lost relatives is condemned always to fall short. The full story is no longer possible, while being made all the more morally compelling as a focus of our attention and imaginings because of the brutal annihilation of its subjects. A rare detail about the family’s annual strawberry eating, randomly retrieved from a neighbor, becomes all the more striking in a narrative world that is otherwise deprived of color, taste, and other details that could have captured the texture of actual experience (296): the story that cannot be told. 120

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Memory by Numbers As The Lost’s subtitle, A Search for Six of Six Million, already announces, Mendelsohn deploys numbers both as a precision instrument and as a literary device in exploring the story of his murdered relatives. Starting with the subtitle, the book signals a preoccupation with computation, scales, and measurements, as well as with the limits of these. While the term “six million” has a certain specificity, in being the estimated number of Jewish victims of Nazi terror, it is above all a highly codified way of referring to the Holocaust. The repetition in “six of the six million” gives it a poetical quality, while also suggesting through its very symmetry that the story of the six represents a scaled-down version of the Holocaust as a whole. From the outset, then, The Lost alternates between the local and the large-scale as well as between individual experience and statistics. As we will see, it also works very hard to open up an imaginative space between what can be quantified, dated, and measured, and the singular texture of embodied experience. Initially, nothing is known about the daughters than that there were “four” of them and that they were murdered, not even their names. How could these four undifferentiated and nameless daughters ever be remembered as individuals? Implicit in the whole enterprise is the idea of individuating these four persons as a way of undoing the dehumanization inflicted by the Nazis. At various points, mention is made of a desire to go beyond “charts and tables” (40), for which Mendelsohn confesses a certain fascination (38–40), so as to allow individuals to become more than a “stick figure, a cipher” (198). In this way, the narration selfreflexively strains to “go beyond” numbers, abstractions, and calculations to imagine the lived experience of which numbers and dates are merely the traces. In the end, after all his research, after all the airline flights across the world, after all the interviews with survivors carrying their own stories that thus enter tangentially into the narrative: after all of this, Mendelsohn succeeds in reconstructing only a bit of the story of his family and then sometimes only indirectly by analogy with other cases. Crucially, however, there is more at the end than there was at the beginning. The painstaking anamnesis produces a story out of absences, hence ensuring that the murdered family will have a place in future recollections. As the quest for more information continues, the one lost family expands into six separate if interrelated lives and the stories multiply. Characteristic of The Lost, and something that resonates with the issue of 121

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singularity-comparability raised earlier, is its concern with the nature of families and sibling rivalry—with respect to the lost family, to Mendelsohn’s own family, to Cain and Abel, but also to the relations between Jews and Ukrainians. The family is not only used in the book as the primary “social framework of memory” (to use Maurice Halbwachs’s term).21 It is also deployed as a figure for thinking about the identity of individuals or groups in terms that show them as always already caught up in relations with others. The Lost brings out the fact that family members are both unique and defined by their biological, affective, and biographical ties to their siblings and parents. They are, in Jean-Luc Nancy’s phrase, “singular plural.”22 The story of the single family of Uncle Shmiel breaks down into the biographies of its members, while the stories of the six also aggregate again to form the story of the single family. In this way, the narrative is structurally organized around an oscillation between the one and the six and, implicitly, between the six and the six million, between the family and the Jewish people, between the intimate and the global. It bears out Marianne Hirsch’s description of postmemory remembrance as bringing “resonant individual and familial forms of mediation and aesthetic expression” into “more distant social/national and archival/ cultural memories.”23 In the slow accumulation of tiny quantities of data, some of the things that were once taken as true (that the entire family perished together, for example, in a concentration camp) turn out to have been false. This making and unmaking of certainties is also played out through numbers, with one of the leitmotifs being the question of how many daughters there were in the family. While Mendelsohn begins and ends with four daughters, the number is regularly questioned along the way, with some interlocutors insisting that Uncle Shmiel had three or even two daughters instead of four (188), threatening to undermine the very foundation of the search. In the end, however, some things are established with certainty: the fact that there were indeed four daughters; that they were called Frydka, Lorka, Ruchele, and Bronia; that the whole family was indeed murdered by the Nazis, but that they died on five different occasions in distinct acts of violence, only one of them in a camp. Numbers are furthermore woven into the very fabric of individual sentences in the form of enumeration and specification. To give just one example, relating to the last known photograph of Uncle Shmiel sent to his U.S. relatives in 1939: 122

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Zur Erinnerung. To remember me by. That picture, with its inscription, is the reason why, until much later, Shmiel was the only one of the six whose birth-date and year we knew. April 19 was his forty-fourth birthday, but he didn’t write “on the occasion of his 44th birthday”; he chose instead “in his 44th year,” and as I read this I am struck by the fact that the word I am translating as “year” is Lebensjahr, which means, literally “year of life,” and this diction, although of course it was casual and there’s no doubt in my mind that he didn’t give it a second thought when he wrote it, strikes me as noteworthy, perhaps because I know that, on the spring day this picture was taken, he had exactly four of those life-years left to live. (25; italics in original) In this way, scarce details are amplified—expanded, broken down into component parts, repeated—so as to maximize their significance and poetical effect (the four of forty-four echoing the six of six million). In addition, the photograph, the translation, and the original are all reproduced and commented on in the text: the desire to bear witness exceeds the availability of new information. Clearly, numbers and dates are no substitute for lived experience, but they do have a key role to play in providing coordinates in space and time for the existence of certain lives or the occurrence of certain events: a date and number proves that there was something there. Moreover, the logic behind dates, measurements, and numbers helps generate new information in an otherwise scarcely populated archive: the known date of death of one family member enables Mendelsohn to reconstruct the probable date of birth of one of the daughters who was called after her (151). Most important, perhaps, counting as such is used prominently as a way of registering the iterative scale of the atrocity. This is particularly evident in the horrific interview with two survivors of the roundup of Jews in Bolechow on August 24, 1943, who recall how they counted 900 shots as their neighbors were shot one by one, a statement that is repeated no less than three times in the text, both in Yiddish and in English: And we heard every shot. . . . She turned to Shlomo. Unt yayden shuss hub’ ikh getzuhlt. Yiddish again. I understood. And I counted every shot. She turned to me but continued in Yiddish. Noyn hindert shiess hub’ ikh getzuhlt. Nine hundred shots I counted. (331–332; italics in original) 123

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Here again, numbers and dates help map the past, but like the difference between a map and the country itself, they open up a gap between the modeling of reality and lived experience.24 In this case, The Lost continuously points to the gaping hole between numbers and what they stand for, confirming the point once made by Saul Friedländer that “the starkest factual information” loses “its historical weight when merely taken as data.”25 Where a novelist like Foer has recourse to imagination to evoke the unimaginable, Mendelsohn instead performs a long, drawn-out struggle with numbers and information scarcity in a laborious attempt to transmute a dearth of facts and figures into an individuated story.26 The struggle continues on beyond the pages of the original text into the postscript added to the second edition, which notes the input of a reader who informed Mendelsohn that the youngest daughter, Bronia, had been killed in Bolechow and not in a camp (a photograph of the document proving this is also included). With this information, he could then deduce something more about the hitherto unnarrated fate of his great-aunt Ester, about whom almost nothing had been known until then. In the supplement to the second edition, then, Mendelsohn accordingly summarizes what he has managed to find out about the mother of the four daughters, before going on to speculate about the nature of her death in the final words of the book: And because I know this concrete fact now, I am also forced to speculate about something that can never be proved, but which is almost a certainty; that whatever my Aunt Ester—Ester Jäger née Schneelicht, to give her her due, a forty-six-year-old mother of four, a matron of Bolekhov who was a good wife and fine homemaker, who very likely crocheted to pass the long winter nights, who had two such pretty legs and who once added a postscript to a desperate letter that made its way to New York, a postscript that somehow, somewhere got lost, which is why nothing of that woman’s thoughts survives today—that whatever my Aunt Ester suffered during the dreadful ending to that life, she suffered alone. (510; italics in original) In the end, then, both the six and the six million have been brought back to the one. There is, of course, a difference between the number one (which is a measurement of quantity) and the term “alone” (which evokes the experience of an individual subject), and it is this difference that sums up the trajectory of The Lost. Despite (perhaps also thanks to) the pau124

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city of information about Ester’s life, the text succeeds in evoking her solitude at the moment of death. The circumstances of Ester’s murder are unique, and her suffering in face of death absolutely her own, but by being evoked through this assemblage of minor details, she is at least “individuated” as a singular being. At the same time, she figures as also deeply connected to plural others: her immediate family, Mendelsohn and his family, and, the reader who, having made it to the end of the book, is invited to bear witness to her aloneness and imagine her suffering. The result is an awareness both of proximity and distance, of intimacy and alienation that recalls what Dominick LaCapra has referred to as “empathic unsettlement.”27 It is as close as this book gets to the “event” of literature as defined by Attridge: that sense of being brought through the agency of language and the attention it commands into an aesthetic, but also profoundly ethical, encounter with the existence of someone else— in this case, someone whose experience we can never share but in whose memory we have become implicated as adoptive witnesses.

Changing Frameworks With The Lost having reached its dramatic ending in the “aloneness” of the great-aunt, the question arises of how her story relates—within the framework of the book, but also in the framework of its reception—to that of the six million that serves as its implicit horizon. Or, going beyond the specifically Jewish framework indicated by the book’s title, how does the story of this particular family relate to the other millions of non-Jewish victims of Nazi terror and of other mass persecutions? In response to “the high stakes of proliferating memory discourses,” Michael Rothberg writes, it has become imperative “to develop an ethics of comparison that can distinguish politically productive forms of memory from those that lead to competition, appropriation, or trivialization.”28 It is clear that the issue of exceptionality-comparison is already at play within the dynamics of the family story depicted in The Lost; each of these six lives is “singular plural” in relation to their immediate family, to the community in Bolechow, and to the millions of other victims of the Holocaust. The six million Jewish victims, indicated in the subtitle, provide the overarching social framework in which these six lives are remembered by Mendelsohn. Toward the end of the book, however, he does briefly invoke “other great devastations” by way of comparison, listing in chronological order “the million and a half Armenians slaughtered by 125

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the Turks in 1916, the five to seven million Ukrainians starved to death by Stalin between 1932 and 1933, the six million Jews killed in the Holocaust, the two million Cambodians killed by Pol Pot’s regime in the 1970s” (460). In a sweeping peroration some twenty pages later, he goes on to compare the obliteration of the Jews of Bolechow and of their memory to the loss of other historic civilizations, including the Incas, the ancient Egyptians, the Hittites, and the peoples of Ur and Kush, but also the African slaves, and the “five million (or six or seven) Ukrainians” starved to death by Stalin (486–487). The intent is clear: once again to give historical depth and weight to these six lives by comparing them to other narratives of large-scale destruction. In the immediate context of the book, however, these analogies seem less like serious starting points for an “ethics of comparison” than a way of adding an epic dimension to the lives of his six relatives, as well as to his own task of rescuing them from oblivion. The Lost itself does not explore the implications of such comparisons in any depth; indeed, in remarkable contrast to its relentless pursuit of precision, it is somewhat cavalier when it comes to the exact dating or the number of millions of victims in other genocides. Nevertheless, the invitation to think beyond the Jewish Holocaust in a comparative way is clearly there. This is particularly so in the case of the Ukrainian victims of Stalin, who are mentioned several times as a possible counterpart to his six million and as another story on the horizon that might also be told on another occasion outside the pages of the present book (120, 460, 486).29 They mark the book’s outer perimeter, not its central concern. Crucially, the work of articulating singular lives and larger narratives did not stop when Mendelsohn finished the book, but carries over into its subsequent reading. From the perspective of the dynamics of cultural remembrance, readers can be said to coproduce the mnemonic work started by authors. After all, in publishing his highly crafted memoir, Mendelsohn not only performed an act of secondary witnessing vis-à-vis his own relatives, but turned this family drama into a matter of public concern. In the process, he opened up the possibility for unknown parties coming from different positions and different angles to become adoptive witnesses to a family story they do not “own” and to connect this multidirectionally (to use Rothberg’s important term) and, if need be, critically, to their own identity narratives.30 In this process, the aesthetic qualities of the work are key: by commanding attention in its own right, the storytelling inspires hitherto uninvolved readers to “take an interest” in the lives of particular strangers. 126

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Thanks to the Internet, it is possible to track some of the many reactions to The Lost among both professional and nonprofessional readers in social media and online forums. Fans of the book have included many Jewish Americans, some of whom have been inspired to carry out their own family history research (or, in at least one case, use the book as a vade mecum on a pilgrimage to the Ukraine in search of family roots). Indeed, following the publication of The Lost, a Bolechow Jewish Heritage Society (BJHS) was established in 2007 (Daniel Mendelsohn was the founding chair) as a platform for further research into the history of the Jewish community in Bolechow and surrounding areas, as a forum for those with “direct family roots” in the area or in search of “long-lost cousins,” and as a lobby for the curation of the material vestiges of Jewish presence in the town (the cemetery, for example, has recently been restored).31 The BJHS provides an excellent example of the role that a work of literature—in this case, a piece of literary nonfiction—can play as a catalyst in the production of memory by mobilizing people to investigate other related stories and to perform their affiliation with traditions to which they are more or less distantly related. The conduct of new research, the production of new narratives, and recent commemorative performances relating to the Jewish heritage of Bolechow are all indirect outcomes of The Lost: a testimony both to its literary force and its mnemonic procreativity.32 The productive reception of The Lost among Jewish-American readers with family roots in Eastern Europe is not in itself surprising, since it is largely based on existing patterns of identification. More remarkable is the fact that The Lost has also attracted the attention of readers from outside the Jewish-American mnemonic community and spoken to them as “implicated subjects,” to use Rothberg’s term, with respect to the Holocaust.33 The translation of The Lost into so many European languages is further proof of its power to speak to readers—as individuals, as nationals, as Europeans—outside of the immediate mnemonic community in which it was written. It has apparently the power to mobilize subjects who, as descendants of victims, perpetrators, beneficiaries, or bystanders, are positioned at various degrees of removal from the events depicted. It is impossible to say with certainty that those who buy the book, or start to read it, also make it through to the end. It could well be that some readers are attracted more by the idea of The Lost and its central conceit than by the actual experience of reading it. Be this as it may, at least one French reader on Amazon.fr described how The Lost had managed, despite its length, to captivate her attention 127

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as an adoptive witness to the extent that “those disappeared became mine” (ces disparus deviennent miens).34 While the random character of such customer reviews makes generalization problematic, such statements nevertheless indicate that The Lost has the power, either through its central conceit or through the experience of the narrative as a whole, to turn someone else’s story into “mine.” And this power, whenever it comes into play, is arguably linked to the distinctively literary qualities of the text. At a time when our relationship to the Holocaust has become more “angled” the role of literature has changed, as have the terms we have for discussing it. The singularity of literature makes of it above all a “connector” between linguistic, discursive, and mnemonic communities, bringing new lines of affiliation into being that transcend inherited social and family frames. The intense imagining of the lives of others across hundreds of pages helps to recalibrate the border between “thick” and “thin” relations,35 to use Margalit’s terms, between those people who have become imaginable in their singularity as individuals and hence part of our world, and those billions of people who merely belong in an abstract and undifferentiated way to humanity. Whereas thirty years ago, literary analysis focused exclusively on discrete texts, we have now become much more aware of the interactions that take place between narratives as works circulate, enter into dialogue through the critical mediation of readers, and inspire new stories. In the cultural afterlife of The Lost—as it circulates across the world, thanks to its own singularity reinforced by marketing strategies and the institutional support of prizes—Mendelsohn’s work offers an interface between the six and the six million Jewish victims of the Holocaust; between the Holocaust and the millions of other victims of recent dictatorships; between victims, perpetrators, and bystanders; between an American, a European, and a global frame. The possibility of different memory narratives interacting with each other across the global stage, which Rothberg sees as the way forward to a more inclusive and dialogic memory politics, is materially enhanced by the capacity of particular stories to travel from one community to another, their capacity not only to attract new constituencies but also to hold their attention and generate new acts of adoptive witnessing on the part of multiple readers. In such connective processes, the literary has a new role to play.

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6 Interview with Daniel Mendelsohn, Author of The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million

Wulf Kansteiner: Ann Rigney’s analysis of your book emphasizes how it participates in transforming the notion of “singularity” originally attached to the Holocaust as a unique genocidal event, into a more dialogical and comparative literary phenomenon.1 Rigney points out that all Holocaust culture is inextricably engaged in an “ethics of comparison” and argues that it is important to relate the Holocaust “to other events in a nonreductive way.” In your book, you refer to many different human rights catastrophes, but, not surprisingly, the Holocaust overshadows them. Thinking along the lines suggested by Rigney, do you think that we might have a duty to “multidirectional memory” after decades of Holocaust memory? You develop that very idea on page 42, when you wonder if Holocaust victims are perhaps already sufficiently looked after. Perhaps multidirectional Holocaust memory would require us to relate Jewish and non-Jewish suffering in ways that are not developed in your book (The Lost does not feature a nonJewish victim with the possible exception of Ciszko). Perhaps that would be a way to render our stories a little less “myopic” (as you so perceptively describe them on page 147). Mendelsohn: I’d like to push back here against the notion of “duty”: duty for whom, precisely? Writers don’t have “duties,” as far as I am concerned—except to tell stories well. I am a writer, and my book is a search narrative in the present wrapped around a family story that 129

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occurred during the Nazi occupation of Eastern Poland in the 1940s. In telling those twinned stories, I certainly didn’t feel any “duty” to comment at length on other human rights catastrophes, as if I were a graduate student in history writing a thesis on genocide. To do so would have detracted from the story, which was my paramount concern (not least of all because the real subject of this book, as far as I am concerned, is narrative, about how we tell stories and how we transform the past into “history”). So no, I didn’t, and don’t, feel any sense of “duty.” That said, obviously I am aware that the Holocaust is one of many human rights catastrophes, and, in elaborating my own stories, I did think it useful and interesting (but hardly obligatory) to insert references to certain of those disastrous events, in order to enhance and illuminate the particular human rights catastrophe that was, in fact, the subject of my story. And so there are a number of digressions in my book about those other disasters: the Ukrainian genocide of the early 1930s in particular, an event I refer to a number of times, but also the Armenian genocide, as well as smaller riffs on more recent episodes such as Abu Ghraib. I included these allusions (which, interestingly, provoked the ire only of certain Jewish readers, for whom any comparison, apparently, is invidious) precisely because I do feel it is important, at this point in history, for ordinary readers to avoid a myopic kind of moral exceptionalism. Our duty as human beings is to be equally offended by all human rights atrocities, not just the ones that happen to “our” people. Indeed, it’s precisely the notion of “our” people, as opposed to just “people,” that is the problem that causes holocausts in the first place. So yes, I did weave in some reminders, as one might call them, that we should be thinking outside of the box. But again, to have belabored this point disproportionately, out of some sense of “duty” to the principle of “multidirectional memory,” would have been to spoil the story—as would, indeed, have been any significant “development” of the stories of the non-Jewish victims of the war in Bolechow. (Although, incidentally, I included as much about those victims as I could learn.) There may be such a thing as multidirectional memory, but when the (alleged) duty to write about it results in incoherent, multidirectional writing, I draw the line. But such matters are literary in nature, and perhaps not of equally great interest to theorists of history. 130

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Affiliative Memory Kansteiner: Rigney appreciates that your work anticipates the position of the reader who is more than once removed from the story and by identifying with your search develops affiliative connections with the individuals of your family, thereby extending this family to the whole of humanity. On the other hand, you have established a Bolechow Jewish Heritage Society [BJHS], which clearly indicates your grounding in a specific community of memory. Do you have any concern with the generalized reading of your work in a non-Jewish, non-Holocaust-specific direction? Where do you see the limits of affiliative identification? Mendelsohn: My grandfather used to say, “Everyone has a family, and every family is crazy.” Of course, my book is about a family—my family—and, of course, my book seeks to make my specific family available to all readers; I would argue that all serious literature in some sense functions precisely by making the specific available to a kind of generalization; paradoxically, the more specific the writing is, the more available the subject is to generalizing. For that reason, I certainly do not have any concerns whatsoever about the possibility that my work is being extrapolated into the identifications and experiences of readers whose experiences and family histories don’t precisely map onto mine and those of my family: that’s the whole point, that’s what every author wants. And yet I don’t see this as somehow inimical to the fact that I and a few other Bolechow descendants founded an organization to promote the memory of Bolechow. (For the record, the express goal of the BJHS, which takes only its name from “our” shtetl, is to illuminate the history of Jewish life in all of the shtetls in the L’viv area.) One can be a specific person with specific “affiliations,” on the one hand, and yet still be committed to a larger human picture. It’s the balancing act that we all perform every day, and I don’t see it to be particularly challenging, frankly.

Narrative Structure Kansteiner: Rigney defines your narrative as a “hyperbole,” in reference to the disproportion between the knowledge of the events to which you refer (after all, we learn only a tiny bit after 500 pages) and the 131

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expression of these events in the long and complex narrative of your search for knowledge. Was this hyperbole present to you while writing the book? Does this hyperbole have an important ethical dimension? Is there perhaps the risk that the story of the extended search for historical clues upstages the experiences of the victims, including the experiences of the six, but especially the experiences of the victims beyond the circle of the six? Mendelsohn: The book is about precisely what the title says it is about: a search. That is my interest, that is my theme, and that’s what this book (and, indeed, my other books) return to obsessively: how we know the past, how we know our families, how we know ourselves. The book is not “about” the Holocaust—in the sense that it is not a history of Bolechow; it is not a straightforward, nonfiction account of what happened in Galician shtetls in the 1940s: it is, to repeat, about searching for knowledge about the past, about what such a search could mean, and what such a search might retrieve from the past, and about how the search and the results of the search might be narrated. And so yes, certainly, the searching “upstages,” as you put it, what can be known about the victims. I think there’s a page and a half at some point two-thirds of the way through the book where I stop the narrative in order to list all the “facts” (or as close as I could then come to the “facts”) that I learned in the course of my researches and travels. A page and a half out of 503 pages. But the imbalance between that scant page and a half and the other 501 and a half pages of the book is the whole point of The Lost, so I hardly see it as a “risk” of any kind. It’s the vehicle for the point I want to make, which is to illustrate and reflect upon the disparity between what there was in the past and what can be known about that past through obsessive searching—or, as I keep putting it in the book, the disparity between “what happened” and “the story of what happened.” These considerations do, indeed, have an ethical dimension, as far as I’m concerned. Certainly, it has an intellectual and literary dimension, too. The reader is meant to feel, and to ponder the implications of, the “hyperbolic” (to use Rigney’s term) dimensions of the searching in comparison to the scantiness of what was found. I think it is important— ethically important, indeed—to remind contemporary readers, who are accustomed to sentimental fare that aims to wrap up narratives about the past with a neat little bow of “closure,” that much more 132

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was lost than can ever be found. This should, hopefully, trigger a degree of useful suspiciousness about conventional narrative, and indeed about historical “narrative” altogether. Kansteiner: The book features four narrative levels weaving together the story of Shmiel and his family; the story of the past experiences of the eyewitnesses and survivors; the story of the relationship between the narrator and the eyewitnesses and research helpers; and the story of the Mendelsohn siblings traveling around the world to uncover the history of their relatives (435). All four levels conclude with memorable “punch lines.” The historical search hits “bedrock”; the survivors tell remarkable stories with fortuitous outcomes; the narrator forges strong emotional bonds with his interview partners; and the Mendelsohn siblings enjoy a sense of generational unity that did not previously exist. In this sense, your book is highly wrought and literary since you follow an explicitly identified narrative strategy. Can you discuss how you see the relationship between its literary aspects and its subject matter? Mendelsohn: The Lost is, first of all, a search narrative in the present—the story of a fact-finding mission, which does not, in fact, succeed exceptionally well. As I keep pointing out in the book, we didn’t learn very much, in the end, about Shmiel and particularly about the rest of his family. It is, on the next level (or within the next “Chinese box,” which is how I refer at one point to my grandfather’s—and hence my— storytelling technique), the story of my relationships with some of my interviewees, many of which were vexed, difficult, and fraught with problematic emotions; at the next remove, it is, necessarily to a lesser degree since we really didn’t learn all that much, the “story” to some very partial extent of what happened in Bolechow during the war, a story conveyed (ironically) more successfully by archival witness statements than by the extensive interviewing I did with Bolechow survivors and witnesses. (This, of course, is part of my theme of the “problematics of memory.”) Finally—and least successfully—The Lost is the story of “what [may have] happened to Uncle Shmiel,” the question first raised in my childhood, as Part I makes clear, and which isn’t really ever quite resolved for certain; and indeed, as careful readers will note, the scene at the spot where he was allegedly shot is precisely the scene where I realize I have no claim on him or his experiences, the scene where I realize I have to “let go” of any 133

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claim to knowing him as a person or owning him as a narrative subject—to abandon any sentimental claim to be able to understand him or his experiences. To my mind, The Lost is a story of failure, of not being able to know the past—a theme that is underscored by my obsessive, repetitive use of the word “unknowable”; that is heightened by the many stories I tell whose punch line, as it were, is that I hopelessly misunderstood the clues that had been left; and that is structurally emphasized by a number of deliberate narrative discontinuities, interruptions, and gaps. The book is called The Lost for a reason; I didn’t call it The Found because, in the end, my relatives were (and indeed remain) mostly lost. To my mind, the book strives mightily to evade any sense of easy closure (that horrible word), and I think this by far outweighs any satisfactions or “successes” that the story may also offer.

Judging Past and Present Kansteiner: In several passages, your narrator speaks of his refusal to judge the behavior of people’s actions or inactions during the Holocaust: I am not judging! I judge no one, I said. And it was true. Because it is impossible to know certain things, because I will never experience the pressures that people experienced during the war years, the unimaginable choices that had to be made, because of all of this, I refuse to judge. (386) Yet the narrator adds immediately that he did not consider that his “terrific yearning to know” would lead to the accumulation of facts, dates, and details that “might add to something more than entries in a chart or elements in a story—that they might one day force me to judge people” (386). But the inevitability, perhaps even duty, of having to stand in judgment of people in the past remains elusive throughout the book. Neither German perpetrators, nor Ukrainian collaborators, nor members of the Jewish police are explicitly judged. It is intriguing to note that the book engages with contemporary human rights violations in the same way. The passages about Abu Ghraib, the Iraq War, and contemporary Israel do not contain any condemnations of perpetrators. What are the advantages and the purpose of this ethical gesture of nonjudgment? And what is the significance of these comparisons for thinking about the Holocaust today? What does it mean 134

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to think about violations in contemporary Israel and contemporary atrocities (like Abu Ghraib) in the same context as the Holocaust? Does the effort to withhold judgment and omit negative emotions interfere with the moral obligation to attribute responsibility for past and present crimes? Does this reticence serve the purpose of initiating meaningful dialogues about violence and interrupting historical cycles of violence? Mendelsohn: I’m very perplexed by a reading of my book that sees no judgment of the Germans or their Ukrainian collaborators. It would seem from your question that one problem is that these perpetrators (and those of the more recent instances of atrocities I mention—a multidirectional gesture, incidentally, that you suggest in your earlier question I do not make) are “not explicitly judged.” Indeed. But, as my grandpa might say, “explicit, schmexplicit.” Again: I am not a graduate student in history writing a dissertation about the Holocaust. There is such a thing as irony, there is such a thing as tone, there is such a thing as context. I think that a careful reading of the passages in question leaves no doubt as to just what I think of the various atrocities I describe, whether of the Ukrainians and Germans during the war or those of the Abu Ghraib thugs, the Americans during the Iraq War, or the Israelis, or anyone else. I would further point out a crucial element missing from your question: in the passage that you cite as evidence of my refusal to make moral judgments—as in every other instance in which I explicitly state that I “refuse to judge” someone—is not, in fact, about a Nazi or a Ukrainian, but about a Jew who, for whatever reasons, acted ostensibly immorally during the war. The whole point of these passages was precisely that people were very often forced to make unbearable (and, strictly speaking, immoral) choices that are, to us in our comfortable lives, unimaginable—choices that, therefore, make facile “judgment” equally unimaginable, or at least should do so. Mothers smothered crying babies in hiding places, members of the Judenrat had to make life and death decisions involving their own people, people protected themselves and their families at the cost of neighbors’ lives, and so forth. The ethical point, to spell it out—which is, again, part of my larger theme of how difficult it is to know the past, and how dangerous it is to try to imagine ourselves in it—is that we must step carefully when peering into these murky ethical waters with the intention 135

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of “judging.” Should I, sitting in the comfort of my living room in Manhattan, and should you, sitting in your cozy office at a university, feel perfectly at ease judging, say, as a “murderer” the woman who smothered her baby so as not to give away the place in which seven people were hiding? Should I judge a nineteen-year-old boy or twentyseven-year-old man who thought he might be able to protect his fiancée or his new wife or his family by being in the Jewish police? Should I judge the Ukrainian who chose to save his own family over the family of a Jewish neighbor? I’m not comfortable making such judgments, and, if anything, I had thought that by introducing my own discomfort in this way, it would raise provocative and discomfiting questions about how easily we often make what are, in fact, lazy, facile, and not very morally illuminating judgments. For this reason, among many others, I take strong exception to the suggestion that my book in any way makes an effort to “omit negative emotions.”

Visuality Kansteiner: Your book interweaves text and images, yet the reader does not get much help interpreting the images. There are no captions or provenance information for the numerous illustrations. Historical photographs, more contemporary photos, maps, historical postcards, and historical documents appear throughout the book without yielding much information on their own. The illustrations become somewhat more meaningful for the attentive reader who can begin to match text and image. But even the attentive reader might wonder about some of the visual codes associated with the illustrations. Some historical photographs are represented with their paper frames and some without; many new photos are presented on modern display technology (tablet, square device frame for Hasselblad photos), while others are not. At least one photo is shown twice (the photo of Frydka, one of the six family members, 194, 365) illustrating the spiral, repetitive narrative progression of the book. Holocaust iconography is largely avoided (with the exception of the Kristallnacht photo on 351 and perhaps the landscape photo on 493). Does the interplay between text and image attest to a consciously adopted didactic-ethical impetus? Did you seek to sidestep easily consumable Holocaust iconography? Does the lack of captions serve the purpose of encouraging users to read and pay attention to the details that are recovered in the book, 136

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not least of all by way of exchanging and communicating about photographs (477)? At the end of the book, the narrator and his siblings are in the exceptionally positive position that they are rich in memories and in photographic and other keepsakes (182). Thus, although it does not seem that way on first sight, the uncaptioned photos play an important role in the process of narrative resolution. Mendelsohn: The use of photographs was very important to me, and of course I was very self-conscious about how they were displayed (although I cannot say I gave much thought to the issue of frames and borders: I think I just went with whatever felt “right” to me). My feeling was this: all that I had to go on, when I began my search, was a bunch of photos from the family albums, and the stories I heard, first from my grandfather and other relatives when I was a child, and then from the survivors I interviewed as I researched this book; and so I wanted my reader to have the same tools, so to speak—pictures and stories. Partly this was due to my wish to underscore, yet again, the reader’s appreciation of just how it is that we know about the past: often, it’s images (photos, movies, etc.), and often, it’s narratives. Often it is both, of course. And yet, as you rightly point out, I consciously intruded an element of difficulty in my deployment of images. The point of not captioning the photos was to make the reader work—to look closely, as I had to do; to process the stories, the narratives, and to make sense of the visual data carefully; to not take anything for granted. I still get irritated e-mails from some readers who complain that the pictures aren’t captioned, but as I write back to them, that’s the whole point. “Why should you have it easy, when I didn’t?” is my usual response. I’ll take exception to one of your interpretations here, however. The whole point of the passage on page 182 (and, indeed, of the book) was precisely that I and my siblings were not rich in memories: we had the pictures of our “lost” relatives, but it was the people I interviewed, the survivors, who had the memories that could animate those pictures, which we, of course, never could, not having known “the lost,” not having been there. The disparity between the richness of their memories about the past and our own, at best oblique and rather impoverished relation to the past, is emphasized repeatedly throughout the book—it’s part of the larger theme which I describe above, about how we need to be careful about what we think we “know” about the past, 137

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and about to whom that past really belongs. This, indeed, is the point of the sunt lacrimae rerum passage, from the first book of Virgil’s Aeneid, that I interrupt my narrative to relate in that passage on page 182. The Carthaginians have decorated their new temple with scenes from the Trojan War; to them, it’s just a good, colorful story, a bit of décor (just as, for many readers, the Holocaust is becoming a “gripping story,” and therefore, however problematically, a form of entertainment); but when the incognito Aeneas tours the temples, he bursts into tears because it’s his story: he can animate the images with his own, real experience. That disparity between image and experience, between entertainment and suffering, absolutely fascinates me, and this classical text seemed the ideal way to illustrate it at that moment in my narrative. I had just shown one of the survivors some photos of my relatives, and I was suddenly struck by (this is how I put it) how rich in pictures we were but poor in memories, while the survivor was so rich in memories but poor in photos, having lost all of her possessions so long ago. It is true, in the case of the photographs that appear in my book, that there is, in the end, a meaningful relationship between the pictures scattered throughout the text and the stories that ultimately explain them: sometimes the story comes first, with the photograph as a kind of visual exclamation point, and sometimes its comes just after the image it describes, which is a bit more disorienting. So yes, there’s always a connection. But my own feeling is that this “positive outcome” stands, if anything, in ironic contrast to the larger, “negative” outcome of the book as a whole—by which, of course, I mean the fact that we didn’t at all recuperate very much about my relatives in the end. One can learn something by searching and studying and scrutinizing; but hardly everything. Kansteiner: What is your position on the representation of Holocaust violence? You refrain from showing graphic photos of the Holocaust, possibly because they simply do not exist for the six. But you use eyewitness testimony of Holocaust massacres to illustrate the fate of your family. You recognize the danger of ventriloquizing other people’s experience (226), but decide to take your relatives’ point of view and attempt to describe how their ordeal might have felt like (210–211). Moreover, the text includes key scenes, for instance, the death of 138

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Mrs. Grynberg, that are repeatedly described in very graphic language, including language that carries significant ethical ambivalence because it could be read as reflecting the perspective of the perpetrators (for instance, the reference to “bloody bits” on pages 235 and 436). Where do you see the limits for the representation of Holocaust violence? Are the scenes the primary focus of the text or do they mainly serve as powerful narrative counterpoints to the story of historical detective work that takes up considerably more space? Mendelsohn: I think my strategy is pretty clear: to avoid at all costs facile “reconstructions” or “you were there” narratives about my relatives’ (or indeed any victims’) experiences. I do not, in fact, take my relatives’ point of view at any point: there is one passage in the book where I make the rather journalistic gesture of trying to follow Shmiel and his wife and daughter into the gas chambers, starting with the roundup and the departure from Bolechow to the cattle car to Belzec; but the entire point of that passage, as the reader learns later on, is that it’s wrong: Shmiel did not, in fact, end up in a gas chamber, as I was to discover; and so the moral of that rather “gripping” little reconstruction is precisely that we cannot “go there,” that we cannot really know. This passage, rounded out in time by the reader’s understanding that its reconstruction of the past moment is totally inaccurate, is an important part of my ongoing critique of facile Holocaust narratives, as I described above. To my mind, one of the book’s most important themes is that we in the present can only approximate the past, at best. As with Zeno’s paradox, we can get closer and closer— with our research, our archives, our searching, our historians—but never quite arrive. Everything we know about the past is extrapolated, to some extent, from our personal knowledge, and indeed our knowledge often derives from popular, even pop narratives, and all this can lead us astray. I make reference to this problem many times in the book, and often illustrate it by showing how my own attempts at “knowing what happened” went disastrously astray precisely because all I had to go on was what I myself know, what my own experiences have been, and those led me down the wrong path as often as not. (The most disastrous and “dramatic” of these was my misunderstanding something my grandfather said when I was a child, an error that led me to make a series of fruitless inquiries during my travels, 139

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and which I only became aware of four decades later when I made my last trip to Bolechow and suddenly understood what he had really said.) Because of all this, I felt strongly that the only tool I had the right to use, in presenting a picture of what (may have) happened to my relatives and other Jews in Bolechow during the war, was eyewitness testimony—the witness statements given by survivors just after the war—and the testimony of the survivors I interviewed during my search, who had been there. Certainly, as you say, these “eyewitness” (let’s call them) narratives are meant to stand in strong counterpoint to my own “search narrative”: here again, I am making a pointed comparison between what participants in an event and what “historians” of the event (professional and amateur both) narrate about a given subject. In the end, the whole point of the book was to withhold “closure,” to challenge the reader’s expectation of any kind of phony redemption, to interrupt the momentum of the “detective” narrative and to foreclose any facile kind of enjoyment of the book as a mere Holocaust thriller by leaving the narrative gaps and open questions as reminders that much more is “lost” than found in such searches.

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7 The Death of the Witness; or, The Persistence of the Differend MARC NICHANIAN

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N THE SPRING of 2009, I gave a series of public lectures in Istanbul.

To the best of my knowledge, it was the first time that an Armenian intellectual from the diaspora spoke to a Turkish audience on Turkish soil. Never in my life, before that invitation, did I imagine that I would one day set foot in Turkey, in the country my father and mother had left once and for all, in 1920 and  1923, without any hope of return (and surely without any desire to return either). The lectures had a general title, “Literature and Catastrophe.” I wanted to explain that only literature could speak about the Catastrophe (which, of course, it can do only through its own failure, and we have to learn how to read a failure, how to read that which has never been written, the supreme science; I explained these things in my Le Roman de la Catastrophe).1 But to do that, I needed first to explain the difference between genocide and Catastrophe. I needed to explain that at the core of the genocidal will there was the erasure of the fact or, more precisely, the erasure of the factuality of the fact, and therefore the elimination of the witness as such. I needed (and still need, for the task is never completed) to explain what it meant to eliminate, to obliterate the witness in the victim or the survivor, what it meant to erase the witness in man, in the human being, once and for all. When Giorgio Agamben gave an emblematic status to the figure of the Muselmann, obviously it is the death of the witness that he had in mind. Earlier and better still, Shoshanna Felman had already said everything about the “death of the witness” in her extraordinary essay, “In the Era of Testimony: Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah,” which can be fairly considered as 141

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one of the founding documents of the modern reflection on testimony. Felman wrote the following: Shoah embodies the capacity of art not simply to witness, but to take the witness’s stand: the film takes responsibility for its times by enacting the significance of our era as an age of testimony, an age in which witnessing itself has undergone a major trauma. Shoah gives us to witness a historical crisis of witnessing, and shows us how, out of this crisis, witnessing becomes, in all the senses of the word, a critical activity.2 It was the first time that the transformation undergone by the term “testimony” was so clearly thematized. The Holocaust represented “a radical crisis of testimony,” to the extent that it appeared as “the unprecedented, inconceivable historical advent of an event without a witness, an event which historically consists in the scheme of the literal erasure of its witnesses.” It was the whole question of the “witness’s death” that Felman was tackling in her essay. She even used the expression quite explicitly: “It is the silence of the witness’s death which Lanzmann must historically challenge here.”3 The problem is that Agamben and Felman, have not been understood, or they have not understood themselves. This is why I will return to these questions in some detail, but this time in their relation to the “subject of history.” The fact is that in the last twenty years, we have been literally overwhelmed with undisturbed commonplaces around the figure of the “witness” and “testimony” in general. From death there is no return for the sake of bearing witness. Certainly. But we hear: We shall bear witness nonetheless, in place of those who did not come back, we shall be witnesses by proxy. We shall universalize testimony. This is what we have been told. There was no better way to ignore the significance of the witness’s death, that murder of the witness in man, which the perpetrators had planned and implemented with such an incredible stubbornness and mastery. We did not notice immediately what was taking place. By universalizing testimony, we thought that we were countering the will of the perpetrator. In fact, we were not doing anything except obeying him faithfully. That is what I needed to say in Istanbul, to explain once more, once and for all, that if the core of the event is the elimination of the witness, there can be no bearing witness for what happened to the victim or to the survivor. There can be no humanist account of (or relationship with) the Catastrophe. No testimony understood in humanist terms can account for the event. This is what I 142

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explain here through two different angles of approach: martyrdom and torture. But what are we going to do with real testimonies, which by the way, we only today call “testimonies,” these hallucinating accounts of death or survival in the camps or on the roads of deportation? This question shall remain unanswered up to the end. Let me be clear. I will repeat this in many different ways: the survivor is not the witness. He cannot be the witness of the death of the witness in man. And if he is not the witness, he can hardly be anything else but the negation of the death of the witness, the figure of self-denial par excellence. I will explain the difference between the French words déni and dénégation, between the survivor’s self-denial and the perpetrator’s denial. But as long as we have not cleared the survivor from his role as a figure of self-denial, that role devoted to him (as it seems, forever) by the perpetrator, the latter will never stop exulting. The survivor will remain the triumph of the perpetrator, again and again. There is one more thing to say about my Istanbul lectures. In the spring of 2009, after so many years of writing and lecturing on these topics, there was still something I had not understood, something I realized only later, when I was rereading David Rousset’s impressive books. At the core of the genocidal will there was the erasure of the factuality of the fact, and therefore the elimination of the witness as such. I had not yet understood the “therefore.” In my Istanbul lectures, I decided to put entirely aside everything that is implicit in the first sentence of my book The Historiographic Perversion: “Genocide is not a fact because it is the very destruction of the fact, of the notion of fact, of the factuality of the fact.”4 Have no doubt: the perpetrators were powerful philosophers. And I am astonished time and again, when I see that they immediately knew (they knew in their murderous way) the things that we are only now beginning to understand, the things that we discover only today by making our way in the dark: the destruction of the factuality of the fact and the erasure of the witness as such, and now the equivalence of the one with the other. Then I repeat: the perpetrators did not want to destroy the facts, in the plural. It is the very factuality of the fact that they wanted to destroy. How can I affirm such a thing? This “thing,” which is indeed terrible, damages everything we know (what we imagined we knew) about history, about history as it is written and history as it is done. Historiography will not recover from that blow. What Shoshana Felman, in 1989, called a “crisis of testimony” is actually a crisis of historiography as well. Hayden White in the United States 143

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and Jean-François Lyotard in France took the measure of that crisis decades ago. Who really heard what they were saying? In Istanbul, I explained as much as I could what it means to erase the witness, to create from scratch a humanity without witnessing, but I thought that the “factuality of the fact” was too difficult to swallow, whereas it is the same phenomenon, the same will, on both sides. It would have been necessary to confront head-on the discourse of denial (which is possible as the discourse of a state only because it is the core of the so-called genocidal will in the first place; just as there are perverse historians only because history is denialist in its very essence). I did explain, nevertheless, what a crime without truth is. A campaign had just been launched in Turkey by four French-speaking intellectuals. It was a plea for forgiveness. Most of my auditors were signatories of the plea, at least potentially. Therefore, I had to explain what the expression “a crime without truth” means, and to insist on the fact that historiography had failed all along, in order to be able to ask later if there was any possible forgiveness for a crime that is not inscribed in the books of history and never will be. The perpetrators were torturers and philosophers at the same time. They knew before anyone else that at the core of humanity (as we understand it) there is the witness, the capacity to bear witness. They knew that by destroying that capacity of bearing witness, they destroyed the very possibility of writing history, the possibility for a fact to be a fact. How did they know?

Martyrdom and History In the penultimate chapter of her book The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt wrote the following: “The next decisive step in the preparation of living corpses is the murder of the moral person in man. This is done in the main by making martyrdom, for the first time in history, impossible.”5 This extraordinary formulation needs some contextual explanation. Arendt’s purpose is to lay bare the “essential principle” of the camps, “the most consequential institution of totalitarian rule.” The first element on the path to total domination is the destruction “of the civil rights of an entire population.” This first step corresponds to what she calls the fall of the “juridical person” in man. It is not yet the fall of the witness in man. But what she says about this first step is already impressive and entirely relevant for what will be asserted later regarding the erasure of the witness. Arrest and internment are not functions of the op144

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position. It is here that Arendt establishes a parallel between arbitrary arrest and torture. The purpose of the former is to destroy “the validity of free consent.” The latter aims to destroy every possibility of opposition. And Arendt adds, in a mysterious interpolation, “as distinguished from death.” With this distinction, she has already initiated the description of the second step in the process leading to total domination, the step that consists in destroying what she calls “the moral person” in man. This is why we need to linger on her interpolation. It is clear that what is in question here is the human capacity to mourn, or rather the link (which we thought indestructible) between meaning and mourning. Every human death has a meaning, thanks to mourning. As long as the memory of the dead, even that of the slain enemy, was respected, “all was not lost and never could be lost.” Therefore, it seems (according to Arendt’s reconstruction) that it is through their onslaught on the very possibility of mourning that the Nazis “robbed death of its meaning.” Yes, but let us consider for a moment the examples she gives in order to show how death is given a meaning through mourning—strange examples, made all the more so by their juxtaposition. Even Achilles “set out for Hector’s funeral.” Even the Romans allowed the Christians “to write their martyrologies.” Is it true that Achilles set out for Hector’s funeral? Is it not rather the case that he stubbornly dragged his corpse on the ground, aiming at tearing it to pieces and throwing it to the dogs, and that in the end he only reluctantly gave up, following the injunction of the gods? As to the Roman authorities, they did not play any significant role in the establishment of a Christian martyrology. Moreover, these examples say the contrary of what they are meant to convey. They say that mourning is harmed by too much mourning. They say that martyrdom has a validity as such only for those who already believe and no value whatsoever for the others. But the strangest thing is that Arendt here hesitates between mourning and testimony. The fact is that never before in human history had a political enterprise aimed in that way at the production of human waste, by extirpating from man both mourning and testimony, the capacity of performing one and the other, at the same time. Nevertheless, they need to be distinguished for the sake of clarity. If we keep in mind one moment more the typology established by Arendt, the juridical person is man in his ability to consent and to have opinions. The moral person, she says, is man in his capacity to oppose, to protest, and to die as a victim. The perpetrator does not succeed in his enterprise just by making mourning impossible. Achilles already knew how to do that, and he would 145

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have done it if the gods had not intervened in order to tell him: “That’s enough!” The perpetrator succeeds when he prevents the victim from dying as a victim and the survivor from surviving in order to bear witness, when the unique alternative is “no longer between good and evil, but between murder and murder.” This is the context in which the sentence on the preparation of living corpses and the impossibility of martyrdom appears in the text. The moral person is the one that is in question here, the person that has preserved in him or herself the capacity to protest and the power to die a meaningful death, as related to the capacity of being a witness and bearing witness, not only the capacity to mourn or to be mourned. Arendt arrives at this idea through a passage of David Rousset’s Les Jours de notre mort, which describes the impossibility of any protest within the concentration camp. Here is the passage, as translated by Arendt herself: How many people here still believe that a protest has even historic importance? This skepticism is the real masterpiece of the [Schutzstaffel] SS. Their great accomplishment. They have corrupted all human solidarity. Here the night has fallen on the future. When no witnesses are left, there can be no testimony. To demonstrate when death can no longer be postponed is an attempt to give death a meaning, to act beyond one’s own death. In order to be successful, a gesture must have social meaning. There are hundreds of us here, all living in absolute solitude. That is why we are subdued no matter what happens. In French: “Lorsqu’il n’y a plus de témoin, aucun témoignage n’est possible.”6 But the last sentence of the Arendt quote is very different in French: “C’est pourquoi ils acceptent. Le sens de la résignation” (That is why they accept. The sense of resignation).” We can assume that the phrase “That is why we are subdued no matter what happens” comes from Arendt’s pen, since there was no English translation available of David Rousset’s testimonial novel. Here, Arendt leans on Rousset in order to invent a formulation that best explains what she meant when she used the expression of “total domination” to describe the relationship between the executioner and the victim in the camp (and, of course, beyond the camp in a society transformed into a concentration camp). From such a total domination, there is no return. We are subdued no matter what happens. From now on, martyrdom is impossible because the meaning of 146

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death has disappeared. At the same time, and more precisely, the possibility of testifying for one’s own death has disappeared in the camp. We see here most clearly how for Arendt, as well as for Rousset, total domination (and the type of society that total domination involves) is related in the final analysis to the erasure of the witness. I now return to my main argument. The aim and the result of the genocidal will is the obliteration of the witness in man in every case. There is no exception. This is how the Nazis purported to create a “new man.” And the Armenians, this subcontinent of ghosts, are the living proof that it is not enough to remember; it is not enough to recount, to tell one’s own story time and again, in order to counter the will of the perpetrator. On the contrary, to recount one’s story time and again is only a way of obeying the perpetrator, of obeying the logic of the perpetrator. As long as we do not understand what it means to eliminate the witness in man, they have succeeded in their enterprise. This is also the reason why the genocidal will of the perpetrator translates into a Catastrophe for the victim. The witness’s death amounts to a disintegration of the language that could have integrated the event, the destruction as event. The survivor’s experience is that of a loss beyond repair, both particular and extreme. What the survivor has lost is the very capacity to speak the loss. This is not too difficult to understand, even if it is extremely difficult to admit. Primo Levi thought that a retrospective construction of the witness was possible after all. Such optimism derives from what philosophers might call a transcendental illusion, which makes us believe that the suppression of the witness could be corrected in a way or another. It distracts our attention. It diverts us from the Catastrophe. Do we want to be distracted? Do we want to be diverted from the core of the event? Do we want to be optimistic? I return later to the profound paradox of such an optimism, the aporia to which we are driven by the executioner. We have to cope with this will; there is no other way out; we need to cure ourselves from the sickness that eats into us. We need to believe that history is still possible, that it is not reduced once and for all to the perpetrator’s version of history. We need to negate the Catastrophe. That is what our transcendental illusion consists in. I do not say that we should not counter the executioner’s will, that we should not try against all odds to reconstruct the position of the witness, much as Felman wanted to do at all cost. But what interests me in this predicament is the aporia to which we are thereby driven. In order to survive, therefore, the survivor has to negate the experience of the death of the witness in some way. He must do this as though 147

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history for him were still possible, as though the witness could be reconstructed, as though a “narrativization” of the experience were still within the sphere of his capacities. This denial by the survivor has nothing to do with the denegation of the perpetrator. The genocidal negation or denegation is always the fact of the executioner and his accomplices. It negates the event that it carries out. The genocidal negation is a paradoxical and redoubled negation because it denies the event that is the negation itself, at the core of the event. Denial, on the contrary, always belongs to the victims and to all those who identify with them (today, the Christian world in its entirety, the same world that no later than yesterday was still rustling with anti-Semitism). The victims and all those who identify with them, if they cannot deny the event (they do not cease to speak of it vehemently), succeed nevertheless in denying what it really was: the witness’s death, and henceforth the impossibility of speaking of it forever as a historical fact. And this is precisely why yesterday’s perpetrators identify themselves so easily today, so blithely, with the victim. They themselves occupy the place of the witnesses that the perpetrator aimed at eliminating. It is a self-denial, a denial of what I have been submitted to, because my own experience in my own eyes is unbearable. In the Armenian case, this denial is less complex because, here, nobody identifies with the victims. The victims, then, are condemned to simply deny the Catastrophe, their own Catastrophe.

Torture Concerning the aporias of post-Catastrophe testimony, a Brazilian author, Idelber Avelar, has provided brief and luminous insights, at the beginning of his book The Letter of Violence,7 in a chapter subtitled “Torture, Confession, and the History of Truth.” The author examines torture and the production of truth as object and as concept (while emphasizing the Nietzschean project of a history of truth in relation to suffering inflicted). The chapter ends with a reflection on the “therapeutic task” when confronted with trauma. The question asked is as follows: What exactly does torture make the person being tortured feel or experience? What is the torturer after exactly? Is he trying to extract information? Is he trying to get at the truth? And if so, what sort of truth? Or is his goal simply to destroy his subject, to make it so that he cannot even recognize himself anymore? Everyone knows that it is impossible to survive torture and remain human. Torture operates on the human body by inflicting pain beyond 148

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reckoning. But it also works away at the human soul. It destroys the victims’ personalities. It turns them against themselves, it generates a destructive guilt. Psychoanalytic literature describes different curative methods that are used to bring victims back to a state of quasi normality. It explains that the “healing” process must go through a phase where it is experienced as being part of a narrativization. In so doing, one can lessen a subject’s guilt. One can heal the soul or what is left of it, and one can distance subjects from the world of insanity by making them talk. But the moment one does so, one is confronted by an absolutely unexpected phenomenon. Speaking, telling, integrating the event and the experience into a story, all of these things are possible, all of these things are part of the healing process of a traumatic event. But this one does not obey the usual laws of reception of events, even traumatic ones. It is not that the victim of torture cannot speak, tell, or “narrativize.” It is only that once he begins to speak, once he explains, once he narrates or narrativizes, he betrays the event, he betrays the fact that the event (here, the very act of torture) was destined to destroy the language that usually receives events, metabolizes them, and integrates them into its symbolic chain. This is not a paradox for paradox’s sake. It is the (very real and terrible) reason why there is no possible cure for someone who has been tortured. Idelber Avelar says this in slightly different words: The traumatized subject perceives that the experience has tainted language in an irreversible manner and that it has made of narrativization an impossible enterprise. Every true therapy should work against the effects of this perception which knows that the integrity of language has been compromised.8 But then, as a therapist, what can one do in order to counteract this perception? Must one show that the integrity of language has not been compromised? If one does that, one betrays the subject’s experience and lies to him. One restores a certain normality, but based on the negation of what the experience was in reality. One forces the subject to deny his very experience, one forces him into a state of denial. The subject’s normality is reestablished as the price of a denial of what was irreversible in his own experience. To become normal, the subject must deny and negate his own perception of the harm that was done to him, that of the irreversible damage done to language. This betrayal of the event through narrative, any narrative, provides the guidance that will perhaps permit us to better understand what I mean 149

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by the difference between a fact and an event, for example, between the genocidal fact and the catastrophic event. To inflict pain is a fact. To definitively compromise language for a tortured subject is something completely different. This cannot be narrated, integrated into a story into any form of language, for the subject who has been its victim. No narration, no narrative, no story can integrate into language the disintegration of language. This would be a contradiction, pure and simple. It would open the door to insanity. One must acknowledge Avelar’s acute perceptiveness and the accuracy of his arguments. One understands that “narrativization” (the diegetic organization of the past monstrosity) can only be experienced as the betrayal of the event or of the experience. But we need a further explanation. How does the torturer go about attacking language’s ability to organize a story while also destroying the very ability to mourn? One should be able to find the answer in the “therapeutic” act, the one that tries to negate the executioner’s will. Logically, this healing act lies in the “promise of narrativization.” Yet this is what Avelar says: “For the survivors, the promise of narrativity takes the form of a retrospective construction of the witness, at the very place where every act of witnessing has been eliminated.”9 This is a breathtaking assertion. Indeed, nothing said previously had prepared us for such a formulation. Avelar has read the classics of the genre, of course, the theoretical literature on trauma and on the crisis of witnessing that flourishes today in the United States.10 But why does the “witness” suddenly appear? Avelar suggests here that every narrativization, every historicization, every diegetic act that results for the victim in bringing to language the event of his or her torture, necessarily in the form of a narration (otherwise, it would simply be a scream), every such act has a relationship with the possibility of witnessing. It seems that a witness, at least one witness, is needed for the story to become possible, for the narration of the event to survive the mortal confrontation between executioner and victim. What Avelar is suggesting then, is the following: the most terrible aspect of the act of torture is not the pain that it inflicts; it is not even the destruction of the soul that occurs in it, as guilt is internalized by a victim who survives. The most terrible aspect is the suppression of the witness. It is because the torturer’s will is to eliminate the witness of the torture. It is because the final effect of torture is the death of the witness that torture so completely dehumanizes the victim, that it excludes him from humanity once and for all. Of course, the difficulty and the paradox at work here are the same as before. If one reconstructs the witness retroactively, for example, through 150

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psychoanalytic therapy, one integrates the event into the narration, one gives it meaning after the fact, one acts as if the witness had been there, making the narration possible after all. It is no longer the same event. It is no longer the event of the elimination of the witness. And since “the retrospective construction of the witness” itself could be read as a betrayal toward the experience and the reality of the witness’s death, Avelar minimizes that expression further by speaking of a necessary postulation of the virtual place of the witness, which should, he says, be preserved. And because this is still not enough (even as virtual, the restored place of the witness is an insult against the nature of the event), Avelar offers a final formulation: “To confront the trauma is to conquer the space of narrativity in which even the unmasking of narrativization would have its place.”11 This is our challenge, from now on: how to live in a world in which the death of the witness has happened once, henceforth, once and for all. In every case and even when using a cure whose goal is to reconcile the subject or the survivor with him or herself, the subject—if he wants to survive—must deny and disclaim his most profound experience, which, in its most rigorous formulation, is that of the witness’s death. Denial is the price that must be paid for survival. Survival is denial. That is also why if one returns to the survivor of genocidal will, none has ever used the proper noun of the event: the Catastrophe. No one can actually accept being excluded forever, irreversibly from humanity. No one can accept that the event was an “event-without-a-witness.” An “event-without-awitness” is the formula, we recall, that Felman invented in her 1989 essay on Lanzmann’s film Shoah. We are not dealing with an event that took place and to which coincidentally there were no witnesses to testify with regard to its historical truth. What we are dealing with is the very elimination of the witness. Once that has been properly understood, it makes little difference if one unearths historical documents. It makes little difference if numerous visual witnesses were on the spot and later wrote terrified reports and barely believable memoirs on the facts as they took place in front of their very eyes.

Metareality Let me now say a few words about the scholar who I consider the hero of my account on its historiographic side, the first one who understood something (and who gathered the courage to say it out loud) about the 151

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crisis of historiography in the face of the catastrophic events of the twentieth century. I am speaking of Hayden White. As soon as the French (original) version of my book The Historiographic Perversion was published in 2006, he was kind enough to write me a letter, from which I want to quote two excerpts: One thing was misrepresented by Friedländer in his introduction to the published proceedings of the colloquium, and this was the idea that I had backed off my relativist position and admitted that with respect to the Holocaust, the facts were relevant to the task of refuting the revisionists. . . . Here, too, it was for me important to stress that one cannot arbitrate among conflicting interpretations of the Holocaust when the difference between the two or more interpretations turns upon the question of “what is a fact?” Your discussion of genocide as a program which seeks not only to destroy a people but also to destroy the facts makes immanent sense to me, and it is a point that I had not considered. I very much like your revision of Lyotard’s notion of the differend. But as you know, the historians will not heed you because their discipline’s constitution requires the belief in the primitive nature (the givenness) of factuality itself. At that time, I had not yet understood that the crisis of historiography resulting from the genocidal events of the twentieth century had to be correlated with the will to obliterate the witness in man. In 1991, at any rate, the historian Carlo Ginzburg had launched a fierce diatribe against White in an essay entitled “Just one Witness.” Following his “relativistic” critique of historical discourse and his emphasis on the generalized rhetoricity of that discourse in particular, it seemed that White had gone as far as having the “reality” of the event depend on the power of interpretations (or at least this was how his position was understood). Truth in history had become a question of power or, say, of dominant representation. For White, the war was never finished, not even (or, perhaps, first and foremost) in the case of the Holocaust. This was clearly explained in his 1982 article.12 Every interpretation could suddenly (or in the long run) transform itself into a historical lie. The truth of an interpretation of the Holocaust had value only through its efficiency; moreover, this was true for all interpretation and, consequently, for every truth. It so happens that Jean-François Lyotard referred to this article by Hayden White in 152

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his book The Differend, at a central juncture in the book. This is the passage in section 93, where Lyotard speaks of the “meta-reality that is the destruction of reality,” and where he asks his reader to imagine an earthquake that would not only destroy human lives but also “the instruments used to measure earthquakes directly and indirectly.”13 It is clearly not history that will be able to adjudicate in such a situation. The difference between truth and lie, between the refutation of nonreality and the refutation of reality is not of a historiographical nature. The revisionist historians are asking for facts, like any historian would. But in the situation of the earthquake just evoked, we do not have to deal with facts. We have to deal with signs. “But with Auschwitz, something new has happened in history, which can only be a sign and not a fact.”14 In the accepted idioms— those of justice, law, history, objectivity, and acceptable testimonies— there is nothing to receive that these signs indicate, or toward which they point. One does not prove, one does not validate the reality of this referent, which is not one. It is even indecent to think that one could prove and validate it in that way with the discourse of proof and the convergence of testimonies. Historians are reduced to silence. Let me quote Lyotard at length on this matter: The facts, the testimonies which bore the traces of here’s and now’s, the documents which indicated the sense or senses of the facts, and the names, finally the possibility of various kinds of phrases whose conjunction makes reality, all this has been destroyed as much as possible. Is it up to the historian to take into account not only the damages, but also the wrong? Not only the reality, but also the metareality that is the destruction of reality? Not only the testimony, but also what is left of the testimony when it is destroyed? . . . Yes, of course, if it is true that there would be no history without a differend. . . . But then, the historian must break with the monopoly over history granted to the cognitive regimen of phrases, and he must venture forth by lending his ear to what is not presentable under the rules of knowledge. . . . Its name [the name of Auschwitz] marks the confines where historical knowledge sees its competence impugned.15 The reader will remember that all this was quoted by Carlo Ginzburg in his diatribe against Hayden White, but accompanied by an observation that canceled out Lyotard’s and White’s assertion: “Is this last remark 153

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true? I am not fully convinced. Memory and the destruction of memory are recurrent elements in history.”16 Carlo Ginzburg then wanted to preserve the old meaning of the word “witness,” and he understood very well the stakes of the metareality defined by Lyotard. To give up on the status of the witness would have been tantamount to accepting that historical knowledge sees its competence impugned at the limit of our experience. In his unavoidable indifference to that “meta-reality,” how could the historian account for this unnameable that is the destruction of the fact? Is the destruction of the fact itself a fact? How could the historian account for an event, the condition of possibility of which is provided by the principle of its own destruction? How could he do it if he fails to lend “his ear to what is not presentable under the rules of knowledge,” that is to say, if he does not turn his attention to the rule and to the power of the self-devouring archive and, consequently, to the radical change that has occurred in the status of the witness in a post-Catastrophic time? I first posed these questions in The Historiographic Perversion; they need to be repeated and converted today in a different tone. If testimony is indeed submitted to a metareality that is the destruction of reality, in some way we have to read that metareality in testimony itself, in the testimonies of survivors. Of course, it is not inscribed and readable except in the form of a photographic negative. We have to learn how to thematize this “negative,” how to make it visible. It is precisely this “negative” that I call the “death of the witness.” What remains of testimony when it has been destroyed as such, in the very act of the genocidal will (and in the practice of torture, today still everywhere in the world)? What remains is the death of the witness. What remains is the impossibility of bearing witness. Yes, we need to learn how to read this remnant. But we need to learn how to read it against history, precisely against the subject of history. One has then to work in view of a phenomenology of the survivor, as contradictory as the expression may seem. Otherwise, one can be sure that the subject of history, the witness of himself, will appear again in the various forms of a retrospective construction, a testimonial function allotted to art (which is then able to “rewrite the event-without-witness into witnessing, and into history”),17 or else simply of a philosophy of the subject as witness. This is what neither Agamben nor Felman was able to avoid. Every operation aiming at a refutation is still the victim of the historical puppet, in that grandiose chess game that is history itself, as conceived by Walter Benjamin. 154

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Refutation Immediately after his injunction to break with the cognitive regimen of phrases on history, Lyotard writes the following: “Every reality entails this exigency . . . Auschwitz is the most real of realities in this respect.”18 The reality in question cannot be the reality of facts. This is what Lyotard says explicitly. It can therefore only be another reality, another register of reality, which is not accessible to the powers of the historian. And, nevertheless, Lyotard’s project, the project of this philosophical machinery called The Differend, is to make possible a refutation of negationism. It so happens that according to the same logic and the same necessity, Agamben writes about the paradox of Primo Levi: “[This paradox] contains the unique possible refutation of every denial of the existence of the extermination camps . . . Auschwitz—that to which it is not possible to bear witness—is absolutely and irrefutably proven.”19 Here, more explicitly than in Lyotard’s book, we encounter the project of liberating testimony from all its historicizing usages, from every reduction to a “probating value,” and therefore from “historical truth” as such, which also means: from every attempt at reading it as though its destination was to establish facts, as though it could be the direct transcription of a historical event. But once again, and in spite of everything that has been said, it is nevertheless the question of an irrefutability beyond the historicizing usage of testimony. And once again, therefore, the sense of history and the subject of history are guiding and governing these statements. In the examples I just mentioned, denegation and testimony are on the same level. By refuting each other, they make possible a return of the event to history, to a history of the civilized world, the one in which there are still recognizable facts. With Lyotard and Agamben, the demonstration operates through a Kantian distinction between “registers of reality.” With Felman, it operates through a recuperation of what remains from testimony in the form of art, an art that is from now on able to bear witness in the court of history and to transmute the “event without witness” into history. These three authors are those who had the most profound insights about the catastrophic event, about the “witness’s death.” And, nevertheless, the three of them have refuted it. And if it is refuted, then where is the death of the witness, this non-Christian death, this death without mourning, without resurrection and without reconstruction, to be inscribed? The production of the witness’s death, equivalent to that genocide which is not a fact, cannot have a witness. Which witness for 155

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the death of the witness? Which witness for an event of which the very definition is the death of the witness and therefore the erasure of its own factuality? I refer the reader to my Historiographic Perversion for the rest of the demonstration. In any case, whether it operates on a Kantian mode (as in Lyotard), or proposes art as witness (Felman), or the subject as witness (Agamben), refutation strictly obeys the logic of historical truth. It is driven by the subject of history. Even when it questions the nature of the catastrophic event, it superbly ignores the figure of the survivor. This ignorance obviously has nothing fortuitous about it. The survivor (I mean, the survivor as a figure, for instance, the one who appears in Maurice Blanchot’s The Madness of the Day, and who plays sexual games with the feminine figure of the law, la loi), if he did not deny himself, would be the reverse of all and every subject. He would be first and foremost the reverse of the subject of history. And still more precisely (with a formula that encompasses both sides: the denying nature of survival as well as its contradictory connection with the experience of the subject): history is the institution of the survivor, in the sense that it institutes itself in order to better ignore the survivor or, conversely, that the survivor institutes it in order to better deny himself. In the same vein and according to the exact same logic, I explained elsewhere that philology is the institution of mourning.20

The Sense of History We need a phenomenology of the survivor. We must invent a new language for it. And “what remains,” therefore, is what we will be told by those who returned as ghosts, and by them only, these living dead who are sometimes called survivors. And yet such a “phenomenology of the survivor” is a very paradoxical affair for a number of reasons that came to the fore above and that I summarize here. First of all, there is no phenomenology but of a subject. And (as I said already) the survivor is the reverse of a subject. The modern subject was invented in the eighteenth century. A fabulous invention. The subject is always and again the one who obeys, as the word subject indicates. One knows, however, that what he henceforth obeys is the law that he himself instituted. This first revolution, the revolution of the subject, belongs to the modern era, and it is at the origin of the time of nations, our time, which has yet to exhaust all its resources. It brought about the next, secondary revolutions, the political revolutions, when the good news spread that the subject had turned sov156

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ereign and when the nations learned to provide themselves with a past fantasized and imagined for them by philology. The subject, whether individual or national, thus became the witness par excellence, his own witness, before the law and by means of the image. The second reason for the paradoxical enterprise that is a phenomenology of the survivor is that it has, in fact, already been formulated. It took a novelistic form in the narratives written by Blanchot in the late 1940s, at least Death Sentence (1948) and a narrative entitled “Récit?” from 1949, published as a book by Blanchot in 1973 with a changed title, The Madness of the Day. Derrida once proposed a remarkable reading of these narratives, in one of his early great texts translated into English (in Deconstruction and Criticism [1979]). The French title of the essay Derrida devotes to Blanchot was “Survivre”; the English title, “Living On.” Derrida (and, before him, Blanchot) was speaking of the survivor and, beyond the survivor, of the catastrophic event that the witness’s death has introduced in our mental universe. The problem is that when, at the end of The Madness of the Day, the survivor says in French “J’avais perdu le sens de l’histoire,”21 the English translation (by Lydia Davis) reads: “I had lost the sense of the story,”22 instead of “I had lost the sense of history.” As long as the nature of the catastrophic event (the event that produces the survivor as a figure) was not questioned as such, it seems that it was impossible to imagine even for one second that the issue here was history, the sense of history and henceforth the subject of history. This passage is quoted several times by Derrida in his essays on Blanchot. Each time, imperturbably, the translators reproduce Lydia Davis’s wrong translation or a variant of it.23 We need a renewed phenomenology of the survivor, we need a new reflection on the nature of the catastrophic event, if only to explore what it means to lose the “sense of history.”

The Holocaustic Crisis of Historiography This brings me to my next remark, which is about the astonishing absence of Derrida’s name in the 1992 volume Probing the Limits of Representation. It must be recalled that the second part of “Force of Law” was read at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in 1990, during the conference on the “limits of representation,” where a witch hunt had been organized against Hayden White, who had dared to interrogate the principle of realism in historiography, and who thereby became suspected of potential “negationism.” Over the course of a private conversation (it 157

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must have been in Paris in 2000, during a conference honoring Antoine Berman at the Collège de France), I asked Derrida if he had meant not to publish “Force of Law” together with the proceedings. Derrida was surprised by my question. There was no dispute between him and the organizers. But he did tell me that he was outraged by the treatment inflicted on Hayden White during that conference, since “ce n’est quand même pas un négationniste” (“he is after all not a negationist”). To this day, in any case, I remain convinced that Archive Fever was written in part in order to say, in an abrupt and indirect manner, what Derrida could not say directly about the great holocaustic tragedies, which are also the tragedies of our modern historiography.24 Carlo Ginzburg later wrote a book where, this time without Hayden White as a target, he continued to muddle the issues by maintaining at all cost (and always against the critiques of the principle of realism in historiography) the following, which is obviously directed (after all) against Hayden White and, accessorily, against JeanFrançois Lyotard. Ginzburg writes that “the fashionable reduction of history to rhetoric . . . can and must be rejected by rediscovering the intellectual richness of the tradition started by Aristotle, particularly its central argument: that proofs, far from being incompatible with rhetoric, are its fundamental core.”25 Ginzburg’s book consequently partakes after its own fashion in the debate over the “archive” and (unwittingly) demonstrates that the realistic will of historiography and thus the historiographic perversion are an essential part of what Derrida called the “trouble of the archive.” One knows of the reactions, at times violent, to the final pages of “Force of Law,” which appeared under the title “Post-Scriptum.” This was partly for what is said there, and partly because Derrida makes Benjamin and his text on mythical violence “speak” beyond what they normally would have been able to say in 1921. There is nevertheless one argument offered by him that is worthy of consideration in the present context, linked to the “scandal” consisting of making a 1921 text speak of what was only to occur twenty years later. This concerns the following lines from Derrida’s essay: “Benjamin would perhaps have judged vain and without pertinence, in any case without a pertinence commensurable to the event, any juridical trial of Nazism and of its responsibilities, any judgmental apparatus, any historiography still homogenous with the space in which Nazism developed up to and including the final solution.”26 I interrupt the citation: Is it not true that law and historiography miss the event when 158

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they ignore that this event obeys in the most radical manner the law of the archive, that it is the only event that enables a full understanding of what the law of the archive is, since it cannot be reduced to a murder and an extermination? More essential, this event consists in annihilating, in annihilating extermination itself, by the “will of the archive.” How could law and historiography take into account an event in which it is the “anarchiving destruction” that is at work, that is to say, the destruction of the conditions of possibility for the destruction to become a fact? And if we had not precisely understood what the “law of the archive” is, would this not be one of its possible formulations? In sum, there can be no genocidal will without the dimension of the archive. After all, Derrida says this very clearly: the “system of mythical violence” such as it was carried to its most extreme consequences by the Nazis, “at the same time, . . . kept the archive of its destruction . . . and (at the same time, therefore) it produced a system in which its logic . . . made possible the invalidation and therefore the effacement of testimony and of responsibilities . . . in short, it produced the possibility of the historiographic perversion.”27 Derrida does establish a distinction between “the system of mythical violence” and its setting to work by the Nazis. It is of the latter that he says it produced “the possibility of the historiographic perversion.” He says that in passing. Is there a confusion? It is obviously not as an incarnation of the system of mythical violence that Nazism produced the possibility of the historiographic perversion. Later on, in Archive Fever, Derrida did correct what seems to me to be too vaguely phrased here. Such hesitation is the sign of a theoretical vacuum. It is this vacuum that I am attempting to redress in the present essay and elsewhere.28 It can only be corrected by means of a reflection on the archive and of a confrontation with historiography as we know it. Such was the condition posed by Hayden White a quarter of a century ago, but no one understood it then. And this is why in Archive Fever, Derrida spoke of a “holocaustic tragedy” of historiography. Every historiography that does not reflect on its own “holocaustic” crisis (but also every attempt at a refutation inspired by the subject of history) is still homogeneous with the space in which the perpetrator carried out his will to the very end.

The Absolute Survivor The nature of the catastrophic event cannot be grasped by a historical discourse. The truth beyond truth of survival is not ruled by the truth of 159

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the facts, of those facts that we could, for instance, retell in a testimony as a response to the tacit demand for an accurate telling.29 But reciprocally, the inquisitorial demand for an accurate telling is itself part of the catastrophic structure of the event. There is no telling, recounting, or account that does not respond to that structure. I am convinced that Maurice Blanchot, to this day, is the only one besides Derrida, of course, who has been able to take this mad structure into account in all its complexity. He is the only one who has understood it, in a light that for himself was absolutely blinding. He is the only one who understood that the interrogation on the testimonial account of facts implies that we also, simultaneously, ask ourselves what was the nature of the catastrophic event. What we call history cannot ask those types of questions. But this is still a harmless formulation. If history is unable to ask such questions, one can always imagine that we could try to ask them far from history, in other institutional places, independently from it. But this is not precisely true. The question that interrogates the nature of the event can be asked only against history. History is denialist in its very essence. It demands a truthful account and the establishment of responsibilities. Through that very demand, which clearly is a demand for truth, ruled by the logic of truth, it nullifies any possibility of apprehending the truth beyond truth of survival, and also, of course, the truth beyond truth of the catastrophic event, which is a crime without truth. But there would be no history without truth. History is therefore condemned to not understand the crime without truth. And because Derrida did not comment on the phrase “I had lost the sense of history,” we need to begin everything again from scratch, after him, with him. In front of the mad structure of the crime without truth, there is a generalized blindness, which Derrida himself did little to dissipate. The survivor of the holocaustic tragedies of the century is a relic. The word “relic” comes to me from Hagop Oshagan, the author of Mnatsortats [The Remnants], that immense novel in the Armenian language, published in Cairo between 1932 and  1934, in which Oshagan wanted to “approach the Catastrophe.” In several texts written in the years 1946–1948, Oshagan identified himself with the intellectuals, his brothers in arms, who were deported and killed one after the other in the summer of 1915. He was one of them. He was dead like them. He was the dead witness. I showed in Le Roman de la Catastrophe how the very project of writing the Catastrophe (and the painful failure of the project) was linked to this mad identification. But as mad as it could be, it is thanks to this identifi160

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cation that today we can understand how the survivor can replay and reenact the birth of the testimonial narrative, that is to say, at once obey the injunction that obliges one to testify and denounce that very injunction, both at the same time. And, apparently, there can be no denouncing the narrative account, no pointing out the demand for a narrative account without them being the work of the survivor as identified to the dead witness. Here then is the “absolute” survivor. The survivor obviously is not the one who escaped death. He is the one who comes back dead, as the dead witness. Only the dead witness can denounce the phenomenon of testimonialization. And the catastrophic event of which I have been speaking here all along can therefore be characterized the following way: as the event (or the advent, if I may say so) of the witness’s death. Hence, a consequence that goes without saying: the No to the narrative account pronounced by Blanchot at the end of The Madness of the Day is not only a No addressed to testimony, for instance, the survivors’ testimonies. It is obvious that there cannot be a bearing witness for the death of the witness, and that every survivor’s testimony, on this account, is condemned to be self-contradictory. The No addressed to the narrative account is also a denunciation of the testimonializing operation, that is to say, the historical and modern operation through which every narrative becomes testimony. Thus, the absolute survivor would be the survivor as identified with the dead witness. We need some evidence to verify this. In The Madness of the Day, there is a scene that is strange in its very insignificance. It is the scene where the narrator sees from afar a woman trying to make a baby carriage pass through an outer door. A man enters, returns, probably holds the door for her. The woman enters, looks at him, and walks on. The narrator is thus a witness to a scene, as insignificant as it may be. And because he has been a witness, because witnessing is still possible, the scene becomes a vision (“Outdoors, I had a brief vision.”) Yet, right after describing the scene of which he has been a witness, the narrator writes a few lines that seem to be of immense import: This brief scene excited me to the point of delirium. I was undoubtedly not able to explain it to myself fully and yet I was sure of it, that I had seized the moment when the day, having stumbled against a real event, would begin hurrying to its end. Here it comes, I said to myself, the end is coming; something is happening, the end is beginning. I was seized by joy.30 161

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Immediately after this, the “accident” happens, and he is turned into a survivor. Here is then a “true” event. Beginning here, from that apparently insignificant moment, the day will hurry to its end. Despite all the polysemy of the word “day” (to which Derrida has lengthily attended), the “day” here is the space where being a witness is still possible. “Being a witness,” that is to say, being present at an event that occurs here, now, before my eyes, and being able to give an account of it through a narrative. Nothing more. There would then be events in the world of which an account would be possible, events that would be liable to be part of history, as insignificant as they may be. It is a miracle. He has witnessed his being a witness. Which means that implicitly he has also witnessed the possibility of not being a witness, of not being able to be a witness anymore, or at all. That is why “the end is coming . . . the end is beginning,” why “the day, having stumbled against a real event, would be hurrying to its end.” He has witnessed the possibility and, consequently, also the impossibility of being a witness. He has stood up in the truth. That is what they call the truth. The pure witness has stood up in the truth of his experience. He recounts this experience in the course of his narrative. But this narrative, the one that we are reading, has not been written by the witness, whoever he may be. It is the narrative of the survivor, the one who “survived” the death of the witness. It is the narrative of the one who “identified” himself with the death witness, like Hagop Oshagan in the same years. Dead as witness, he woke up as survivor, as the bearer of that death. Between the experience of the pure witness and the narrative of that experience, the Catastrophe took place. From all this, one thing must be deduced: the witness and the survivor are radically distinct; they are the converse of each other. We have just seen that the pure witness is the one who experienced the possible end of the day. The day stumbled against an event. Between this possible end of the capacity of being a witness and the death of the witness (or the dead witness with whom the absolute survivor identifies himself) there is an infinite, an impassable distance. Between the two, the Catastrophe took place, that is to say, a very real event whose characteristic nevertheless is to be without truth. Submitted to the demand for a testimonial narrative about an event for which there can be no account in testimonial terms, the survivor is first driven to demand justice, to beg for a reparation, to initiate a lawsuit: “When I woke up I had to listen to a man ask me, ‘Are you going to sue?’ A curious question to ask someone who has just been directly dealing with the day.” A cu162

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rious question indeed. And our survivors do not cease to resort to the law and to tribunals. They have not understood that the Catastrophe has taken place, even it has not yet arrived, let’s say arrived to them, they have not understood that it was irreparable, that it would never be recorded in history, any history, forever, and that no tribunal was ever entitled to take into account a crime without truth, in as much as it is without truth. And then he is subjected to the injunction of producing an account. He can denounce the injunction. All this has nothing to do with the experience of the pure witness. The survivor does not witness the possible end of the power to witness. He sees that power (or its end) face-to-face. Or, more exactly, what he sees face-to-face is the madness of the day, the light become mad, the insane daylight. He has to deal directly with the day, in the form of an inhuman malfunction. If, indeed, a single event in this world escapes the truth (of the facts), it is generalized madness for sure, the emergence of a threatening inhumanity. And, nevertheless, we see that humanity is not affected beyond measure. What is the point of being troubled by the survivor? He is close to betraying himself at every moment. He is radically ignorant of the Catastrophe. He asks for recognition and justice. He appeals to the tribunals, sometimes even to national legislations. He obeys the demand for a narrative account without raising an eyebrow. If there weren’t any historians and any police of the intellect, he would himself formulate the demand for a narrative account and address it to himself. He voices his agreement with the historians, for he requires facts. Humanity, therefore, has nothing to worry about. It is perfectly sheltered from the inhumanity of the survivor. In the human and humanist world of facts, there is no “absolute survivor.” This is why we need a phenomenology. Blanchot’s writing produces the object of his phenomenological description. Extreme events are those that are perpetrated against the fact, the very notion of fact. History wants facts. It obliges and says: “Get to the facts!” The crime without truth does not yield to the injunction of history, once and for all. That is why the law of tribunals intervenes. The law must intervene if one wants at all cost that the crime be inscribed as fact in the human community, that it acquire a truth, which will always be only the truth of history, of course. Yet (and now I turn the entire argument around, against itself; I walk against the flow, like the crab that I am), it is the case that “we are not a people of historians.”31 It is Kafka who makes the narrator of his last story say this. And Blanchot: “I had lost the sense of history.” To want to inscribe the crime as fact is to ignore the nature of the 163

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event, to bend it to a truth that does not belong to it. It amounts to conforming to the modern apparatus of the will. History is denialist in its origin and essence; it denies the truth beyond truth of the survivor and the survivor wholeheartedly participates in his own denial. It is not just history’s irreducible limitation; it is that which founds history as a discipline. It is its seed, its root, its condition of possibility. It is that which gives it birth. This is how it “sees the day.” It will never challenge this limitation. No sudden burst will ever make it enter into dialogue with the survivor.

The Last Man In the last book of his phenomenological series on these questions of the witness and the survivor, in 1957, Blanchot organized a final encounter with the “last man.” In the lower margin of “Survivre,” Derrida quotes from The Last Man, without any commentary, only with the promise that he “will read this again later.”32 This is not the place to offer a detailed analysis of Blanchot’s writing; I will be brief. The last man is the one who does not have the capacity of being his own witness anymore. Here, nothing is revealed about his past, about events that could have brought him to his present state. The only object of the narrative is the impossible encounter with him. “As soon as I was able to use that word, I said what I must always have thought of him: that he was the last man.”33 This is the first sentence of the book in which the phenomenological encounter with the survivor (or the impossibility of such an encounter) is described. How can the capacity of being one’s own witness be withdrawn from someone? “Even a God needs a witness.”34 But since this incapacity is attested, since this is the nature of the “last man,” then maybe my own role in front of him should be the role of the witness he cannot be for himself. “I spent a long time imagining what his witness would be. I would become almost ill when at the thought that I would have to be that witness, a creature who not only had to exclude himself from himself in favor of that end, but had to exclude himself from the end without favor and remain as closed, as motionless as the milestone on a road.” Immediately after this reflection, everything changes again, and what comes to  light is a new thought that needed as its premise the “time of suffering” necessary for becoming that motionless milestone. “But slowly— abruptly—the thought occurred to me that this story had no witness.”35 The time of suffering was necessary in order to realize that if he himself 164

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ever played the role of the missing witness, the two of them (the last man and the narrator) would form that which everyone already is for himself, that is, his or her own witness. Instead, he has to see to it that no one interferes, “so that there would be no one between him and his destiny, so that his face would remain bare and his gaze undivided.” Why undivided? Because if someone came and tried to play the role of the witness for him, the autoscopic subject would be restored and, like anyone else, the last man would be able to be his own witness, with the usual divided gaze of the subject, the modern anthropological monster with two heads: native and philologist, survivor and historian. All this is written with an astonishing clarity: “I was there not in order to see him, but so that he wouldn’t see himself, so that it would be me he saw in the mirror, someone other than him . . . He shouldn’t split in two.”36 We are here under the catastrophic constellation. The Catastrophe is nothing else, nothing more: it is the death of the witness in man. The last man is the survivor, this at least is now obvious. The survivor cannot bear witness for the event that made him a survivor. For that purpose, he should be able to bear witness for the death of the witness. Should someone else bear witness on his behalf? This is a new temptation, a very common temptation nowadays. True, the narrator does not want to be the witness that the last man cannot be for himself. His task is different. But can he nevertheless bear witness for the event of the death of the witness? This is the question that guided us along this essay. A simple version of the same question could be formulated as follows: Can that event become a fact? Here is what Blanchot writes as an answer to that question: “He [the last man] did not have any precise notion of what we call the seriousness of facts. The truthfulness, the exactness of what has to be said astonished him. Each time, this surprise was indicated and dissembled by a rapid flutter of his eyelids. ‘Now what do they mean by event?’ I read the question in his recoil.”37 What is presented here in the form of a description of the last man’s helplessness repeats and refines what Blanchot had already written in 1949. The last man has no idea of what is asked of him if the demand addressed to him is the one of a testimonial account, if he is told: “Let’s get to the facts.” From 1949 to 1957, therefore, the same project guided Blanchot’s writing, the project of being the guardian of that which characterizes most accurately the last man: the loss of the capacity of witnessing and of bearing witness, the identity of the absolute survivor, the refusal of any testimonial account, the denunciation of the injunction to recount and testify. “But if I was present, he 165

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would be the most alone of all men, without even himself, without that last man which he was—and thus he would be the very last.”38 The presence of Blanchot’s phenomenological writing thus, in the most uncommon way, keeps the absolute survivor away from himself, prevents him from turning against himself, from submitting his will to the doctors who exhort him to get to the facts, from obeying the logic of truth and the subject of history, from allowing any retrospective construction of the witness, any “rewriting of the event-without-witness into witnessing and into history.”

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PART II

REMEDIATIONS OF THE ARCHIVE

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HIS SECTION takes up the question of the archive, not only in the

commonsensical understanding of the archive as a storehouse of documents for the formation of future memory but also as a media-specific problematic that raises a number of ethical issues around the status of testimony, the formation of public memory, and the “datafication” of the Holocaust. Each of the chapters presented here confronts the conditions of possibility of the archive by casting attention on its mediality, namely, the technologies in and by which the archive (and its analysis) is created, remediated, and accessed. The archive, as Derrida has argued, is “not only the place for stocking and for conserving an archivable content of the past . . . [but also] the technical structure of the archiving archive [which] determines the structure of the archivable content even in its very coming into existence and in its relationship to the future.” The process of archivization “produces” the event at the same time that it “records” it.1 Attendant to this recursive relationship between recording and producing the event, two of the chapters in this section focus on archives of the victims (the Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive and Peter Eisenman’s Berlin Holocaust Memorial and its accompanying underground information center), and two of the chapters focus, at least in part, on archives produced by the perpetrators (the Geographies of the Holocaust project and Yael Hersonski’s documentary A Film Unfinished). Altogether, they raise fundamental ethical questions about the limits of representation vis-à-vis the quantification, abstraction, and modularity of

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technologies of the archive, the architecture of the archive, and the digital tools and technologies for visualizing, analyzing, and mapping the archive. Without reproducing the Nazi gaze and its normative logic, the chapters ask how the archivable content and the processes of archivization created by the Nazis can be interrogated. What does it mean to analyze these kinds of archives—for example, the 1936 card index of every Jew living within the Reich; the general population census of 1939, aimed at creating a complete registration of Jews and Mischlinge (mixed blood); the punch cards and the machine technologies developed by IBM in the early 1940s for the SS Race Office; the documentary records of the units of the Einsatzgruppen (SS death squads) throughout Eastern Europe; or a singular film shot in the Warsaw Ghetto in the spring of 1942 immediately before the film’s subjects were murdered at Treblinka—all of which were created to expedite genocide, highlight the murderers’ accomplishments, or document an obliterated people? These questions are taken up by an interdisciplinary team of scholars involved in the Geographies of the Holocaust project, as well as by the Israeli film director who probed the limits of the filmic archive by dissecting and remediating the footage shot by the Nazis in the Warsaw Ghetto. At the same time, what does it mean, in terms of the production of public memory, to conceptualize and create an archive of the victims some fifty or sixty years after the events of the Holocaust? What can be archived of the past in the present for the sake of an unknown future? What built form might this archive take? How would its structure be determined and what would be “inside” and “outside” this archive? In other words, what is remembered and what is forgotten in the very processes of creating a structure that gives rise to the possibility of the archive? These are questions at the core of the archival impulse of the Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive as well as the Berlin Holocaust Memorial. With more than 52,000 testimonies, over 100,000 hours of video footage, and a database of some 7 million records, the Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive is the largest archive of Holocaust testimony in the world. But more than an archive of eyewitness testimony, it is also an information management system, a patented digital library, and a generalizable database for indexing and cataloguing genocide. The second part of our volume begins with an exploration of the materiality and media of this archive, attuned to the seemingly neutral technologies 168

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for its production, accessibility, and dissemination. Born as the offspring of the most successful Holocaust film of all time, Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, and its maturation as a child of the digital revolution, the Visual History Archive sits squarely at the symbolic center of a remediation process that over the past two decades has intertwined technologies of representation and memory keeping in ways that have challenged traditional conceptions of historical representation as much as the debates on narrative explored in the preceding chapters. A second exchange between Claudio Fogu and the coeditors of Geographies of the Holocaust focuses on the transformation of several traditional archives into digital databases for the geographical exploration and visualization of the Holocaust. These archives range from arrest, police, and execution records produced by the Nazis and their collaborators that are held in various state and national archives, to primary sources (such as building blueprints and ghetto name lists), to testimonial documents such as oral and video histories in various museums and libraries. The project also draws on several comprehensive databases, such as the Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos produced by the  U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. As such, the first set of dialogues takes us to the heart of the digital revolution in the humanities and social sciences by raising critical questions about the “datafication” of the Holocaust and the ethical purchase of empirical methods of analysis. A second set of dialogues, between historian and film critic Nitzan Lebovic and documentary filmmaker Yael Hersonski, and between architectural historian Gavriel Rosenfeld and architect Peter Eisenman, explores the remediation of the archive in the analogic forms of historical representation par excellence: the film and the monument. Our choice of grouping together reflections on the digital transfiguration of the archive into the database with discussions of the archive’s special presence in highly public and visual forms of representation is itself indicative of a perceptible shift in scholarly focus from close readings of (written or visual) texts within discrete modes of representation, to questions of remediation typical of a growing sensibility to the operationality of digital technology. As Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin defined and popularized the term, “remediation” is a process of refashioning one medium in another motivated by “the desire to get past the limits of representation and to achieve the real.”2 This impulse to achieve the real can be thought of as the encounter between a (very Western) desire to foster immediacy of perception in the viewer by seeking to make the medium as 169

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transparent as possible in representation, and a contrary urge toward hypermediacy, that is, saturating representations with references to multiple media informing the chosen medium of representation. Yet, under the conditions of our current digital revolution, our own experiential reality can no longer be thought of as separate from media; therefore, these two poles have come increasingly close to each other, whereby we can often experience immediacy via saturated hypermediacy. Accordingly, we suggest that there is a critical thread connecting the endlessly searchable database and multiply remediated testimonies of the Visual History Archive and the Geographic Information Systems (GIS) maps of the Geographies of the Holocaust to contemporary documentary films, such as those of Yael Hersonski and Peter Forgács, and Holocaust monuments that hypermediate the archive as the cipher of a now-accepted instability and oscillation (rather than opposition) between history and memory, truth in representation and the representation of truth. All of these projects reproduce, remediate, and critique the archive through strategies of immediacy and hypermediacy. In Chapter 8, Todd Presner examines how forms of computation— specifically databases, data structures, algorithms, and information visualizations—function as specific modes of historical emplotment that are far from neutral or value-free. Through an investigation of the entirety of the database of the Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive, Presner shows how the transformation of testimony into data through computational processing raises significant ethical questions at every step of the way. At the same time, he also suggests ways to conceive of computation against itself to develop an “ethics of the algorithm,” drawing in part on insights from the Jewish ethical tradition. In response, Stephen Smith, executive director of the Shoah Foundation, argues that the ethical dimension of digital technologies is to be found in the way in which they preserve memory in perpetuity through “data integrity” and facilitate global access and, potentially, understanding. Smith shows how the mission of the Shoah Foundation has broadened to include the preservation of firsthand testimony of survivors of other genocides and human atrocities, including the Armenian genocide, the Rwandan genocide, and the Nanjing Massacre. The second set of chapters shifts attention to the “spatial turn” in the humanities, which has challenged the priority of temporality and narrativity in conceptualizing the cultural record, giving rise to a lively debate on the spatialization of the contemporary historical imagination and 170

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drawing on methods of mapping and data visualization coming from fields such as geography, critical cartography studies, information sciences, and urban planning. And just like the linguistic turn before it, the spatial turn has come to confront itself with the “limit case” of the representation of the Holocaust in a collective research project entitled Geographies of the Holocaust. Claudio Fogu analyzes the project and resulting volume in light of its uncanny resonance with some of the theoretical insights of the linguistic turn in historiography. While considering the project’s resultant book a unique and promising form of modernist social science that approaches Hayden White’s call for a “middle voice” in the representation of the Holocaust, Fogu also highlights a disturbing return to the language of experience and presence in the visual apparatus of the book. In a frank interview with Fogu and Presner, the coeditors and coprincipal investigators of the project, Anne Knowles, Tim Cole, and Alberto Giordano, along with author/art historian Paul Jaskot, defend their choices and describe the epistemological and ethical challenges of mapping the multiple geographies of the Holocaust. They point out how their work takes “scaling” as an analytical principle and how visualization— through both maps and models—is an interpretative, propositional undertaking that is far from definitive or merely illustrative; instead, it facilitates new research questions and experimental approaches. As such, this interdisciplinary group of authors argues for the need to develop a textured visual epistemology, which does not simply turn quantitative data into visual forms of representation, but underscores the imaginative stakes of any empirical study. In the 1990s, the debates in Holocaust Studies about the supposedly relativist implications of the linguistic turn found remarkable echo in the discussions about the aesthetic, ethical, and epistemological boundaries of popular feature films triggered by blockbusters such as Schindler’s List (1993) and Life Is Beautiful (1997). While, in the past decade and a half, the ethical stakes in fictional representation have continued to be raised by films such as Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds (2009), the world of media as a whole has taken a turn toward a reality-based paradigm that has brought on an unexpected revival of documentary cinema. The History Channel, born in 1995, opened an unprecedented market for historical documentaries, while digital restoration techniques have made it possible to edit footage from the past into contemporary films—hence, our decision to focus attention on the documentary film form and, in 171

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particular, on its innovative use and remediation of the archive as a strategy of testing the limits of representation. In Chapter 12, Nitzan Lebovic turns to the work of filmmakers Péter Forgács and Yael Hersonski to interrogate their inventive use of archival images and found footage in the films The Maelstrom (Forgács) and A Film Unfinished (Hersonski). Lebovic focuses on the manipulation of temporality in Hersonski and Forgács’s use of freeze-frame techniques, arguing that this use instantiates a modality of emplotment akin to the one utilized by Friedländer in his two-volume history of the Holocaust, while also focusing attention on the filmic dispositif. Through the remediation of the archive, the audience is, in Lebovic’s words, called on “to ponder . . . the selection and organization of historical evidence, potential or real, virtual or ‘factual,’ real or imagined,” as much as “the event” itself. In her response, Hersonski discusses the ethical stakes of interrogating a Nazi film, including her choice to include not only frozen frames and multiply remediated sequences but also a historical reenactment in her documentary, further complicating the process of boundary crossing between historical picturing in film and re-presenting the past through archival moving images. She argues that film has the possibility of “defamiliarizing” the archive by countering the ways in which its images— especially those produced by the perpetrators—were intended to be used (and abused) to dictate a particular past and a preordained future. The final exchange in this part explores arguably the most public and publicly debated instantiation of Holocaust memory in the past two decades. The debate around erecting a Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin coincided with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the most monumental testament to the Cold War and to the competing politics of memory in divided Germany and Europe after the Second World War. Eventually located on the former no-man’s-land between East and West Berlin, just south of the Brandenburg Gate and the Reichstag, the Holocaust memorial would assume a central place in Germany’s self-fashioning at the end of the twentieth century and start of the twenty-first. It would take two international competitions, over 500 proposed designs, and some fifteen years for the monument to be selected, approved, and installed. In that time frame, several other key memorial institutions were also built, including the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum (1993), the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation (1994), and the Jewish Museum in Berlin (2001); yet, the aesthetic, historical, and ethical stakes of this particular monument would continue to intensify as more time 172

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elapsed between the original idea, first put forward as a citizens’ initiative in 1988, and its inauguration in 2005. While giving monumental expression to Germany’s simultaneously celebrated and maligned Vergangenheitsbewältigung (literally, “mastering the past”), the memorial took much of its initial meaning from participating in the architectural and political frenzy that rebuilt Berlin as the capital of a unified Germany within a new Europe. In a word, it was a monumental declaration of Germany mastering the political legacy of both Nazism and Communism. This complex entanglement of motives found form in the design of American-Jewish architect Peter Eisenman, whose work had been associated—sometimes problematically—with the continental philosophies of deconstruction and poststructuralism. An echo of the debates that impassioned critics and viewers of the monument is still quite audible in the reconstruction-critique of Eisenman’s “deconstructivism” offered by Gavriel Rosenfeld in his dialogue with the architect. In his response, however, Eisenman takes issue with the portmanteau of “deconstructivism,” which he argues evacuates the ethics of deconstruction, and, instead, focuses on the embodied and experiential nature of the memorial’s built form. In so doing, Eisenman points out how the memorial rejects “the tradition of narrative monuments” in favor of a dislocative experience marked by the tension between the “immemorable memory” of the monument and the “archival” memory of the information center housed below it—a tension that might be read as yet another instantiation of the remediation of the archive.

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8 The Ethics of the Algorithm Close and Distant Listening to the Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive TO D D P R E S N E R

I

BEGIN with two sets of computer-generated visualizations: The first

is the Digital Monument to the Jewish Community in the Netherlands (Figure 8.1).1 It is a Holocaust memorial that has no physical or built counterpart; it exists only on the web. It is a digital image consisting of about 831,432 colored pixels (reproduced here in black-and-white). Each little box of pixels represents a single person, and they vary in size according to the age of the victim. The monument is a raster graphic, or bitmap, which is comprised of a rectangular grid of pixels viewable in a web browser on a computer monitor. The graphic represents more than 100,000 Dutch Jews who were killed by the Nazis. Clicking on an individual box brings a viewer to a web page containing information about the victims, including their names, dates of birth and death (if known), place of birth, and family members, including information about whether they survived the war or not. The graphic organization of the monument is based on the alphabetical order of the place of residence of the victims when they were deported. The second computer-generated visualizations are based on the general indexing categories developed by the Shoah Foundation to organize the genocide-related concepts and experiences described in the 49,000 Jewish survivor testimonies in the Visual History Archive (Figures 8.2– 8.5). These categories form the most general or highest level in the 50,000-word thesaurus created by the foundation, including: Captivity, Culture, Daily Life, Discrimination, Feelings and Thoughts, Movement, Organizations, People, Places, Politics and Economics, and Religion and 175

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Figure 8.1. Digital Monument to the Jewish Community in the Netherlands (2005–2016).

Philosophy. Under each of these broad categories are hierarchical vocabularies to facilitate searching at a more precise level. For example, Captivity includes Camp Experiences and under that category, among other things, are camp adaptation methods, which are further broken down into camp barter, camp begging, camp betrayals, camp bribery, camp smuggling, and camp stealing.2 Each visualization shows 200 different testimonies along the y-axis; time is shown along the x-axis, divided into one-minute segments (as per the indexing guidelines of the foundation). A black box means “yes” (that a given category was mentioned at that moment in the testimony) and a white box means “no” (that it was not). The length of the testimonies varies from under an hour to over fifteen hours in length, although the vast majority is around two hours. Any given segment can contain multiple keywords or indexing terms, thus a “black box” may appear at the same time marker across multiple categories. A few things become apparent from these visualizations: Certain general categories (and, hence, their specific topics) crop up significantly more frequently in the course of the testimonies: Places, Organizations, and Activities are marked up (and presumably discussed) significantly 176

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Figure 8.2. Mentions of the top-level category “places” by minute in 200 testimonies from the Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive.

more often than feelings, emotions, and attitudes. Almost all testimonies begin with the mention of place, which makes sense as a starting point for a survivor’s life story. We can also track some general structural trends in the narrative arc of the testimonies: Discrimination tends to cluster in the first third of the testimonies, often keyed to life before or during the war, and Still and Moving Images tend to cluster in the final

Figure 8.3. Mentions of the top-level category “discrimination” by minute in 200 testimonies from the Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive. 177

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Mentions of the top-level category “captivity” by minute in 200 testimonies from the Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive.

Figure 8.4.

third, often keyed to present-day life, pictures of family, and messages to the future. Part of the reason for this is that the goal of the interview was to produce a story-like narrative that followed the chronology of the survivor’s life, beginning with experiences in the prewar period before moving to the war and the Holocaust, and, lastly, the postwar period, which concludes with a segment with family members and a future message.

Figure 8.5. Mentions of the top-level category “still and moving images” by minute in 200 testimonies from the Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive. 178

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While computer-generated data visualizations may illuminate certain commonalities, patterns, or structures through quantitative analyses, ethical questions immediately come to the foreground. These pixels signify Holocaust victims (in the first case) and the testimony of Holocaust survivors (in the second case). Even if we do not object to the “digitization,” there is certainly some kind of “aestheticization” in the digital images’ gridded, clean organization. To turn Holocaust victims into quantifiable entries in a database and to visualize their lives as data points using colored pixels on a bitmap is, on the face of it, problematic: It presents victims as numbers and digital colors; it abstracts and reduces the human complexity of the victims’ lives to quantized units and structured data. In a word, it appears to be dehumanizing and, even worse, might even partake in the same rationalized logic of modernity that Zygmunt Bauman identified in his seminal work, Modernity and the Holocaust, as the condition of possibility for genocide, namely, the impulse to quantify, modularize, distantiate, technify, and bureaucratize the subjective individuality of human experience.3 And, as we know from the work of Edwin Black, computational processing in the form of IBM’s Hollerith punch card and card-sorting technologies automated the process of identifying Jews from census data, registration forms, and other governmental records, and these computational technologies were deployed in Germany and occupied countries throughout the Reich to manage, accelerate, and automate the annihilation of the Jews.4 Might, then, the realm of the “digital” and the “computational”— precisely because it is, by definition, dependent on algorithmic calculations, information processing, and discrete representations of data in digitized formats (such as numbers, letters, icons, and pixels)—present some kind of limit when it comes to responsible and ethical representations of the Holocaust? In other words, are the “digital” and the “computational” at loggerheads with the ethical, and, if not, what might “ethical” modes of computation look like in terms of digital interfaces, databases, and data visualizations? To answer these questions, I take both a close and a distant view of the Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive: The archive currently contains a total of 53,583 video testimonies (primarily of Jewish survivors of the Holocaust), in 39 languages, from 61 countries, amounting to more than 100,000 hours of testimony.5 I have watched only a tiny fraction of the video testimonies, but have spent considerable time examining the significance of the metadata scaffolding and data management system, including the numerous patents for its information architecture, 179

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which allow users to find and watch testimonies. This chapter is not another contribution to the debates over the relevance or reliability of survivor testimony for historical writing or the possibilities of navigating the blurred lines between history and memory in eyewitness accounts of the Holocaust; instead, it is an analysis of the computational genre itself in historical representation. This includes databases, structured data and queries, and all the algorithmic means by which data is mined, analyzed, and visualized. It seeks to locate the ethical in digital and computational modalities of representation—hence, the title: “The Ethics of the Algorithm.” Let us begin by considering what the question is to which these visualizations may be an answer. For the Digital Monument to the Jewish Community in the Netherlands the question might be: How could one create a visual representation of the entire Dutch Jewish community destroyed by the Nazis? This is a problem of scale, scope, and complexity, and the interface provides one answer: An interactive bitmap of hundreds of thousands of pixels connected to a database documenting every person. Without the visual interface, the database is still searchable by way of the tables containing structured data (name, place of birth, date of birth, date of death, family members, and so forth); however, the totality cannot be seen without an interface that visualizes the scope and scale of the database. In fact, given the infinitely extensible nature of the digital, the physical limitations of built memorials (construction materials, available land, and the legibility of inscriptions, among other things) are no longer an issue. One need only recall that one of the reasons the first winning proposal for the Berlin Holocaust Memorial by Christine Jackob-Marks was scrapped in 1995 was because there simply was not enough physical space to legibly inscribe the names of some 4.5 million identifiable victims.6 With the Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive, we are, of course, speaking about survivors, but the question of scale is equally daunting: With over 100,000 hours of survivor testimony, it would take a viewer 24 years to watch every testimony, assuming one watched 12 hours a day, 365 days of the year (and could understand 39 different languages). The scope of the archive—that is, its sheer scale measured in terms of hours of testimony—is not readily comprehensible to the human facilities of listening. Thus, the database exists to organize, categorize, and search the content of the testimony based on a series of parameters. The visualizations above attempt to extrapolate the “whole” of the data in the data180

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base (which is—and this is critically important—a very different thing than the “whole” of the event called “the Holocaust”). But such problems of scale and scope are not new or unique to these digital archives. In fact, many of the same problems of representation and human comprehension came to the foreground in attempts to create a mode of history writing and visual representation to capture “modernist events” of the twentieth century, which, according to Hayden White, seemed to be different from events that historians from Herodotus to Arthur Schlesinger typically wrote about.7 Against the backdrop of the new experiences of mass death in World War I, Walter Benjamin wrote his famous essay on Nikolai Leskov, “The Storyteller,” about the social and historical conditions of impossibility of certain modes of representation. He argues that we have lost “the ability to exchange experiences” or tell stories precisely because the scale, scope, and depth of modernist events does not reflect or cannot be captured by the structures of storytelling in a realistic mode of narration.8 The experiences of the war event and mass death could no longer be observed, described, and communicated using the structures and meaning-making strategies reserved for historical realism, which was part and parcel of the tradition of storytelling with clear agents, a coherent plot, and narrative strategies characterized by the unities of time, place, and action that gave rise to the logic of a story. In other words, in modernism, we see a breakdown of the homology between real events (Geschichte) and the narrative strategies (Historie) used to represent, capture, communicate, and render these events meaningful. With the Holocaust and other catastrophic modernist events, we are faced with several challenges for historical representation: The first concerns the scale, scope, and complexity of the events themselves; the second concerns the lack of homology between the reality of “what happened” and the modalities of representation, whether through narrative, visual, or computational techniques; and the third is the problem of limited human faculties to observe, comprehend, read, listen to, and finally adjudicate the vastness of the different accounts of the events in question. This, I would suggest, is the “data sublime” that both the Digital Monument to the Jewish Community in the Netherlands and the Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive are confronting through computational modes of representation. And yet, as I show here, the data sublime of the 100,000 hours of testimony provided by more than 50,000 survivors arranged in some 6 million tables of keywords in the database is structured 181

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by an information management system that is remarkably literalist: It accounts for the reality of “what happened” without attending to the heterogeneity of testimony as a representational form about a modernist event. Even as the Shoah Foundation’s database assures factuality and facilitates access and preservation, it has the side effect of flattening differences between the testimonies and rendering listening one-directional. As I argue here, computation—as a genre of historical representation that includes data, databases, algorithmic processing, and information visualization—can be used against itself, so to speak, to not only deconstruct assumptions of objectivity and mathematical certainty but also give rise to a renewed attention to the ethical. As such, far from simply replicating the structures of automation and information processing used in the planning and execution of the Holocaust, I argue that computation also contains the possibility of an ethics of the algorithm. We need to begin with the specific genre of Holocaust video testimony because it is here that we can appreciate the conventional ethical imperatives structuring the creation, encounter with, and dissemination of survivor testimony. Much has been written on the history, significance, and media specificity of audiovisual Holocaust testimony.9 As such, I can give only the briefest overview of that history here, focusing primarily on how the work of recording, archiving, and dissemination of Holocaust video testimony has been defined through a Jewish ethics of individualized listening and personal obligation. One of the earliest efforts to videotape Holocaust survivors began in 1979, when Dori Laub and Laurel Vlock created the Yale Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies. It was later named the Fortunoff Archive, and today has more than 4,400 testimonies and consists of some 10,000 hours of video. But oral history–recording projects of survivors and other documentary efforts to capture eyewitness testimony began in the immediate aftermath of the war, of which one of the earliest and most extensive was David Boder’s wire-recorded audio narratives in displaced persons camps in 1946.10 Many of the early testimonies in Yad Vashem’s collection were recorded before it was established in 1953, and, today, Yad Vashem has an archive of 36,000 testimonies, of which 11,000 are video testimonies (the remainder being oral and written testimonies). Started in 1994 and funded by the Spielberg Foundation, the Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive, with more than 53,000 video testimonies and over 100,000 hours of testimony, is the largest such archive in the world. 182

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It is not coincidental, as Annette Wieviorka points out, that the impulse to record audiovisual testimonies in the late 1970s and early 1980s was spurred by televisual realities, ones that go back to the immediacy of first-person accounts by survivors at the Eichmann trial and go forward to the public impact of the television miniseries Holocaust in 1979, and, later, the global success of Schindler’s List in the early 1990s.11 But the visual power of televisual and cinematic modes of presenting and representing history is, as we know, not only alluring and captivating but also demands an interrogation of the reality effect produced by such ways of seeing and experiencing. Geoffrey Hartman, one of the founders and project directors of the Yale archive, has written extensively on the ethical dimensions of video testimony and distills the essential meaning of video testimony to be about the “duty to listen and to restore a dialogue.”12 For Hartman, video testimony offers what he calls an “optic” for viewers to immediately experience their nonexperience of the Holocaust: That is to say, it mediates the geographic, temporal, experiential, and psychological remove that most of us have with the events of the Holocaust. This happens first through the relationship between the interviewers and the survivors and then through the generations of viewers who contribute to the creation of an “affective community” of witnesses to the witnesses.13 Martin Buber’s “Ich-Du” relationship provides a widely adopted expression of the ethical performance of testimony, in which the listener and the survivor, in Laub’s words, enter into a “contract” through listening, bearing witness, and being heard.14 Every survivor, writes Laub, has a need to be heard, to tell his or her story to a listener who is actively present for the other, listening to both silence and speech, trauma and survivorship.15 “The unlistened-to story,” as in Primo Levi’s recurring nightmare in Survival in Auschwitz, is a trauma akin to reexperiencing the event itself.16 In essence, video testimony—insofar as it instantiates a relationship of intersubjective relationality through the Ich-Du pact between the survivor and the listener—becomes a practice of ethics as a relation of obligation and responsibility to the other. Bearing witness, then, is as much a testimony of the self as it is a testimony for the other, and Hartman will explicitly situate it within a framework derived from Emmanuel Levinas. For Hartman, testimony implies a “covenant” between the self and the other, one that is in the face of an “infinite demand.” “Ethical testimony” is, for him, about being present: “Here I am”—I am ready to listen, I am attentive, I am all ears, I am standing open, ready to be summoning to 183

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this infinite demand, to this injunction to “hear” (the central prayer of Judaism, Shema Israel).17 While there is nothing inherently or exclusively “Jewish” about the ethics of testimony, the philosophy of Levinas, perhaps more than any other, has informed much postwar thinking about ethics as obligation and responsibility to the other. In survivor testimony, it is the physical face of the other—the traumatized, wounded face of the survivor—which calls forth in its alterity and infinity. The face of the survivor is a face of difference and rupture, but one that is brought into a relationship of proximity, vulnerability, and closeness with the listener’s own face. For Levinas, ethics—defined as the relation to the other—is “the first philosophy,” prior to any ontological structure, origin, or attempt to ground being. It is not coincidental that Hartman will use the term “optics” to highlight the media specificity of video testimony, since Levinas will use the same term, “optics,” to define ethics as a relation of seeing and being for the other.18 Indeed, Levinas’s greatest works, Totality and Infinity and Otherwise than Being, posit a philosophy of ethics as a relationship to the other, such that the other is never reduced to the same, which he considers to be the violently universalizing or totalizing impulse of ontology. Ontology is “a philosophy of power,” violence, and injustice because it subordinates and even negates the relationship of the subject to the other.19 Ethics is a relationship of vulnerability marked by responsibility to and difference from the other, perhaps most notably in the fragile relationship between survivor and listener. But what place, if any, does Levinas have in the realm of the computational, where relationships are characterized by data placed within tables and fields in a database to be queried, displayed, and visualized? And, simultaneously, we may ask what place, if any, does the computational have in the realm of listening to survivor testimonies? What would it mean for a computer to “watch,” “hear,” and “listen to” testimonies? What might be seen or heard beyond the faculties of human cognition and the optics of human perception? These are the questions to which we now turn as we delve into the Visual History Archive (VHA). While the media specificity of the first generation of Holocaust testimony has been discussed at great length—ranging from Boder’s wire recordings to cassette tape and audiovisual documentation—there is virtually no literature on the digitization of the Holocaust archive and its transformation into an information management system. With regard to the Shoah 184

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Figure 8.6.

Screenshot of testimony of Daniel Geslewitz.

Foundation VHA, this is particularly noteworthy because the very condition of possibility for watching any testimony is the information architecture standing behind the testimonies themselves. This information architecture consists of several components: First, there is the interface itself, which runs in a web browser, allowing a user to type in keywords, names, and other search terms in order to listen to segments of testimony (Figure 8.6); behind that is a relational and structured query language (SQL) database in which content is organized into tables, records, and fields (Figure 8.7); all of this data was input after the videos themselves were indexed with keywords and other associated information was manually entered (such as the information on the preinterview questionnaires that each survivor had to fill out before the interview took place). But before this indexing could happen, standards and protocols—which were derived from the National Information Standards Organization’s Z39.19 standard for the construction, format, and management of monolingual controlled vocabularies—provided the guidelines for what and how to index the content of the videos.20 The standard governed the creation of a unique thesaurus to achieve consistency in the description of the content through a controlled vocabulary and thereby facilitate its 185

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Figure 8.7. Screenshot of database with data relating to the testimony of Daniel Geslewitz.

search and retrieval. A special piece of software called a video indexing application or a cataloging facility was developed to do this.21 Beyond this, we have the hardware, such as the archive servers and storage servers, where the videos are stored in digital formats for streaming in a video player. 186

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As such, for every survivor, we have two texts: first, the video testimony itself and, second, the data in the database about the testimony. With regard to the latter, every survivor is assigned a testimony ID, and his or her testimony is broken into segments, which are generally one minute in length. Each segment is assigned a segment ID that is correlated 187

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with a keyword ID, which, in turn, corresponds further to a type label in the index hierarchy. The effect is to turn the narrative into data amenable to computational processing. Significantly, this process is exactly the opposite of what historians usually do, namely, to create narratives from data by emploting source material, evidence, and established facts into a narrative. The global architecture of the Shoah Foundation’s Digital Library System was developed by Samuel Gustman, the chief technology officer, and consists of the following elements: data capture (starting with the transfer of the videotape to digital format and cataloging) to the storage of data (both the videos themselves and the indexing server that knows where all the catalog metadata is) and, finally, the interface to play, search for, and distribute data and its related content. In what follows, I focus on that realm of information architecture between the user interface and the server storage—in other words, the metadata, the data structures, and the database. It is precisely here that we see a fundamental dissociation of the presentation of the content (that is, the testimonies and the interface to watch them) from the information architecture, database, and metadata scaffolding that lies behind the content. Such a dissociation is not unique to the VHA but bespeaks a common practice in digital library systems and computation more generally, stretching back to Claude Shannon’s theory of information as content neutral.22 In the words of media theorist Alan Liu applying the principles of Friedrich Kittler, what we are witnessing is emblematic of “the discourse network 2000”:23 a mode of organizing information characterized by the “separation of content from material instantiation . . . [such that] the content management at the source and consumption management at the terminus [are] doubleblind to each other.”24 In essence, the content of the testimonies knows nothing of the information architecture, and the information architecture knows nothing of the testimonies. In this sense, the database aims to be an empty, neutral bucket to put content in, and the goal of the information system is to transmit this content as noiselessly as possible to a receiver or listener. Between 1996 and 2002, ten separate patents were filed by inventor Samuel Gustman and the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, the assignee, for the VHA information architecture. The inventions include the following: a Method and Apparatus for Cataloguing Multimedia Data; several patents for a Method and Apparatus for Management of Multimedia Assets; a Digital Library System; and, finally, a 188

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Method and Apparatus for Cataloguing Multimedia Data. Some of the patents—such as the “Digital Library System” and “Methods and Apparatus for Management of Multimedia Assets”—have been referenced by more than seventy other patents from companies such as Xerox (for developing a browser-based image storage and processing system) and Microsoft (for semiautomatic annotation of multimedia objects). In 2011, the Shoah Foundation granted an exclusive right to all ten of its patents to a company called Preservation Technologies, a company with a specialty in audiovisual preservation, media transfer, digital archiving, and media streaming.25 The first patent, “A Method and Apparatus for Cataloguing Multimedia Data,” was filed in 1996 and established the method for indexing the testimonies and creating a search and retrieval system for their playback. I quote the summary of the invention: “The invention catalogues data such as multimedia data. A catalogue is a collection of one or more catalogue elements. An index is used to access a catalogue. An element of a catalogue has one or more attributes. An attribute provides information that can be used to search for, answer questions about, and navigate through a catalogue. . . . Attribute elements and attributes are used to build an index that can be used to facilitate catalogue access.”26 This summary can be elucidated using a diagram from the patent itself (Figure 8.8): At the top are video segments, generally chunked into oneminute units; they contain narrative elements (sentences and phases) said by the survivor; these phrases have a number of different attributes— they mention particular people (and the particular information about the person is stored in the database); they contain particular keywords (which may already exist in the thesaurus, or may need to be added, hence, “proposed keywords”); and, most important, the keywords have a certain hierarchy in that they can be contained in more general “types.” Altogether, the keywords and types form a catalog consisting of an index of attributes connected to phrases uttered during segments of video. This is the metadata scaffolding or “metatext” that resides behind the videos themselves. In the words of Johanna Drucker on the significance of such metadata structures, “arguably, few other textual forms will have greater impact on the way we read, receive, search, access, use, and engage with the primary materials of humanities studies than the metadata structures that organize and present that knowledge in digital form.”27 This is certainly true of the VHA, whose knowledge model, as we will see, is fundamentally aimed at the transformation and disambiguation of narrative 189

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Figure 8.8. Drawing from Samuel Gustman, “Method and Apparatus for Cataloguing Multimedia Data,” U.S. Patent 5,832,495 (November 3, 1998).

into data that makes it amenable to computational processing and structured logic. It is a process that can be called “defiguration”—precisely because it evacuates all traces of the figurative in its literalism. Within the index, there are three different kinds of relationships that can exist between any two (or more) indexing elements, and these relationships form the “pillar” of the index, according to Gustman: inheritance, whole/part, and associative relationships.28 Inheritance relationships are characterized by “is a” (for example, in the patent, he writes a “Ford Bronco” is a “car,” where the specific keyword is “Ford Bronco” and the type is a 190

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“car”).29 The second relationship is whole/part (for example, cars and tires); and the third relationship is associative (such as “car” and “driver”— where neither “is” the other and they are not in a whole/part relationship). As I mentioned earlier, these principles derive from the application of a specific standard (Z39.19) to consistently and unambiguously describe “content objects” (the survivor testimonies) in order to produce a monolingual controlled vocabulary (the thesaurus) to facilitate their search and retrieval.30 The goal of the standard, as explained in its documentation, is to provide “guidelines for the selection, formulation, organization, and display of terms that together make up a controlled vocabulary” for the purposes of “knowledge management” and “knowledge organization.”31 The indexing terms are generally nouns and form subject headings, underneath of which one finds keywords in various relationships (inheritance or hierarchical, whole/part, and associative). It is important to underscore that none of the testimonies in the Shoah Foundation VHA was automatically tagged with keywords; instead, every component of the cataloging system—from the development of the indexing terms and the thesaurus to the database itself—was created by the staff working at the foundation who listened to all the testimonies and indexed them according to the guidelines developed by the foundation. This is because there are currently no transcripts of the Holocaust testimonies. In fact, the keyword indexing system—which consists of a thesaurus term (or terms) linked to a particular segment of video—is the only way to search the content of the testimonies. On average, testimonies have about 120 indexed terms associated with one-minute segments (although many have more and some less), yielding about 6.2 million tables of data. To develop the metadata, the Shoah Foundation employed about fifty indexers who worked for several years watching each and every video using a specially developed application (also patented) that allowed the human indexer to assign a keyword to a video segment. Keywords were assigned to the narrative content of the video from the thesaurus and, at the same time, new keywords could be proposed to describe experiences not already in the thesaurus.32 For the first 5,000 testimonies, the segments were variable in length and could be determined by the indexer; however, this was quickly replaced by another system (used for the remaining 46,000 plus testimonies), in which the Video Indexing Application would automatically “chunk up” the testimony into discrete, one-minute segments and prompt the indexer to assign a keyword. The 191

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“chunking” of the video was automated, but the assignment of the keyword was determined by a human listener. Not every minute segment, however, has a keyword, something that generally indicates the continuation of the previous keyword but, according to the Shoah Foundation staff, may also mean “the lack of indexable content.”33 Lack of indexable content can mean many things, ranging from an interviewer asking a question to a survivor repeating him or herself, a pause in the conversation to reflect or search for the right words, an emotional moment, noise, silence, or even content that the indexer may not want to draw attention to (such as racist sentiments against Hispanics, for example, in one testimony). In other words, indexable content is manifest content, in a declarative or imperative mode—in general, what is literally and objectively said. Altogether, the indexing system produces a kind of “normative story” (purged of certain contingencies and unwanted elements) in which—on the level of the data in the database—many of the testimonies, but certainly not all, become quite like each other.34 The result is a massive data ontology that has expelled the latent content, the performative, the figural, the subjunctive, the tone of questioning and doubt, the expressiveness of the face, and the very acts of telling (and failing to tell) that mark the contingency of all communication. And while its aim is objectivity, it is important to underscore that a human listener decided what to index and what not to index; a human listener decided what indexing term to use and what indexing term not to use; and a human listener decided if a given narrative segment could be described by a keyword or not. This is a fundamentally interpretative process. The result is the removal of the potentialities of the narrative in the application of the data ontology. In the end, it has the effect of turning the narrative into data. In this regard, it is exactly the opposite of the problem that Berel Lang bemoaned about the use of figurative language and aestheticization “adding to” the factual reality of the events;35 here, we are speaking about “subtracting from” or “abstracting of” the narrative as told by the survivors. In other words, what goes missing in the “pursued objectivity” of the database is narrativity itself36—from the dialogical emplotment of the events in sentences, phrases, and words in response to the interviewer’s questions; to the tone, rhythm, and cadence of the voice; to the physical gestures, emotive qualities, and even the face itself. Of course, this is because databases are not narratives or people telling stories; instead, they are formed from data (such as keywords) arranged in relational tables that can be queried, sorted, and viewed in relation to 192

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tables of other data. The relationships are foremost paradigmatic or associative relations, to use Ferdinand de Saussure’s terms, since they involve rules that govern the selection or substitutability of terms, rather than the syntagmatic, or combinatory elements, that give rise to narrative.37 Database queries are, by definition, algorithms to select data according to a set of parameters. Whenever I enter a search string in the Shoah Foundation interface, I am performing an SQL query based on parameters that can be searched. “Indeterminate data,” such as “nonindexable content,” must be given either a null value or not represented at all. How would emotion, for example, need to be represented to allow database queries? While certain feelings such as helplessness, fear, abandonment, and attitudes are tagged in the database, it would be challenging to mark up emotion into a set of tables and parse it according to inheritance structures (sadness, happiness, fear, and so forth, all of which are different kinds of emotions), associative relationships (such as happiness linked to liberation, or tears to sadness and loss), and quantifiable degrees of intensity and expressiveness: (1) weeping gently, (2) crying, (3) sobbing, (4) bawling, and (5) inconsolable. While we might quickly unpack the futility (not to mention the insensitivity) of such a pursuit, there are precedents for quantified approaches to cataloging trauma, including a method developed by David Boder following his analyses of the interviews he conducted with survivors in displaced persons camps.38 Needless to say, databases can only accommodate unambiguous enumeration, clear attributes, and definitive data values; everything else is not in the database. The point here is not to build a bigger, better, more totalizing database, but that database as a genre always reaches its limits precisely at the limits of the data collected (or extracted, or indexed, or variously marked up) and the relationships that govern these data. We need narrative to interpret, understand, and make sense of data. So that leaves us with a critical question: What do we need databases for? With regard to the Shoah Foundation VHA, the database exists to provide meaningful access to the testimonies on a scale that is both tailored and comprehensible to a human viewer whose faculties of attention and knowledge (most likely) preclude twenty-four years of viewing and listening. In other words, a database and, hence, the very genre of computational representation exists, first of all, to manage scale. Second, as I show in the following, a relational database, by definition, functions by virtue of the relations or cross-connections between the data in the 193

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database. As such, the database can gave rise to infinitely many search queries and thereby allow innumerable combinations that identify larger thematic issues, reveal patterns and structures, and create new associations between experiences that may not otherwise be considered together. And, finally, computational analysis can provide insights and ethical perspectives that human listening cannot, precisely by the way in which it allows a kind of “distant listening” based on the whole of the archive rather than a selection of representative or even canonical testimonies. The visualization (Figure 8.9) and the detail (Figure 8.10) are examples of network relations based on just one hundred testimonies, in which names are connected to keywords mentioned in the testimonies. The large circles (nodes) are survivors and all the lines (edges) that extend out from them are keywords used not only in their testimony but also in the testimony of other survivors. The thicker the line, the higher the frequency of use; the larger the circle, the more keywords are associated with the person. Keywords at the center are more common (and this also moves the person to the center); keywords describing less common experiences gravitate toward the periphery. In this particular example, one survivor, Arie Leopold Haas, appears on the periphery with comparatively fewer lines connecting the keywords in his testimony to those of other survivors. Perhaps this is because the experiences he describes in his testimony— being an Italian Jew who was hidden, who converted to Christianity, and who attended church—are ones that are less typical, at least when compared to the experiences of others in the archive. In fact, when querying the full database, we find that only 366 testimonies of Jewish survivors (out of more than 49,000) are tagged with the keyword “church attendance.” The graphic was generated by a data visualization program called Gephi, which algorithmically determines “communities” based on topics mentioned. From the one hundred testimonies, it detected sixteen different communities. In some cases, these “communities” appear to be based on nationality (Russian and Ukrainian), but in other cases, they seem to be based on places mentioned in the testimony or shared experiences. Visualizations like these might provide new starting points for delving into the more than 6 million records in the database and seeing connections that a human eye could not possibly detect or track. In this particular case, we might be able to identify “outlier” experiences or noncanonical stories that help us reassess certain assumptions or provide a more differentiated set of perspectives. 194

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Ozarichi (Gomel' Soviet resistance groups German police and security forces

resistance group children photographs (stills) 1959 military decorations (stills) injuries injuries (stills) Jewish religious objects (stills) revenge acts Ozarichi (Gomel' Belarusian resistance fighters resistance group leaders Belarusian police and security forces Gomel' (Belorussia Jewish resistance fighters children's homes resistance group internal conduct grandmothers resistance group intelligence activities resistance group food acquisition resistance group medical care collaboration partisan family camps Rudnia (Belorussia Bobruisk (Belorussia mass grave opening mine warfare Baranowicze (Poland) Dnepropetrovsk (Dnepropetrovsk photographs (stills) 1960s German invasion of the Soviet Union (June 22 (u)Polonka (Vinnitsa ghetto blood extraction photographs (stills) 1953 police and security forces photographs (stills) 1957 future message Arkadiy Duvidzon Marksovo (Ukraine ghetto social relations Romanian soldiers Balta (Moldavian ASSR Bratslav (Vinnitsa Kotovsk (Moldavian ASSR funerals ghetto Jewish education deportation from Bratslav (Ukraine Transnistria rabbis Russian Far East (Russia USSR 1929 (December 27) - 1939 (August 31) postwar survivor reunions (stills) USSR 1941 Chechel'nik (Vinnitsa photographs (stills) 1979 camp covert movement communist regime everyday life games Gvozdovka (Moldavian ASSR Jewish ghetto inhabitants Pervomaisk (Odessa Nikolaev (Nikolaev Zabuzh'e (Vinnitsa decapitations USSR 1922 (December 30) - 1939 (August 31) Ukrainian police and security forces ghetto clothing Soviet propaganda Allied armed forces USSR 1944 (January) - 1945 (May 7) military decorations deportation from Miastkovka (Ukraine Abram Duvidzon Stalino (Stalino Arab-Israeli War (1967) Soviet armed forces military surrender Kodyma (Moldavian ASSR begging lice photographs (stills) 1970s weapons provision Bratslav (Vinnitsa hiding people Pechora (Vinnitsa USSR 1945 (January 1 - May 7) camp escape attempts daughters forced march corpses Russian units Volksdeutsche ghetto suicides Tul'chin (Vinnitsa Moscow (Moscow deportation to Trikhaty (USSR : Concentration Camp) Russia 1991 (December 26) - 2000 (January 1) Alexander Annapolski Aleksandr Oirekh Jewish population roundups Aleksandr Levin mothers' occupations ghetto Appell Austrian soldiers United States 1993 (January 1) - 2000 (December 31) camp funerals Miastkovka (Vinnitsa Belorussia (USSR : Soviet Socialist Republic) Romanian ghetto inhabitants deportation from Kodyma (Moldavian ASSR Appell ghetto inhabitant physical condition USSR 1964 (October 15) -1985 (March 10) ghetto resistance STALAG 304 (Zeithain USSR 1941 (June 22) - 1945transfer (May 7)to Miastkovka (Ukraine United States 1981 (January 1) - 1992 (December 31) resistance group clothing Kodyma (Moldavian ASSR camp deaths synagogue attendance mass execution survival Arkadi Voskoboinick Minskprofessional (Belorussia training executions loved ones' deaths photographs (stills) 1994 Romanian prisoners hunger ghettoization procedures camp environmental conditions migration from Russia Russian police and security forces Kiev (Kiev USSR 1945 (May 7) - 1991 (December 24) Soviet mass invasion of Manchuria deportation from Tul'chin (Ukraine ghetto sexual assaults military retreat executions transfer food acquisition Wiener Neustadt (Austria) Lipetskoe (Vinnitsa ghetto-related psychological reactions ghetto insignia deportation to Pechora (Vinnitsa land combat kolkhoz aborted killings fathers' occupations Trikhaty (Ukraine USSR 1942 photographs (stills) 1923 ghetto medical care USSR 1953 (March 6) - 1964 (October 14) education transferoffrom Trikhaty (USSR : Concentration Camp) photographs (stills) 1972 Romanian invasion the Soviet Union (June 23 lost property recovery camp betrayals escape decisions ghetto liberation anti-aid giver attacks Miastkovka (Vinnitsa ghetto corpse disposal Odessa (Odessa war crimes trial witnesses Anna Shumskaya Iosif Dolmatsky Anna Voskoboinick ghetto humiliation Ukraine 1991 (December 26) - 2000 (January 1) postwar family photographs (stills) ghetto killings migration decisions photographs (stills) 1992 Zhmerinka (Vinnitsa Michael Litvak Arline Kuznetz family histories Peschianka (Vinnitsa USSR 1944 education interruption Zhmerinka (Vinnitsa deportation from Krutye (Odessa USSR 1945 (May 7) - 1953 (March 5) German occupation conditions postwar survivor reunions Chechel'nik (Vinnitsa Krutye (Odessa USSR 1985 (March 11) - 1991 (December 24) ghetto living conditions photographs (stills) 1956 Vinnitsa (Ukraine weddings (stills) Pomoshnaia (Kirovograd photographs (stills) 1975 civil maintenance forced labor military discharge Jewish persecution bystander responses Zaleszczyki (Poland) deportation to Rybnitsa (Moldavian ASSR ghetto food deportation from Haigerloch (Germany) American Red Cross documents and artifacts (stills) 1938 family life Tluste (Poland : Ghetto) ghetto procedures Abraham Barath Romanian police and security forces (u)Travneh (Poland : Concentration Camp) Tluste (Tarnopol Bad Gastein (Austria : DP Camp) Riga (Latvia : Ghetto) Soviet police and security forces agricultural forced labor Aleksandr Levyant deportation to Jungfernhof (Latvia : Concentration Camp) voluntary military enlistment Romania 1945 (January 1 - May 7) camp mass executions Rybnitsa (Moldavian ASSR Nuremberg Laws (September 15 gravesites and gravemarkers (stills) interviewees' children Cernauti (Romania) photographs (stills) 1950 photographs (stills) 1941 Rzanwka (Tarnopol transfer from Stutthof (Danzig (FC) : Concentration Camp) photographs (stills) 1928 resistance group social relations flight attempts

postwar political activities

USSR 1943 photographs (stills) 1990s

USSR 1939 (September 1) - 1941 (June 21) Abram Volfson Temnikov (Mordovian ASSR

Tashkent (Uzbekistan Rybnitsa (Moldavian ASSR

Heereskraftfahrzeugpark deportation suicides

Liberec (Czechoslovakia) Dondangen (Latvia : Concentration Camp)(generic) prayers

wartime documents and artifacts (stills)

Alice Wolf tutors

Latvia 1941 (June 22) - 1944 (October 12) Elbing (Germany : Concentration Camp) documents and artifacts (stills) 1924

identity concealment preparations China 1941

Poland 1926 (May 12) - 1935 (May 12) Slonim (Poland)

Riga-Kaiserwald (Latvia : Concentration Camp) Jungfernhof (Latvia : Concentration Camp) ghetto time awareness Haigerloch (Germany)

Japanese soldiers

Netherlands 1939 (September 1) - 1940 (May 9)

sexual assaults resistance group antisemitism hiding-related physical condition

flight to the United States Shabbat Lubcz (Poland) Wlodzimierz (Poland : Ghetto) pogroms Jewish religious holidays Jewish persecution awareness Garmisch-Partenkirchen (Germany) loved ones' final contacts Wlodzimierz (Poland) ghetto deaths flight from Poland Bucharest (Romania)

humor

photographs (stills) 1951

ghetto shoes

Polish resistance fighters

Halifax (Nova Scotia photographs (stills) 1965 Ann Kazimirski killings birth certificates (stills) Passover judicial proceedings deportation from Dukla (Poland) camp uniforms deportation from Cracow (Poland) ghetto housing conditions Frysztak (Poland) hiding-related food Danzig (FC) 1939 (September 1) - 1945 (May 7) publications (stills) Allgemeine Elektrizitts-Gesellschaft (AEG) Tschenstochau-Warta (Poland : Concentration Camp) United States 1933 (March 14) - 1939 (August 31) Abraham Horowitz photographs (stills) 1934 deportation to Cracow (Poland) Korczyna (Lww forced march liberation Czechoslovak history flight to Poland Dukla (Poland) deportation to Krakau-Plaszow (Poland : Concentration Camp) attitudes toward Venezuela and/or Venezuelans Venezuela 1945 (May 8) - 2000 (January 1)

interviewee occupations

Yugoslavia 1940 Yugoslavia 1944 (October 20) - 1945 (May 7) Yugoslavia 1941 (April 6) - 1943 (September 7) Austria 1918 (November 11) - 1932 (May 19) Yugoslavia 1918 (November 11) - 1939 (August 31) rescue Nonantola (Italy)

Split (Yugoslavia)

Jewish educational-exclusions documents and artifacts (stills) 1982

China 1945 Abraham Slucki attitudes toward Italy and/or Italians Yugoslavia 1944 China 1941 (December 8) - 1945 (September 1) Budzyn (Poland : Concentration Camp) Zagreb (Yugoslavia) Upper Austria (Austria : State) Switzerland 1939 (September 1) - 1945 (May 7) Bund Sugihara Japan 1941 Lida (Poland) Poland 1939 (September 1) - 1945 (May 7) post-liberation documents and artifacts (stills) environmental conditions Yugoslav armed forces hiding in forests Austria 1944 photographs (stills) 1985 Poland 1939 (September 1) - 1941 (June 21) covert activities photographs (stills) 1961 Poland 1918 (November 11) - 1939 (August 31) Shanghai (China) Austrian refugees Poland 1941 (June 21) - 1944 (July 21) (u)Robert Taylor (Ship) Anna Lincoln Poland 1940 education-related documents (stills) German ghetto guards Marine Jumper (Ship) ghetto begging French resistance fighters Walter C. Tbbens (firm) interviewee original works female prisoners Rothschild Hospital (Austria : DP Camp) musical recitals Druskieniki (Poland) photographs (stills) 1955 Yugoslavia 1941 dissolutions attitudes toward the United States and/or Americans post-liberation persecution site visits Sugihara visas Flossenbrg (Germany :marital Concentration Camp) transfer to Tschenstochau-Warta (Poland : Concentration Camp) foster families Europe 1943 (February 3) - 1945 (May 7) documents and artifacts (stills) 1945 black market activities Poland 1941 Koniecpol (Poland)(generic) Pruszkw (Warsaw Italy 1933 (January 30) - 1939 (August 31) photographs (stills) 1950s deportation-related aid giving vocational training ghetto smuggling Bialystok (Poland) Italy 1943 camp corpse disposal ghetto children Poland 1935 (May 13) - 1939 (August 31) (May 8) - 2000 (January 1) Ferramonti-Tarsia (Italy : Internment Camp) synagogue attacks Kobe (Japan) JanowskiePoland Forest1945 (Poland) migration to Japan Italy 1940 (June 10) - 1943 (September 7) camp covert activities Rzeszw (Poland) Yugoslav resistance fighters Belgrade (Yugoslavia) ghetto selections hiding-related living conditions Soviet invasion of Poland (September 17 Vilna (Poland) documents and artifacts (stills) 1940 Humenn (Czechoslovakia) agricultural training organizations (stills) Krasnik (Poland) deportation awareness Nowogrdek (Poland : Voivodship) Warsaw (Poland : Ghetto) Judenrte Yugoslavia 1941 (April 6) - 1944 (October 19) cigarette importance funerals and burials (stills) San Francisco (California Poland 1942 toward Israel and/or Israelis attitudes Alice Hemar German annexation of Sudetenland (October 1 Trieste (Italy) St. Georgen (Austria : Concentration Camp) United States 1939 (September 1) - 1941 (December 7) Lww (Poland) China 1945 (September 2) - 1949 (September 30) Warsaw (Poland) passports Haganah Roman Catholic clergy and monastics civilian awards migration from Japan spiritual experiences ghetto service work friendships flight decisions Dubrovnik (Yugoslavia) Armando Moreno escape preparations (Stanislaww Poland 1939 (September 1 - DecemberStanislaww 31) ghetto child deaths ghetto hunger migration preparations property seizure Alex Lauterbach valuable item concealment assistance Japan 1939 (September 1) - 1941 (December 7) false documents (stills) Stropkov (Czechoslovakia) personal property sales intelligence activities German invasion of Poland (September 1 Organization for Rehabilitation through Trainingarts ghetto Judenrte Skierniewice (Poland) performing citizenship United States armed forces Israeli armed forces escape assistance refugee camp working life denazification Brnnlitz (Czechoslovakia : Concentrationmigration Camp) from Ukraine hospitals Vladivostok (Primor'e Italian police and security forces Stuttgart (Germany) Tyniec (Cracow Gestapo personnel political activities (stills) Hitler Pilsudski smuggling Athlit (British Mandate Palestine : Internment Camp) Skierniewice : Ghetto) ghetto (Poland adaptation methods quarry forced labor civilian expulsions Gross Masselwitz (Germany : Concentration Camp) Goeth transfer to Brnnlitz (Czechoslovakia : Concentration Camp) camp time awareness Italy 1945 (January 1 - May 7) Cracow (Poland : Voivodship) Yugoslavia Schindler mass graves photographs 1946 dysentery Weinsberg (Germany : DP Camp) Krynica(stills) (Poland)(generic) deportation escapes Bedzin (Poland : Ghetto) sanitary conditions ghetto workshops Italy 1943 (September 8) 1945 (May 7) photographs (stills) 1912 social relations Bedzin (Poland) ghetto covert movement Karwin (Czechoslovakia : Concentration Camp) ghetto forced labor Rosen (Germany camp-related psychological reactions transfer from Gross Rosen (Germany : Concentration Camp) interviewee memory transfer to Gross : Concentration Camp) transfer from Gross Masselwitz (Germany : Concentration Camp) Anna Fischer Christian religious observances Abraham Froch camp diseases Krakau-Plaszow Camp) human soap rumors (Poland : Concentration Stettin (Germany) Miedzyrzecz (Rwne transfer to Gross Masselwitz (Germany : Concentration Camp) mass murder awareness inter-survivor relations skilled forced labor Plymouth (England deportation from Cracow (Poland : Ghetto) deportation to Peterswaldau (Germany : Concentration Camp) Treuhnder camp food Jewish prisoners Cracow (Poland : Ghetto) humiliation camp latrines Kamionka (Poland : Ghetto)(generic) transfer to Kamionka (Poland : Ghetto)(generic) Cracow (Poland) Alexander Rosner Ukrainian camp guards Czechoslovakia 1945 (January 1 - May 9) Stuttgart (Germany : DP Camp) transfer to Kamionka (Poland : Ghetto) Schindler interviewee photographs (stills) ghetto Munich rumors : Deutsches Museum (Germany : DP Camp) Arie Leopold Haas transfer from Krakau-Plaszow (Poland : Concentration Camp) camp hiding and evasion postwar photographs (stills) Castelmassa (Italy) Belz Hasidism ghetto escapes migration from Poland Spain 1939 (April 1) - 1945 (May 7) photographs (stills) 1945 Gross Rosen (Germany : Concentration Camp) Petah Tikva (Israel) transfer to Waldenburg (Germany : Concentration Camp) Holocaust testimony sharing willingness church attendance photographs (stills) 1982 flight from Czechoslovakia documents and artifacts (stills) 1929 attitudes toward Zionism and/or Zionists United States 1945 (May 8) - 1952 (December 31) New York (USA)(generic) migration to Germany hakhsharot Holocaust-related psychological reactions Anna Rekechinskaja antisemitismAnna Reich enforced residence punishments Poland 1941 (June 21) - 1945 (May 7) British Mandate Palestine 1933 (January 30) - 1939 (May 15) hiding-related decisions childhood antisemitism experiences transfer from Brnnlitz (Czechoslovakia : Concentration Camp) Murafa (Vinnitsa textiles and garment forced labor Romanian refugees migration from the Netherlands prisoner functionaries attitudes toward Poland and/or Poles Himmler Abraham Jachzel Polish civilian laborers Anni Hollander female camp guards Peterswaldau (Germany : Concentration Camp) Murafa (Vinnitsa Germany 1941 Italian resistance fighters Zionist organizations Holocaust education Marine Perch (Ship) official registration Hidden Child Foundation/ADL Germany 1939 (September 1) - 1941 (June 21) Gleiwitz (Germany) hiding discovery Czechoslovakia 1938 camp childbearing criminal prisoners photographs (stills) 1932 creative works photographs (stills) 1929 British Mandate Palestine 1945 (May 8) 1948 (May 13) photographs (stills) 1991 Aliyah Bet World War II history photographs (stills) 1937 Jewish property attacks deportation from Bedzin (Poland : Ghetto) beatings Camp Hood (Texas child placement United States 1939 (September 1) - 1945 (May 7) national identity attitudes toward Holocaust survivors Hashomer Hatzair camp children typhoid fever Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society Palmah France 1939 (September 1) - 1940 (May 9) correspondence marriages Jewish community welfare Italy 1939 (September 1) - 1945 (May 7) kibbutzim ghetto-related aid giving female camp personnel roundup evasion transfer from Bedzin (Poland : Ghetto) ghetto covert communications refugee housing ghetto family interactions teachers camp killings migration assistance Purim Italy 1945 (May 8) - 1947 (December 31) Schindler's List Deggendorf (Germany : DP Camp)(generic) hangings medical forced labor Zakrzwek (Lublin Fair Lawn (New Jersey Jewish prisoner functionaries Waldenburg (Germany : Concentration Camp) Koblenz (Germany) transfer from Klettendorf (Germany : Concentration Camp) camp and prison artifacts (stills) Neustettin (Germany) Barcelona (Spain) transfer from Sosnowitz (Poland : Concentration Camp)(generic) friendsnationalization SS/SD personnel Holocaust indifference/ignorance deportation to Majdanek (Poland : Concentration Camp) transfer to Klettendorf (Germany : Concentration Camp) migration to Spain moshavim Egypt 1939 (September 1) -1945 (May 7) migration to Poland Polish history Philadelphia (Pennsylvania ghetto diseases Stubenlteste Panstwowe Muzeum Auschwitz-Birkenau tefillin photographs (stills) 1939 transfer from Karwin Breslau (Germany) Germany 1918 (November 11) - 1933(Czechoslovakia (January 30) : Concentration Camp) transfer from Pionki (Poland : Concentration Camp) air raid cleanup forced labor Ann Lauterbach transfer Brande New Yorkfrom (New York (Germany : Concentration Camp) migration to British Mandate Palestine transfer to Brande (Germany : Concentration Camp) camp corpses Dachau (Germany : Concentration Camp)(generic) kapos November Pogrom (Nov 9-10 Feldafing (Germany : DP Camp) transfer from Faulbrck (Germany : Concentration Frth (BavariaCamp) ghettoization migration from Spain photographs (stills) 1989 deportation from Miedzyrzec (Poland : Ghetto) deportation from Pruzana (Poland : Ghetto) camp liberation Chrzanw (Poland)(generic) Blechhammer (Germany : Concentration Camp) Nassau (Germany)(generic) transfer from prisons Waldenburg (Lower Silesia transfer to Mauthausen (Austria : Concentration Camp) photographs (stills) 1920s deportation to Pruzana (Poland : Ghetto) Nice (France) resistance Yad Vashem United States 1945 (May 8) - 2002 Gusen (Austria : Concentration Camp)(generic) Zionism deportation from Chrzanw (Poland) Gmunden (Austria) Angeles (California Brande (Germany : Concentration Los Camp) Germany 1942 Grditz (Germany : Concentration Camp) camp brutal treatment occupation deceptions camp guards Germany 1939 Germany 1938 Netherlands 1933 (January 30) - 1939 (August 31) Sonderkommando Uprising (Auschwitz II-Birkenau memorials andtransfer museums to Melk (Austria : Concentration Camp) prison forced labor Poland 1945 (May 8) - 1948 (December 20) Alexander Kuechel Cologne (Germany) Organisation Todt camp-related aid giving transfer to Ebensee (Austria : Concentration Camp) transfer from Melk (Austria : Concentration camp medical Camp)experiments transfer to Auschwitz I (Poland : Concentration Camp) transfer to Grditz (Germany : Concentration Camp) migration from Austria ethno-racial discrimination Greek prisoners Germany 1941 (June 22) - 1945 (May 7) camp31) crematoria (stills) Addie Bernd General LeRoy Eltinge (Ship) physical condition acculturation Germany 1933 (January 31) - 1939 (August transfer from Auschwitz I (Poland : Concentration Camp) transfer to Auschwitz (Poland : Concentration Camp)(generic) photographs (stills) 1940 camp daily services forced labor camp punishments Arnold Levinsky synagogues (stills) transfer to Faulbrck (Germany : Concentration Camp) photographs (stills) 1930s Jewish Brigade Group survival explanations inter-Jewish relations ghetto punishments France 1939 (September 1 - December 31) political opponent arrests Auschwitz I (Poland : Concentration Camp) transfer from Grditz (Germany : Concentration Langenbielau I (Germany : Concentration Camp) Camp) Pruzana (Poland : Ghetto) Ebensee (Austria) deportation to Blechhammer (Germany : Concentration Camp) apprenticeships Christianity conversion Jewish Faulbrck (Germany : Concentration Camp) migration fromschools Italy 1945 (January 1 - Camp) May 7) EbenseeAustria (Austria : Concentration photographs (stills) 1960 deportation from Mtszalka (Hungary : Ghetto) Vallendar (Germany) Hajnwka (Poland) tracing loved ones transfer from Mnchen-Allach (Germany : Concentration Camp) survivor guilt camp populations Austria 1945 (May 8) - 1955 (May 14) Romanian prisoner functionaries gas chambers transfer to Langenbielau I (Germany : Concentration Camp) Feldafing (Germany) Nowa Gra (Poland) attitudes toward Czechoslovakia and/or Czechoslovaks deportation from Hajnwka (Poland) Auschwitz (Poland : Concentration Camp)(generic) photographs (stills) 1969 camp epidemics shootings post-liberation photographs (stills) Miedzyrzec (Lublin Abraham B. Stern France 1940 (May 10) - 1944 (August 25) Israel 1967 (June 6) - 1973 (October 6) New Orleans (Louisiana photographs (stills) 1927 Bene Beraq (Israel) preferential treatment transfer hunger Poland 1943 Malchow (Germany : Concentration Camp) attitudes toward Russia and/or Russians Pionki (Poland : Concentration Camp) armed resistance camp humiliation convents and monasteries (stills) prisoner tattoos Salzburg (Austria : DP Camp) Kolo (Kolo camp food acquisition Armin Mandel Galati (Moldova camp resistance United States prisoners Kielce (Poland) camp infestations forced march killings camp Jewish religious objects Kanada (Auschwitz II-Birkenau) Posen (Poland : Concentration Camp)(generic) Netherlands 1945 (January 1 - May 7) Cahul (Romania) camp corpse cremations migration to Cuba transfer from Auschwitz (Poland : Concentration Camp)(generic) Halberstadt-Zwieberge (Germany : Concentration Camp) Rostov (Russia Cuba 1939 (September 1) - 1945 (May 7) hiding place postwar visits self-preservation acts post-liberation aid giver-aid recipient relations refugee camp marriages Federal Republic of Germany 1949 (May 23) - 2003 (January 1) camp adaptation methods Rostov-on-Don (Rostov family homes (stills) Wohyn (Poland) camp living conditions transfer routes political prisoners transfer from Blechhammer (Germany : Concentration Camp) camp personnel Exodus 1947 (Ship) Sosnowitz (Poland : Concentration Camp)(generic) ghetto hiding and evasion Wels (Austria : DP Camp) documents and artifacts (stills) 1943 camp barter forced labor conditions Geppersdorf (Germany : Concentration Camp) Abraham Rabinovitz Kielce (Poland : Ghetto) Israel 1948 (May 14) - 2003 (December 31) Al Feigen transfer to Halberstadt-Zwieberge (Germany : Concentration Camp) Israel 1948 (May 14) - 1967 (June 5) Melk (Austria : Concentration Camp) Netherlands 1940 (May 10) - 1945 (May 7) Adela Grinbaum transfer to Mnchen-Allach (Germany : Concentration Camp) Mizrachi living conditions camp covert economic activities documents and artifacts (stills) 1988 Abram Stone converts to Christianity Majdanek (Poland : Concentration Camp) documents and artifacts (stills) Dutch prisoners Mnchen-Allach (Germany : Concentration Camp) camp forced labor Sosnowiec (Kielce German soldiers Belgium 1945 (May 8) - 1950 (August 14) German camp personnel Alex Larys Germany 1918 (November 11) - 1939 (August 31) anti-political opponent measures Catholic prisoners Gross Sarne (Germany : Concentration Camp) Katowice (Poland) photographs (stills) 1964 trains Nyregyhza (Hungary) Wolbrom (Poland) convents and monasteries road construction forced labor Tel Aviv-Jaffa (Israel) Hofgeismar (Germany : DP Camp) Klettendorf (Germany : Concentration Camp) forced labor squads (stills) Kolo (Kolo documents and artifacts (stills) 1958 military personnel capture tracing aid givers Soviet occupation zones Miedzyrzec (Lublin German forced labor civilian supervisors camp orchestras Ann Wigoda Hungarian prisoners Soviet prisoners of war malaria compulsory military enlistment Germany 1943 prisoner hair cutting forced labor Langenstein (Saxony camp injuries Canadian soldiers Aaron Bram attitudes toward the United Kingdom and/or the British brothers badges and armbands (stills) camp quarantines prisoner tattoos (stills) documents and artifacts (stills) 1989 plyi (Hungary) camp bribery military service school antisemitism German prisoner of war camps wartime photographs (stills) Zurich (Switzerland) b'nai mitzvah survivor organizations German camp guards Netherlands 1945 (May 8) - 1948 ( August 23) Niemce (Bedzin Belgium 1940 (May 10) - 1944 (September 2) carriages photographs (stills) 1962 illegal border crossings Germany 1945 (May 8) - 1990 (July 1) deportation to Geppersdorf (Germany : Concentration Camp) Belgium 1939 (September 1) - 1940 (May 9) Pardes Hanna-Karkur (Israel) Polish kapos stepsisters military training bombardments child roundups and deportations Dresden (Germany) Brussels (Belgium) flight from Germany photographs (stills) 1967 Polish police and security forces early personal aspirations camp procedures water combat Abe Goldzweig temporary identity concealment documents and artifacts (stills) 1950s Holocaust faith issues German prisoner functionaries construction forced labor migration to Belgium interrogations coerced sexual activities German armed forces Russian soldiers United States soldiers Liegnitz (Germany) ghetto escape attempts Akiva Kohane camp first impressions Ebensee (Austria : DP Camp) Yom Kippur Madrid (Spain) Annalee Roettgen Germany 1940 Vaslui (Romania) Falkenberg (Germany)(generic) wartime family photographs (stills) flight to the Netherlands deserters Italian prisoners Ann Nosel Saint-Cyprien (France : Internment Camp) American occupation zones NSDAP members warnings correspondence from the camps (stills) France 1943 migration discussions identity concealment flight to Switzerland German refugees refugees Zamora (Zamora Lambach (Austria)(generic) Jewish soldiers French Morocco 1939 (September 1) - 1945 (May 7) Slawkw (Poland) Berlin (Prussia class photographs (stills) refugee camps (stills) Youngstown (Ohio Muret (France) Michalovce (Slovakia photographs (stills) 1971 war casualties personal property sorting forced labor British internment camps (generic) Albe (France) Fellbach (Germany) false documents photographs (stills) 1942 Lambach (Austria : DP Camp) prewar documents and artifacts (stills) Marseille (France) criminal prisoner functionaries children's occupations Mtszalka (Hungary : Ghetto) documents and artifacts (stills) 1949 Kalisz (Ldz identity concealment-related psychological reactions Modena (Italy : DP Camp) Reagan Sosnowiec (Poland : Ghetto) Zawiercie (Poland) visas Russia 1900 (January 1) - 1922 (December 29) flight from Belgium Ghent (Belgium) childbearing incarceration releases flight to Belgium youth organizations Ldz (Poland : Ghetto) refugee-local population relations mining forced labor migration to Italy Jdischer Ordnungsdienst French police and security forces betrayals siblings identification papers loved ones' introductions factory forced labor Romania 1941 Josiah Wedgewood (Ship) Belgium 1945 (May 8) - 2000 (January 1) prewar photographs (stills) fine arts flight Knigsberg (East Prussia German kapos documents and artifacts (stills) 1954 France 1939 (September 1) - 1945 (May 7) Briceva (Romania) flight to Cuba protection paper provision Seibersdorf (Poland : Concentration Camp) family businesses (stills) childhood perceptions abortions German invasion of Belgium (May 10 Silesia (Europe : Region) transfer to Gurs (France : Internment Camp) France 1940 (May 10) - 1942 (February 28) flight preparations camp liquidations prisons Charlottengrube (Poland : Concentration Camp) Westerbork (Netherlands : Concentration Camp) Paris (France) Rosh Ha-Shana SA personnel Lyon (France) Tiscornia (Havana hiding preparations flight to France camp Jewish religious texts Soviet occupation conditions attitudes toward bystanders post-liberation family photographs (stills) Annelies Herz documents and artifacts (stills) 1975 Havana (Cuba) Czechoslovakia 1940 France 1945 (January 1 - May 7) Spain 1943 Dunkirk (France) transfer to Auschwitz II-Birkenau (Poland : Death Camp) deportation from Ldz (Poland : Ghetto) Munich (Germany) loved ones' togetherness decisions Russian resistance groups transfer procedures orthodox Judaism Netherlands 1918 (November 11) - 1939 (September 1) Jewish religious observances Belgium 1940 Fisar (Czechoslovakia) transfer from Althammer (Poland : Concentration Camp) France 1941 Melk (Austria) shelter provision France 1942 Adolph Schmid Slovak resistance groups deportation to Stutthof (Danzig (FC) : Concentration Camp) politico-military event awareness documentary evidence of the Holocaust British Mandate Palestine 1939 (May 16) - 1945 (May 7) granddaughters family homes Abraham Grussgott transfer escape attempts Jewish communities Aaron Nussbaum Arnold Krul Anna Kaufman Serpa Pinto (Ship) identity exposure Lithuania 1944 passports (stills) migration from Belgium camp commandants France 1940 Perpignan (France) German invasion of the Netherlands (May 10 deportation to Saint Cyprien (France : Internment Camp) Albert Brokman Kauen-Schanzen (Lithuania : Concentration Camp) Obodovka (Vinnitsa postwar reflections Brzeziny (Brzeziny migration from British Mandate Palestine hiding places home movies Bardejov (Czechoslovakia) internment camps (stills) adaptation methods transfer from Kauen-Schanzen (Lithuania : Concentration Camp) Antwerp (Belgium) Lithuania 1939 (September 1) - 1940 (June 14) transfer to Buchenwald (Germany : Concentration Camp) Gurs (France) escapes Netherlands 1942 (June 26) - 1944 (September 3) Dourgne (France) Netherlands 1942 grandsons Ldz (Poland) transfer to Dachau (Germany : Concentration Camp) Anschluss (March 13 migration from France persecuted group insignia prisoner doctors deportation from Zawiercie (Poland : Ghetto) Sighet (Romania)(generic) extended family members attitudes toward perpetrators rtelsbruch (Germany : Concentration Camp) Cern (Switzerland) Arnold Clevs ghetto mass executions armament forced labor domestic flight routes forced marches Cdiz (Spain) liberation grandchildren Casablanca (Morocco) Holocaust history Anna Fishman Frankfurt am Main (Germany) Polish forced labor civilian supervisors work permits (stills) flight from Austria Switzerland 1942 Ninth Fort (Kaunas transfer to Landsberg (Germany : Concentration Camp) flight from France photographs (stills) 1910 - 1919 deportation from Amsterdam (Netherlands) food provision Toulouse (France) illegal immigration deportation to Skarzysko-Kamienna (Poland : Concentration Camp) Slobdka (Vilna Althammer (Poland : Concentration Camp) flight to Spain Amsterdam (Netherlands) United forces States 1943 photographs (stills) 1938 Anne Bodenheimer Netherlands Netherlands 1939 (September 1 - December 31) 1943 British armed transfer to rtelsbruch (Germany : Concentration Camp) trauma-related dreams transfer from Dachau (Germany : Concentration Camp) France 1918 (November 11) - 1939 (August 31) Krupp AG ghetto barter Montauban (France)(generic) Meudt (Germany) political civilian aid givers transferactivities from Buchenwald (Germany : Concentration Camp) bribery Lithuania 1926 (December 17) - 1939 (August 31) Zawiercie (Poland : Ghetto) ghettoization preparations Glasgow (Scotland United Kingdom 1939 (September 1) - 1945 (May 7) protection papers danger misconceptions camp executions Tschenstochau (Poland : Concentration Camp)(generic) Revel (Haute-Garonne Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiter-Partei ghetto artifacts (stills) Jonava (Lithuania) Andrew Meisels Beate Dublon Haifa (Israel) arrests Valkenburg (Netherlands) United States 1941 (December 8) - 1945 (May 7) Thuringia (Germany : State) ghetto food acquisition forced march-related aid giving cultural activities Chicago (Illinois cannibalism camp hunger Rcbdou (France : Internment Camp) attitudes toward Germany and/or Germans deportation to Westerbork (Netherlands : Concentration Camp) resistance fighters Buffalo (New York Russian prisoners Bren an der Aare (Switzerland : Refugee Camp) transfer to Althammer (Poland : Concentration Camp) transfer from Tschenstochau (Poland : Concentration Camp)(generic) Pyrenees (Mountain Range) Netherlands 1940 (Germany : Concentration Camp)(generic) transfer from Gleiwitz Slovakian history Auxiliary Territorial Service transfer liberation French internment camps (generic) transfer from rtelsbruch (Germany : Concentration Camp) fine arts (stills) Armand Herskovic Jabotinsky prewar family photographs (stills) camp sanitary conditions memorials and museums (stills) London (England brutal treatment medical care camp escapes food acquisition Gurs (France : Internment Camp) transfer conditions Skarzysko-Kamienna (Poland : Concentration Camp) Hungarian soldiers ghetto currency (stills) international flight routes evasion Tllya (Hungary) Anna Waller ghetto personal property seizure Mittelbau-Dora (Germany : Concentration Camp) Dachau (Germany : Concentration Camp) Bavaria (Germany : State) Ha-Shomer ha-Dati Jewish refugees Varenne (France)(generic) non-violent resistance Czechoslovakia 1942 performing arts (stills) civilian labor conscription Hungary 1944 American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) ritual circumcision (stills) Wallenberg camp shoes writing German prisoners documents and artifacts (stills) 1942 transfer from Landsberg (Germany : Concentration Camp) diseases ghetto injuries ships and watercraft false document provision Andrew Stevens Alfred Pasternak Aurillac (France : GTE Camp) postwar visits home Betar loved ones' renewed contacts Austria 1945 (May 8) -2000 (January 1) Syria 1944 flight from Greece Zirc (Hungary) Jewish history Toronto (Ontario Arrow Cross Gleiwitz (Germany : Concentration Camp)(generic) Lithuania 1941 Thvai (Greece) Greece 1949 (August 30) - 1967 (April 20) Austria 1938 deportation from Kaunas (Lithuania : Ghetto) photographs (stills) 1944 farms attitudes toward aid givers bereavement-related psychological reactions Salonika (Greece : Ghetto) protection papers (stills) migration to Austria resistance group weapons procurement British Mandate Palestine 1943 transfer from camps deportation humiliation resistance group external contact Rochester (New York migration policies Hungarian resistance groups camp smuggling undated family photographs (stills) transfer from Fnfteichen (Germany : Concentration Camp) anti-Jewish arrests Belgium 1918 (November 11) - 1939 (August 31) photographs (stills) Aleppo (Syria) camp stealing Lithuania 1918 (November 11) - 1939 (August 31) Christian identity Albert Marcos Romania 1939 (September 1) - 1941 (June 21) deportation from Tllya (Hungary) Arrow Cross members British Mandate Palestine 1944 b'nai mitzvah (stills) sisters Greece 1942 deportation to Auschwitz (Poland : Concentration Camp)(generic) Anna Rodstein photographs (stills) 1981 clothing provision protected houses (Budapest) Athens (Greece) attitudes toward liberators wives Lithuania 1941 (June 22) - 1944 (July 12) schools escape attempts Jewish identity deportation from Storaljajhely (Hungary : Ghetto) flight discussions deportation to Thebes (Greece : Concentration Camp) Greece 1943 Landsberg (Bavaria Jewish identity reassertion camp prisoner insignia forced labor compensation Thebes (Greece : Concentration Camp) Izmir (Turkey) transfer to Drnhau (Germany : Concentration Camp) Abraham Rodstein Kaunas (Lithuania) attitudes toward humanity adoptions Siauliai (Lithuania) Salonika (Greece) attitudes toward Judaism and/or Jews migration from Greece Storaljajhely (Hungary : Ghetto) synagogues flight assistance camp prisoner physical conditions Greece 1945 (May 8) - 2000 (January 1) Hungary 1939 (September 1 - December 31) United States 1953 (January 1) - 1960 (December 31) deportation to Landsberg (Germany : Concentration Camp) Ladino Culture United Kingdom 1945 (May 8) - 1979 (May 2) attitudes toward religion deportation from Salonika (Greece : Ghetto) Mexico 1945 (May 9) - 2000 (January 1) transfer killings Drnhau (Germany : Concentration Camp) epidemics Tarnazsadny (Hungary) hiding-related injuries Greece 1918 (November 11) - 1939 (August 31) Turkey 1943 Greece 1941 deportation to Storaljajhely (Hungary : Ghetto) Palanga (Lithuania) ghetto cultural activities camp medical care Austrian refugee camps Salzburg (Salzburg flight to British Mandate Palestine Jerusalem (Israel) roundup warnings ghetto liquidations religious identity Boy Scouts Association Stutthof (Danzig (FC) : Concentration Camp) selections post-liberation medical problems camp Jewish religious observances refugee camp artifacts (stills) Lithuania 1940 (June 15) - 1941 (June 21) Cuba 1933 (September 4) - 1939 (August 31) Hungary 1945 (April 4) ? 2002 (December 31) identification papers (stills) Landsberg (Germany : DP Camp) documents and artifacts (stills) 1947 attitudes toward the Netherlands and/or the Dutch photographs (stills) 1977 transfer from Westerbork (Netherlands : Concentration Camp) corpse disposal forced labor documents and artifacts (stills) 1948 Kaunas (Lithuania : Ghetto) Westerbork (Netherlands : Refugee Camp) refugee camp housing conditions prisoner identification numbers workplace antisemitism displaced persons camps migration to the Netherlands medical care provision trucks Denmark 1945 (May 8) - 1948 (April 3) underground construction forced labor Soviet concentration camps (generic) deportation suicide attempts Netherlands 1940 (May 10) - 1942 (June 25) photographs (stills) 1930 Lithuania 1940 migration to Denmark attitudes toward Hungary and/or Hungarians domestic migration routes migration from Mexico General R.L. Howze (Ship) migration to Mexico Bernadotte migration from Sweden Lithuania 1939 (September 1) - 1945 (May 7) forced sterilization Lithuania 1943 St. Louis (Ship) Hungarian police and security forces migration from Cuba migration to Sweden Danzig (FC) 1944 transfer from Bergen-Belsen (Germany : Concentration Camp) migration from Denmark deportation preparations passenger trains Jewish education Bratislava (Czechoslovakia) Judenburg (Austria : DP Camp) deportation personal property seizure transfer to Gunskirchen (Austria : Concentration Camp) transfer from Auschwitz III-Monowitz (Poland : Concentration Camp) Ana Maria Gordon ghetto covert activities photographs (stills) 1935 loved ones' contact Jnoshza (Vas valuable item concealment deportation to Oranienburg-Heinkelwerke (Germany : Concentration Camp) Jewish identity exposure fears forced labor battalion deaths liberation physical condition Prague (Czechoslovakia) Romania 1945 (May 8) - 1947 (December 29) Sevlus (Czechoslovakia) siblings' occupations ghetto corpses Hungarian forced labor battalions Hungarian forced labor battalions (stills) New York (USA : State) hiding grandparents Cleveland (Ohio Linz (Austria) Hungarian annexation of Carpatho-Ruthenia and Felvidk (November 1938 and March 1939) photographs (stills) 1983 transfer escapes Austria 1918 (November 11) - 1938 (March 12) forced labor battalion cultural activities typhus Hungarian armed forces Czechoslovakian armed forces Hungary 1939 (September 1) - 1944 (March 18) migration to Romania liberator sexual assaults forced labor battalion bribery transfer brutal treatment forced labor battalion adaptation methods Arnold Grunberger deportation from Szeged (Hungary : Ghetto) transfer from Sachsenhausen (Germany : Concentration Camp) forced march conditions Belsen (Germany : DP Camp) refugee camp adaptation methods Sudetenland (Czechoslovakia : Region) Jszladny (Hungary) Latvia 1944 migration from Israel platform forced labor housing conditions military and police uniforms photographs (stills) Europe 1944 stealing Poland 1944 (July 22) - 1945 (January 16) Fnfteichen (Germany : Concentration Camp) forced labor battalion medical care deportation from Balf (Hungary) Annie Szilagyi Albert Page attitudes toward Christianity and/or Christians Ukraine (USSR : Soviet Socialist Republic) deportation from Budapest (Hungary) Romania 1939 (September 1 - December 31) deportation from Mukacevo (Czechoslovakia: Ghetto) philanthropic activities Montral (Quebec Sydney (New South Wales forced labor battalion punishments deportation centers identity concealment assistance forced labor battalion diseases transfer to Bergen-Belsen (Germany : Concentration Camp) Canada 1945 (May 8) - 2000 (January 1) Felszsolca (Hungary) transfer to Sachsenhausen (Germany : Concentration Camp) Szeged (Hungary) camp abortions migration to Israel forestry forced labor Auschwitz III-Monowitz (Poland : Concentration Camp) Teplice (Bohemia forced march routes hidden valuable item recovery Jasina (Czechoslovakia) aid giving transfer adaptation methods Hungary 1956 Czechoslovakia 1918 (November 11) - 1938 (September 29) Bistrita (Romania : Ghetto) transfer to Auschwitz III-Monowitz (Poland : Concentration Camp) Austria-Hungary 1914 (July 28) - 1918 (November 10)(November 5) - 1967 (December 31) photographs (stills) 1936 attitudes toward Ukraine and/or Ukrainians illegal emigration Balf (Hungary) restitution forced march escapes suicide attempts German invasion of Hungary (March 19 Dumitra (Nasaud International Red Cross Carpathian Mountains Austria-Hungary 1900 (January 1) -1918 (November 10) Kobylecka Poljana (Czechoslovakia) Latvian forced labor civilian supervisors Szentkirlyszabadja (Hungary) Budapest (Hungary : Ghetto) Agudat Israel Jewish war veterans Buchenwald (Germany : Concentration Camp) French prisoners documents and artifacts (stills) 1944 Alexander Rosenberg transfer from Dyhernfurth (Germany : Concentration Camp) Abram Berger photographs (stills) 1990 migration to Australia correspondence from forced labor battalions (stills) migration attempts Romania 1941 (June 22) - 1944 (April 1) Andor Friedman Alex Varnai Alice Sylvester transfers Oranienburg-Heinkelwerke (Germany : Concentration Camp) Gunskirchen (Austria : Concentration Camp) deportation to Auschwitz II-Birkenau (Poland : Death Camp) Salzwedel (Germany : Concentration Camp) Hungary 1948 (June 12) - 1956 (November 4) migration from the USSR Strojno (Czechoslovakia) Hungary 1944 (March 19) - 1945 (April 3) post-liberation return journeys death marches food additives Hungary 1945 (January 1 - April 3) Holocaust testimony sharing reluctance numerus clausus transfer food front-line military service Svalava (Czechoslovakia) transfer from Wolfsberg (Germany : Concentration Camp) forced labor Hungary 1943 transfer from Praust (Danzig (FC) : Concentration Camp) Bulgaria 1934 (May 19) - 1939 (August 31) food Strasshof (Austria : Concentration Camp) Ana Rothschild photographs (stills) 1988 forced labor battalion escapes deportation from Sopron (Hungary) camp prisoner marking deportation from Sighet (Romania : Ghetto) Vsrosnamny (Hungary) forced march deaths transfer to Salzwedel (Germany : Concentration Camp) photographs (stills) 1986 forced labor battalion-related aid giving Austria 1955 (May 15) - 2000 (January 1) transfer from Mauthausen (Austria : Concentration Camp) food rationing Romania 1939 (September 1) - 1945 (May 7) photographs (stills) 1919 transfer from Strasshof (Austria : Concentration Camp) Austro-Hungarian armed forces billeting California (USA : State) anti-Jewish measures Hungary 1945 (April 4) - 1956 (November 4) Fertrkos (Hungary) transfer from Oranienburg-Heinkelwerke (Germany : Concentration Camp) Yellow Star Houses deportation to Strasshof (Austria : Concentration Camp) deportation from Bdszentmihaly (Hungary) Sofia (Bulgaria) Samaria (Ship) yeshivot Hungarian occupation conditions post-liberation deaths forced march adaptation methods Adolf Deutsch deportation brutal treatment Szeged (Hungary : Ghetto) Hungary 1938 (March 5) - 1939 (August 31) Polish refugees Sianki (Poland) Alex Brook Czechoslovakia 1941 forced labor battalion living conditions documents and artifacts (stills) 1940s migration from Germany Germany 1945 (May 8) - 1949 (May 23) refugee camp living conditions Hungary 1941 (June 22) - 1944 (March 18) Satu Mare (Crisana-Maramures Czechoslovakia 1939 forced labor battalion covert activities postwar documents and artifacts (stills) migration to Hungary Sonneberg (Germany)(generic) Riga (Latvia : Concentration Camp)(generic) spouses' occupations Romania 1945 (May 8) - 2000 (January 1) camp family interactions deportation from Strojno (Czechoslovakia) Jewish-gentile relations military fortification forced labor Bulgaria 1942 deportation from Vsrosnamny (Hungary) forced labor battalion external contact domestic staff tuberculosis Praust (Danzig (FC) : Concentration Camp) deportation from Mukacevo (Czechoslovakia) German concentration camps (generic) Szarvas (Hungary) Vienna (Austria : Autonomous City/District) deportation from Fertrkos (Hungary) prisoner external contact Berehovo (Czechoslovakia : Ghetto) photographs (stills) 1993 migration to Czechoslovakia Bistrita (Transylvania deportation to Berehovo (Czechoslovakia : Ghetto) labor battalion commanders international migration routes migration to France forced labor battalion forced brutal treatment Satu Mare (Romania : Ghetto) suicides camp menstruation deportations forced labor battalion food Koch Albert Rosenbaum Europe 1945 Czechoslovakia 1941 (June 22) - 1944 (March 18) Budapest (Hungary) documents and rumors artifacts (stills) 1994 camp covert communications freight trains Austria 1941 (October 1) - 1945 (May 7) Mukacevo (Czechoslovakia) Slutsk (Belorussia transfer to Braunschweig (Germany : Concentration Camp)(generic) Agnes Beildeck Hungary 1953 (March 5) - 1956 (November 4) Arnold Fiala Bulgaria 1939 (September 1) - 1945 (May 7) Stockholm (Sweden) photographs (stills) 1948 Germany 1945 (January 1 - May 7) migration to Canada Salzwedel (Germany : DP Camp) Oradea (Romania : Ghetto) Catholic schools Romania 1918 (November 11) -1939 (August 31) Neology socioeconomic status Sachsenburg (Germany : Concentration Camp) Federal Republic of Germany 1949 (May 23) - 1961 (August 12) transfer to Neustadt-Glewe (Germany : Concentration Camp) forced labor battalion executions grandfathers Romania 1942 deportation to Mauthausen (Austria : Concentration Camp) United Kingdom 1939 (September 1 - December 31) camp barracks Frth (Germany : DP Camp) deportation procedures transfer to Wolfsberg (Germany : Concentration Camp) railroad forced labor photographs (stills) 1940s Srospatak (Hungary) intergenerational Holocaust impact photographs (stills) 1949 Braunschweig (Germany : Concentration Camp)(generic) Czechoslovakia 1939 (March 15) - 1945 (May 9) Romania 1944 photographs (stills) 1980s post-liberation family home returns Mauthausen (Austria : Concentration Camp) migration from the United Kingdom Jewish organizations photographs (stills) 1943 Czechoslovakia 1944 ghetto brutal treatment documents and artifacts (stills) 1946 prisoner uniforms photographs (stills) photographs (stills) 1947 camp intake procedures Uddevalla (Sweden) flight to Czechoslovakia migration from Hungary Jewish ritual leaders and functionaries documents and artifacts (stills) 1935 (Germany : Concentration Camp) flight to Hungary occupied Axis population treatment Sopron (Hungary) transfer to Dyhernfurth (Germany : ConcentrationDyhernfurth Camp) transfer from Braunschweig (Germany : Concentration Camp)(generic) Podkarpatska Rus (Czechoslovakia : Province) Wolfsberg (Germany : Concentration Camp) corpses Agi Adler war-related experience psychological reactions photographs (stills) 1954 Germany 1944 health deceptions Agnes Kun escape discussions working life camp selections Italian soldiers Hungary 1939 (September 1) - 1945 (April 3) ghetto releases military documents and artifacts (stills) documents and artifacts (stills) 1952 migration to the USSR Turzansk (Poland) camp housing conditions United Kingdom 1933 (January 30) - 1939 (August 31) migration to Chile Czechoslovakia 1938 (September 30) - 1939 (March 13) deportation from Bistrita (Romania : Ghetto) Sighet (Crisana-Maramures Australia 1945 (May 8) - 2000 (January 1) Anna Soltes Europe 1939 (September 1 - December 31) photographs (stills) 1921 Czechoslovakia 1918 (November 11) - 1939 (March 14) Czechoslovakia 1945 (May 10) - 1948 (February 19) camp construction forced labor Alice Demeter transfer to Ravensbrck (Germany : Concentration Camp) Hungarian history transfer from Engerau (Czechoslovakia : Concentration Camp) migration from Romania Kosice (Slovakia Halberstam deportation from Satu Mare (Romania : Ghetto) photographs (stills) 1952 migration to the United States Hungary 1939 (September 1) - 1941 (June 21) Miami (Florida Mukacevo (Czechoslovakia : Ghetto) photographs (stills) 1926 Engerau (Czechoslovakia : Concentration Camp) Duderstadt (Germany : Concentration Camp) Teitelbaum Neustadt-Glewe (Germany : Concentration Camp) camp food sharing Lucenec (Czechoslovakia) antisemitic propaganda Bronte (New South Wales German civilian laborers Sweden 1945 (May 8) - 1974 (December 31) Czechoslovakia 1939 (March 15) - 1944 (March 18) Danzig (FC) 1945 (January 1 - May 7) International Council for Jewish Women Kaddish perpetrator Allied approach response transfer from Auschwitz II-Birkenau (Poland : Death Camp) Mengele camp social relations migration from Czechoslovakia Poland 1944 Czechoslovakia 1945 (May 10) - 1992 (December 31) Ravensbrck (Germany : Concentration Camp) migration to Tunisia Uzhorod (Czechoslovakia) deportation routes testimony-sharing motivations Sighet (Romania : Ghetto) Most (Czechoslovakia) Esztergom (Hungary) Czechoslovak soldiers Fhrenwald (Germany : DP Camp) forced correspondence Czechoslovakia 1948 (February 20) - 1968 (August 19) Italy 1939 Romania 1940 courtships Petrzalka (Czechoslovakia) transfer to Fnfteichen (Germany : Concentration Camp) Theresienstadt (Czechoslovakia : Ghetto) Chile 1945 (May 8) - 1964 (November 2) loved ones' separations Lucenec (Czechoslovakia : Ghetto) transfer deaths Czechoslovakia 1944 (March 19) - 1945 (May 9) post-liberation camp/ghetto transition Lagerlteste camp clothing migration from Tunisia flight from Hungary loved ones' fates Bergen-Belsen (Germany : Concentration Camp) Blocklteste transfer to Theresienstadt (Czechoslovakia : Ghetto) Netherlands 1945 (May 8) - 2000 (January 1) personal services forced labor attitudes toward the Soviet Union and/or Soviets Czechoslovakia 1939 (March 15) - 1941 (June 21) attitudes toward prisoner functionaries transfer to Ober Hohenelbe (Czechoslovakia : Concentration Camp) perpetrator capture-evasion efforts deportation to Uzhorod (Czechoslovakia : Ghetto) Albert Rosenthal transfer to Duderstadt (Germany : Concentration Camp) Hungary 1918 (November 11) - 1939 (August 31) literary recitals Soviet soldiers transfer from Wolfen-Bitterfeld (Germany : Concentration Camp) Jewish mourning customs camp Appell Allan Weiss Romania 1943 sexual assault fears migration to the United Kingdom deportation from Lucenec (Czechoslovakia : Ghetto) Ober Hohenelbe (Czechoslovakia : Concentration Camp) Berdichev (Zhitomir Poland 1945 (January 1 - May 7) transfer from Duderstadt (Germany : Concentration Camp) Adele Diamantstein Bauer Botiz (Romania) Auschwitz II-Birkenau (Poland : Death Camp) survivor marriages Breslau (Germany : Concentration Camp)(generic) Hungary 1945 (April 4) - 1948 (June 11) Jewish kapos Wolfen-Bitterfeld (Germany : Concentration Camp) secretarial forced labor Chteau de Vaucelles (France : Children's Home) camp rumors Lower Silesia (Prussia Uzhorod (Czechoslovakia : Ghetto) Romania 1939 (September 1) - 1944 (April 2) Anna Mandel Canada 1945 (May 8) - 1948 (May 13) France 1945 (May 8) - 1958 (September 27) Prenzlau (Brandenburg deportation conditions transfer preparations Axis deceptions Neudachs (Poland : Concentration Camp) post-liberation adaptation Bdszentmihly (Hungary) transfer to Breslau (Germany : Concentration Camp)(generic) Polish prisoners liberation-related aid giving transfer from Neudachs (Poland : Concentration Camp) lesbian prisoners family businesses Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants Storaljajhely (Hungary) photographs (stills) 1918 Alida Praag Nyrjespuszta (Nograd

F gure 8 9 keywords

Ne work v sua za on o 100 es mon es and assoc a ed

The query ng of the database part cu ar y through faceted search ng that a ows a user to app y mu t p e fi ters can revea s tes of over ap and nkages between exper ences I wou d contend that the poss b ty of nfin te “queryab ty” and v sua zat on of the re at ons n a database s n fact a cr t ca part of ts eth ca d mens on Cons der for a moment the a ternat ve 52 000 atom zed test mon es searchab e by un que dent fiers such as name or record ID but w thout the ab ty to traverse orthogona y through the tab es The more “th ck” the poss b e re at ons 195

Figure 8.10.

Detail of network visualization.

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and intersections are between tables, the more possibilities of interconnection, the more ethical the database. In other words, the potential to facilitate an ever-deeper relationality among the data in a database is one of the conditions of possibility for an ethics of the algorithm. As Lev Manovich asks in The Language of New Media: “How can our new abilities to store vast amounts of data, to automatically classify, index, link, search, and instantly retrieve it, lead to new kinds of narratives?”39 As an explicit uptake of Manovich’s question of how classification, indexing, search, interlinking, and retrieval can lead to new narratives, the Shoah Foundation VHA allows users to create their own project narratives from the search results, essentially, building remixed and hybridized narratives from any number of constitutive narrative segments. In this regard, we see a symbiosis between narrative and database, such that the paradigmatic structure of the database contributes to the syntagmatic possibilities of combination at the heart of narrative.40 And I would point out that this is not fundamentally different from what historians already do: make selections from the trove of archival sources in order to combine elements together to form a narrative. The database performs this selection and combinatory process in every query and, hence, literalizes an instance of historical emplotment. The metadata database of the Shoah Foundation VHA thus represents a kind of “paratext” insofar as it can be reordered, disassembled, and reassembled according to the constraints and possibilities of computational logic.41 The visualizations of the Shoah Foundation VHA are representations of the paratext, the metadata scaffolding that runs behind the testimonies and, with every query to the database, represents an algorithmically transformed text. In a computational mode of representation, it is common to “toggle” between the singular and the global, the individual experiences of particular eyewitnesses and all the experiences as recounted by the survivors, which, in this case, is the summation of all the data in the VHA. The latter does not represent the reality of “the Holocaust” (as a complete or total event), but rather the totality of the archive, and therefore can only present structures, patterns, and globally oriented visualizations of data. But, again, this is not very different from what historians do, insofar as they emplot events at various levels of “zoom” in order to convey different kinds of meaning. In other words, we “toggle” back and forth between macrolevel accounts of the totality of the event (zoomed out) and microlevel accounts of individual experiences (zoomed in), which are, by their very nature, defined by specific experiences, perspectives, spectatorship, 197

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language, and so forth. Saul Friedländer’s “globally oriented inquiry” into the history of the Holocaust not only examines the encompassing “ideological-cultural factors” and mythologies of the Nazi regime while recounting the totality of events, actions, and numbers to convey the overwhelming efficiency and scope of the destruction, but he also calls on the individual voices and personal chronicles of diary and letter writers “to illuminate parts of the landscape . . . like lightning flashes,” and thereby “pierce the (mostly involuntary) smugness of scholarly detachment and ‘objectivity.’ ”42 In essence, there are certain parallels between the compositional practices of historians and those of computation. But the computational mode also allows another kind of reading and listening practice, which is quite different from what individual readers and listeners tend to do with memoirs and video testimony. The computational allows us to perform what literary scholar Franco Moretti has termed “distant reading”—a practice that moves away from the close, hermeneutical reading of texts in favor of an algorithmic approach that presents overarching structures and patterns.43 For Moretti, distance is “a condition of knowledge” because it allows a scholar to “focus on units that are much smaller or much larger than the text: devices, themes, tropes—or genres and systems.”44 In other words, the perspective of distance allows us to see different things than the perspective of closeness (characterized by close, attentive, detailed reading). By confronting scale, “distant reading”—or, in our case, “distant listening”—reveals structures, patterns, and trends that are not discernable when the focus remains on just a handful of close readings of individual texts. And the stakes are much higher than just revealing structures: distant listening facilitates whole corpus analysis and, potentially, the democratization of knowledge. Instead of privileging “human listening” (in which we necessarily have to limit ourselves to a tiny canon of works, probably a few hundred), distant listening is performed by a computer and can easily “listen to” thousands, if not millions, of works.45 So what might this kind of large-scale, full corpus, “distant listening” mean for the Shoah Foundation VHA? For one thing, it brings into stark relief the tiny fraction of memoirs and testimonies of survivors that are actually read, listened to, and taught. We tend to privilege a very small canon of witnesses, whose stories stand in—rightfully or not—for the stories of almost everyone else. We know Elie Wiesel, Anne Frank, and Primo Levi, but what about Anna Neuman-Goldman, Daniel Geslewitz, and Arie Leopold Haas?46 Distance listening can facilitate a democ198

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ratization of witnessing since it has a leveling effect in that all testimonies are granted equal importance and weight, such that no one testimony takes priority or assumes canonicity. To extrapolate structures, trends, patterns, frequencies, and correlations from the entire database will produce claims that are grounded in the experiences of exponentially more people than tend to enter into conventional historical accounts grounded in a significantly smaller sample size. I would posit that “distant reading”—or, in our case, “distant listening”—is ethical precisely because it takes into account the metadata (specifically, the keywords linked to testimony segments) of every survivor who had his or her story recorded in the VHA. I am not arguing that the computer should replace the human listener and the intersubjective experience at the heart of testimony, but I am saying that computational or algorithmic analysis can be ethical precisely because it takes into account the fullness of the archive insofar as all the indexed data related to the narrative of every survivor is part of the analysis. Let me now conclude with some speculative questions with the aim of reimagining the database of the Visual History Archive in a modernist register, considering data as figuration, and implementing a practice of humanistic computing characterized by an ethics of the algorithm. We might begin by asking: How would a Levinasian database operate? What would it mean to bring the realm of the ethical as defined by Levinas as “a first philosophy” to the back-end information architecture (the database, the data structures, and the metadata standards)? In other words, I want to imagine an information architecture that is fundamentally connected to the content, and not just any content, but the specific narratives of Holocaust survivors and the listener’s responsibility to that testimony through an ethics of obligation. This means the database, like all of the information architecture, is not a neutral container to store or put content into, and the goal of the information system is not simply to noiselessly and seamlessly transmit messages to receivers. Instead, the database must be conceived through the same ethical optic as watching the testimonies and, therefore, fundamentally connect testimony to the information architecture, the data ontologies, the data structures, the indexing systems, and the viewers who are engaged in a participatory mode of listening. For Levinas, ontology is the problem because it is a philosophy rooted in being and the attempt to ground meaning though identity, objectivity, 199

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and even certain kinds of linguistic structures, namely, what he calls the literalism of “the said.” This is essentially the same literalism of the data in the VHA database: disambiguated, manifest content, objectively said. Instead of ontology, Levinas poses a philosophy of relationality, in which the self is connected to the other through bonds of responsibility, vulnerability, proximity, and even rupture. Here, the linguistic operation is the act of “saying” or, more radically, the possibility of “unsaying the said.” For Levinas, the challenge is to undo the paradigms of wholeness and totality, which are implicated in philosophies that are grounded in ontology and identity, in favor of an intersubjective philosophy of relationality, alterity, fragility, and uncertainty. I wonder how we might rethink the very genre of the database as a representational form vis-à-vis the specific experiences of bearing witness, testifying, surviving, and narrating. How might the database reflect the fragility of life, the uncertainty, ambiguity, and figuration of narrative? How might it preserve (rather than undo) the “hauntedness” that informs so much of the testimony? In other words, how might a database be open to the haunt of the past, the trace of the unknown, the spectral quality of the indeterminate, and, simultaneously, be oriented to the uncertainty of the future, the possibility of the unknown, what Jacques Derrida calls “the spectral messianicity” at the heart of the archive? Such a notion of the archive specifically disavows the finality of interpretation, relishes in ambiguity, and constantly situates and resituates knowledge through varying perspectives, indeterminacy, and differential ontologies. As such, we might imagine how a fluid data ontology might work, by allowing multiple thesauri that recognize a range of knowledge, standards, and listening practices. For example, what if verbs that connected action and agent, experience and context were given more weight than hierarchies of nouns primarily in associative relationships? What if a more participatory architecture allowed for other listeners to create tags that could unsay the said, or in other words, undo—or, at least, supplement—the definitive indexing categories and keywords associated with the segmented testimonies? Or, more radically, what if the user interface was generated by network graphs or visualizations, such that the listener did not merely type terms into an empty search box but rather could browse the entirety of the archive in a dynamic way based on, perhaps, communities of experience, narrative structure, or even silences, gaps, and so-called nonindexical content?47 200

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Such structures of saying and unsaying the database would constantly reinterpret and reinscribe the survivors’ stories in ways that not only place the listener into an active relationship of responsibility but also unleash a potentiality of meaning in every act of “saying” and “browsing.” Narratives would be heard in their polyphony, with some listeners hearing some things and others hearing quite different things. Through these acts of saying and unsaying, which are, according to Levinas, marked by an “allegiance” and “exposedness” to the other, the responsibility to the other might become part of the ethics of the information architecture itself. We might call it: Otherwise than the Database, or Beyond Essence.48 In a sense, we would never be done listening, watching, and processing the testimonies because there is always more—a surplus of meaning—that is never finally captured in data or databases. And this is what the information architecture would facilitate: a hermeneutic of uncertainty, a modernist—or perhaps, Talmudic—writing and rewriting of the metadata through an ethics of obligation and ever-thicker relationships between data and narrative, as a kind of Jewish ethics of responsibility, telling and retelling, interpreting and reinterpreting, listening and being present. There is no reason, then, why the realm of information architecture, data structures, and databases should be considered apart from the realm of ethics and the subjective, contingent, meaning-making, interpretative practices at the heart of the humanities. What is at stake when the ethical philosophies of the humanistic tradition do not fundamentally inform the digitization of the archive, when data and data management “conform to a model of mathesis that assumes objective, totalizing, mechanistic, instrumental capability”?49 This is the risk of completely separating content from information architecture, of privileging disambiguated data ontologies over probabilistic knowledge, potentialities of figuration, and interpretative heterogeneity. But computational representation does not have to be this way if it is guided by an ethics of the algorithm. The challenge resides in imagining a kind of humanistic computing that not only deconstructs the assumptions of mathesis operating behind and imposed on top of the cultural record but also propels an approach to information, the database, and the digital archive in general that does not seek to overcome or suppress the ambiguous, the unfinished, the differential, the multiple, and the spectral. Through ever-thicker relationships between data and narrative, saying and unsaying, visualizing and listening, it is possible for computation to facilitate an ethics of listening 201

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that moves between the whole of the database and the individual testimony, transforming both in a never-ending, dynamic process of listening that gives rise to new narratives. As such, the ethics of the algorithm might begin by performing close and distant listening to the more than 52,000 testimonies in the Shoah Foundation archive: listening to them one by one and by listening to them all at once.

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9 On the Ethics of Technology and Testimony STEPHEN D. SMITH

Y

VETTE NYOMBAYIRE RUGASAGUHUNGA was fourteen when

she survived the genocide in Rwanda. Her survival relied on the dangerous concealment of her Tutsi identity while living among the Interahamwe militia. She recounted an outline of her life history to me in person, describing how a Hutu man had offered to look after her and her two sisters, whom he had been led to believe had been orphaned, on the understanding that they were from a Hutu family. She described to me how he “returned home in the evening with blood on his shirt, and then was really good to me.” Noting how confident she was while recounting her experience, I inquired whether she had given an audiovisual life history. She responded that she had not done so, and explained that there was a significant difference between telling me and placing her testimony on public record. I gathered from the way she responded that it was a matter of trust. She knew she could trust me as an individual, but was not ready to trust the personal details of her life to an institution. That evening, I watched her perform her one-woman short play, A Survivor’s State of Mind. The fifteen-minute piece is a largely autobiographical account of her experience during the genocide and, in particular, the total pervasiveness of those memories in the present. The script was bold, traumatic, accusing, and painful. Her presence onstage, reenacting her own life struggle, was highly public. It seemed incongruous that someone who had chosen not to give a life history was able to stand in front of a live audience and perform an interpretation of her story onstage. 203

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During the discussion that followed her performance, Yvette disclosed that retelling her life experience in a dramatic production was empowering onstage because she controls the narrative, the space, and her own emotions within the character she plays. The content was raw and traumatic, but it never left the room. It was a public performance in a private space, where her level of control of the drama balanced her lack of trust in society with her narrative. There was an unspoken contract between her and the audience, in which she could be more outspoken and show her true feelings in return for applause. In day-to-day life, Yvette is a highly public person. She is a public servant and, as a community activist, organizes the Rwanda Genocide Commemoration in the United States each year, speaks widely about her experiences on public platforms, acts and sings about the genocide, and is a vocal advocate for commemoration and support of the needs of survivors of the genocide in the United States and in Rwanda. The fact that she had not given an audiovisual testimony seemed at odds with her public persona. Put simply, she does not trust the medium.

Born Digital The management of digital objects of historical value has entered a new era. The focus on digitizing analogue or physical objects is rapidly being supplanted by the reality that many objects of historical interest are now born digital. For example, the original, master collection of 52,000 audiovisual testimonies in USC Shoah Foundation’s archive of witnesses to the Holocaust was recorded onto 235,000 Beta SP analogue tapes. A submaster was then created by copying the analogue signal onto Digital Betacam. This process was identical in quality to the original master, just on a different format. A low-resolution copy was then made for television viewing on VHS tape and an even lower resolution copy was made for computers in a format called MPEG-1. The final redacted MPEG-1 digital file was one-ninetieth the quality of the original Beta SP master. As the digital age progressed and the only digital file available was a lowquality copy, the University of Southern California, which had acquired the collection, undertook a project to redigitize the entire collection as part of its agreement to preserve the archive on behalf of the Institute. A number of ethical and technical decisions had to be reached about the digitization itself, the transfer process, file formats, storage, preservation, and the integrity of the new data, which resulted in the collection being 204

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digitized in industry standard Motion JPEG2000 for preservation purposes and four other derivatives for streaming, download, and playback purposes. Today, video testimonies are created as digital files and will only ever exist as digital objects. Todd Presner’s questions about the “ethics of the algorithm,” therefore, permeate every level of decision making around digital collections, starting with decisions about the quality of digitization and the management. Because of the rapid transformation of technologies, there are ever-changing parameters for data management. From  2008 through 2012, the 235,000 Beta SP masters were converted into Motion JPEG2000 digital files. The process created a new digital master, which can now be treated as if it were born digital. This was an ethical as well as a technical choice, as many archives, including some major Holocaust testimony collections, have opted to downgrade their files into lower-resolution digital masters, effectively removing much of the original data to lower the costs of preserving the testimony. Audiovisual testimony is a narrative genre but cannot be reduced to text alone. It is a complex narrative form encompassing many features. The face, eyes, voice, intonation, emotion, and body language of the subject inform its narrative complexity, as well as pauses, silence, and staring blankly at the floor. All form a part of the visual narrative, which the text itself cannot convey. Those physical features of the narrative are as much a part of the historical heritage to be preserved as the text itself. Downgrading the video data at the point of digitization is the equivalent to creating a low-resolution monochrome scan of a historical document, then disposing of the original. There is an ethic underpinning the industry standard preservation policy that accompanies both high-resolution digitization and bit-level preservation. The ethic states that all the data captured has value at the point of digitization and that every piece of digital data that can be preserved will be for its own sake. There is a counterargument, which assumes that the historical content has more value than the video data itself, and so—provided the video can be viewed in any format—the history itself is preserved, regardless of the quality of the file. Bit-level preservation, however, takes a decision of principle that assumes that if you begin the process of data management by preserving the integrity of every byte of data (for its own sake), then all decisions about the management of that data will conform to the same ethic, because any decision about storage, retrieval, and access that compromises the original file undermines the ethic of data integrity at the heart of the activity. 205

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Bit-level preservation is a working standard wherein preserving the integrity of the data underpins the whole effort. USC Shoah Foundation’s preservation system protects 100 percent of the data to within one bit per five terabytes per three years. When the original file is treated with that level of respect, all other policies about data management, access, and education follow the same ethical standards. The ethic of data integrity— treating the original source with the highest standards of care—is at the heart of both data and institutional integrity.

Searching for Sheyna In the audiovisual testimony of Sima Wagner,1 the viewer encounters an agonizing choice (Figure 9.1). A selection was taking place during the liquidation of the Vilnius Ghetto. Sima was clutching her baby, Sheyna, as she waited. Standing with Sima in that panic-stricken moment was her mother, Leah Benoscher, and her mother-in-law, whose name is not mentioned in her testimony. Sima recounts: “And my mother saw that this was death because the soldiers were standing by, beating us over the head. She grabbed my baby from me and said, ‘Run my child, you are young; you will find your husband.’ ” Sima’s mother, Leah, took her grandchild from her daughter. At the same moment, her mother-in-law said: “Sima darling, don’t leave us. We are all alone.” As if for emphasis, Sima repeats: “My mother grabbed my child . . . and [a soldier] hit me over the head and he threw me to the right side, because I was very young at the time. And this is how I am alive. What can I tell you?” I was present with Leon Wagner at the offices of USC Shoah Foundation as he viewed the testimony of his mother, Sima, and his father, Rubin, for the first time. His parents, who are now deceased, married before the Second World War, survived separately, were reunited after the Holocaust, and had two children, of which he is the younger, born in 1953. While Leon and I were reviewing photographs attached to the video file of his father’s interview (subjects were encouraged to present photos, documents, artworks, and other items of personal interest during their interview), there was an image of his parents standing in a grassy area by a memorial plaque. Leon disclosed that the place in the photograph where his parents were standing was the place his sister was buried. I had been to the site of the Ponary massacres and recognized from the photograph on-screen the topography where an estimated 100,000 Jews from the Vilnius Ghetto had been shot into large open graves. Leon added, 206

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Figure 9.1.

Screenshot, USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive.

“they are visiting the grave of their daughter.” The three other family members in the room expressed some surprise and inquired why they had not known that he had a sister who was murdered during the Holocaust. Leon replied, “We don’t talk about that.” Using the metadata structure in the Visual History Archive (VHA), as described in Todd Presner’s chapter, I navigated using the search tool to find any reference to Sheyna Wajner.2 Her name appeared four times in the archive because her mother, Sima, had made reference to her baby on four occasions (her father, Rubin Wagner,3 had no references to Sheyna in his own testimony and so without Leon being in the room, it would have been impossible to know that the photo was taken at the place of her death). The search tool allowed me to zoom in on 107, 000 hours of video to the few minutes of testimony to which Sheyna’s name was associated, which in fact was in Sima Wagner’s testimony. I went to the second of the four one-minute segments where her name appears in the archive. In that same segment are other keywords, which include: “ghetto liquidations,” “ghetto selections,” and “loved one’s separations.” Seeing 207

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the combination of keywords, without any prompting, and before I had chance to play the video file, Leon stood up and walked to the whiteboard where the archive was projected. From seeing the keywords alone, he knew he was about to hear his late mother tell him what happened to the sister he never knew. On the surface, Sima Wagner’s harrowing testimony had been turned into what appears to be dry and descriptive metadata. But in a matter of seconds, while navigating to those few keywords, Sheyna Wajner was restored to her place in her family. The relationship between data (the video testimony itself) and the metadata (the markup of the data and, hence, the way to identify content) has many interlocking layers. It is a dynamic and fluid matrix of physical data (video), narrative (words), supranarrative (emotions, tone, context, face, gesture, and so forth), metadata (content identifiers), context (place, people, reason to view), interpretation (meaning to audience), and secondary narratives (retelling). Leon Wagner and his family were neither interested in, nor cognizant of, the testimony as either data or metadata. What they heard were the words of Sima Wajner; they felt her emotions and interacted with each other about the meaning of what they had just seen and heard. Subsequently, they have retold the experience to many friends and family. That experience was only made possible by the power of retrieval—using metadata to find the correct data, which, when retrieved, would have meaning to the viewer.

The Limits of Metadata The concern Presner expresses about the limits of metadata holds true. Metadata, by definition, have boundaries through their structured hierarchy. Without structure, metadata would not have consistency and, therefore, not meet the needs of those seeking the associated content; but by the very fact of that need for structure, metadata also limit experience, because they cannot meet all needs and interests. Metadata represent one layer of interpretation created to meet one defined set of interests and expectations. Once set, they are limited to specific interests and expectations by default. The choice of the keyword “loved one’s separations” is correct to describe the principal activity about the decision between the three women who held Sheyna during the selection. But that was not all that was happening in the video. The emotion expressed by Sima Wagner, the tearing apart of a family, the inevitable death of two parents and a child, the desperation of separation, the tears in Sima’s eyes, and the silence that followed are all critical parts of the testimony. All of those affec208

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tive gestures happened, but do not appear as characteristics in the metadata. But metadata are also expandable and over time can be enriched in relation to the demands of users who may wish to navigate the data in new ways. One pathway to enrich metadata is to tag the content in collaboration with multiples users. This procedure is yet to be introduced to USC Shoah Foundation content because of another layer of ethical consideration: who should be able to tag what and under what circumstances; where do the boundaries of appropriate behavior and activity lie; who defines those boundaries; who determines what metadata correctly reflects the purpose and meaning of the data itself? The considerations are multiple and complex and represent another limit of metadata management that is part of the underlying ethical considerations to maintaining the integrity of the archive as a whole. Gaining greater access supports the ethics of sharing the data. Answering the question of who has the right to create the metadata according to what policies has levels of complexity and consequence that are not easily resolved.

Supranarratives The concept of a metanarrative—an overarching and common narrative— is sharply contradicted by the granularity of experience represented in the metadata of the VHA and also challenged by the medium of video testimony itself, which has many more aspects to it than text.4 I propose the term supranarrative—those aspects of the narrative that are beyond the text itself. Put another way, in video testimony, supranarratives are all of those aspects of the testimony except the spoken words and their overarching meaning (the metanarrative). Supranarratives include concepts of time, space, chronology, themes, and meaning; spiritual, moral, or ethical compass; historical framing, familial and relational contexts, storytelling, mythologization, implied meaning, commentary, poetics, and unspoken elements of the interview, such as physical silence and memories not revealed in testimony but that can nevertheless be discerned from the testimony. The silence after Sima Wagner’s recollection about the selection process was supranarrative. It tells the viewer a great deal about Sima herself, her emotions in that moment, and the meaning of that episode to her life. There is no metadata (currently) to tag that silence. It is quite plausible that a future metadata structure would allow for the keyword “reflective silence” or “silence related to loss”; but that structure itself has inherent weaknesses. How do you describe hierarchical evidence of 209

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trauma experienced and narrated by the subject: “displays trauma,” “highly traumatized,” “highly distraught”? As soon as the metadata structure enters the realm of emotion and human subjectivity, it becomes difficult to manage because it is impossible to apply such terms consistently or reliably. In time, metadata structures will be adapted and expanded, but the policy that the Visual History Archive adopts is not to do so until the structure can accurately and appropriately reflect the meaning and be true to the intent and experience of the subject. Metadata can never capture or represent the complexity of human experience and narrative. Those traits are found in the supranarrative—the human element of the narrative itself.

Avoiding Digital Myth The ethics of the algorithm also points to another pitfall: ranking. Almost every channel of digital media preferences the most watched, the most clicked, the most downloaded. The more a given piece of data is accessed, the higher the ranking and, hence, the higher the perceived relevance or importance. I was startled by one potential interviewee who asked me: “What would make my testimony so special among 52,000 others?” He had concluded that the 107,000 hours of testimony represented a surfeit of data and was concerned that the uniqueness of his own testimony would not be more apparent—that is, ranked more highly—than the thousands of testimonies alongside his own. So what makes a “good” Holocaust testimony? Is it the level of brutality; the eloquence of the storyteller; the difficulty of survival; the point of view of the subject? What sort of evaluative system might one apply to grade a testimony? Would five stars indicate eloquent, compelling, accurate, inspiring, and intelligent? In the Facebook era, a system based on “liking” would conceivably resonate—the more people that “like” the testimony, the higher its ranking as rated by users. I raise this issue, not because USC Shoah Foundation is pursuing any such options, but rather to place the content we deliver through the lens of user expectation. Users expect to be guided and trust the algorithms to be their navigation tool to content, rather than to seek it out themselves. In fact, most users do not have the digital skills to seek out relevant content as in their daily lives, wherein they almost universally use unstructured search to find digital material, something that works almost exclusively on ranking.5 210

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The issue with ranking is that it creates a hierarchy based on regularity of access rather than quality of relevant content. Ultimately, the one testimony that goes viral becomes the “celebrity testimony,” which in turn undermines the efficacy, complexity, individuality, and fine granularity of the collection as a whole. In fact, the rigid metadata classification system and the structured search system employed in USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive is an ethical decision not to privilege one type of content over another. The metadata system gives equality to each oneminute segment of the entire 107,000 hours, to avoid hierarchical classification. This ethical decision in turn avoids closure, which in our soundbite society is the temptation—the one segment of testimony that goes viral and reaches 100 million people becomes a defining story, which when retold, reposted, and retweeted becomes digital myth. The search for meaning in meaningless death invariably results in myths. The Visual History Archive’s metadata structure is antimythological by design. It does not allow the viewer the luxury of condensing. It encourages the deeper pursuit of knowledge, personal research, struggling with contradictions, grappling with facticity, historicity, and human individuality. It also does not allow the Holocaust to become Auschwitz: While there are 13,176 out of 51,348 testimonies that do reference Auschwitz in all sorts of contexts, there are also 38,172 testimonies, or 66 percent of the archive, that do not.

Encouraging Use through Digital Education The hidden danger of such a huge databank of content is the lack of use. If the Visual History Archive is not used, it will become an icon itself. Like the Haggadah within the Jewish tradition, which recounts a significant period of sacred history in a few brief pages layered with interpretation, the existence of the archive could come to merely represent the Shoah as a monumental period, but not well understood in terms of detail. However warm and wonderful the family tradition of the Passover Seder is, from the text of the Haggadah, we learn virtually no details about what actually happened. If the Visual History Archive is to have meaning beyond the purely symbolic, individual testimonies need to be understood in detail, which is why access is the future of preservation—the more people understand it in detail, the better its complexity is preserved. It is therefore the community of users that provides the ethical justification for access and the metadata structure that supports it. Usage 211

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of the archive helps avoid the symbolization of the testimonies as a transmogrified digital monument. The memorial elements of each testimony speak to each viewer through their pursuit of deeper and highly granulated interaction and learning. A decision made by USC Shoah Foundation was to make the testimonies available in the twenty-first-century classroom for use by high school students. At first glance, this may appear to be a certain way to curate the collection for ease of use. With limited time available in the curriculum, teachers do not have the opportunity to watch thousands of hours of testimony. And yet, the version of the Visual History Archive for schools—IWitness—has almost 3,000 hours of testimony for classroom use. The decision to deploy the same metadata structure and search tools into the high school classroom was purposeful, in order to teach younger users how to search, retrieve, manage, and use testimony in the context of ethical decision making and online citizenship. Once again, the ethics of the algorithm were a significant consideration as a new set of algorithms were applied to the metadata to provide additional filters to narrow down topics to fit the common core school standards in North America. This process means that when students search, instead of providing rankings by the most watched, it provides suggestions breaking down the large number of results by, for example, artifacts, emotions, photos, and so forth (Figure 9.2). In the screenshot of IWitness, the secondary school’s version of the Visual History Archive search, shown in Figure  9.2, the search term “ghetto” has retrieved 7,112 clips from 819 testimonies—clearly, too many for a student to navigate. By using filters (Gender, Experience Group, Country of Interview, Country of Birth, and Length), the number can be narrowed down. Then, by using the algorithms on the left-hand sidebar, further narrowing occurs through activities, concepts, and so forth. In the next screenshot (Figure 9.3), we see the same search with filters applied to narrow it to female rescuers, which results in twentyone clips from five testimonies. This decision underscores the efficacy of metadata decisions because school students are learning how to manage and curate data. The same keyword structure is applied to the online digital assets of United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and Yad Vashem, making IWitness a learning tool for aggregated big data. This metadata structure means school students are managing digital historic artifacts of the Holocaust from three trusted repositories at their school desk or home computer 212

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Figure 9.2. Screenshot, USC Shoah Foundation IWitness search term interface.

Figure 9.3. Screenshot, USC Shoah Foundation IWitness search filter interface.

and are learning deep, structured search and associated research skills at an early age, including the skills of managing assets, citation, ethical editing, and online publishing. By directing them away from curated content and developing their skills toward ethical editing and video argumentation, the metadata support learning and skills, which have application well beyond the boundaries of the Visual History Archive itself. 213

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Ethics of Access Building for redundancy is part of the ethics of preservation. When the Library of Alexandria burned down in 48 BCE, an irreplaceable body of knowledge was destroyed and lost for all time. The equivalent for the Visual History Archive is a catastrophic data wipe of one or multiple copies of the archive. To protect against this possibility, multisite servers with no live connection and hacker-resistant systems are required. Bit-level preservation, regular migration, and securing the master files on multiple sites all support good preservation policy. The final element of the preservation matrix is usage—the more people who access and use the data, the greater footprint the information has, influencing knowledge in a variety of educational contexts and disciplines. An addition to Presner’s well-structured and highly informed set of reflections on the ethics of the algorithm pertains to the ethics of access. The latter is a derivative of the former, since providing access is not possible without the organization of the data through a structured metadata system. Once the metadata query structure exists, the next ethical dilemma rests in who is afforded the opportunity to carry out those queries, through which channels, and under what circumstances? Opinions on this matter range from “everyone” to “a select few.” Placing the whole data set on a public platform such as YouTube would make the entire archive available to “everyone,” but it would not be searchable or have any audience-specific support tools. Whenever content of this nature is to be made accessible, audience plays a key role in the decision making. “Who” is going to access the content is necessarily followed by “why” and “how.” USC Shoah Foundation’s IWitness platform is delivered to schools free of charge over the public Internet, but it requires registration, and it has audience-specific tools and activities that support ethical and responsible use of the testimony specifically designed for the high school classroom. The ethical boundaries of access applied by USC Shoah Foundation are to support specific audiences—in this case, high school students—with context and tools, to experiment with and evaluate access platforms, and to provide clear community guidelines for ethical use and behavior within the Visual History Archive’s access channels. To that end, Visual History Archive Online was created for the commodity Internet to enable users worldwide to search the metadata of the entire archive. This access has enabled families to search for relatives, 214

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researchers to explore if content they require is available, and for a limited number of testimonies (initially 1,000) to be viewed online. While only 2 percent of the archive was released with the first version of VHA Online, we noticed a sharp increase in responsible use of the archive across a range of countries and language groups. At the time of this writing, the archive metadata are being reached in more than eighty countries. When access is provided to responsible and clearly identified user groups or audiences, it contributes to the preservation effort, as the dissemination of knowledge is the correlate of physical redundancy.

Subject-Specific The ethics of the algorithm can and will be debated in the current moment, particularly as the consequences of the digital age become clearer over time. One consideration is to understand the wishes of the specific group— the survivors themselves—who provided their personal life histories. It is commonly understood that the subjects, in giving their life history, expected that it would be preserved in perpetuity; therefore, it is entirely ethical to digitize and provide digital preservation since it is the expectation of the subjects. It is also commonly understood that survivors wanted people of all walks of life to watch their life histories. In particular, they stressed that they hoped testimonies would be used in education to enhance knowledge and understating of the Holocaust and the learning that comes from it. The flowering of the World Wide Web in the mid1990s during USC Shoah Foundation’s collection and indexing phases presented a new challenge, because public dissemination on a global scale could not have been anticipated or expected, as it is now. When IWitness was launched in its alpha version in 2010, the thousand subjects whose testimonies were to be included in the platform were asked whether they were comfortable with their testimonies being published over the commodity Internet. Of 1,000 notices issued, less than 1 percent of the interviewees requested that their testimony be withdrawn from consideration for Internet-based distribution. The subjects in the Visual History Archive are universally in the later parts of their lives. In their lifetime, they have witnessed the technological revolution of the last eighty years, from having their first telephone installed to owning a smartphone. As a result, their barriers to new technology are very low. This shift in itself is an important consideration when thinking through the ethics of the algorithm. The subjects of the archive 215

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largely expect us to leverage the effectiveness of technology to disseminate the life histories they have bequeathed to us.

Trusting Technology Yvette Nyombayire Rugasaguhunga is part of a new generation who lives with social media and instant communication facilitating the sharing of details of one’s life with vast parts of the globe. One might have expected that she would have been willing to share her testimony with the wider world through digital media, but it was using public channels that actually concerned her the most. The day after her performance onstage, Yvette toured the data center of USC Shoah Foundation, which is a part of the high-performance computing center (HPCC) of University of Southern California Information Technology Services, where the 52,000 testimonies of USC Shoah Foundation are stored. The data center resembles the operations nexus of a sci-fi movie, with scores of screens, hundreds of flashing LEDs, bright white walls, air-conditioned floors, and rows and rows of sevenfoot-high computer racks. Yvette, a liberal arts graduate, an artist and archivist, had little in common with this environment, nor did she have deep technical knowledge about data management, preservation systems, or the scale of data the Visual History Archive represents. To provide a life history to the archive, she did not need to know that there are four petabytes of raw data (that’s more than a million DVDs) stored there. She did not need to know that the collection is preserved at “bit level.”6 Yvette did not need to know that each testimony is quality assured, or that sound or vision errors in the original file are restored to their original or intended state. To provide a life history to the archive, Yvette did not need to understand the data management processes or the indexing system. She did not need to meet the archivists and catalogers who were painstakingly working through each testimony minute by minute; who were listening to the content of the testimony and choosing keywords to describe the content; researching place names, political boundaries, and historical administrative boundaries; deciphering the linguistics of genocide; and creating the hierarchy described in the previous article. Nor did she need to know that now USC Shoah Foundation was adding testimony from a number of genocides, such that the same infrastructure used for Holocaust and World War II–era testimony was being deployed and adapted with the same pinpoint accuracy for the benefit of testimony 216

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relating to her own experience in Rwanda, with new geographies, linguistic policies, and historically specific keywords. After completing her tour, Yvette participated in a lunchtime discussion panel with staff of the Institute, faculty, and interns. Yvette used the opportunity to disclose that as a result of seeing the data center and understanding the integrity associated with bit-level preservation, the detail that goes into access policies, the granularity of the search tools, and the organization of the historical data in a highly systematic and scientifically structured manner, she found the care behind the metadata sufficiently overwhelming to bring her to tears. She made a decision in the data center that she would be willing to give her life history to the archive, precisely because of the trust she could invest in the integrity of the systems. This is not as it may appear—some form of technological utopianism—as machines and their systems are only as competent and ethical as the coders who code them. Yvette’s initial reluctance to trust technology was reversed based on the policies, procedures, and ethics of this particular archive. Because it was built to support, protect, and contextualize her narrative, the technology behind the Visual History Archive gave her the trust she heretofore did not have.

Data Integrity Data integrity is the process by which data of any kind is checked to ensure there is no compromise to the information being stored, transferred, or duplicated. This concern is often a security issue for those who run high-transaction businesses or large data warehouses for financial institutions or governments. In the case of USC Shoah Foundation, “bitlevel” preservation is at the heart of our “data integrity” policy. If you preserve each testimony to the single “bit,” you set a standard for the whole institution in maintaining the integrity of the collection itself, not purely from a technical data integrity perspective, but through all policies related to the collection. This sense of granular integrity, in turn, informs access policy, which governs where copies are placed, how those copies are updated and monitored, which institutions are granted access, how and where testimony is delivered over the Internet, and community guidelines provided to users. All of those policies stem from the fact that the master video file and the video and narrative content are treated together as a unique, digital, historical object.

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10 A “Spatial Turn” in Holocaust Studies? C L AU D I O FO G U

In that Empire, the craft of Cartography attained such perfection that the map of a single province covered the space of an entire city, and the map of the empire itself an entire province. In the course of time, these extensive maps were found somehow wanting, and so the college of cartographers evolved a map of the empire that was of the same scale as the empire and that coincided with it point for point. Less attentive to the study of cartography, succeeding generations came to judge a map of such magnitude cumbersome, and, not without irreverence, they abandoned it to the rigors of sun and rain. In the western deserts, tattered fragments of the map are still to be found, sheltering an occasional beast or beggar; in the whole nation, no other relic is left of the discipline of geography.1 Thus, in 1946, Jorge Luis Borges fictionalized his critique of modern science’s representational fallacy and delivered it at the feet of cartographers: he has them produce a map that matches “point for point” the empire it represents, but for that very reason leads to the demise of the “discipline of geography.” This Borgesian dystopia is not so far from the one painted by theoreticians such as Hayden White about the dangers, for historians, of leaving unexamined their assumptions about the correspondence of historical representation with its object of study (the past). Yet, pace Borges, it seems that geographers have gone much further than historians in freeing themselves from the remnants of a “point for point”—footnote to fact—correspondence theory of truth. Their maps are no longer ana218

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logic, but digital, and dependent on Global Positioning System (GPS) technologies. GPS-generated maps no longer scale themselves to reality, but rather break down space into scales of observation. They do not “cover” space. They are dynamic and interactive, for they invite scholars to transform space into place.2 In fact, the time seems to have come for geographers to lay claims to the historian’s very object of desire, “the past.” And it is not entirely surprising that this challenge would materialize from a collaborative study entitled Geographies of the Holocaust (GoH), coedited by geographers Anne Knowles and Alberto Giordano with historian Tim Cole.3 In GoH, we find not only a refreshing distance from Borges’s surreal tragedy of geography but also an elaboration of the problem of historical representation that speaks very directly to the issues addressed by White in relation to the historical representation of Nazism and the Final Solution.4 GoH is an interdisciplinary multiyear research project that started in 2009 and is in the process of publishing its results in various digital and print forms, after having shown parts of it in digital format on the websites of the Stanford Humanities Lab and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM).5 The epistemological novelty of the project rests not only in studying the Holocaust “from a geographical point of view” but also in its utilization of special software to digitize and organize huge quantities of data into databases that can translate these data into interactive maps. The ensemble of software, database construction, and map visualizations is what practitioners in the field refer to as Geographic Information Systems (GIS). This technology allows for coding—according to attributes selected by the researcher and GPS spatial coordinates—of any data extracted from a large and very diverse corpus of sources like video testimonies, or lists of survivors and victims such as those collected by the USHMM or the Shoah Foundation, as well as unique narratives such as Elie Wiesel’s memoir, along with photographs, documents, maps, and any other sort of documentation present in official or private archives. Thus constituted, the databases for each of GoH’s chapters are accessed through different types of GIS software to produce various types of visualizations according to the questions pursued by the individual researcher, the attributes attached to the data, and, of course, the type of software used to produce the visualizations. While the coordinates attached to each data point translate into specific locations on a base map, the attributes generate layers commensurate to different scales of observation of the phenomenon under study: be it the building of the three Auschwitz camps; 219

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the density and distribution of concentration, labor, and extermination camps over space and time from 1933 to 1945; the daily lives of Jews in the two ghettos of Budapest; the spatial constrains of Wehrmacht actions against civilians in 1941 Belarus; the patterns of arrest and deportation of Italian Jews; or the experience of evacuations from Auschwitz. These are not just examples. They are, in fact, the topics of the seven chapters that make up GoH, and though they do not amount to an exhaustive or definitive geographical synthesis of the Holocaust, comparable to historical syntheses such as Saul Friedländer’s The Years of Extermination, they do offer a compelling theoretical-methodological sample, for they make very clear the challenge that geographical scales intend to bring to historical narratives. As the three editors write in their introduction, “scale” is the “overarching geographical concept that bind[s] together [the] diverse case studies.”6 So, one chapter looks at the continental scale of camps distribution, another at the regional scale of deportations in Italy, another at the subregional one of Wehrmacht operations, and another at that of the city (Budapest), to end with the scale of individual buildings and bodies in the construction of, and evacuations from, Auschwitz. At the level of chapter distribution, then, scale “is operationalized primarily as a conceptual device” that frames “particular aspects of the physical and social world in order to render its structure and meaning intelligible.”7 Yet, the alignment of the metaphorical sense of “scale” when attributed to the Holocaust—widely understood as the paradigmatic off-scale genocide event—with a methodology proposed as uniquely commensurate to the enormous scale of databases such as those of the USHMM, and therefore aimed at breaking down the off-scaleness of both event and data into discrete empirical scales that go from the continental to that of the individual body, suggests something much more daring at play. The epistemological challenge that GoH brings to the field of Holocaust Studies can only be appreciated in relation to White’s prolonged reflections on the relationship between the linguistic turn and the representation of the Final Solution. When, in 1990, Saul Friedländer issued an invitation to Hayden White to reflect on the applicability of his tropological theory of historical discourse to the representation of Nazism and the Final Solution, the ethical stakes of this challenge were clear to everyone involved. The literary conception of the historical text theorized by White seemed to provide no criterion for discriminating between true and false accounts of historical events, or for adjudicating between different interpretations of the same 220

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event, thereby offering no basis for rebuffing either negationist or normalizing accounts of the Final Solution. White’s initial response to this challenge was to argue that the power of the negation of the Holocaust existed only because there were still people (that is, historians) who believed that “the events themselves possess a ‘story’ kind of form and a ‘plot’ kind of meaning.” In this respect, historians shared with negationists the premises that there can be a “literal (rather than figurative) representation of events” and that plots are “inherent in (rather than imposed upon) the facts.”8 If one were to depart instead—as White did—from a purely “figurative” conception of representation, then “the question of its truthfulness would fall under the principles governing our assessment of the truth of fiction.”9 To exemplify his point, White referred to Art Spiegelman’s Maus: A Survivor’s Tale as representing a pure example of figurative realism allegorizing the story of the Holocaust as a “game of cat-and-mouse-and-pig” without losing either in (figurative) realism or emotional grip precisely because “it makes the difficulty of discovering and telling the whole truth about even a small part of [the Holocaust] as much a part of the story as the events whose meaning it is seeking to discover.”10 From this conclusion, White also derived a second—and more radical—line of defense, by indicating “modernist” modes of representation, such as Primo Levi’s prose or poetry, as uniquely appropriate to the representation of Nazism and the Final Solution, because modernist realism was based on the rejection of any “literal” conception of narrative and the experimentation with all shades of figuration, from Barthian “middle-voicedness” to surrealism.11 Yet, the confrontation was not over. Picking up on a third strand of his argument consisting of the undeveloped assertion that “events such as the Holocaust . . . are themselves modernist in nature,” in 1996, White reached the conclusion that modernist modes of representation are solely appropriate to the representation of twentieth-century “modernist” events from the Great War to the present. For White, post–World War I events resist all “inherited categories and conventions for assigning meanings to events” and therefore demand to be represented according to the modernist modes of representation developed by artists in response to them since neither “commonsensical techniques utilized in conventional historical inquiry” nor “any of the several varieties of quantitative analysis of the kind practiced in the social sciences, capture the novelty of such events.”12 When White wrote his essay on the modernist event, Geographies of the Holocaust was fifteen years in the future, but reading it today one 221

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cannot escape the impression that the latter was written with the intent to test and challenge White’s theory of the modernist event by providing just the sort of “quantitative analysis” capable of capturing the “novelty of the Holocaust.” In fact, GoH shares with the modernist spirit of the linguistic turn a critique of narrative history—despite repeated references to a complementary role13—as far too “static” and “monumental” a form of representation.14 And it can hardly be mere coincidence that in their introduction, Knowles, Cole, and Giordano refer explicitly to Maus as the model their readers should keep in mind while reading GoH to appreciate its self-reflexivity.15 Yet, these more or less explicit references to White’s confrontation with the historical representation of the Holocaust do not make the “spatial turn” into a mere spin-off of the “linguistic” turn, nor its progeny. Rather than for its exemplifying the figurative basis of all language, GoH praises Maus for “the coexistence of text and visuals,” and for toggling between the “past” and “present” of narration. And its critique of narrative refers to the latter’s inadequacy to reveal the “patterns” that GIS “visualizations” unveil, rather than to its representational inadequacy toward the modernist tenor of the event—Holocaust.16 Ultimately, GoH editors and authors profess themselves to be more, rather than less, married to “empiricism” and “induction” when compared to mainstream historians.17 Moreover, they are not the ones who are called on to defend their practices and theories from a challenge issued to them by Holocaust studies practitioners, as it had been the case for White in 1990. They are the ones who question the limits of narrativehistorical representation from within the social sciences, and in the name of a “spatial turn” in the humanities. The Holocaust, therefore, becomes the terrain on which they stake their ambitious call to spatialize the social sciences and the humanities. In so doing, their work raises not only fascinating epistemological questions but also, and maybe primarily, new ethical issues that are likely to characterize the confrontation of Holocaust culture as a whole with digital forms of representation in decades to come.

The Spatial Turn and the Modernist Event It is rarely the case that the first words of a text carry so much weight as those with which Knowles, Cole, and Giordano introduce their book and research project to the reader: 222

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The Holocaust destroyed communities, displaced millions of people from their homes, and created new kinds of places where prisoners were concentrated, exploited as labor, and put to death in service of the Third Reich’s goal to create a racially pure German empire. We see the Holocaust as a profoundly geographical phenomenon, though few scholars have analyzed it from that perspective. We hope this book will change that by demonstrating how much insight and understanding one can gain by asking spatial questions and employing spatial methods to investigate even the most familiar subjects in the history of the Holocaust.18 The repetition of this “profound” connection between the “Holocaust” and space in different ways but in virtually every chapter of GoH suggests that this is not just a point of departure; it is an ontological statement. For the GoH collective, the very nature of the Holocaust was at some essential level spatial, for “the Holocaust was implemented through space not just in space.”19 And this was so also for Nazism, whose “vision,” “policies,” and “resulting actions on the ground were” for GoH editors, “all manifestations of the powerfully geographical notion of territoriality.”20 Hence, their call to examine the event “from an explicitly spatial perspective,” in order to visualize its “spatial logic” and “dynamics,” and to contextualize it as belonging to “what is coming to be called the spatial humanities.”21 In this respect, the ontological connection between the Holocaust and space posited by GoH editors interacts very directly with White’s notion of the modernist event by mobilizing Joseph Frank’s early definition of modernism as “spatial form” (1945). Frank famously argued that the modernist novel had developed away from the temporal form of narrative and toward a “spatial form” that matched the synchronistic experience of modernity, and asked “its readers to suspend the process of individual reference temporarily until the entire pattern of internal references can be apprehended as a unity”—that is, “spatially, in a moment of time, rather than as a sequence.”22 For Frank, this did not mean an elimination of time in the modernist novel, but a temporary suspension of temporality, lasting long enough to allow the emergence of spatial patterning that makes sequence a function of its development rather than the narrative backbone of historical representation. As if taking a cue from Frank, GoH editors and authors posit the discovery, identification, and visualization of “patterns” as the main end 223

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goal of all their analyses.23 The very frequency with which the term pattern appears in the text—indicating the result of the GIS visualizations— leaves no doubt concerning its intended replacement of the temporal language of “developments,” “progress,” and “processes” that characterizes historical studies.24 In fact, in GoH, narrative itself is detemporalized. The primary narrative line in GoH does not refer to the events of the Holocaust, but to the dialogic relationship of the texts to their paratexts—the GIS maps, the charts, the explanation boxes, and all other image texts that accompany every chapter. The reader is invited to shuttle between text and GIS visualizations, for the former’s narrative is, above all, a procedural story about the coming into performance of the latter. The story usually starts with the construction of the database; continues with explicit remarks concerning its partiality, including the exclusion of data that could not be reduced to unambiguous entities; and, little by little, gets to the production of the first GIS. This is how, for example, Anne Knowles and her collaborators put it in the chapter on “Mapping the SS Concentration Camps”: Because database development became our primary task during [the] first phase of the camps project, we have not yet been able to pursue all of our initial research questions. Exploratory mapping also raised new questions that have yielded some unexpected findings. . . . We begin with the broad spatial story of the expansion of concentration camps across Germany and beyond. . . . We also relate the temporal patterns of camp openings to major phases in Nazi policy. In the next section we compare spatial and social characteristics. . . . Each of these comparisons reveals another geography that raises historical questions.25 Clearly, in GoH, narrative, analysis, and interpretation are joined at the hip in the dialogue between text and paratext: all GIS visualizations are only as telling as the database preparation allows them to be; yet, they are also digital interpretations of the data that need to be analyzed visually by the researcher, who, on the basis of this analysis, will then derive new research questions leading to new GIS, and so on and so forth, in a virtual loop between text and paratext, which is itself a major part of the story told in the text. Narrative does not carry linear temporality. Rather, it loops back and forth between text and paratext, writing and visualizing, so that GoH may be said to foreground a navigational conception of narrative quite unlike that of mainstream historiography. In fact, when 224

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it comes to narrating “how things essentially happened,” GoH authors usually summarize events in a few paragraphs,26 and either make direct narratives of events derivative of GIS images, or highlight their iconicity by referring them to spatial tropes such as “the universe of the camps,” the Nazis as “doctors of space,” or their “hunt for Jews” in Italy.27 To summarize, each chapter in GoH has two narrative lines going on: one is entirely self-reflexive and procedural, referring to the process of scholarly construction, analysis and interpretation of the geographical visualizations; the other is historical, referring to the events under analysis, and amounting to little more than a Wikipedia entry, or metaphorized in spatial images. Despite repeated proclamations that GoH intends to complement historical studies of the Holocaust, the message it sends could not be clearer: linear-temporal historical narrative is inadequate to capture the modernist “spatial form” of the Holocaust. By contrast, the self-referential toggling between texts, digital databases, and paratextual visualization enacted in every chapter of GoH perform modernist strategies of visualization that perfectly enact the “temporary suspension of temporality” theorized by Frank, and, insofar as they are “in” the process of creating the data, databases, and visualizations and expose their choices, contingency in the process, they also adopt a sort of “middle-voicedness” advocated by White as the modernist style most appropriate for the representation of the Holocaust.28 They are not just “outside” observers (neutral), nor are they entirely within as “actors,” but somewhere in between. In White’s own words, they are “interior to the action,” like the subject of the middle voice in Ancient Greek verbs, and their narratives prevent the coagulation of clear “oppositions . . . between agency and patiency, subjectivity ad objectivity,” that we customarily associate with “any version of realism.”29 With GoH, then, the “spatial turn” does meet the “linguistic turn” on the terrain of a common dismissal of narrative as the carrier of an obsoletely linear notion of temporality, and with the adoption of a social scientific version of the modernist middle voice. At the same time, GoH resolutely rejects the direction taken by White toward coupling modernist realism with modernist reality. At its core, GoH is designed to conquer precisely White’s notion of the off-scaleness of the Holocaust by turning “scale” into the troping device of scaling. Scaling is the strategy performed by these texts to address the question of ethical legitimacy in their response to the off-scaleness of the event itself. To the bewildering amount of resources poured by the Nazis into 225

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their genocidal project, as well as the huge number of victims, bystanders, and perpetrators involved, GIS scientists respond first of all by coding information into huge databases. Then, rather than deploying their evidentiary might into a full-scale treatment of the Holocaust, Knowles, Cole, and company organize their chapters according to scales of observation, and, internally to each chapter, they show that the results of their analyses are the fruits of differential observations among the different spatial-temporal layers within a chosen scale of observation. Scaling therefore leads to layering, which in turn depends on attributes, which yield variables, in a frenzy of dynamic interactions that may leave the uninitiated reader bewildered, but not lost. No matter the chapter-scale one is reading at, the message is always the same: “scaling connects!” And it connects not only the dots, pixels, and polygons on the GIS maps but also the researcher and the reader to the mental world of the perpetrators. In fact, notwithstanding explicit warnings to the reader not to “read our maps as the totalizing gaze of the perpetrator,” GoH’s authors and editors are also quite conscious that their data “reproduce, at least to some extent, the mind-set of the perpetrators,” and their “analys[es] privilege the perspective of perpetrators.”30 Their maps and visualizations might not be as static and monumentalizing as narrative representations, but they carry the reader in a more uncomfortable gray zone, in which the reader-viewer’s own positionality is closer to that of a Nazi architect peering over a map of Auschwitz (as shown in a photograph published on page 166) than to the more neutral one of the bystander. It is therefore at the level in which GoH makes a case for replacing (historical) representation—in either realist or modernist modes—with what the authors call (geographical) visualizations that we encounter the most courageous moves and, simultaneously, the most disturbing aspects of the whole enterprise.

From Representation to Visualization GoH editors start from the premise that “geography is a visual way of knowing,” but also specify that GIS software is a “modeling” tool that in no way claims to “describe the reality of experience.”31 Hence, the maps and visualizations that have been published in the book are but a fraction of the many more that have characterized the process of analysis, and in that respect, the ones published always refer primarily back to those invisible steps rather than directly to the reality they model. In addition, 226

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the authors consistently and explicitly highlight the limits of their visualizations, specifying that their databases are themselves works “of interpretative scholarship,” or highlighting what their “mapping does not show.”32 Thus, their stated awareness of a similarity between their efforts to impose consistent categories and rules, and the Nazis’ efforts to categorize the people and places they wished to control, is put into the service of showing precisely the gap between reality and any controlling and categorizing gaze. In other words, the subtleness of scaling in GoH is no mere scientific wizardry. It seeks to enact an anti-Nazi level of imaginary that forces the reader to embody a Nazi-perpetrator perspective in order to become aware of how limited, undynamic, monumentalizing, and static this perspective really was, and also, to see the victim, by ascertaining just how “visible” the victim really was to all. What is not afforded is to assume the neutral “bystander” perspective in which narrative historiography generally positions the reader. And, in this conscious and unapologetic conflation of reader and perpetrator’s positionality, GoH makes clear the epistemological challenge that the digital-geographical conception of visualization brings to the analogic one of historical representation, as well as the ethical stakes of this challenge. As Donna Haraway recognized long ago, maps can be thought of either as tropes that “mark the nonliteral quality of being and of language,” or as “fetishes” that “obscure the constitutive tropic nature of themselves and the world,” “make things seem clear and under control,” and project a mythic image “of figure-free science and technique.”33 Similarly, Bruno Latour sees cartographic and analogical maps as caught between an “iconophilic understanding of science,” that is the attitude of “respect for the series of transformations for which each image is only a provisional frame,” and the “idolatry of science,” that imagines its referent to be present in the image.34 Yet, he has credited GIS maps with having heralded the dawn of a “navigational” understanding of representation in science that has done away with the “mimetic” view that held sway for centuries.35 For Latour, this shift is momentous because digital maps rely on a sequenced, “signpost to signpost” trajectory that goes from the territory mapped (the real) through “many successive stepping stones in order to achieve the miracle of reference by making sure that there is as little a gap as possible between two successive links.”36 Contrary to the two-steps working of the analogic—which makes mimesis an article of faith rather than correspondence—it is only with the digital that, for Latour, the “correspondence theory of truth” has finally found 227

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“sturdy ground,” for “it is much safer to fumble from one signpost to the next than to attempt to jump daringly from words to world or from maps to territory.”37 In Haraway’s terms, GIS maps are quintessentially tropic visualizations that alert us to the “contingency, finitude, and difference” of being, nonfetishized science that “indexes cartographies of struggle.”38 I share Latour’s and Haraway’s enthusiasm for the antimimetic nature of digital mapping, and I would further propose that the navigational relationship between the maps and the paratextual “boxes” of explanation of GIS methodology offered in every chapter perfectly matches and is greatly enhanced by the scaling architecture of the book I have just referred to. Quite aside from the repetitive appeals that some authors make to the empiricist premises of their enterprise, on the whole, GoH explicitly advances a navigational view of the social sciences.39 In the box related to the Budapest ghettos in Cole’s chapter, for example, we learn that the construction of his GIS involved at least six signposting steps, from the digitization of a base map of the city as it was in 1944, through its georectification via Google Earth, to the fieldwork involved in identifying streets and address numbers in contemporary Budapest, to the digital layering according to temporal and spatial attributes that emerged from the analysis of the initial visualizations.40 As a result of these navigational mappings, Cole and collaborators were able to visualize, for example, an “estimate of how many times streets were used for walking from Jewish-designated residences to the closest market hall” on “June 22, 1944” (Figure 10.1).41 Clearly, this map calls the reader’s attention much more to the stepby-step process that has taken her from the first map published in the chapter, visualizing “Jewish-designated residences, June to November 1944,” to those visualizing kernel density analyses of “residential distribution,” than to the referential relationship between map and territory. Thus virtualized, the bidimensional GIS maps published alongside tables and other paratextual elements, for the most part, escape both visual fetishism and idolatry of science, offering instead an iconophilic experience of reference, without falling into postmodern simulacrum or reverting to analogic correspondence. Take, for example, one of the maps showing the spatial-temporal distribution of concentration camps in chapter 1 (Figure 10.2).42 The caption highlights the navigational status of the map and its incompleteness, specifying that the location of the camps illustrated by the dots on the map is “developed from the Camps database created for the USHMM 228

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Figure 10.1. Estimate of how many times streets were used when walking from Jewish-designated residences to the closest market hall in central Budapest, designated on June 22, 1944.

Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, vol. 1.”43 The use of dots of different sizes and vivacious colors to indicate different camp systems makes the iconophilic status of this GIS obvious to any reader-viewer. In fact, when one looks at this colorful GIS for the first time, one may experience something akin to the “frisson” that Saul Friedländer described so cogently in his Reflections of Nazism, as characterizing the reaction of readers and viewers to what he saw as a “new discourse” on Nazism, emerging in the late 1960s.44 Yet, the homology Friedländer posited between the mixing of “kitsch aesthetics and death” in the new discourse and the “kitsch of death” characteristic of Nazi discourse itself, is not what is at play here.45 In itself, the experience of this frisson does not compromise the ethical status of this GIS visualization. On the contrary—and in parallel with the primary narrative—the frisson alerts the reader that he or she is being temporarily invited to adopt the perpetrator 229

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Figure 10.2. Location of camps administered by the SS, developed from the camps database created for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, volume 1. Large dots represent main camps; smaller dots are subcamps. Territorial boundaries as of June 30, 1943.

positionality of looking at maps, but does not collapse the two perspectives. The shapes on the map may resemble those of the Europe observed by Nazi generals in their war rooms or extermination conferences, but the scaled bright dots covering these shapes are clearly not the same as those one would expect to see on a Nazi map. For, as uncomfortable as this positionality may feel, the reader’s toggling between text and paratext delivers a dynamic navigational experience that puts the frisson to work. Rather than ethical uneasiness, the result may be likened to an 230

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acute awareness of the distance between the navigational world of contemporary social science under the sign of the digital, and the analogical imagination of the Nazis. At its best, then, GoH gives its reader the frisson of beating the Nazis at their own game: it shows them enslaved to a static and controlling gaze, subdued by their own idolatry of mimesis, and trapped in an ideology that sought to cover the territory of their empire like Borges’s map. This is certainly a risky ethical position for both authors and readers, but one that I would argue GoH is capable of pulling off most of the time, but not always.

Visualization and the Return to Experience GoH’s iconophilia extends far beyond the valorization of visualizations as navigational tools. Even before a reader is introduced to the first GIS map, discussed earlier, he or she is welcomed into the world of GoH visualizations by the image shown in Figure  10.3, which introduces the chapter entitled “Mapping the SS Concentration Camps.”46 After making out the unusual shape of England on the lower left of the image, and reading the name “Buchenwald” jutting out from the hemispheric visualization of continental Europe, even the uninitiated reader—for whom names such as Vaivara (upper left) or Riga might mean next to nothing—would recognize in this image a Google Earth–like projection of the Nazi camps system that is the subject of this chapter. On closer scrutiny, an attentive reader would probably estimate (correctly) that the relative size, color, and darkness of each darting name corresponds to a major camp or subcamp, so that, even in the absence of a caption, one may conclude that this is not an arbitrary image, but a GIS visualization itself, different from the one discussed earlier (Figure 10.2), even if based on the same data. But does this make it scientific, empirical, and factual? What, then, about the wavy systems of dark, and darker clouds hovering over and in the midst of the darting names? Is this a GIS projection, too? And, if so, of what? The density of death in each camp? The point is that it really does not matter in the least whether GIS software is responsible for every single element of this image, because its adherence to Friedländer’s definition of the “kitsch of death” could not be more literal. It surely is arresting, provokes uneasiness—at least in this viewer—and, positioned where it is, cannot but be aimed at provoking the frisson denounced by Friedländer. And, just as surely, it presents the viewer with an amalgamation of “on the one hand, an appeal to harmony, 231

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Figure 10.3. This image projects the SS camps database onto an obliquely viewed globe, with a base of physical terrain and graphic effects added by Erik B. Steiner. Main camps are shown in large type, subcamps in small black type, as if rising from the earth.

to emotional communion at the simplest and most immediate level”—the names of the camps seen from a stratospheric perspective devoid of all historical specificity in favor of a literalization of “universal” reference— and “on the other, solitude and terror”: taken as a whole, the darting names caught in tornado-like dark clouds reinforce the apocalyptic connotation of this scene as one of a massive migration of souls.47 Furthermore, once the reader reaches page 23 in the chapter, he or she will find the textual image that functions as the analog to the one just described: “the universe of the camps.”48 This is a self-referential move that alerts us to a very direct, though implicit, confrontation between GoH scholars and Friedländer’s theses. In fact, the “universe of the camps” image is not an isolated case. All six images introducing the six case study chapters present a similar combination of elements: an equally explicit search for images that have nothing to do with the canon of Holocaust imagery, and are startling in their novelty and arresting in their daring. Five of 232

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Figure 10.4. The base photograph of the Krupki killing site, taken by Waitman Wade Beorn, with additional imagery layered in by Erik B. Steiner.

them are probably the (modified) result of some GIS software visualization, but one of them is surely not, and the reader cannot but consider this one as a hypericon, that is, an image that speaks about the nature of visualization.49 Page 88 in GoH shows a field and a wood of conifers in the background, under a cloudy Eastern European sky, (Figure 10.4). The figure of a man emerges from the field in the foreground, but he is not alone: suddenly, other figures appear, faintly emerging from the background while being almost reabsorbed by it. They are out of scale, static, semitransparent; some wear Nazi uniforms while others do not; some carry guns; one looks straight at the reader; all of them are ghosts or, better, “phantasms,” as Friedländer would appropriately name them.50 One could have hardly conjured up a more fitting image for that desire to break through a certain “blockage” in the representation of Nazism by “giving free rein to the imaginary,” which Friedländer posited as the motivation inspiring the “new discourse” on Nazism.51 And, had this book been published before 1984, there is little doubt that, for this figure alone, Friedländer would have had to add “scholarship” to literature and film as participating in reviving the Nazi passion for kitsch aesthetics. But, appearing as it does, today, in a book that claims to be part of a “spatial” turn toward visualization in scholarship, and insists, in every chapter, on the 233

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status of geography as a “visual way of knowing,” one cannot escape the impression that this image, along with the other five chapter-heading images, is explicitly designed to test the complacency of traditional Holocaust scholars to the moral vigilance demanded by Friedländer in 1984.52 In other words, these are images that speak of the pleasure and the desire to visualize, and the yearning for presence that lies beneath the so-called spatial turn. If the image of the phantasms of the Einsatzgruppen inhabiting the idyllic (killing) fields of Eastern Europe on page 88 tells us that there is only a porous boundary between itself—a purely imaginary projection—and the aestheticizing visualizations based on “data” that introduce the other five chapters of the book, this boundary is dissolved inside the chapters as well. This is a gradual process; most images in the beginning chapters are firmly tied to GIS software visualizations, but beginning with chapter 4, we start getting images responding to what the authors call “figurative visual symbology,” “conceptual symbology,” or, more simply, “visual symbology,”53 as well as archival images, full-page photographs of places and spaces as they look today—including a completely nondescript field covered by snow with the caption “Pszczyna environs. Photo by Marc J. Musurovsky,” which may have more appropriately been found hanging in a photo-art gallery.54 Quite appropriately, the climax of this visual essay about the porous borders of visualization takes place in the final image of the book (Figure 10.5).55 Its caption is worth quoting in its entirety: The rope of history. This rope presents a bridging of sculptural, cartographic, and historical inquiries. It is a sensory reflection, grounded in objective geography and direct testimony, on the experience of a community (of both prisoners and guards) being bound, woven, knotted, and frayed over the course of a traumatic foot journey.56 What we find in this caption is in nuce the schizophrenic movement of GoH’s iconophilia caught between repeated and ever-emptier declarations of being grounded “in objective geography” or, more generally, “empiricism,” and a much more powerful yearning for the sensory appeal of presence, that is, for gaining access to “experience.”57 This is a path that can be retroactively traced through a series of statements in which GoH authors openly declare their intention to first “uncover the often fastchanging experiences of the victims” and “inmates,” and then “intuit vi234

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Figure 10.5. “The rope of history” represents a bridging of sculptural, cartographic, and historical inquiries.

sual experiences that are not recorded in any document or captured in any historical photograph.”58 So that when we encounter the last methodological box of the book—tellingly entitled “Spotlight on Methods: Looking at the Limits of Representation”—we are not surprised to find the definitive conflation of mapping and experience in a discussion of the methodologies necessary to “map experience rigorously,” to “understand evacuations as embodied and sensory experience,” to reveal “the evolving texture of experience.”59 Here, the yearning for accessing experience expresses itself not only in a 180-degree reversal to an instrumental (rather than navigational) conception of GIS technology, which is subordinated to the visualization of experience, but also in the valorization of “figurative symbologies” because they “provoke strong emotional responses in us and the audiences with whom we shared our work.”60 It is just a small step, then, for the authors to present the “rope of history” image as their most “expressive visualization” and a “metaphorical image [that] crosses the boundary that usually separates art from analytical scholarship.”61 One can appreciate the intellectual honesty of this declaration, but one should not shy away from also remarking that the “spatial turn” in Holocaust scholarship operated by GoH may have much less to do with ontological or epistemological propositions about space and time than with a “return” to “experience” motivated by the desire to break free from both the “limits of representation” and the “debates” about them. For GoH authors, in fact, these debates need to be “updat[ed]” in relation to 235

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“new genres such as cartography and digital media.”62 But what this means, for them, is opening up “opportunities for also engaging with the representation of affective limits—the limits of what is revealed and of what can be expressed from the otherwise hidden contours of mobile trauma” in order to arrive at a “geography of traumatic experience.”63 Clearly, for GoH authors, the time has come to remove the very phrase “the limits of representation” from the intellectual context of the “linguistic turn” from which it had risen, in order to attach it to the potential of visualization to overcome those limits and give us access to experience. At first sight, GoH may seem to realize the hopes expressed by Martin Jay in his Downcast Eyes for an overcoming of the “antiocularcentrism” that dominated twentieth-century French thought and underpinned the ‘linguistic turn.’64 The iconophilic celebration of “synoptic” vision, the devaluation of narrative, and the trust in the technological promise of the digital to release us from representation into the era of visualization, make GoH a quintessential model of what Jay calls “synoptic” or “polyscopic” scholarship.65 And yet, even Jay, after almost 600 pages of critical analysis and denunciation of the anti-Enlightenment attack on vision brought on by Foucault and poststructuralism, had to warn his reader that “for all its hyperbolic rhetoric, for all its inclination to demonize, the antiocularcentric discourse has successfully posed substantial and troubling questions about the status of visuality in the dominant cultural traditions of the West.”66 These questions, Jay has argued in a more recent book, pertain specifically to the status of “experience” in Western metaphysics.67 The poststructuralist attack on vision was waged in order to unmask the tendency of the visual to stand for the selfsameness of the subject of knowledge and the chimera of an unmediated access to the object of knowledge. Behind both antiocularcentrism and the assertion that “experience,” like all reality, is discursively constructed, that is, “only a function of the counter-concepts that are posed against it in a discursive field,” there always stood, as Derrida put it, the metaphysical yearning for “the theme of presence.”68 And, on this score, Jay finds that the antiocular masters of suspicion did not simply dismiss “experience,” or make language “all-determining,” but rather helped to recast “experience,” correctly, as a field of discursive tension, of ineradicable oscillation between mediation and immediacy, while at the same time debunking the traditional claim that experience is narrative.69 Quite clearly, GoH does not seem to have heeded to the caution that Jay’s intertwined exploration of vision and experience recommended 236

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against any dismissal of the poststructuralist critique of presence. On the contrary, the visual metanarrative enacted by GoH’s visualizations inserts this book squarely in the “anti-linguistic” turn to “experience” that has marked both the theory and practice of history in the past two decades.70 Forgetting the caution announced in the introduction, GoH visualizations direct the reader toward both the understanding of “experience” as something directly accessible to the historian (“the rope of history”) and the idea that historians have the tools to reconstruct the experience of past actors. The reader is first introduced to the proposition that GIS technology can lead to a “mapping [of] experience,” but ends up contemplating questions such as “how can one map experience rigorously, or convey the power of emotion in the context of motion and stasis?”71 In between, GoH authors go from claiming to be inferring the “experience of inmates” from the “nature and timing” of the construction of concentration camps, to “intuit[ing the] visual experiences” of inmates, all the way to analyzing “the experiences of concentration camp prisoners” in order to “explore what evacuations meant to the prisoners,” or how movement within the camps “affect[ed] individuals’ prospects for survival and escape.”72 Symptomatically, the authors of the chapter on evacuation from Auschwitz quite openly connect their search for a “rigorous” mapping of experience to proposing their “visualizations” as “alternatives of historians’ written analyses.”73 It is certainly not the case that any talk of “experience” in contemporary scholarship is to be condemned because some adherents to the linguistic turn have proposed that all reality, subjective or objective, is linguistically constructed. In fact, as Jay reminds us, the “auratic term ‘experience’ ” is notoriously “one of the most obscure we have,” making it a catchall word that very few authors or scholars can avoid.74 Even poststructuralist thinkers such as Bataille, Barthes, and Foucault, found a place for experience in their work.75 More to the point, Alon Confino has praised Friedländer’s Years of Extermination precisely for its use of Jewish testimonies to add “experientiality” to his analysis and interpretation.76 According to Confino, these are “startling in their visualness” and “endow the book with (what we feel is) a presence of the past.”77 In fact, comparing GoH to Friedländer’s Years of Extermination helps us see that the issue raised by the replacement of representation by visualization in GoH is only marginally epistemological. What strikes the reader of GoH is the “ethical dissonance” between the navigational narrative of the analysis and the fetishism of presence 237

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erupting from the visual apparatus and the barrage of rhetorical questions mobilized by the authors. As Wulf Kansteiner has argued, Friedländer’s insertion of the diarists’ voices in his synthetic panorama of the Final Solution is also highly self-referential, for it highlights the “potentially debilitating conflict between explanation and emotion,” in Friedländer’s own narrative, while at the same time “systematically subvert[ing] the kind of uplifting survivor story that informs so many mass-media representations of the Holocaust.”78 By contrast, GoH seems to go in the opposite direction: instead of the voices of the lost, of the victims, of their sufferings and death, we get an unquenchable search for the life and presence of survival. We sense this yearning lurking beneath the GIS maps and tables that in every chapter seek to evaluate, visualize, and qualify the best “placement” for survival, be it in the Italian camps, the Budapest ghetto, or Auschwitz, all the way to the evacuation/death marches. But we also find it in smaller narrative details, such as the notation that the “fluidity of a construction site” in Birkenau could offer inmates “an opportunity to save themselves,” or at least a “precious moment of privacy.”79 And, once again, the apotheosis of this yearning for experience, presence, and survival takes place in the last chapter, in which the authors feel the need to distinguish between “evacuations” from Auschwitz, defined as “administrative undertakings,” and “the impact of evacuations as death marches.”80 The latter, they specify, represent “experiential markers of forced movement,” so that the very “term death march” is presented as “an evolutionary signifier of the physical and emotional assault of the evacuations on the already vulnerable body through direct exposure to military fronts and landscapes of violence.”81 The theoretical overkill of this sentence signals an inability to confront the horror of death that can only be described as “cognitive dissonance,” the very concept the authors mobilize to describe the strident clash between the actions and the words of surviving perpetrators. Paraphrasing only a little, GoH authors are prone to “change either their beliefs or their words to bring their mental and physical states into congruence.”82 Appearing in the same chapter that ends with the image of “the rope of history,” the emotional refusal to give in to the march of death in the Final Solution brings ethical and cognitive dissonance in line with each other, thereby raising red flags that cannot be ignored, precisely because of the epistemological daring of the enterprise. The idea of breaking down the “spatial form” of the Holocaust into scales of observation, and of performing a navigational mode of both 238

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verbal and visual representation to deconstruct the analogic gaze of empire (Nazi and otherwise), is an accomplishment that not only bestows on GoH the qualification of modernist, but also highlights unsuspected continuities between the linguistic and the spatio-digital turns in the humanities. The crisis of narrativity—belabored by White and so many others for decades—was always, in the last analysis, about the prolonged crisis of historical temporality that some, like Marc Bloch, had already identified as a diffused mentality that he named “modernism,” and defined as a heightened sense of “contemporaneousness” possessing the mind of post–World War I generations, and that others, like Walter Benjamin, equated to “the end of experience” tout court.83 While debates in academia would rage on over the epistemological stakes of the linguistic turn, the detemporalization of history would gradually find expression in all digital forms of historical “simulations,” from digital archives to historical websites to video games.84 Fully in tune with this digital spatialization, GoH brings the social sciences to match the arts of our time, to produce, at last, an updated idea of history that puts to rest that “combination of late-nineteenth-century social science and mid-nineteenth-century art,” which, according to White, had produced the narrative-realist model of historical representation and motivated both his critique and much of the “linguistic turn” that ensued from it.85 This is why, when compared to the ontological claim put forth in the introduction and the modernist tenor of the whole enterprise, GoH’s offer of visualizations granting direct access to experience, and its yearning for turning the Holocaust into a story of survival, cannot be dismissed as peripheral. The oscillation is too wide and the equilibrium too precarious to prevent a fall into kitsch and fetishism. To conclude in cinematic terms, at its best, GoH promises to project the field of Holocaust studies toward an Inglourious Basterds version of historical scholarship; at its worse, however, we are yanked out of camouflage, wish fulfillment, and self-reflexive moves, to be thrown back into the romantic worldview of Spielberg’s Schindler’s List.

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11 Interview with Anne Knowles, Tim Cole, Alberto Giordano, and Paul B. Jaskot, Contributing Authors of Geographies of the Holocaust

Claudio Fogu: My first question has to do with the relation you see between your work and the issues that were raised by the 1990 conference on the limits of representation in Holocaust studies and, specifically, the need expressed not only by Hayden White but also others after his intervention, to go beyond traditional forms of narrative, and towards modernist ones, in representing the Holocaust. While often stressing the intent to produce a companion to narrative representation in your book, you repeatedly set spatial visualizations and geographic patterns as alternatives to representations and narratives of temporal development typical of historical discourse. And you explicitly contend that your work is to be seen as representative of the socalled spatial turn in the humanities. It seems to me that there is much more than complementarity between space and time going on here. How do you conceive of the relationship between the spatial and the linguistic turns in the humanities in view of this common critique, and almost antipathy for narrative? What are the ethical stakes that you see in the challenge that your work issues to traditional historiography? Paul Jaskot: If I’m understanding correctly the trajectory of your question, our book, Geographies of the Holocaust, seems to position itself between the two historiographies (traditional and modernist) you refer to, in that our representation of spaces confronts, in the first instance, the linguistic turn in debates about representation. Our spatial visualizations are a kind of a materialization of the sources. That is, 240

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they provide a material critique of the concept of the Holocaust as “a narrative.” They lay a claim to a material history that has a sense of moral truth about it, I would argue. But a related second part of that claim is that visualizations are also a disciplinary critique of the limitations in the textual evidence that has been used up to now. These limitations have not allowed us to have a fuller sense of the complexity of the human in Hannah Arendt’s terms.1 Anne Knowles: In addition to what Paul has said, I’m reminded of Barbara Stafford’s argument that history as a discipline has mostly privileged text, has gone to textual evidence, and has valorized written text as the acme of scholarly achievement and representation.2 Our group sees an enormous absence of the use of visual evidence in historical research and argumentation, and we see tremendous value in using visual evidence and visual argument for representing aspects of the Holocaust that are literally inaccessible and invisible without them. What I’m particularly thinking of in the Auschwitz and SS camps chapters is the value of revealing patterns that one can only see by using visual analysis.3 Tim Cole: I think, in some ways, space has been looked at in the context of the Holocaust over the past fifteen or twenty years. If you think of Andrew Charlesworth’s pioneering work, he pointed to spatiality as being central to the Holocaust and there’s other work as well, as we discuss in our introduction.4 What our book brings to the table is a critical methodological intervention in its visual apparatus. The maps themselves are the key critical intervention we make. Adopting a different repertoire of representation which is nontextual is absolutely central to the book. We always talked about the maps and visuals being part of the process rather than a final product and, in the book, we talk quite a lot about these eureka moments when we see things that we don’t see from the textual documents. What is interesting in the book is that the documents used are normal documents for historians so there’s nothing unusual about the vast majority of source material. It has been used quite routinely in Holocaust studies. What I suppose is our intervention is what we then do with the source material, which is to visualize it. And that is critical. Alberto Giordano: You also mentioned in your question spatial patterns and the spatial turn, and both are part of our project. We are trying to 241

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understand the spatiality of this event. I’m a geographer interested in a geographical approach to Holocaust studies, but when I started reading the academic literature about the Holocaust, I realized that there was very little geography. A lot of what I read was about events in time, but without a real clear sense of space, of the importance of where the events took place. Was it in a neighborhood? A nation? Or was it in a city? Did the spatial scale at which a certain event occurred matter? So, in addition to the value of visualizing per se, we often use visualization to uncover and explain spatial patterns. Todd Presner: Your extensive work in data visualization follows an argument put forward by Johanna Drucker that we need to take seriously graphical forms of knowledge and visual epistemologies.5 Of course, all the visualizations are constructs based on interpretive decisions that you, as researchers, made in the process of creating them. Nevertheless, in your book, there seems to be a continuum of sorts between what might be called “factual visualizations” (rooted in what we now take to be factually existing data) and “fictional visualizations” that tend to be more speculative, such as “what could have been,” or are overtly aesthetic like “the rope of history” [see Chapter 10, Figure 10.5], an artistic representation of a frayed rope based on, or inspired by, the very real historical events of the evacuations and the death marches from the camps. I wonder if you can talk a little bit about this borderland between visualization tending toward the factual and visualization tending toward the fictional. Knowles: Yes, great question. Those graphics developed partly out of our frustrations with the limits of our factual evidence, such as exactly when and where concentration camps were created, and when buildings were built at Auschwitz, which only told us a tiny bit of what we wanted to know. So, bringing in the human element of sight became important for Paul and me. It was partly where we started: we wanted to know how did sight control or what were the limits of sight within Auschwitz. That’s why we wanted to build a 3-D model. Then our coauthor Chester Harvey was actually able to build a simulated three-dimensional environment and create a visualization that suggested what a guard could and couldn’t see, which prompted new questions for us. Jaskot: I’m an art historian, so I’m kind of the odd man out here. I’m in a discipline in which we argue that images or representations are dif242

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ferent from texts, and do something different. It is not just a question of narrative; and here is where I think that Friedländer—as much as I love his work—treats film too much like a text, when we know it is not; otherwise, we would have a text.6 So, I would say the need to imagine is a representational question that goes beyond narrative and textuality. Knowles: I wouldn’t say it goes beyond; I think it does something different. Giordano: I also want to make the point that we didn’t want to give the idea that visualization was only about quantitative data and records. It is also about representing qualitative information, like the “rope of history” mentioned earlier. Geographic visualization is about both. So we wanted to give examples of representing space in a different way than we do quantitatively, and try to suggest how geographers can also represent emotional space from a more humanistic point of view. So it was a decision that we took at the very beginning. We did not want to suggest that there was only one way of visualizing the Holocaust. Cole: I think partly that’s about the nature and variety of the source material as well. The danger would be if you had a single model of visual representation that flattens out the nature of the data, which varies tremendously. So we draw upon a series of different sources, and I think that “the rope of history” is an interesting example: this is a place where people are grappling with testimony and that’s very different than grappling with memoranda. There needs to be a different kind of representation, or I’d suggest a different representational mode in operation. I don’t think in the book we’ve necessarily found what that is, but I think the book is an exploration of a variety of representational modes, of different ways of visualizing different kinds of data. What has been interesting to me, just thinking about the Budapest chapter that Alberto and I wrote, is that there are moments when it feels like the visualizations are much more factual representations than others, like those that visualize shifting patterns of ghettoization. You clearly see something through visualizing that you don’t see in the archive. At the same time, we encountered the potential for spatial and visual modeling because there were moments in that chapter when we’re much more speculative about slippery concepts like “the 243

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potential for interactions” or the bystanders’ gaze. I’m really intrigued by that, a sense in which you’re not just representing the sources but you’re also creating something akin to a new source through the visual. Or, when we create a model: in part we’re representing what we find in the archive, but in part we are also creating something entirely new by modeling it in a way that then provokes new questions. Fogu: Let me try now to push you a bit more towards self-reflection, on account of your visible enthusiasm for visualization by connecting your work to Martin Jay’s Downcast Eyes, his famous study of antiocularcentrism in twentieth-century French theory. Jay’s basic argument is that much of what goes under the name of French theory is the articulation of a deep-seated suspicion and revolt against vision in the sense identified, physically and metaphorically, with the so-called Enlightenment tradition. Your work seems to me to be right at the heart of the reevaluation of vision in humanist studies that Jay forcefully called for in his conclusions; and this is all the more important because your multileveled and synoptic reevaluation of vision is mobilized against the darkest moment in twentieth-century European history. Yet, even Jay, after having decried from every possible perspective the antivisual bias of French thought for 600 pages, has a moment of hesitation in which he admits, for all its hyperbolic rhetoric, anti-ocularcentrism has raised substantial and troubling questions about the status of visuality in traditions of the West.7 So I want to ask you: were there moments of trouble for you? Which questions arose from the choice of mobilizing so many levels and modes of visualization? Were there moments in which you confronted an ethical threshold in a sensory, epistemological, or emotional way? Knowles: Countless moments. Jaskot: I think that Martin Jay is a really wonderful place to start because, in fact, what we are talking about is not just one historiographical and theoretical debate turning around questions raised by the linguistic turn, but about two competing historiographies. So, Martin Jay, coming out of a Western Marxist tradition, is absolutely aiming at the influence of Michel Foucault, for example. And, in fact, when we started this project in 2007, one of the things we started from was talking about the model of the panopticon—that is, the depiction of the SS as a panoptic force, which is how they have been written in 244

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antiocular terms and against that tradition of opticality that, of course, is quite dominant in my field of art history.8 Yet, there is also the Western Marxist tradition that is equally attentive to the question of vision, but is involved in things like the study of material cultures and does say that there are indeed disciplines of sight, and we do talk about that. You are controlled through vision and through an internalization of a model of vision that is not your own. That is an incredibly important way of understanding certain environments that we talk about, for example, the question of escape at Auschwitz and why you do or don’t try to get out. We started many of our projects with the idea of control, which gets to that totalizing concept of sight including the physical environment, and we have tried to represent that. So, we haven’t rejected the idea of the disciplinary gaze, but we have attempted to historicize it more thoroughly through visualization. In this sense, we have expanded the idea to a more complete, and I would say from a Western Marxist perspective, a more total vision of what the history of the Holocaust is. Knowles: There is, however, the aesthetic trouble that we also discussed in our first meeting in 2007, something with which we have continued to struggle. It comes down to everything from color choice to overall design. We talked quite a bit about the dominant aesthetic of Holocaust representation, which is either you don’t show anything at all, or it’s black and white, or you choose every single color extremely carefully. We actually think our work challenges that dominant aesthetic—usefully and provocatively. But there’s another side of this, too, that I think Alberto and I have been particularly sensitive to as geographers. There is a whole body of theory that I think is sympathetic with Foucault’s critique of the totalizing gaze in geography, which sees maps only as means of control by elites and tools of empire that are inherently violent because of what they assert about the people on the ground. And then there is the other view, the empirical tradition in geography, that says that maps—as we were saying earlier— reveal so much, and we must use them. I think we have reached a sort of consensus within the group now that you don’t ever visualize something once. You visualize it over and over again, and you use visual explorations of data as ways to understand the data more deeply. Some of those visualizations will never see the light of day; they’re just part of our process of understanding. So we’ve become very 245

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careful choosers of what will make it into print. Not that what we print is some sort of “final” product, but simply the best, or the best compromise. Giordano: I would add that we have not at all resolved this issue. We’ve always been thinking about it, and this is just one way of doing it. We didn’t want to stick to just one form of visualization for everything, so even our maps are very uneven. I’m sure a geographer or cartographer would say that some are better than others, but there is something to be said for thinking naively that maps and visualizations can also be used for the good, to communicate more effectively . . . Knowles: . . . to give voice to the victims. Giordano: Exactly. Presner: Some people may say that a limit you cross—and I’ll put it very crudely—is that you add new visuals to the history of the Holocaust that are not visuals that were there already. To be sure, we see things that we didn’t see before, but these visuals also become part of that history as a new visual culture, a new aesthetic. Perhaps this is no longer a problem of narrative (as the debates of the 1990s showed)— after all, what is someone like W. G. Sebald doing in a work like Austerlitz?9 He’s adding stories and photographs that reside on the fertile borderland between fact and fiction, between history and literature. Now, the visuals that you’re adding to the archive also sit on this borderland, but they are simultaneously speculative and propositional. They’re process oriented, they’re multiple, and they’re partial; they show some things and certainly occlude other things. Knowles: Yes, Denis Wood says, “Every map is a proposition.”10 Presner: Yes, that’s what I was thinking of. So have you reflected on what it means to add these propositional visual forms to the history of the Holocaust? Is there anything ethical there? Cole: I think the propositional is absolutely central to our work. We are massively explicit about the fact that these visuals are representations and are propositional, imperfect, multiple processes of representation. Maybe we even go overboard in some ways with pointing out the limitations, but that’s really important. We wouldn’t want those visuals to be taken as making a kind of truth claim that we don’t give them. 246

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Jaskot: And yet they aren’t fictional. So I have two responses coming from an art historical tradition: there are artists that respond to the Holocaust all the time, and this becomes part of Holocaust history. And, indeed, we have significant numbers of testimonies and examples of postwar memory, and we don’t question them as a valid contribution, or as commentary, to help us understand the Holocaust in spite of the fact that they, too, are representations. So why would we think that a visualization here is ethically problematic when we wouldn’t say it of, for instance, a Gerhard Richter painting of his uncle Rudi taken from a photograph showing him in his Wehrmacht uniform?11 And secondly, and again I’ll go back to this point, they’re not fictions. They are visualizations of archives, visualizations of processes . . . Cole: . . . or databases. Jaskot: Yes, which are based on material evidence but also physical spaces. These spaces are not fictional. They hit you. History is what hurts, right?12 Knowles: Yet they are imagined. This is the interesting thing for me in Todd’s question and the previous question: What is the difference between fiction and imagination, and where or when does imagination come into history? I think Tim is right that we bent over backwards and felt it was necessary to remind people throughout the book of how speculative this is. Hence, we composed methodological boxes that are part of each chapter where we explain the limits of our evidence and of our method. We did that because we felt it was necessary. We wanted people to know how cautious one needs to be. But as we made those decisions, we were afraid we were going to lose our audience because our book is not a compelling narrative; it is not a good story. We’re constantly intervening to remind people that we made this decision and it has these problems, which makes it a really academic book. Fogu: Everything you say would work except that you insert at the beginning of each chapter images that have the most tenuous, if any connection at all, to your data set. Try imagining your readers looking at the picture opening your first chapter, of a geospatial globe with the names of camps darting towards the universe [see Chapter  10, Figure 10.3], or taking in a field with ghostly presences such as the 247

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ones in the image that opens chapter 4 [see Chapter 10, Figure 10.4]: would they not say, “Okay it’s not fiction, it’s imagination; still, what the heck is going on here?” And would they not also think you to be rather disingenuous in your often-repeated juxtaposition of your visualizations with metaphoric and symbolic representations, when it is clear that the first image is nothing but an aestheticized cipher of the “universe of the camps,” a metaphor you use in your chapter? Let me say that I don’t mean with this question to criticize you for pushing the boundary between the fictional and the factual, but to actually praise you for taking such a risk: those images dance on the tightrope of the kitsch aesthetic famously denounced by Friedländer, but they also confront us with our deepest taboo about extracting pleasure from death.13 What I find untenable is the schizophrenic attempt to repeatedly tell your reader that your work is empirical. Alberto referred a while back, approvingly, to the image of the “rope of history.” It seems to me that the authors of that chapter put it best when they define this image as a metaphorical image that “crosses the boundary that usually separates art from analytic scholarship.”14 Can this definition not be extended to your whole book? Knowles: That’s a fabulous question, and I’m sure yours will be a response we will get from many, but let me ask a question of you: Does it make any difference to know that in fact every single chapter opener, except for the ghosts in the field you refer to, is based on a database? Fogu: No, I mean, it does and it doesn’t because I read them not only as framing the texts they open, but also not in isolation from the socalled factual visualizations you use in the chapters. To me, they are there to make an argument about the aesthetic quality of all of the data visualizations in the book. Had you not wanted to do so, you could have played it safe and just eliminated them altogether. In this respect, their supplementary reference to the data makes them perfect self-referential icons of that theory of cognitive dissonance you discuss in your book in regard to how Polish perpetrators “exaggerated their physical remove from the sites of murder.”15 Don’t you exaggerate your closeness to the empirical tradition? Giordano: I think that, internally, we had some discussions about these opening images to the chapters, and some opinions were stronger than 248

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others. But I think, as Anne said, that they are all real except for one. “Real” in the sense that they are all based on empirical data that refers to the location and date of events in the Holocaust, from the arrest of Italian victims, to the location of ghetto houses in Budapest, to the construction of camps, and so on. They are visualized differently, in part, because the geographical scale of the events varies, and they represent one way to tell the reader that there are many different ways of visualizing data. Jaskot: I think Alberto’s point about process is an important one here. What you’re seeing is really a range of relations to the visual. But that doesn’t mean that all ten scholars agreed on each of them. I think they are complementary. For example, the first version of the Auschwitz chapter wasn’t going to go with me. So Anne and I began a dialogue that ended up with a wide range of relations to the visual. This is what you are seeing. And that’s part of the argument: there are different ways of visualizing, including Erik Steiner’s chapter openers, and these represent the historiographic debate amongst ourselves. Knowles: Your question, Claudio, raises a fascinating, enormous issue, which is the problem with categories, and how scholars categorize their work in order to be recognizable to one another. What we find so exciting and crucial about our interdisciplinary work together, and our forcing ourselves to work together across the boundaries of history and geography, is that we think those boundaries are limits that we shouldn’t accept. So, and this is what I meant to say: why can’t the empirical be imaginative? Cole: Yes, and I think that this is what has been profoundly challenging about the project. In collaborative work, there are times when you feel uneasy, and that is provocative in terms of pushing you to reflect on why you feel uneasy. Take the opener for the Budapest chapter. I felt uneasy about the fact that there are human figures on the map, and that to me is profoundly challenging because it leads me to wonder why I did not feel any unease about putting a dot on a map, which is a symbol that represents a ghetto house. Why do I suddenly start to feel some unease about the point when we move to a figurative form? To me, this is, in a sense, what makes the whole process of visualizing so profoundly important, because it pushes you to a degree of selfreflection about the limits of representation. 249

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Giordano: What you are saying is very interesting to me, Tim, because I actually have the exact opposite feeling. I feel very uneasy about putting a dot on a map and thinking that’s a Jewish-designated residence, you know, with people living there. I feel much less uneasy about putting a person there because, to me, it suggests that there is a person that’s suffering. So this is an example of what we had to struggle with all through the book. Cole: I think that collaboration has to do that. It needs to have an ethical dimension; it’s not just about different disciplines. It’s about those kinds of issues, and I just don’t know if we convey enough of that process. Fogu: I think, as I said, that this dialogue and struggle is not lost on any attentive reader, especially when you openly discuss the concept of cognitive dissonance in testimonies, which is a clue to the cognitive dissonance that is part of your enterprise as a collective, and there are other suggestions in the text, too. In fact, I would suggest that your book, in its best moments, presents ways to bring to the forefront those dissonant moments that all historians confront; those oscillations between the factual and the imaginative, the data and the work of emplotment. Jaskot: Still, I would also go back to the point you made from Martin Jay: it’s not nearly a kind of infinite world of representation, you know. We are always making a kind of empiricist claim here. So, that’s the tension, right? Fogu: Yes, Paul. And yet, the point I am trying to make here is that, collectively, you have pushed the tension very far, to the point of breaking, by including six pictures as chapter headings that foreground the imaginative level of your work, and, on the other hand, having the scholars who wrote the last chapter equate (in their methodological box) “the limits of representation” with “the limits of the evidence,” thereby ignoring decades of discussions on representation, and, in particular, the very collection of essays that made that phrase central to the field of Holocaust studies.16 Cole: I guess I would answer by referring to Hilene Flanzbaum’s response to the many critics of Life Is Beautiful, in which she argues against what she calls the “caretakers” of Holocaust representation, which is, 250

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for her, a way of reframing the question of the limits of representation in terms of the set of people who define these limits.17 As this applies to our project, I think we have been daring, and I’ve been kind of conscious about myself that I don’t want to be too much of a caretaker. Especially in a collaborative project, I think there are places where we haven’t gone as a team, but there are probably places we’ve gone to, which some of us might have not gone alone. And it felt like a good part of collaboration is precisely not to have some sort of caretaker who erects boundaries, which is why I wonder if “limits of representation” is even a relevant issue at all these days. Fogu: Let’s see if I can change your mind on this. One of the key issues arising from The Limits of Representation was Hayden White’s suggestion that the Holocaust was a modernist event requiring modernist modes of representation.18 It seems to me that your text may, on the one hand, fit perfectly Joseph Frank’s definition of the modernist text as a “spatial form” leading to “a temporary suspension of temporality,” and, on the other, an uncanny rebuke of everything White says about the modernist event.19 Take White’s indication of Art Spiegelman’s Maus as a prime example of modernist representation, insofar as it produced an entirely figurative representation of the Holocaust that had factual and emotional content, and created meaning, but at the maximum level of figuration rather than literalness.20 Now you, too, cite Maus approvingly as a model for how to read your text. But your interpretation of Maus is that it’s about memory and history, and you completely ignore its media-specificity and its imaginative contribution to figurative visualization. By the same token, when, in the last chapter, the authors use what they call “symbolic figurations” or “figurines” in their maps, it’s almost like the figurative here becomes literal. So, you’re going in the opposite direction than the one White suggests in his own endorsement of Maus. Finally, White has defined the Holocaust as the modernist event par excellence because of its being “off scale.”21 It seems to me that your work is a direct response to this definition insofar as you have adopted scales as the methodological and conceptual fulcrum of your entire project. So, how do you see yourselves in this debate about modernist representation and modernist events? Did you think about it at all? Did you consider your utilization of scales as a means to dominate the modernist tenor of the event? 251

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Giordano: The way I see it from a geographical perspective is that scale is a conceptual device. If you want to tackle a phenomenon that is so complex and enormous (all of Europe!), then the way to do it is by scaling it, because it did really change history in Europe from the single human being to the wiping out of entire parts of the continent, to the obliteration of an entire population from certain parts of Eastern Europe. So, to us—or to me, at least—scale is a conceptual device that we have actually twisted to fit our project, because in geography, scale is contentious and has a very specific meaning. We stayed away from defining scale in any specific terms because we think that it’s only through this more flexible and broader view of scales that we can actually tackle this event. Cole: And I would add that the multiplicity of scale is really important. In a sense, we’ve selected these case studies precisely because they operate at different scales. And there are moments in which I think the reader gets this, such as in the chapter on the opening and closing of the camps, and then, the one on Auschwitz, in which the idea is that you are actually offered just one single slice of an event that is operating at multiple scales. And at multiple scales you get different stories and to me that is where you get something very interesting happening, which is that you can have multiple narratives of the same event through different scales because that’s the nature of everything that happened. Sure, the Holocaust needs to be visualized and imagined at the continental scale; but the challenge is to imagine it at the scale of the individual as well, and everything in between. Jaskot: And you also used the term “dominate,” which is I think a really interesting ethical choice, in the sense that, for Tim and Alberto, it’s not a question of domination, it’s a question of relations. So, relational scale is a way of thinking relationally and thinking relationally means that we are having a more comprehensive understanding of the Holocaust. I think that’s different than to dominate. Fogu: I agree, Paul. So let me spell out why I am insisting on this question of scales and scaling. In the final analysis, the debate on the relationship between the Holocaust and modernist or nonnarrative forms of representation is not merely aesthetic. It harkens back to the vexing question of the historicization of the Holocaust as leading to its ethical normalization. Your work seems to me to foreground, potentially, 252

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a way out of that debate by suggesting that by multiplying the scales you can embrace, without normalizing, both the individual and the systemic. My question is whether you were ever aware of this potential in the work you were carrying out. Knowles: No. I think the answer to that is simply “no.” What we do hope is that other scholars will take our method and our findings as being genuinely useful and that they will begin to think critically and creatively about geographical methods and visual approaches to the Holocaust to open up their own imaginations and do fresh work. So, we’d like to have lots of other people do their versions of what we have discovered and particularly to form collaborations with different skills coming together. And let me add just one other note about Hayden White and his argument that the Holocaust is off-scale. We do take these basic facts as foundational starting points for our work: The Holocaust was real, that it happened, that it was enacted on the ground, and that it is capable of being represented and understood. So, if saying that the Holocaust was off-scale means that it is actually unrepresentable and we cannot understand it, we do not agree with that. Presner: But White doesn’t say that, just to be clear. He says that it demands new kinds of representation specific to modernism or modernist events. And so it’s actually an interesting parallel to what you’re doing. He’s not saying that because it’s off-scale it can’t be represented, but that it requires different kinds of representations, and he finds those kinds of representations in modernism. So, multiplying perspectives, many different views, different kinds of scaling, and so forth— these are all modernist techniques. Cole: But don’t you think Hayden White’s work needs to be situated in a moment which is pre-1989 and before the opening of the Soviet archives? I think that one thing essential about Holocaust studies today is the way it has shifted eastwards and away from Auschwitz. Take the Holocaust museum in Washington,  D.C. Its focus is clearly the journey to Auschwitz. If I were to set up a Holocaust museum now, I’d set the focus somewhere further East because I think we’ve moved in that direction in the scholarship. Jan Gross’s Neighbors is a very different book, isn’t it?22 It works at a very different scale from what used to be done before. It does not concern itself at all with the continental 253

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scale, but focuses on a single village. And it’s about a series of interactions that are happening within an intimate space, and to me, that’s quite an important meta shift, one that is both spatial and geographical. Scholarship has moved further east, and now we’re actually on the Soviet/Polish borderlands. At the same time, we’ve moved, I think, in terms of different spaces towards more local, intimate, and rural spaces, and I think our book tries to do a little bit of that. And yet perhaps what is still missing from the book is more of the East; we have one chapter on the Einsatzgruppen and Wehrmacht atrocities in the East, but otherwise we don’t really grapple with the early killings.23 Yet, in general, there are new spaces and new places that have really been opened up by the historical and geographical literature. I wonder if White’s work is not situated in a very particular moment when there was a kind of dominant geography of the Holocaust framed around Auschwitz, and imagining the Holocaust as a singular event, while today we have reset our imagination somewhere between Neighbors and Bloodlands, and we visualize it in a different way, and around new kinds of narrative strategies.24 Jaskot: Just a final footnote on this. White’s work also belongs to a moment in the discussion of representation that is about the explosion of memory and memorialization, and the concerns about articulating them in a very aestheticized way. We’re building off that debate in the early 1990s, but it is not “our” debate. Fogu: This brings me to my final question concerning the ontological status of space in your work. Beginning with your introduction, you call the Holocaust a “profoundly geographical phenomenon.”25 And in one of your chapters, you write that “historical GIS [Geographic Information Systems] and a spatial analytical approach . . . provide the potential for modeling landscapes of the Holocaust in order to better understand the actions and experiences of, and interactions between, perpetrators, victims, and bystanders.”26 In your afterword, you write that the Holocaust was a “profoundly human phenomenon just as it was a spatial one.”27 Now, to say “human” and “spatial” in the same sentence as two equivalent categories sounds to me as a peculiar form of reification that rather than dehumanizing, humanizes the subject-event Holocaust. The Holocaust acts, it is endowed with spatial and temporal categories like the Kantian subject, but at the price of the reification of the event. Once again, this is not a critique; it’s a 254

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question that I’m asking because it feels to me that all these spatial references to nature, essences, profundity, et cetera . . . go in the direction of a replacement of a narrative understanding of history with a spatialization that will give us discrete events, scales of observation, and a playground for visualizations, but will make the reader forget that everything, beginning with the very name of the event called “the Holocaust,” is fraught with conflict and ideology. Jaskot: We could also argue about reification as a term, which for me has a Lukácsian connotation, and relates to political economic processes, and that is surely not what we’re doing here by summarizing our claims about the Holocaust. But I think it’s an important point because what we are doing is using analytic categories; and analytic categories are always the way we talk about or make (synthetic rather than reified) arguments as historians. And, after all, it does seem to me accurate to say that our study is human and spatial, as opposed to humans in place. There are bodies that exist and spaces that exist. These are physicalities. This is not narrative, but a material claim. We did not say “the human in place” or “the ontological categories that we’re working with” are . . . Fogu: . . . and yet, Paul, I don’t think one could write that same sentence replacing space for time and saying, “The Holocaust was profoundly human and temporal.” It wouldn’t work because the definition of the Holocaust as a historical event includes the temporal, while its treatment as space brings with it that spell of reification I was talking about. Is it not a conceptual detemporalization of history? Knowles: But we’re not taking time out. I’m sure you’ve noticed a number of times in the book in which our work with geographical data made us more aware of time. We are adding space, not subtracting time. We do not take space or place as givens. They are both constructions useful to our understanding of events. And we also construct our scales. That’s obviously an invention as well. Cole: Spaces and places are absolutely essential to the way we approach the events and how we approach human beings is through the spaces and places where they acted, experienced, and resisted. And that’s absolutely central to our text. But I think Anne is right here, in the same way Thomas Bender is in his response to Philip Ethington’s piece in Rethinking History, entitled “(Re)Placing the Past,” in which he says 255

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it’s all place and space, while Bender talks about time and space together, and I think that’s very much our experience.28 We wouldn’t want to reject chronology. Giordano: Yet we also operate with a peculiarly spatial understanding of time in a topological sense. So events happen one after the other, like steps, and, in a sense, for certain analytical techniques, it doesn’t matter how long these steps last. The important factor is that one comes after the other, and, in this sense, they are topological. Just like we have a topological sense for distance, we have a topological sense of time. So chronology is still there, but there are other things that interest us. The chapter on Italy, for example, asks what are the sequences of events and when did these sequences occur? But how long each step in the sequence lasted is, in a sense, less important than the duration of the whole and the number of steps that occurred from place of residence to place and time of arrest, to incarceration in Italy, and on to internment in Italy and deportation to camps outside of Italy. Cole: I think our common understanding is that the Holocaust does not just occur in space but through space. So we see space as a dynamic player or actor and thus the maps aren’t merely illustrations, they’re analytical. That’s the critical thing for us: that this isn’t a purely illustrative atlas of the Holocaust that shows where things happened, but that what we are doing is researching the spatiality of events through mapping and visualization. And all this is framed by a particular understanding of space as an active agent, which we share as a starting point.

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12 Freeze-Framing Temporality and the Archive in Forgács, Hersonski, and Friedländer N I T Z A N L E B OV I C

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HAT TURNS the ‘Final Solution’ into an event at the limits,” Saul

Friedländer wrote in 1992, “is the very fact that it is the most radical form of genocide encountered in history.”1 This notion of “radicalism” has fascinated both historians and artists for the past few decades by raising the vexing question of how to present “an event at the limits.” How does one discuss an event so radical that it is compared to a rupture in time and in consciousness?2 Both the historian and the two documentary filmmakers, Yael Hersonski and Péter Forgács, whom I discuss below, organize their stories around a temporal continuity that questions and refutes the usual separation between the event and its presentation, the document and the archive that houses it, and daily life and its political context. As I show, the medium of film does not just provide access to the historical archive; rather, it interrogates the very concept of the archive by way of a historiographic intervention. At the same time, Friedländer’s historical writing will make use of cinematic devices as part of his historiographic project. In both the epilogue interview contained in this book and in the introduction to the second volume of his Pulitzer Prize–winning Nazi Germany and the Jews, Friedländer thinks about the writing of such a history in cinematic terms, as the integration of “voices” or “personal chronicles [that] are like lightning flashes that illuminate parts of a landscape.”3 While the films animate the archive by reimagining their impact on the present, Friedländer develops a filmic language of representation for depicting an event at the limits. In fact, a central implication of the analysis in this chapter is that one of the results of the 257

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sustained theoretical reflection on issues of narrative and history in the 1980s and early 1990s may be found in the intellectual exchanges between historiography and film in the representation of the Holocaust over the past two decades. For all three—Friedländer, Hersonski, and Forgács—the relationship between knowledge and power, rupture and continuity is an essential element for understanding the Holocaust in terms of both a chronological sequence of events and the reorganization of these events as narratives structured by interruptions and critical moments of self-reflection. Hersonski and Forgács are building on Friedländer’s corpus of critical tools and stress the need to consider both the unique character of the Holocaust as a historical event and its impact on the present. By the same token, as Friedländer himself explained, he consulted with documentarists when contemplating his own narratological strategies and, in the epilogue to this volume, even talks about using montage and “cutting” techniques that are inspired by modernist filmmakers like Sergei Eisenstein and modernist authors like John Dos Passos for the construction of his historical narrative.4 As Friedländer’s 1992 volume Probing the Limits of Representation already demonstrated, any reflexive discussion of contemporary documentaries on the Holocaust (and the historical texts they rely on) must start with their techniques of representation. The difficulty of finding a suitable language commensurate with an event that resists logic and explanation—“it is as if the disaster itself resisted representation; it is grasped only afterwards by studying, as it were, the aftershocks,” as Anton Kaes put it—forces an open and a reflexive discussion of historical and narratological conventions. In that regard, freezing the frame, in the midst of a narrative, is the cinematic device par excellence.5 While the use of the device itself is not unique to Holocaust documentaries, its centrality and repetition in Holocaust documentaries makes it into a distinct mark of that particular genre. But where does it come from? Why this and not another cinematic device? Where does it stand when compared to similar devices in both cinematic and historiographic terms? Why should it matter to the historian? The argument of this chapter is that it is this particular device that enables the spectator to tie the “event at the limits” with a core question about the ontology of human temporality, on the one hand, and with a concentration on the epistemology of knowledge, or its gathering and organization in the archive, on the other. 258

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Freezing the frame—mostly on a face or a gesture—raises a question about the temporality and orientation of human action and response, as well as about our own understanding of it within a particular historical context. Let me explain what I mean by moving gradually from the history of the aesthetic device to its meaning for both the historical narrative (Friedländer) and the filmic representation (Forgács and Hersonski). I conclude the chapter with a more specific discussion of Hersonski’s film in the context of current Israeli representations of the Holocaust. As shown below, the unique cinematic language developed by Forgács, Hersonski, and Friedländer allows us to view “an event at the limits” in the context of its historical-ideological reasoning and beyond, from the perspective of a temporal analysis of its creation, perception, and retroactive application.

A Cinematic Language In the opening to Theory of Film (1960), Siegfried Kracauer separates film from photography in two respects: films “represent reality as it evolves in time, and they do so with the aid of cinematic techniques and devices.”6 Discussions of filmic representations of the Holocaust placed such consideration at the center of both history and its representation. A number of critical studies—Annette Insdorf’s Indelible Shadows: Film and the Holocaust (1983); Ilan Avisar’s Screening the Holocaust: Cinema’s Images of the Unimaginable (1988); Libby Saxton’s Haunted Images: Film, Ethics, Testimony and the Holocaust (2008); and, more recently, Aaron Kerner’s Film and the Holocaust: New Perspectives on Dramas, Documentaries, and Experimental Films (2011)—have unpacked the problematic relation between the historical event and how those events are presented on-screen. The gap between the event and its cinematic translation has been made even more distinct in the case of the Holocaust due to the special challenge that arises when one tries to use conventional language or known images to describe a catastrophe of that size and “radicalism.”7 In this case, as Kracauer noted, the historical event is repeatedly reconsidered and rethought with the assistance of cinematic techniques that focus on its relationship to temporality. In other words, to put it succinctly, every filmic representation of the Holocaust is a commentary on the difficulty of representing, a claim that was already put forward in the original Probing the Limits of Representation conference. More than two decades later, these two documentary films, that—at their core—analyze 259

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the historical archive as anything but a “given,” have carefully confronted the historiographical claims and internalized them into a new language of cinematic representation. Both Péter Forgács’s The Maelstrom: A Family Chronicle (1997) and Yael Hersonski’s A Film Unfinished (2010; a literal translation of the original Hebrew title is “silence of the archive” ‫ )שתיקת הארכיון‬stress the temporal dimension of the events and use explicitly cinematic devices to make us, the viewers, keenly aware of it. One such device is the freezeframe, routinely used in both films. Another is the explicit discussion of principles of collecting and organizing information in the archive, whether based on home movies, as in Forgács’s films, or on contrasting Nazi and Jewish principles of organization and presentation, as is the case in Hersonski’s film. Both the aesthetic and epistemic decisions draw attention to the active hand of the editor, reminding viewers of their temporal and experiential remove from the scenes depicted. Both directors often accompany the use of freeze-framing with the preceding or following slow motion and resizing, an effect that prepares or stresses the suspense of movement and creates a moment of emotional disbelief. Both directors connect such techniques with the ethical commitment to the testimonies they present and the need to handle them in a cautious and committed way. But both directors also use them in order to move beyond the limited perspective of the witnesses, and beyond what Friedländer called “the age of ideology.”8 Such techniques slow down our perception and force us to reflect on the nature of the event and our own set of expectations. Furthermore, they shed bright light on our own understanding of the event, its conditions, and our Aristotelian expectation to follow “a whole” story that has the coherence and continuity of a beginning, middle, and end; we seem to think we know the (catastrophic) end, but the end—as presented in these movies—is either present from the beginning (Forgács), or is just another point in an endless and ongoing narrative (Hersonski). Holocaust films have used innovative techniques—such as integrating still images—since Alain Resnais’s Nuit et brouillard (Night and Fog, 1955). As I have shown elsewhere,9 Resnais’s film arrived at a difficult time, a mere decade after the Holocaust and before the Holocaust became “an essential stage in the formation and shaping of a national community.”10 This was before it was normalized as a “redemption theology,” or turned into an “atrocity aesthetic,” to use the term developed by Barbie Zelizer to describe films such as Schindler’s List (1993); or, more recently, we might say, Inglourious Basterds (2009).11 Resnais’s film opened a 260

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critical discussion of Holocaust presentation as a problem of representation itself, while popular films like The Diary of Anne Frank (1959) and Exodus (1960) did the opposite—that is, they created a language of iconic images and, in the words of David Ben Gurion, the first prime minister of Israel, affirmed the Holocaust as “the most tragic and sublime spectacle.”12 In contrast to these and other movies in the next few decades, Resnais’s film stressed the plurality of universes and the abstract nature of an event that did not answer any communal boundary or aesthetic iconography. In order to stress the transhistorical effect of the Holocaust, Resnais’s film used frozen still images, found later in “essay-films” such as Chris Marker’s dystopian La Jetée (1962). Resnais and Marker, in other words, used the frozen image as a tool to undermine basic norms: Historical, cinematic, and philosophical. Both Hersonski and Forgács re-present a historical archive in film to tell a story about the Holocaust, but even more, they tell a story about how to tell a story about the Holocaust, about its tekhnê (principles of craft, skill). Forgács uses home videos shot in the 1930s and 1940s by a Jewish family and a Nazi family living in the Netherlands, shortly before and during the deportation of the Dutch Jews. His main story line follows the original images taken at the time, mostly by a member of the Peereboom family. The images in his film function as primary documents, or as testimonies do in written works of history. There is no voice-over to the film, no explicit and authoritative narrator; the music is used to guide and intensify the emotional code of the narrative and is never distanced, commenting, or ironic. Rather, the narrative is built by contrasting the archival perspectives of the two sources, the Jewish and the Nazi, while respecting their chronological order. Time and point of view function as the organizational frameworks. In this sense, Forgács’s technique follows Friedländer’s insistence that the victims’ own voices “are essential if we are to attain an understanding of this past. For it is their voices that reveal what was known and what could be known. Theirs are the only voices that conveyed both the clarity of insight and the total blindness of human beings confronted with an entirely new and utterly horrifying reality.”13

Retroactive Meaning What, then, does the cinematic device of freeze-framing do for the understanding of the Holocaust as event, representation, and archive? To 261

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answer such a question requires a closer reading of the temporal and narratological impact of the device, including for the cinematic world surrounding it. Hersonski’s film interrogates the gaze of the perpetrator by using a sixty-minute film shot by the Nazis in the Warsaw Ghetto in May 1942, shortly before the ghetto was evacuated and its former occupants deported to the death camps. Ostensibly, it is the diametric opposite to the emphasis on the victims’ own voices. Unlike The Maelstrom, A Film Unfinished is accompanied by a voice-over. Yet, like The Maelstrom, little historical background is presented directly, and much more is exposed indirectly, mostly while interpreting the nature of the footage itself: how it was shot, the stylistic choices, the contrast between the perspective of the Nazi cinematographer and the Jewish subjects documented, what it was intended to do, and how it was found. Like Forgács, the filmic archive is not accepted as a given or straightforward historical document; instead, the very nature of the archive in film becomes the subject of the film, interjecting a historiographic layer into any historical discussion of the events by employing an editorial language that breaks apart the footage, sutures it back together again, freezes it, dissects it, questions it, screens it over and over again, and tries to understand its conditions of possibility. Much like Friedländer and Forgács, Hersonski offers a consideration of the gap between perspectives, particularly the loaded gap between past events, the archival value of the filmed chronicles, and our present consideration of both layers. In a private discussion with the author, Hersonski considered the impact that the films of Alain Resnais and Claude Lanzmann had on her own historical analysis and aesthetic approach.14 She learned from both that it is especially in this difficult “archival” context that the analysis of the visual material exposes the implied process of decision making of the witness, the photographer, and the later editor or filmmaker. In spite of taking a lesson from both, she, like Forgács, developed a path that contrasted with Lanzmann’s vehement rejection of any archival material.15 As she explained, it was because of Forgács’s use of found archival footage that she consulted him during the making of her own movie.16 At the center of both films is an explicit discussion of the difficulty of translating “an event at the limits” into a cinematic representation. Both documentarians use freeze-framing in order to linger on moments threatened by their own looming future. Both directors freeze movements or gazes of Jews and Germans, victims and perpetrators. They also are aware 262

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of their stylistic and ethical-historical decision to leave material outside the frame. The repetitive usage of freeze-framing, equally used in order to portray the two “sides” in the historical narrative, demonstrates the importance of the device for the anti-Aristotelian “poetics” of the two films, while leaving out much of the “original” intention. By stopping time, they seem to turn our attention to the process of documentation itself and the relationship between three moments: the present of filming during the 1930s and 1940s (the event); the present of the filmed (the witness’s perception), Jews and Nazis during the era of the world war and the industrial annihilation of the Jews; and the present of the director/editor and viewer, seven decades later (analysis of both past and present). The stylistic intervention, textual or virtual, charges the two earlier moments with contemporary and retroactive significance: Forgács does that by cutting between the different contexts and adding a musical score that charges the silent home videos with retroactive meaning. The music tells us when a threat is imminent, while its melancholy timbre frames the story as a story of loss and absence, even at the happiest moments. Hersonski brings the present—and its interpretation of the past—into the open by filming elderly survivors from the Warsaw Ghetto watching and examining the Nazi footage. Freezing the frame on gazes turned to the camera turns our own attention to the anachronistic reading Hersonski exposes—that is to say, her own tekhnê. The relationship between those three moments forms what Hersonski sees as a “continuous past,” and that I would like to characterize as a notion of retroactive duration. It is a sense of continuity that is structured backward, but asks us—in contrast to Michael André Bernstein’s notion of “backshadowing”—to withhold judgment.17 In contrast to the perpetrator’s gaze that Gertrud Koch found in Nazi photographs of the victims, freezing the frame in the context of this documentary by editing and suspending the Nazi film enables Hersonski to refuse the perpetrator’s gaze while avoiding an immediate judgment, exposing both the expectation of the photographer and the underlying, naked humanity of his object of scorn.18 Furthermore, by using such a purely cinematic device, both films reach for a cinematic effect that recharges the past with a historical meaning that was not open to those experiencing the moment. The temporality of the narrative is shaped backward from the present, our present, and not from a simulated past. Kracauer describes such moments as “a return to the world of film, whose inherent motion alone renders possible such excursions into the 263

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whirlpool of the motionless.”19 In Holocaust films, such devices expose the “crisis of figurability” that has been proposed by other Holocaust scholars: where images were erased and testimonies obliterated, the work of the historian and filmmaker is to find a possible way to discuss and expose the absence of the murdered object, or—in aesthetic terms—to expose the radical nature of a presentation of the unrepresentable.20 Needless to say, the motionlessness conveys a certain fragility, both visual and narratological, which threatens to collapse both the site of vision and the narrative. Once the conventional narrative collapses, it is possible to give the lost object another, alternative voice. It turns again into a subject. That is what Friedländer has attempted to do in his integration of testimonies; and this is what Forgács and Hersonski are doing by the use of freeze-framing. All three force us to acknowledge the loss of the onceexisting world by means of both an aesthetic and ethical commitment to reimagining the archive and the very semantics of historical representation itself. Only such means could prevent the normalization of the memory into mere stereotypes or empty icons. As Primo Levi noted in The Drowned and the Saved, “a memory evoked too often, and expressed in the form of a story, tends to become fixed in a stereotype, in a form tested by experience, crystalized, perfected, adorned, installing itself in the place of the raw memory and growing its expense.”21 Because freeze-framing suspends movement and time in favor of cinematic stylization and historical defamiliarization, both films use the device to fiercely reject any clichés while also questioning any assumption of the neutrality of historical narratives, chronological time, and the visual archive. Much like the scholars who contributed to Probing the Limits of Representation, the directors questioned the validity of conventional devices after the Holocaust. But they add something related specifically to the visuality of the medium: film’s unique sense of presentness, its actuality, and the criteria to be used in preserving it. The use of freezeframing forces us to pay more attention to individual gestures played to the camera itself, the documenting eye, obliging us to reflect on the decision made to preserve and linger on some moments while leaving others on the cutting-room floor. Including a frame of historical footage in a film presents a way of preserving it; including a commentary that narrates that historical footage means reloading it with contemporary historical semantics. This way, both films make their commitment to the present a part of their historical and stylistic discussion. Both films ask us to trust their

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narrators and both directors ask us to avoid the dichotomization of the world into what Friedländer, in a similar spirit, called either “a mere outcome of some haphazard, involuntary, imperceptible, and chaotic onrush of unrelated events or a predetermined enactment of a demonic script.”22

Jews and Nazis, Suspense and Acceleration Such a keen awareness of narratological temporality should be contextualized by discussing the hermeneutic tools of the period vis-à-vis those of the present. Kracauer, in his seminal work From Caligari to Hitler (1946), declared that in the films of the 1920s, “the tragic destiny of the cosmos was exhibited to deflect the spectator’s attention from the problems of everyday life.”23 Kracauer, it is obvious from this comment, rejected any romanticization or sublimity as a deflectionary tactic. Accordingly, in Representing the Holocaust, Dominick LaCapra identified the “tendency to valorize positively not only sublimity but melancholy and selfvictimization” with “Western Christianity” and romanticism.24 The two documentarians tackle such tragic or transcendental expectations, nowadays already identified with known conventions, insisting on the everyday in spite of the horrifying context, even as they reject the paralysis and escapism of the German films Kracauer wrote about. The freeze-framing of daily life forces us to pay attention: these were real human beings, alive and hopeful. Nothing is more important than that banal fact. As such, freeze-framing turns back to us, requiring an intense consideration of our own ethical perspective as viewers. It demands our full attention to those who are no longer among us and that we reflect carefully about our ethics, positionality, and commitment to watching images of the everyday lives of and hopes harbored by the dead. While admitting the possibility of creating empathy, freeze-framing also produces a recognition of difference, an effect as important as empathy, which stresses both the proximity and distance from ourselves.25 The use of the freeze-frame in conjunction with the suspension of linear movement thus forces us to reconsider any continuous movement, and with it the easy and immediate understanding of the archive of images, language, and conventional narrative modalities for the representation of reality. The implication of an “event at the limit” is that the immediate relation between signifier and signified is broken; it is not clear that a term signifies what it is expected to signify. Life itself is recharged

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with a different, existential meaning when the end is near. The image reveals, as Friedländer noted, “the inadequacy [that] grows between language and certain events.”26 Mostly, the suspension of movement charges the cinematic language with a special sense of historical irony, an effect produced when the body is decontextualized in space, or when we know more than the protagonists do. The distance in time is an informative distance—we know more than those filming or those being filmed. In both history and film, the editorial work reaches from the present to charge a certain moment from the past with meaning. Let me explicate these abstract claims with two short examples that concretize my argument. Forgács’s The Maelstrom follows the home movies of the Peerebooms—a Jewish family—and the family of Arthur Seyss-Inquart (1892– 1946), the Nazi Reichskommissar who served in the Netherlands. The home movies follow their daily pastoral routine: a baby playing and a tennis game with Heinrich Himmler. The frame freezes—and with it the viewer’s gaze—at one crucial moment, when Seyss-Inquart is looking at his watch and again when he gazes straight into the camera. The director then shifts the perspective to the Jewish refugees and their capture. SeyssInquart’s gesture suggests his expectations, while providing an ironic comment on the preparations being made for the deportation of the Jews, as if the Reichskommissar could not wait for it to begin. He is accelerating the rhythm, while the Jews are trying to slow it down, stop, or suspend it. The film makes sure we understand that time is pressing, but also that suspending it amounts to an ethical intervention, when considered from our present perspective. Slowing down the rhythm amounts to buying us another short moment with the not-yet-dead. Similarly, Hersonski freezes the gazes of Jews in the ghetto, but also the gestures of the Nazis who document them. The gaps in perspective point at the different understanding of the situation: While the Jews look at the camera trying to decipher their future and possible survival, the Nazis see through the camera that which does not exist anymore. Willy Wirst, the German cinematographer in Hersonski’s film, never questions why he has been sent to document the ghetto, nor does he reflect on the purpose of that documentation or the people in the film he created in the Warsaw Ghetto. Instead, he thinks about nature. In his postwar testimony, he suggests that time was out of joint: his arrival at the ghetto took place at what felt like an earlier month, “because nature was still hibernating.” In fact, Hersonski found his testimony, given years later in a juridical proceeding, important enough to reenact in the context of her film because, 266

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as she explained, it gave concrete agency to the images: “By insisting on the presence of the photographer (Wirst) I tried to turn seemingly ‘autonomous’ material into a set of images that was not ‘sacred.’ It was taken by a certain person at a certain time. A decision was involved in focusing on that and not another detail. . . . This is the reason I used different techniques such as freeze framing, slow motion and re-sizing; I was afraid I would miss and lose the details.”27 In other words, Hersonski attempted to unmask the procession of linear temporality and to raise an ethical claim about story making in that context. As Bill Nichols put it in a series of publications, reenactment is “the specter . . . a variation on the ghost of the absent subject.”28 A conscious usage of reenactment—the missing subject is heard but not seen, except for a shadow or a gesture of the hand—places it between “the representation of a prior event while also signaling that reenactments are not a representation of a contemporaneous event.”29 Reenactment is a signal of distance, of time out of joint; it marks the absolute inexistence of the past, but also the performative and reconstructive act of opening a place for present reflection and disagreement. Time was indeed out of joint, but mostly due to decisions made by people like Wirst. Reenactment, in this context, stands at the opposite end to the Nazis’ staging of a Jewish performance for the sake of their propaganda film. This is the same semantics of temporality that marks the use of freeze-framing in the film, only from the opposite perspective: instead of a no-longer-living gaze of the victim, the reenactment marks the no-longer-living body of the perpetrator. These two examples evidence a careful consideration of temporality and the archive at the center of both documentaries. But how important are these temporal considerations for the historical semantics of the two films? The Nazis and the Jews were determined to maintain some sense of continuity with normal life, but with a very different sense of its temporal limit, and, hence, a different understanding of the principle of organization. For that reason, Hersonski’s film depicts not only people but also the historical archive from the Warsaw Ghetto collected by Emmanuel Ringelblum (1900–1944), the Jewish historian imprisoned in its walls.30 Similar to Forgács’s ironic shifts of perspective—from the remnants of normal daily lives of the victims to the pastoral daily lives of the perpetrators—Hersonski contrasts the Nazi footage and the Jewish depiction of life in the ghetto. Beyond the obvious separation of perspectives, she shows how the two mechanisms of archival documentation 267

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worked on fundamentally different assumptions and under the impact of two fundamentally different temporalities. While the Nazi propaganda organized and staged the Jewish performance, often rehearsing scenes for the sake of “future use” by the Nazi propaganda machine, the Jewish historian gave up on any hierarchy of importance, realizing that since life itself is about to be erased, every detail has become invaluable. Ringelblum saved and documented everything, any speck of existence. When death is imminent, every shred of life, every human gesture, becomes important. Ringelblum deserted any sense of stylization or organization in favor of preservation. For him, temporality focused on the ontological fact of life as such, before we organize it as a story and apply meaning to it. In this sense, Hersonski’s challenge, much like Friedländer’s, is to inject a principle of organization into a radical event of obliteration and a counter—disorganized—act of recollection. The editors and filmmakers, the curators of the material, make sure that we understand these differences, that we lock our gaze to that of the past, with life as it was, before and while we contemplate the different possible gazes that may be cast upon it. The frozen frames enable us to cross time in dynamic and unpredictable ways. They stand in contrast with the reenactment, which alienates us from the time and the event. In a frank conversation between Hersonski and a group of Israeli scholars, the director explained her position in similar terms, rejecting the conventional understanding of past images and victimhood in favor of using film material taken by the Nazis themselves: “The German photographer . . . created a sense of estrangement from the image itself, which marked for me the real horror in the scene. The distance allowed me to deal with my own personal experience as a viewer, to see what I have not seen before, and moreover to feel the horrible presence of what cannot be shown.”31 Rather than documenting the political or military process that led to the annihilation, the two films document the expectations of the time, the temporal order of a continuous present about to end. The use of freezeframes, slow motion, blowups, resizing, repetitions, and “metonymic leaps”—where a focus on one element or part of the body signifies the whole—is central to both films’ poetic historical semantics. As Aaron Kerner explains: “At the core, then, of the poetic Holocaust documentary are comparative strategies to measure temporal differences, generational differences, and moral/ethical dispositions. . . . Bill Nichols identifies [such strategies] as the reflexive mode, which he categorizes as distinct and separate from the poetic mode. The example of Peter Forgács’s films 268

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offers a look into these two documentary paradigms.”32 The devices shape a narrative of doom, a poetic view consciously anachronistic, and charge it with the ironic banalization of monstrosity and the presentation of a life that is at the same time meaningful and meaningless.

Historical Freeze: The Archive and Self-Fulfilling Prophecy If the Holocaust taught us a unique lesson about the potential of knowledge, it is one that is indissociable from the roles of history and memory, and the material archives that give rise to the possibilities of historical and memorial representation. Any discussion of the Nazi archives, Friedländer shows, connects them to the temporal horizon the Nazis imagined, a sort of prophecy. The organizing principles of an archive or the processes of documentation illustrate the limits of its realization, the extent to which it could reach into the individual lives that it documents. Since Victor Klemperer’s documentation and analysis of the Nazi language, as well as Hannah Arendt’s documentation and analysis of totalitarianism, a prophetic element in the Third Reich has been recognized in Holocaust studies.33 As Klemperer and Arendt demonstrated, in the totalitarian system, temporality must be considered as an expressive force. In an often overlooked section from her book on totalitarianism, Arendt developed her understanding of Nazi temporality, and emphasized the circular notion she termed “the principle of infallibility”: The form of infallible prediction in which these concepts were presented has become more important than their content. The chief qualification of a mass leader has become unending infallibility; he can never admit an error. The assumption of infallibility, moreover, is based not so much on superior intelligence as on the correct interpretation of the essentially reliable forces in history or nature, forces which neither defeat nor ruin can prove wrong because they are bound to assert themselves in the long run. Mass leaders in power have one concern which overrules all utilitarian considerations: to make their predictions come true. . . . The most famous example is Hitler’s announcement to the German Reichstag in January, 1939. . . . As soon as the execution of the victims has been carried out, the “prophecy” becomes a retrospective alibi: nothing happened but what had already been predicted.34 269

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In a chapter of Nazi Germany and the Jews entitled “Crusade and Card Index,” Friedländer points at the practical and organizational aspect of this infallibility; he explores the preparation of a Judenkartei, an archive encompassing all of German Jewry: “The Jews were registered, as planned, and the card files fulfilled their function when the deportations began.”35 The finality of the Nazi action was already there, in 1936, five years before the “Final Solution,” as pure potentiality waiting to be realized. Such potentiality, or “self-prophecy,” cannot be exposed without a keen awareness of historical semantics; one has to conceptualize the complicated relations between past events, present perception, and future implications, or how those are projected in and out of a certain action. The ingrained potential of the Nazi archive was to obliterate the future existence of German Jews. In other words, as Arendt, Friedländer, and Hersonski each show, the underlying assumption of creating such an archive, or a documentation of Jewish life, was the absolute control and obliteration of the Jewish population. Beyond it, due to its organization of information and knowledge, the archive enables the control (and erasure) of memory itself. After designing the archive and gathering the information, “all debate about the truth or falsity of a totalitarian dictator’s prediction is as weird as arguing with a potential murderer about whether his future victim is dead or alive.”36 As is evidently clear, then, both documentary films rely on and revolve around the status of the archive. As Jacques Derrida famously observed, the word “archive” derives from archium or archivum in Latin, arkheion in Greek, referring originally to the home of the archon, the Greek head of state.37 This was the place where official state documents were gathered, under the supervision of the sovereign. Knowledge was protected and hidden from the public eye, at the house of power. Since antiquity, the state archives have been part of the unexposed, the untold, and the untransparent. For Derrida, the temporality of the archive evolves according to the dynamics of the future anterior, namely as that which will have happened, and thus holds a claim for a prophetic dimension of self-fulfillment. The two documentary films focus on the archive as the home of power but also complicate Derrida’s observation by exploring the ethics of the archive as a kind of past-continuous form of preservation of memories and identities that are not only about the storage of past, present, and future images but also their very conditions of possibility for recogniz270

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ability and legibility in a given present. Ringelblum and the Peerebooms had to hide their visual or written archives. As both films indicate, the act of documenting and narrating the past enables a sense of ownership, an expression of control the Nazis confiscated from the Jewish body and its own sense of continuity, memory, and survival. Both films expose new documents; but more than that, they question our underlying assumption that the documents in the archive—real or imagined—are valid in the sovereign and legal sense: Exposing the Nazi documentary “The Ghetto” as a staged documentary undermines its authority or authenticity, but it also turns the question to the act of documentation itself. Something similar occurs with the home videos of the Jewish victims in Forgács’s film: the videos cannot function as authoritative and legal testimonies concerning the annihilation for the simple reason that the act of killing itself cannot be documented by the victim. Rather, the documentation mirrors an effect, a mixture of present horror and future-oriented hope. In other words, the act of documentation serves to expose the state of the mind of the documentarist himself, more than it does for the political or legal understanding of the event. Still, since there is no way to experience an “event at the limits,” for its radicalism crosses any preliminary knowledge and understanding, it is this very indirect approach—showing rather than telling—to the event that comes closer to reflecting about its radical core. Even while making use of archival material in the form of found footage, the two films continue and debate an enterprise initiated by Claude Lanzmann, who constructed his own archive of testimonies in Shoah. As Ilan Avisar wrote in Screening the Holocaust: “[Lanzmann’s] avoidance of archival material reflects the filmmaker’s determination to view the past in terms of the present, to concentrate on and to explore the legacy of the Final solution. . . . It defies the normal tempo of viewing movies, characterized by the expectation of a beginning, a middle, and an end and the experience of suspense, climax, and closure, which ensure some kind of a cathartic effect.”38 Lanzmann avoided any explicit references to existing historical archives, but chose to build his own “archive” of testimonies. Much of the effect of his film is built on the accumulation of testimonies, which in turn shape a large collection of images and testimonials that document the very act of collecting, organizing, and editing them. Shoah explores, via the testimonies, a hidden perspective. Like Lanzmann, both Forgács and Hersonski introduce a new archive, but they 271

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distance themselves from the truth claim of this—or any other—archive by pointing at gaps and absences, discordance and suspense, rather than filling in the missing information. In this sense, the two recent documentarists study the archive not only as a form of representation but as a power-laden operation, a dispositif. Forgács—working against official histories and archives—established the Private Photo and Film Archives Foundation, based on his own personal collection of home movies. His is a collection of movies that would have been rejected as “marginal” or “useless” for an understanding of the occupied Netherlands and the Nazis. The Maelstrom, as he tells Scot MacDonald in an interview, functions more as an “archeology of time.” He goes on to explain: “As in literature, in cinematography, the open piece gives far more surface for the imagination than does the linear narrative. This accounts for the associative jumps in my work, the shifts from the personal to the public, back and forth, and for the frequent lack of imagery.”39 The archive is as much as what is “in” it as it is the conditions that gave rise to it and the possibilities for examining the operations of archiving itself. Hersonski’s film is also preoccupied with the status of the archive, its politics, and its accessibility. To quote from an interview that I conducted with her: “[The Archive] deals with power, or rather the disempowerment of the image as a historical testimony. What is extrapolated from visual archives? The owner of the archive is usually the occupier. Sometimes the archive shifts owners, and a different kind of writing becomes possible.”40 This “writing against the grain” is what Hersonski’s film does when the archive becomes unmoored from its projected future and its original creators’ intentions. The task of these two films is thus to undermine the claims made by the owners of the archives and to question any given master narrative. As such, both documentaries propose an open discussion of the mechanism of knowledge, the dispositif of archival data, and its evershifting relationship to the present. Yet, given her positionality as an Israeli filmmaker, Hersonski further investigated the political implications of the archive in contemporary society in her attempt to counter the usual Israeli narrative of the Holocaust as a justification for nationalist politics or “a victimhood policy that backs and justifies any form of aggression. This [semiofficial] policy is grounded in archival work and its presentation to the public.”41 In the final section, I thus turn to the larger context of the relationship between global Holocaust culture and Israeli politics, which has come to frame—as shown in several other chapters in this book that address “the politics of exceptionality”—the ethical stakes of the former. 272

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Present Implications: The Case of Israeli Documentaries Idith Zertal discussed the importance of Holocaust films for Israeli identity as creating both “a victim-community” and solidifying the Zionist ethos of overcoming the Holocaust in the name of establishing a strong nation. This can be seen, for instance, in the case of Exodus, whose refugees, “in accordance with the proclaimed goals of the Zionist project, were to be brought clandestinely to Palestine.”42 Further, Sidra Dekoven Ezrahi has explored the “repetition-compulsion” at the core of Israeli collective images of the Holocaust, and Adi Ophir has discussed the growing notion in Israel that “the Holocaust is God,” a kind of infallibility principal that trumps anything else.43 Hersonski’s documentary, next to a very small number of art pieces, such as Roee Rosen’s 66 images of Live and Die as Eva Braun (1997), represents a work that was able to put critical history and theory to the test in specifically visual terms.44 In short, if Hersonski uses cinematic devices to suspend our expectation of an end, catastrophic as it may be, she also refuses any further claim to redemption or revival following it, thereby explicitly rejecting the more consensual and affirmative understanding of the Holocaust as a  justification of Zionism that she sees as typical of mainstream Israeli documentaries. As Hersonski put it: “The story told by Israeli documentaries is usually the story told in Yad Vashem, a narrative one cannot sidestep or question; one exists and sees Jerusalem. It all ends with the required sense of elation and hope [Hatikvah, also the national anthem].”45 From Meir Levin’s The Illegals (1947) to Arnon Goldfinger’s The Flat (2011), the narrative told in Israeli Holocaust films usually follows an individualbiographical quest, leaving and returning to Israel. Such films are almost always grounded in an opposition—implicit or explicit—between the Sabre or “new man” in Israel and the exilic Jew in Europe, the masculine and the feminine, the authentic and practical versus the inauthentic and falsely assimilated, and the present that points toward a redemptive future versus the past that is be to be undone and overcome. The archive of images is usually a mixture of nostalgic memories—inevitably proven false— of a long lost European childhood and a present Zionist lesson. In such narratives, a present protagonist is busy searching for self-justification, not an understanding of the past, and is hardly cognizant of the media of representation or the work of historical semantics to make sense of the archive. 273

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Goldfinger’s documentary, the most recent example of this genre, is an example of a third-generation Sabre who fights the traumatic memories of his mother—herself a second generation to the Holocaust survivors— in order to find the root of his own distressed memories and a way to overcome them. It ends with hope and self-affirmation. Such narratives realize—consciously or unconsciously—the redemptive temporality that occupies the heart of Zionist ideology that leads “Mi’Shoah Li’Tkumah”: from the Holocaust to independence. They answer what Friedländer called “a respect . . . for the established order and for things as they are,” or to put it quite simply, “kitsch.”46 In this regard, the linearity, teleology, and inevitability of the Israeli national narrative express the opposite of Michael Rothberg’s stress on multidirectional memory, namely, “the interaction of different historical memories [that] illustrate the productive, intercultural dynamic” that gives rise to competing and multiple memory cultures.47 Forgács and Hersonski are attempting to oppose linearity and ownership, nationalization and consensus, by showing, as Ernst van Alphen explained, how “personal history” is “in radical tension” with “collective history,” rather than a “synecdoche of historical time.”48 Hersonski’s film takes the opposite route to self-confirmation, not only because it avoids the biographical or the collective story and searches instead for an epistemological category—in essence, the “silence of the archive,” as the film was called originally. This is because Hersonski makes a conscious attempt to unpack and undermine every affirmative category, whether biographical, political, philosophical, aesthetic, or cinematic. Rather than concentrating on the horror or the nostalgia of a lost youth, the trauma and its overcoming, the ideology and its relevance, Hersonski looks at the reality from, and beyond, the gaze of the SS filmmaker in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1942. Distancing herself twice, she avoids any risk of sentimentality or an affirmation of an existing or inherited order. The distribution of her film in Israel was certainly meant to make a point in the charged Israeli context. Whereas standard films such as The Illegals or The Flat explore the traumatic past in order to overcome it, A Film Unfinished interrogates Israeli Holocaust narratives through the very concept of the archive, using devices such as freeze-framing in order to explore trauma itself as a power structure and expose its contemporary purchase. As Thomas Elsaesser put it, “the question is not only who ‘owns’ the representation, memory, meaning of the Holocaust, but who has the authority (moral, political, didactic-educational) to determine the 274

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terms.”49 In this sense, Hersonski, following the critical histories of Holocaust film, tackles the affirmative ghosts that have haunted Israeli culture and collective memory since its early days and that helped to carve the “victim community” that utilized one trauma to cover others that it brought about. In contrast to the Israeli “post-traumatic” cinema, as Nurit Gertz and Gal Hermoni have characterized it,50 Hersonski’s filmwithin-a-film does not suspend one kind of ownership and authority (the SS filmmaker) in favor of another (the Israeli survivors), but suspends both in favor of an abstract contemplation about the relationship of power (whoever shoots the film) to knowledge (the existing visual material) and to the naked face, frozen under our gaze and returning it. Freezing the frame is the way, perhaps the only way, to expose in cinematic ways the mechanism, the dispositif. In the final analysis, then, Hersonski’s film is about the tekhnê of Holocaust representation, the dispositif of its understanding, particularly through the power of the archive. It is a film about “the limits” or representation more than about “the event” of the Holocaust as such. A similar argument could be made about her current project, titled The Visual Crash, which traces the visual material that was shot on the Mavi Marmara, the ship of protesters that sailed from Turkey to Gaza in May 2010 and was attacked by Israeli commandos, an attack leading to the death of nine protesters and the injury of a few soldiers. Hersonski describes the project in close terms to the ones she uses for A Film Unfinished, emphasizing the way it was censored by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and used for propaganda purposes, while “disguising the fact that no one on that ship knows exactly how and what happened, not even the people who shot the images. Of hundreds of hours we were exposed just to one image, i.e. the one of beating the soldiers. It is a story about the way we tell ourselves certain stories.”51 In the case of A Film Unfinished, the difference between the titles Hersonski gave to the Israeli and the American (global) distributers is another case in point. The silence in the Hebrew title (“the silence of the archive”) is a direct allusion to the great difficulty to discuss such representations in a contaminated political situation that insists on persecution and self-victimization, on the one hand, and romanticization and redemption, on the other. The archive is silent because it is silenced, not because it refuses to talk. The English title is more technical and universal—it mirrors the distance between two states of incompleteness: the Nazi film and Hersonski’s own framing of it, from a present perspective. There is 275

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something that would always remain endless in this story, and, hence, unfinished. The archive, as Derrida showed in Archive Fever, assumes both commencement and commandment, an order for action and the gathering needed to carry it out. A Film Unfinished and The Maelstrom rely on visual archives to supply the cornerstones of their narratives. The use of freeze-framing ensures that we, the audience, are called on to ponder the content, the temporality inside the archive, so that we can criticize the selection and organization of historical evidence, potential or real, virtual or “factual,” real or imagined. Opening such questions to present and future generations means acting on Derrida’s call “to repress the archive while archiving the repression.”52 A reflexive consideration of the archive, its apparatus, the dispositif, exposes the world in its plurality and potentiality, permitting us to turn away from those closed narratives whose principles of organization are concealed behind manipulations. In more concrete terms, the use of freeze-framing enables the directors of the two films to find a moment of reflection, in between the pure potentiality of a planned aggression and the retroactive injection of meaning into the oblivious past. It is an ethical, as much as a stylistic, choice. The presentness that is locked in between those two—the potential and retroactive— is always our present, this very minute. With this in mind, the archive—any archive—must always be considered by going against its principles of organization. The universal archive implies a preference for action and a reverse temporality, and freezeframing helps us to reconfigure the familiar. Friedländer’s reflections on specific Jewish testimonies, as he explains in Nazi Germany and the Jews, work in the same way. The historian—like Hersonski and Forgács—is always living in between worlds, in between the already gone and the not yet realized. How better to carry out this task of negotiating the impossible than by the unflickering lamp of the frozen frame?

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13 Witnessing the Archive YA E L H E R S O N S K I

I

THINK it all began in my very early childhood, as the grandchild of a

Holocaust survivor. At that time, maybe, I could not articulate it in words, but I believe I already understood that there existed a tremendous, perhaps infinite gap between my grandmother’s traumatic silence and the way her trauma was being verbalized and visualized during our national Holocaust memorial days, an unbridgeable gap between the way a state commemorates a traumatic event and the way its victims experience it as a continuous past. A state, in my case the Israeli state, had to construct a closed historical story, indeed a narrative of perpetual victimhood, that would serve its national interest and would be used as an educational and ideological tool for future generations. And on this score—obviously on this score alone—the way any state acts in regard to its archival footage is the same, whether it be the Nazi regime or the democratic state of Israel. This, at least, is my experience as an Israeli citizen. In contrast to national historical narratives that have a beginning and an end, my grandmother, like any other survivor, lived with an event that could not be, and was not, worked through to its completion; it had no ending and no closure, and therefore, as far as she was concerned, it continued into the present and was current from every point of view. And in this respect, I believe that the state alone cannot process the trauma. I keep returning to that mesmerizing footage of Yehiel Dinur Ka-tzetnik collapsing on the witness stand during the Eichmann trial in Israel. The judges could not understand what he was saying, or rather failing to say, and they were brutally pushing him to produce what was perceived by 277

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the court as a valid testimony. The clash between what the court wanted to hear from its witness and the witness’s impossibility to speak the language of the court ended in Ka-tzetnik fainting, literally losing his consciousness on the witness stand. It is not only a moment that allows us to reflect upon the historical and political context that created the silence of the victims during the fifties in Israel, but it is also a point where private trauma is given a public stage, and through the failure of its testimony, our understanding of the Holocaust is being transformed. The national historical story does not and cannot register the traumatic silence. I believe that if there is any means of knowledge that can address the traumatic, paralyzing quality of a catastrophe, it is the archival footage which documents it (including the documentation of Ka-tzetnik at the witness stand). My film attempts to question the way we use such footage in order to understand our past and to manufacture meaning in our present. My grandmother was constantly struggling with herself to conceal whatever went on under her skin. On the outside she was not talking about it, and she refused to confront any archival footage from that time, which was regularly shown on TV during Holocaust memorial days. She never encouraged me to listen to the one instance of testimony that she made, the witness account that she gave to the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial museum when she immigrated to Israel. At that time, the museum sent interviewers to take testimonies from all Holocaust survivors immigrating to Israel. My grandmother asked for all of her family members to leave the house, and she gave her testimony to a woman who was typing her words on a Polish typewriter. The woman left, and no one talked about it until the day my grandmother died. We always believed that someday we would have the chance to read whatever she could not say to us. We mistakenly imagined that she would have left us with something that she had not been able to tell us in person. Yet, in fact it is not that she could not face us—it is just that she had no ability to speak her traumatic memories, to put them into words. I should have expected not to find anything in that written testimony, but because it was there and as if waiting for my eyes, I was still surprised to find nothing. When I went to Yad Vashem to read her written testimony for the first time, it was one month after she died, and those ten yellowish pages typed with triple spacing revealed even less than I already knew. It was my first meaningful and rather melancholic encounter with the archive as an institutional 278

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keeper of history, both public and private. For a future researcher, this was the only trace of my grandmother’s time in the Warsaw Ghetto and in the Auschwitz extermination camp—and it told almost nothing. The only two sentences that did bear witness to the state my grandmother was in were the ones where she said she cannot talk about her experiences in the Warsaw Ghetto, followed by the interviewer’s comment: “I noticed that the witness is very upset and vulnerable, and I decided not to pressure her more than I already did.” Thus began my long journey through the archives, and unlike Claude Lanzmann—not as an act against them, but as an attempt to decipher their testimonial faculty. This is also why I was particularly inspired by those filmmakers such as Alain Resnais, Claude Lanzmann, Peter Forgács, Harun Farocki, and even Jean-Luc Goddard, whom I see as having worked on defamiliarizing the archive, on complicating the facile distinction between past and present. I liked, in particular, the ways in which they have used and reused footage, and their critical rereading of the images, which was never aimed at claiming another truth but always at making the frame itself more visible—making the frame declare its own limits and borders. They were all my teachers in that respect, and I keep watching their films again and again. However, I was also determined to go against arguably one of the greatest cinematic masterpieces in existence, namely Lanzmann’s Shoah. When watching this nine and half hour film, which I did several times, I always thought that I had nothing to add to it. In fact, I could not imagine any filmmaker having something to add to what Claude Lanzmann had already done. Yet, today, more than thirty-five years after Shoah was released, I do believe that the fact that most Holocaust survivors are no longer alive, that the witnesses are gone, and all we are left with are the archives should change something in our approach to understanding contemporary cinema’s potential to bear witness. So, when Claude Lanzmann was making Shoah, it was brilliant to go against the archive, against the way its images (which were mostly produced through the Nazi lens) were used or rather misused. But soon, there will be no more witnesses to do the remembering, and this was a very crucial point of departure for me: I was not only aiming at taking a closer look at the visual archives but also understanding the nature of their images and the nature of their historical testimony. Of course, I do not think I fully succeeded in doing that. There was a certain point during the editing stage when I would say to my editor, “I will never understand it,” because there is something so ineffable about it, so incomprehensible and 279

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inconceivable. The gap between what we can see and what we can understand was never more visible and present. One possible example of my unconscious dialogue with Shoah is the reenactment of the interview with the cameraman sent by the Nazis to film the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto. This scene might be compared with Lanzmann’s interview with Franz Grassler, deputy to Dr. Auerswald, Nazi commissioner of the Warsaw Ghetto: the same kinds of questions, the same disbelief on the part of the questioner that he (the one questioned) did not know what was really happening. Admittedly, there may have been an unconscious move on my part after seeing Lanzmann’s film so many times. However, in my case, the text of the preliminary interrogation with the cameraman is an accurate transcript, and I did not rewrite it for dramatic purposes. It is a documentary text from beginning to end. There were some details that I omitted, but I did not change the text itself. At the same time, the cameraman in my film is not the real cameraman: the sequences of his interview are all a reenactment, and the choice of using such a cinematic style was taken only after I understood what my problem was with cinematic reenactments in general: When reenactments assert to be authentic presentations of the events, they undermine the very authenticity of the whole film. I knew that if I am to reenact the interview with the cameraman, I should clearly mark it as a reenactment, in my case, by resizing the frame in a way that focuses details in a nonrealistic manner. I had, however, more than one reason to reenact the interrogation. First of all, there was the sheer amount and diversity of witnesses in this film: the testimonies of the Jews writing during the time of the ghetto, the written testimony of the commander of the Warsaw Ghetto, and the voices of witnesses who are still alive and talking today. So, I was afraid that the importance and rarity of the testimony by the very cameraman who shot this footage would be missed in the midst of so many other testimonies if I used it merely as a text inside the film. This is because it was very important for me to actually acknowledge that there was a real person behind this camera and that he was thinking about many things while shooting, things that we really cannot imagine to be thought while filming these images. I was seeking to establish a human eye, the eye of a Nazi cameraman, behind a frame that became almost objective evidence (for what?), at least to the eyes of those who would see or use this footage after the war. Only after establishing this could I emphasize the double nature of the gaze behind the camera: that of the cameraman and that of the machine itself, the camera. And it is 280

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not the same gaze. Whatever he was seeing is not the same thing that we are seeing in those images. That separation between the cameraman and the images that he produced was immensely important to me. I think that if I had just filmed the textual protocols of this interrogation, the viewer would not have had the opportunity to really feel how different the gaze of the cameraman is from his or her own gaze on the images, and how many details even our contemporary gaze misses (even while informed by much knowledge after the fact), including details that were captured without any human intention that are silently showing themselves as part of that reality. So, I would have had to take an actor to read the protocols—as for other testimonies from that time—but then, as I was imagining the recording of a voice, a German voice who would recite the text of that interrogation, I said to myself: why not show a presence of a person? Since the border between fiction and documentary is already so elusive in the footage itself, why not go even further, and claim something about my own impossibility to determine the thin line between what I see and what I believe I am seeing? I was therefore very irritated by the way this film was promoted, especially in the United States, with trailers shouting that it would reveal the “real truth” hiding beneath the footage. I did not aim at revealing any “real truth.” Instead, I was trying to question the ways we come to define what is truthful and what is not, what belongs to history and what remains to be forgotten on the editing room floor, what is authentic and what is not, what is public and what is private. Therefore, I found the reenactment a proper tool, not only to shed new light on the footage but also to question my own means of filmmaking. My last comment pertains to Nitzan Lebovic’s suggestions about time and prophecy. I asked myself many times why this unfinished film, Das Ghetto, was made. By 1940, the Nazis had already proven to themselves that such nonfiction films were, in fact, financial and propaganda disasters in the movie theaters. Unlike the fiction film Jud Süß (1940), which was a major success, The Eternal Jew (1940) had to be removed from theaters in one week because the German audience just could not bear its images, which mainly provoked horror, aversion, or even unwelcome compassion for the Jews. So I asked myself: why should they pursue a very similar attempt to create another propaganda film in 1942, and such an extensive and expensive one? Although one can only speculate about the reason for making this film, I have formed an idea based on what Joseph Goebbels wrote in his diary just four days before the filming of Das 281

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Ghetto began. He wrote that as Himmler was preparing the great deportation of Jews from Poland, he urgently disposed that documentary films be made for the education of future generations of the Third Reich. So, possibly, this film was not meant to be shown in movie theaters at that time, but was prepared, literally, for the future; for a future, that is, when the Third Reich would be the dominant power in Europe, and only a certain story about the Jewish race that was to have been extinguished by the Nazis would be allowed to be told: a story about the nature of that race, and why it had to be exterminated. When we watch the footage from this future perspective, we can understand what they were trying to do by juxtaposing scenes of Jews living in luxury with scenes where Jews are actually dying from hunger, poverty, and disease. I mean, if we try to imagine the perspective of a future Nazi German citizen watching this film in, say, 1990, we might reasonably get the impression that he would be introduced to a community that was running itself into the ground because of its own abject moral corruption and lack of anything that makes us human. And this perspective takes us back to the idea I discussed in the beginning, namely, of an archive that is already built for the future, that it is already built to articulate a certain kind of story, and cannot, like the state cannot and like the law cannot, process traumatic data. I found out about Goebbels’s quote when I was already editing my own film, and after a number of trials, I decided to leave the footage without the commentary of the Nazi minister of propaganda. When I was trying to insert the quotation into the film—this will sound a bit mystical, but it is not—the film just refused to accept the quote, as it disguised itself as one definite answer to another unsolved question. Something started to collapse, and I could not refuse the order of the film, or better the command of the film; it was just one thing too many in a puzzle that was not supposed to be completed. Retrospectively, I do believe the film really benefited from this choice because something was unintentionally left open, as if it remained to be an unfinished film. And I remember telling myself many times that the only thing I did not want to do was to give the impression of closure by creating something that could be fully comprehensible. The past, like the future, remains open.

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14 Deconstructivism and the Holocaust Peter Eisenman’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe G AV R I E L D. R O S E N F E L D

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INCE IT WAS formally dedicated and opened to the public on May

8, 2005, Germany’s national Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin has drawn millions of visitors (Figures 14.1 and 14.2). In the process, it has become one of the city’s most popular tourist attractions, an internationally recognized symbol of the new unified Germany. The memorial’s iconic status today is indisputable. Indeed, one cannot really claim to have seen contemporary Berlin without having visiting the site. That said, it remains uncertain whether the memorial can be regarded as a success. Despite all the attention that it has received, its impact on the millions of visitors who have seen it is anything but clear. Anyone who has personally visited the memorial knows that wandering through its field of stelae is an intensely subjective experience. On any given day, people come to the site with vastly different intentions. Some walk alone in silent contemplation, having been drawn to the memorial by its intended purpose—to remember the Nazis’ crimes against the Jews. Others, by contrast, come to the vast public space for more prosaic reasons: to picnic, skateboard, or simply lie in the sun. Given this diverse behavior, it is hard to know whether the memorial’s message has been successfully communicated and received. Yet, this begs the question of what the memorial means to communicate in the first place. One would expect that the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe aims to convey an ethical message. Yet, the memorial’s aesthetic form—abstract and minimalistic— makes it difficult to discern what that message might be. 283

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Figure 14.1. Eisenman. 

Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, design by Peter

The interpretive problems raised by Germany’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe are challenging, but hardly new. Ever since the end of the Second World War, the relationship between ethics and aesthetics has been one of the central issues of Holocaust representation. The challenges of representing the Holocaust are many and revolve around several questions: How should art respond to atrocity? Which aesthetic forms, if any, should be employed in representing the crimes of the Nazi perpetrators and the suffering of their victims? What ethical concerns should these representations promote? How can their effectiveness be measured? Throughout the postwar era, countless figures in Western cultural and intellectual life have struggled to address these questions, but most have been influenced in one way or another by the thinking of Theodor Adorno. Ever since Adorno famously declared in 1949 that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric,” writers, poets, painters, and philosophers have tried to heed his recommendations in developing their ethical and aes284

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Figure 14.2. Eisenman.

Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, design by Peter

thetic rationales for producing “post-Holocaust” culture.1 Adorno’s declaration is open to interpretation. But most scholars agree that the philosopher did not so much deny the possibility of all cultural expression in the wake of the Holocaust as insist that the Holocaust should not be exploited for aesthetic enjoyment.2 To prevent this from happening, Adorno urged that prevailing forms of cultural expression—especially mimetic and realistic modes of representation—be fundamentally rethought and reconfigured to mark the rupture of the Nazi genocide. “After Auschwitz,” he declared, “no word . . . has any right unless it underwent a transformation.”3 In keeping with this stance, Adorno’s own tastes gravitated toward modernism, which avoided realism in favor of abstraction.4 His main concern lay less in the realm of artistic style, however, than in artistic responsiveness. Disturbed by Western society’s attempt after 1945 to resume life as if the war and its atrocities had never happened, Adorno believed that postwar culture could only preserve its validity to the extent that it registered the impact of the Nazi genocide and embraced new modes of representation. 285

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Adorno’s thoughts provide a helpful means of assessing the significance of Peter Eisenman’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. At the broadest level, they provide a conceptual framework for understanding the memorial within the context of its medium. For a variety of reasons discussed below, the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe resists easy classification, straddling the fields of sculpture and architecture. The fact that it was designed by an architect, however, means that it should be seen within a specifically architectural context. The memorial should be examined against the backdrop of how architects, on the whole, confronted the legacy of the Holocaust in their work after 1945. Like poets, painters, and philosophers, architects also had to reconsider whether the tools of their trade should be maintained or radically transformed in the wake of the Holocaust. In deciding how to build after Auschwitz, however, architects were generally slow to heed the ethical demands of the recent past. During the early postwar period, most architects remained wedded to the aims of the modernist movement and stayed oriented toward the future. Sharing modernism’s well-known hostility to history and memory, they refused to rethink their architectural principles after 1945 and continued to build as they always had, producing open, light-filled structures expressing hope rather than despair. In so doing, architects differed from their colleagues in the fields of literature, poetry, painting, and music, some of whom sought to acknowledge the rupture of the Nazi genocide in their postwar work.5 At least for the first three decades of the postwar era, most architects seldom thought about the Holocaust at all. And in the very rare instances when they did—as with the ill-fated New York City Holocaust memorial project from the 1940s to the 1960s—they showed no inclination to rethink their principles, producing designs that expressed a redemptive view of the Nazi genocide and validated their forwarding-looking modernist inclinations.6 This mind-set only began to change after the mid-1970s, with the emergence of the architectural movement of postmodernism. As is well known, postmodernism shattered modernist taboos against historical reference and allowed architects to return to the past as a source of creative inspiration. In promoting a greater sense of historical awareness, postmodernism prompted certain architects to open themselves up, for the first time, to reflecting on the legacy of the Holocaust and its ramifications for their profession. This development was crucial, for it paved the way for the first architectural movement in postwar history to directly 286

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confront the Holocaust’s legacy—deconstructivism. Significant in and of itself, the rise of deconstructivism was especially important given Peter Eisenman’s pivotal role in shaping it. Eisenman not only drew on the Holocaust’s legacy in establishing many of deconstructivism’s ideas, he also drew directly on these ideas in conceiving the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe.

Deconstructivism and the Legacy of the Holocaust Deconstructivism first gained national attention in 1988, when the Museum of Modern Art in New York City organized a famous exhibition that profiled the work of Eisenman and several other up-and-coming architects, including Daniel Libeskind, Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaas, Bernhard Tschumi, and the Austrian firm Coop Himmelb(l)au. The designs profiled in the exhibition were linked by common aesthetic features: bent, warped, and fragmented shapes punctured by flying beams and sharply angled planes. In assuming such a destabilized appearance, the works on display rejected both modernist abstraction and postmodern revivalism and seemed to herald a new direction for Western architecture as it headed into the 1990s. Observers at the time struggled to explain deconstructivism’s origins and significance. Many pointed out that the term itself was a portmanteau word influenced by the poststructuralist idea of deconstruction and the early twentieth century Russian avantgarde movement of constructivism. To a degree, both influences shaped the movement. In truth, however, the architects associated with it had developed their radical architectural philosophies independently through years of innovative work. Of them all, Eisenman was arguably the most important, having devoted considerable effort to theorizing in a protodeconstructivist direction already in the late 1970s.7 In doing so, Eisenman drew on a wide range of philosophical and architectural ideas. But among them was the legacy of the Holocaust.8 In a series of essays published between the years 1977 and  1984, Eisenman frequently invoked the legacy of Auschwitz to explain why the Western architectural profession needed to question its traditional foundations. At this point in time, the profession was in the midst of transitioning from modernist abstraction to postmodern representation. Eisenman, however, rejected both movements and sought an alternative third path. Drawing on structuralist and poststructuralist theory, he attacked both modernism and postmodernism as fatally wedded to 287

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Western humanism. Both movements, he argued, continued to affirm the 500-year-old anthropocentric belief that buildings should communicate meaning, attain timeless validity, and use representational means to achieve formal perfection. In remaining wedded to humanism, however, both modernism and postmodernism failed to acknowledge that, in the wake of the Second World War, a “new sensibility” had emerged, one that was “born in the rupture of 1945” and was visible “in the stones of Hiroshima and the smoke of Auschwitz.”9 For Eisenman, the time had come for architects to produce a new kind of architecture that acknowledged the anxious realities of the posthumanist, post-Holocaust world. Eisenman struggled for a time to define this new architecture, invoking the concepts of “postfunctionalism” and architectural “decomposition,” before later embracing the notion of deconstructivism.10 But the essential ideas were clear: the time had come to move beyond an architecture of affirmation to one of negation; beyond an architecture of presence to one of absence. The time had finally arrived for architects to embrace an architecture of “traces” that refused to exist as “a representational object” and that conceded the nonexistence of a “representable ‘reality.’ ”11 As Eisenman told Robert Venturi in 1982, “Since the Holocaust, we live in a world of what I call memory and imminence. . . . It seems to me that architecture could reflect this condition symbolically.”12 In short, Eisenman arrived at the profound, if paradoxical, conclusion that the time had come for architecture to acknowledge the rupture of the Holocaust by admitting the impossibility of architectural representation. In making this appeal, Eisenman was influenced by several factors. His interest in the literary and philosophical works of Theodor Adorno, George Steiner, Maurice Blanchot, and Jacques Derrida alerted him to the Holocaust’s importance in giving rise to the postmodern world.13 Equally important was his decision in 1978 to undergo what became a twentyyear course of psychoanalysis. This decision helped Eisenman confront childhood experiences with anti-Semitism and allowed him to reembrace his previously neglected Jewish identity. Although he had traditionally rejected conventional religious definitions of Jewishness in crafting his personal sense of self, his writings in this period increasingly displayed a willingness to define himself as a Jewish “outsider” rebelling against the classical architectural tradition.14 This new self-perception at the personal level, together with his theoretical interest in the Holocaust’s legacy, combined to fuel a radical—and, in many ways, “Jewish”—turn in Eisenman’s architectural career.15 288

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This turn became increasingly visible in Eisenman’s work after the 1980s. Many of his buildings during this period clearly communicated deconstructivism’s aesthetics of rupture. One of the most important was his Wexner Center for the Visual Arts in Columbus, Ohio (1988). This building’s scaffold-like exterior undermined the idea of architectural solidity, while its “ghost” tower (alluding to the tower of an armory that once stood at the site) evoked absence. All of these features were meant to be disturbing. As Eisenman predicted in a 1984 interview, “I think the general public are going to feel a very definite level of anxiety in the building.”16 Even more destabilized were subsequent buildings, such as his Nunotani Headquarters in Tokyo, Japan (1992), and the Aronoff Center at the University of Cincinnati (1995)—both of which appeared on the verge of imminent collapse. To be sure, these works bore no direct relationship to the Holocaust. Yet others did. Eisenman’s unrealized 1992 design for the Max Reinhardt House in Berlin—an inverted skyscraper in the form of a contorted Möbius strip—was dedicated to the influential German Jewish theater director who was forced into exile by the Nazi regime. More important still was his submission for the Vienna Holocaust memorial competition of 1995. This design, which utilized historical maps of Vienna’s Jewish ghetto, the German Reich of 1938, and the Auschwitz extermination camp to create a disconcertingly jagged, three-meter-deep rupture in the center of the city’s medieval Judenplatz, explicitly showed how deconstructivism’s aesthetic agenda was informed by the Nazi genocide’s legacy.17

Deconstructivism and the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe The best example of the Holocaust’s impact on Eisenman’s work, however, was his design for Germany’s national Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin. Originally conceived with the American sculptor Richard Serra in 1997, the design exhibited many of Eisenman’s deconstructivist principles. The most important was its rejection of representation. Eisenman designed the memorial as an abstract arrangement of 2,711 concrete stelae arranged across a nearly five-acre space in the heart of Berlin. In assuming this diffuse form, the design subverted the aesthetic orientation of conventional memorials, which traditionally have been constructed as solitary monoliths, intended to be viewed from a single perspective. Nathan Rapoport’s famous Monument to the Ghetto Heroes 289

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in Warsaw (1948)—a massive granite block with figurative bronze reliefs of ghetto resistance fighters—epitomized the traditional kind of monument that Eisenman rejected. Instead of creating an object that would be viewed passively by onlookers from a distance, Eisenman produced a much more dynamic space that visitors could enter, wander around, and interact with. The design further opposed traditional modes of representation by embracing an abstract instead of figurative form. Although many observers later claimed to find symbolic significance in the field of stelae (the most common claim was that it resembled a sprawling cemetery), Eisenman denied that it was meant to represent anything in particular. Indeed, the architect refused to have the memorial didactically offer any specific historical or moral lesson. “For me,” Eisenman declared, “the memorial symbolizes silence and emptiness. It does not say . . . what it is and what it means.”18 It was to be a “place of no meaning,” a “place without information,” a place that would “speak without speaking.” The memorial was to be a space that would prompt visitors to ask the question “why?” without answering it.19 In offering this rationale for the memorial, Eisenman strove to honor Theodor Adorno’s admonition about creating art in the wake of atrocity. Adorno’s belief that postwar culture needed to acknowledge the rupture of the Holocaust by breaking with reigning modes of aesthetic representation stood at the heart of Eisenman’s deconstructivist philosophy and directly influenced his memorial design. It clearly influenced the architect’s observation, for example, that “the enormity and horror of the Holocaust are such that any attempt to represent it by traditional means is inevitably inadequate.”20 It also shaped his belief that figurative forms of representation were ill-suited to contend with the Holocaust’s magnitude. Like Adorno, Eisenman feared that such forms could potentially “aestheticize . . . [the Nazis’] crime[s] against humanity.” He was further convinced that such forms, once applied to the Holocaust, ran the risk of becoming “kitsch, sentimental and hollow.”21 Finally, Eisenman believed that such forms were ill-equipped to preserve memory. While didactic, figurative memorials gave people specific lessons to reflect on, they were “easy to compartmentalize and stick away in a drawer.” It was in order to counteract this tendency that Eisenman gave his memorial design an abstract form. In conceiving of his field of stelae, Eisenman hoped to give visitors to the memorial an ineffable sensory experience that “resisted representation and being concretized.” In the process, he hoped to stimulate a more active and “lively” form of remembrance.22 If visitors were 290

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personally responsible for drawing their own mnemonic lessons from the memorial, they would be more likely to internalize them. For this reason, Eisenman had no interest in determining the content of memory. Doing so, he believed, would not only be ineffective but would also be futile. Like Holocaust survivors Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi, Eisenman was convinced that the Nazi genocide lay beyond rational comprehension. As he bluntly put it, the memorial was not meant “to grant further understanding, since understanding the Holocaust is impossible.”23 Eisenman’s opposition to representation shaped not only the memorial’s abstract form but also its sense of space. Although the memorial’s most iconic feature was its thousands of concrete stelae, the space that they collectively constituted was equally distinct. Thanks to their varied height and grid-like arrangement, the stelae created a spatial environment that, while welcoming on its periphery, became increasingly claustrophobic at its center. This effect also derived from Eisenman’s desire to break with traditional forms of representation. Eisenman felt strongly that for the memorial to be successful, it had to subvert itself as an aesthetic object. For this reason, he strove—in good postmodern fashion—to blur the boundaries between the two cultural realms in which the memorial was rooted: sculpture and architecture. The memorial was too large and sprawling to be a traditional work of commemorative sculpture. Its lack of features constituting a sense of shelter, meanwhile, disqualified it as a work of architecture. By undermining the purity of its architectural and sculptural elements, Eisenman conceived of the memorial as a hybrid form that advanced a subversive aesthetic agenda. A second and even more subversive aspect of the memorial’s spatial configuration was its effort to “displace . . . the ground” as a basis for architecture. According to Eisenman, architecture had traditionally been “site specific,” in the sense of being rooted in the ground. Yet, because ground had been essential to “the Nazi ideology of blut und boden” (blood and soil)—and because this racist idea had “made the Jew placeless, alien, and other”—Eisenman deliberately undermined it by having the ground under the memorial’s stelae undulate, forcing visitors into a “zone of instability” in which “the ground falls away” from them. This gesture, the architect believed, would help counter architecture’s inclination to “provide . . . meaning . . . In . . . [an] aesthetic way,” in general, and the Nazis’ tendency to “aestheticize . . . politics,” in particular.24 In short, the aesthetic principles behind the memorial—abstraction and spatial diffusion—were informed by a larger ethical stance. They were 291

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intended to acknowledge the rupture of the Holocaust by breaking with previous modes of aesthetic representation.

Ethical and Aesthetic Ambivalences And yet, while Eisenman’s aesthetic and ethical concerns were closely connected, they also stood in tension with one another. In truth, Eisenman was never entirely comfortable advancing an ethical agenda in his memorial. Throughout his professional career, he strove to keep his architectural work distant from explicit political and moral positions. His early structuralist commitment to architectural autonomy and his poststructuralist opposition to architectural “presence” inclined him to pursue architecture mostly for its own sake. Eisenman was unable to employ such a value-neutral approach in designing the Holocaust memorial, however. Given the project’s overtly moral mission of preserving the memory of atrocity, the memorial’s aesthetics had to be put in the service of ethical goals. Eisenman realized as much, but he still had difficulty shelving his formalistic inclinations and instrumentally viewing architecture as a mere means to an end. This difficulty was especially visible in Eisenman’s ambivalence about the memorial’s commemorative mission. During the period leading up to the memorial’s dedication—and afterward, as well—the architect offered inconsistent and sometimes contradictory statements about its objectives: he never made clear whether the memorial intended to offer a specific message about the Holocaust; he was imprecise about pinpointing the genocide’s origins and identifying the identity of the perpetrators; and he was even hazy for a time about the identity of the victims. Much of Eisenman’s uncertainty stemmed from his inability to decide whether the Holocaust’s historical significance lay in the realm of the universal or the particular. Because he never truly resolved this question, his views of the memorial’s mission remained ambiguous. This ambiguity, in turn, contributed to the divided response to the memorial following its dedication and has since sparked disagreement about its legacy. Eisenman’s difficulty in reconciling his aesthetic and ethical agendas was reflected, first of all, in his approach to the issue of representation. Despite repeatedly insisting that he sought to avoid a sense of didacticism in his memorial design, Eisenman ultimately honored this pledge in the breach. While it was true that he did not want the memorial to preach a single message, the architect intended for it to have a specific emotional impact. As with his Wexner Center, Eisenman wanted the Berlin memo292

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rial to be a space that provoked anxiety. He declared on many separate occasions that the memorial space was meant to be “strange,” “disturbing,” and make people feel “insecure.”25 The architect was unclear, however, about whether this emotional effect was inspired by universal or historically specific sources. In one interview, he compared the effect of wandering through the memorial’s stelae to an experience he once had walking in an Iowa cornfield. As he recalled, “[I] walked 100 yards in and couldn’t see my way out. That moment was very scary. There are moments in time when you feel lost in space. I was trying to create the possibility of that experience, that frisson, something that you don’t forget.”26 On other occasions, Eisenman likened the memorial’s intended emotional effect on visitors to that of being in an actual concentration camp. Visitors to the memorial field, he wrote, should have “a spatial experience . . . similar to what one would have in Auschwitz . . . a feeling of loneliness and being lost.”27 The substantially different analogies employed by Eisenman—a cornfield and a concentration camp—suggested that the sources of the memorial’s aesthetic inspiration were less important than its intended ethical effects. Despite denying that the memorial was meant to be didactic, Eisenman clearly wanted it to unsettle viewers and instill in them a sense of empathy with the Holocaust’s victims (Figure 14.3). Eisenman was also inconsistent in clarifying whether or not the memorial offered an explanation of the Holocaust’s origins. In theory, his antididactic mind-set implied a reluctance to account for the Nazi genocide. In practice, however, he advocated a distinctly postmodern explanation of the Holocaust as the result of modernity. The architect was particularly inclined to explain the genocide in philosophical terms, as the result of modern reason. In describing the memorial’s admonitory objective, for example, Eisenman declared that it “will warn against the belief in reason, . . . [for] when reason becomes all-consuming . . . terrible things can happen.”28 It was to warn against this danger, Eisenman explained, that the memorial assumed its distinctive sprawling form. The memorial’s massive size, he pointed out, was meant to evoke “the excess of . . . reason gone mad.”29 Its rigid, grid-like arrangement of stelae was meant “to look like a field of reason, all lined up” to the point of becoming “obsessive.”30 In making these statements, Eisenman made clear that he viewed the Holocaust as a by-product, rather than a betrayal, of Enlightenment values. This view had a respectable intellectual pedigree that extended from Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment to Zygmunt Bauman’s Modernity and the Holocaust. 293

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Figure 14.3. Eisenman. 

Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, design by Peter

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But it was extremely abstract and effaced the Holocaust’s historical specificity. This effect was visible in Eisenman’s observation that the memorial was meant to stand “as a warning against the . . . rationality that is the hallmark of the 20th century, against the efficiency of machines and production and capital that can go awry.”31 Such claims, by explaining the Holocaust as the result of technological and economic forces, universalized the Holocaust’s significance and shifted attention away from its millions of real historical victims and perpetrators. This universalizing tendency was further evident in Eisenman’s ambivalent view of the Holocaust’s victims. From the very beginning of the memorial’s conception in the late 1980s, debate swirled around the question of whether it would commemorate only Jewish victims or other victims as well. After much wrangling, the German government ultimately decided to highlight the uniqueness of the Jewish experience.32 Eisenman was less sure, however, and struggled with the question of how “Jewish” the memorial should be. Initially, he believed that the memorial should acknowledge not just the Nazis’ Jewish victims but also Sinti and Roma as well as homosexuals. All of these groups, he argued, had been persecuted by the Nazis because they were deemed to be “other.” Eisenman insisted that, for this reason, it was important for the memorial to make clear that “ ‘otherness’ included more than the Jews.”33 In taking this stance, Eisenman yet again showed his indebtedness to postmodern thought, which interpreted the Holocaust as part of modernity’s effort to eradicate “difference” from the world. This view further diminished the genocide’s Jewish features and universalized its significance. Eisenman’s inclination to de-Judaize the Holocaust partly reflected his ambivalence about his Jewish identity. The architect’s childhood exposure to anti-Semitism and his subsequent distance from traditional religious observance led him to shy away from a particularistic sense of Jewishness. In interviews, Eisenman denied having any religious connection to Judaism, pointing out that he never went to synagogue and regarded “rabbinic Judaism . . . [as] alien.” He also distanced himself from the State of Israel, declaring that, in his eyes, “the secular Jew always lives in the diaspora and not in a homeland.”34 To be Jewish, Eisenman insisted, was to be an “outsider.” It was to belong to a people who epitomized the rootless, alienated condition of human beings in the modern era. Given this universalistic definition of Jewishness, it was no surprise that Eisenman initially conceived of the Holocaust’s victims in an expansive rather than narrow sense. 295

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And yet, as the architect continued to work on the project, his attitude began to change. The more time that Eisenman spent in Germany and read about the history of the Holocaust, the more he began to reconnect with his “neglected Jewish heritage.” “The Jewish aspects of my person [began to] reemerge,” he explained in 2003, concluding that the memorial commission ultimately helped him rediscover the “repressed Jew within me”—“my psychological Judaism.”35 This shift in identity led Eisenman to rethink how he viewed the Holocaust’s victims. He now replaced his inclusive view with a more strictly Jewish perspective. When asked by Der Spiegel in 2005 if he thought it was “right that the other groups victimized in the Holocaust are excluded from this monument,” Eisenman replied: “I changed my mind on that a few months ago. The more I read about World War II, the more I realized that the worse the war went in Russia, the more Jews were killed by the Nazis. When the Nazis realized they couldn’t defeat the Bolsheviks, they made sure they got the Jews. Now I think it’s fine that the project is just for the Jews.”36 Empirical history, for Eisenman, had trumped postmodern theory. Probably because of this change in outlook, Eisenman now accepted the German government’s request to include an “Information Center” at the memorial. Although he initially objected to any effort to diminish the effectiveness of his abstract composition, he recognized that documenting the historic specificity of the Nazis’ crimes against the Jews was a necessary component of the memorial’s educational project. By assenting to this measure, which Eisenman ended up designing in a subterranean space at the edge of the memorial site, the architect took an important step toward reconciling his universalistic and particularistic views of the Holocaust’s victims. Eisenman had more difficulty, however, reconciling his contradictory views of the perpetrators. On the one hand, he was inclined to minimize the role of the Germans in the Holocaust. This was visible in his postmodern view of the Nazi genocide, which, by attributing the killing of the Jews to the abstract forces of reason and technology, shifted attention away from the actual deeds of millions of Germans who were involved in the Holocaust. It was also visible in the memorial’s abstract form, which, by refraining from including any figurative references to the perpetrators, spared Germans a direct confrontation with their nation’s historical crimes. Significantly, Eisenman’s de-emphasis of the Holocaust’s German dimensions reflected a deliberate effort to prevent the inscription of German guilt in his monument. As he put it in 2005: 296

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When looking at Germans, I have never felt a sense that they are guilty. I have encountered anti-Semitism in the United States as well. Clearly the anti-Semitism in Germany in the 1930s went overboard and it was clearly a terrible moment in history. But how long does one feel guilty? Can we get over that? I always thought that this monument was about trying to get over this question of guilt. I would hope that this memorial, in its absence of guiltmaking, is part of the process of getting over that guilt. You cannot live with guilt. If Germany did, then the whole country would have to go to an analyst. I don’t know how else to say it.37 Eisenman’s reluctance to impose a sense of guilt on the Germans reflected several motives. First, it reflected his long-standing aversion to leveling moral judgments. When asked by a German interviewer how well Germany had dealt with its Nazi past, Eisenman replied that it was inappropriate for him to “play the judge,” adding, in a rhetorical aside, “How do we [in America] deal with our past with the blacks and Indians?”38 Yet, in asking this rhetorical question—and in view of his comparison of the Nazi hatred of Jews with American anti-Semitism—it is clear that Eisenman was perfectly willing to make moralistic judgments if they involved the history of the United States. A self-critical form of moralism was acceptable, but an accusatory form directed against others was not. This may have reflected Eisenman’s desire to prevent the Nazi past from distracting attention away from America’s own historical shortcomings, but the effect of his comparison was to subtly relativize the Third Reich’s singular features. This relativizing effect underscored a second concern that underpinned Eisenman’s mnemonic agenda—namely, his desire to normalize the Nazi past. Eisenman’s brand of normalization was not the same kind promoted by right-wing German nationalists. Although the architect admired Germany—indeed, although he felt he “belonged” in the country and even said he would “love to live there”—he was not interested in whitewashing its historical record for the sake of fostering German national pride.39 Instead, he was motivated by the more universalistic goal of fostering reconciliation between Germans and Jews. In explaining his design for the memorial, Eisenman said: “I wanted in some way to begin to normalize the German relationship to the past . . . [and] to bring it into everyday life. Without that, there can never be an integrated Jewish community in Berlin or in Germany.”40 Eisenman hoped the memorial 297

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could assist the Germans in “get[ting] over the Holocaust in the sense of acknowledging it publicly and yet moving on.” In this sense, he wanted to make sure the past did not serve as a barrier to the future. He also hoped it would prompt American Jews to “get over the fact that Germany was the nation of perpetrators” and finally abandon their spurning of the country. “One hopes,” he concluded, “that all German Jews could be Germans again and German-gentiles could be German again and not Jews and gentiles.”41 Eisenman, indeed, went so far as to call for “Jews to return to Germany.”42 All of these statements raised the paradoxical possibility that the very man tasked with helping Germans remember the past was himself eager to transcend it. Yet, the reality was more complex. While Eisenman opposed didactic and moralizing forms of memory, he hardly supported amnesia. Indeed, in subtle ways, he was committed to reminding Germans that they were a nation of perpetrators. To begin with, his design for the memorial symbolically showed at the aesthetic level that he was committed to portraying the Holocaust as a German crime. He openly declared, for example, that his embrace of abstraction was largely due to the Nazi regime’s historic opposition to it. The Nazis’ notorious hostility to modernism helped motivate Eisenman’s opposition to any figurative or political forms of aesthetic expression.43 More significant, Eisenman made clear that the memorial’s abstraction, far from intending to spare the Germans a sense of guilt, was actually meant to prompt them to confront their nation’s crimes. A longtime student of psychology, Eisenman believed that it was less effective to lecture the Germans about the past than to provoke them to arrive at their own conclusions about it. Statemandated forms of remembrance, he was convinced, were ritualistic and ineffective. By creating an open-ended, abstract memorial that refused to tell Germans how to remember, Eisenman hoped it would serve a “therapeutic” function by provoking unpredictable reactions, thereby serving as a “mirror for contemporary German culture.”44 He declared, for example, that it would be “good if the memorial elicited political reactions”—say, by prompting neo-Nazis to spray swastikas on the stelae—as this would unearth what was suppressed in German life. Eisenman did not harbor any naïve faith in the German people and, in fact, suspected that “in Germany the real feelings that relate to the [Nazi] past are still being suppressed.” If the memorial, therefore, succeeded in “bursting open the suppressed feelings that still exist towards the Holocaust within the German psyche”—indeed, if “the Germans open themselves up to truly 298

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admitting these emotions”—that would “be very positive.”45 The best outcome of all would be if the memorial’s open-endedness stimulated the Germans themselves to debate their nation’s history. “The stillness of the site,” he argued, would ideally provide an environment for Germans to meditate about their historic guilt in allowing the Nazis’ rise to power. “The Germans were silent in 1933 and should never again be silent. I hope that the memorial reminds them of the silence of 1933 and compels them to declare how they view their country and who they are.”46 In short, while Eisenman was reluctant for his memorial to didactically compel the Germans to face their guilt as a nation of perpetrators, he hoped it would prompt them to do it themselves. In the end, his view of remembrance was focused less on content than form. A self-generated confrontation with the past would contribute to a more genuine and lasting form of remembrance.

Assessing the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe The complex relationship between the aesthetics and ethics of Eisenman’s memorial underscores the difficulty of assessing its significance. To be sure, this difficulty is not unique to the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. Determining the significance of any monument is far from a simple task. Like all cultural artifacts, monuments are shaped by the forces of representation and reception. Their significance—indeed, their ultimate meaning—lies somewhere between their original sources of inspiration and their eventual cultural resonance. In one respect, however, monuments are distinct. Because they have a specific mandate with respect to memory—because they are supposed to foster remembrance—one obvious measure of any monument’s success is whether it preserves the memory of the event it is meant to commemorate. That said, measuring the reception of monuments—how people take notice of them, perceive their physical form, and interpret their intended messages—is challenging. Most people experience monuments in a more fleeting way than they read works of literature, watch films, or listen to music. Indeed, because many people hardly give monuments a second look as they walk by them in their daily lives, it is difficult to know exactly how they are viewed. That said, published responses, even if they mostly measure elite perspectives, provide one indicator of a monument’s status in public opinion. It is worth noting, therefore, that Eisenman’s memorial generated an extremely divided response. On the one hand, the Memorial to the 299

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Murdered Jews of Europe met with widespread approval. This was partly evident by its popularity as a destination. In the years since its completion in 2005, the memorial has become one of Berlin’s most popular attractions, drawing more than 3.5 million visitors in its first year, 8 million in its first five, and millions more since.47 These numbers have more than fulfilled Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder’s hope that the memorial would be “a place people like to go to.”48 The memorial was also a critical success, meeting with the approval of journalists and other representatives of the media. Many commentators admired its aesthetic qualities. One described the field of stelae as having a “poetic effect,” while another appreciated how it “radiated a nearly mystical sense of quiet.” These comments made clear why many observers regarded the memorial as “one of the most successful and beautiful . . . of its kind.”49 Others admired the integration of the memorial’s aesthetic and ethical agendas, especially how its abstract minimalism fostered its nonjudgmental approach to remembrance. As one observer put it, the memorial was “open, uncertain, interpretable.”50 As another wrote, it “demanded nothing” of visitors and instead invited them to “decide for themselves” what kind of “associations and feelings” to take away from it. Proponents embraced the memorial’s refusal to impart a specific message, agreeing that it succeeded as a quiet and noncoercive place of contemplation.51 They were confident that the memorial would leave “no one indifferent.”52 Finally, many reviewers saw the memorial as a positive reflection on Germany’s coming to terms with the past, saying it showed that Germany was “once again a part of the civilized world.”53 In short, many of the memorial’s supporters hailed it for what it revealed about German memory rather than what it taught about German history. By contrast, other observers were more critical. Some were initially unsure whether the “field without qualities,” as one critic called it, would succeed in commemorating the Nazi past, especially if it merely served as a mirror that reflected “the knowledge that everyone already had.”54 This perspective bemoaned the memorial’s lack of a clear didactic agenda. According to these observers, the memorial failed in its mission of heightening consciousness about the Nazi genocide. Some, such as Paul Spiegel of the Zentralrat der Juden in Deutschland, lamented that the while the memorial “honored the victims, it did not refer to the perpetrators,” a fact that kept it from being able to communicate any moral lessons about the Nazis’ crimes “to the collaborators of yesterday and their contemporary sympathizers.”55 Others went further and said that the memo300

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rial not only failed to assume a self-critical stance toward German history, but actually encouraged a self-congratulatory mind-set about the achievements of postwar German memory. One observer criticized the memorial as an “excuse park” that, by physically embodying Germany’s excellence in “pursuing the work of mourning,” sent a message that “we have done our duty.”56 In short, these critics perceived the memorial as an invitation to forget instead of remember. The most common complaint about the memorial, however, was that its very popularity was a sign of its failure. On any given day, the media reported, countless visitors used the memorial site’s sprawling spaces for leisure activities unrelated to its larger educational mission, whether sunbathing or skateboarding. Some visitors even took to using it as a public restroom, urinating in its private nooks.57 According to critics, the site’s popularity proved that it was too pleasant and too appealing for its own good. This suspicion was further confirmed in 2009, when the European airline EasyJet ran an article in its in-flight magazine that featured a photo shoot of male fashion models posing in front of the memorial.58 This flap suggested that the memorial had been turned into an aesthetically alluring, but ultimately empty, signifier. It suggested that it had failed in its attempt to prompt Germans and others to reflect on the magnitude of the Nazis’ crimes. These comments suggested that the memorial’s success was mixed. Interestingly, Eisenman himself seemed to share this opinion. On the one hand, he conceded in 2005 that, in its final form, the memorial was perhaps “a little too aesthetic . . . a little too good looking.” It did not entirely attain the exact level of “the ordinary, the banal” that he was striving for and, instead, looked “a bit too arranged.”59 In other words, it might not be able to succeed in evoking the feelings of unease that the architect originally intended. At the same time, however, Eisenman welcomed the memorial’s normalized use by ordinary Germans and other visitors. He approved of the casual use of the site, saying “the memorial is serious but also fun. I like that.”60 Eisenman’s remarks—seen against the backdrop of the larger debate—make clear that the memorial has accepted something of a trade-off in promoting the cause of remembrance. It has deemphasized the content of memory in favor of concentrating on its form. As noted above, Eisenman did not want the memorial to offer any concrete lesson about the Nazi past, being convinced that didacticism impeded remembrance. Instead, he wanted it to prod visitors to arrive at their own conclusions about the past by trying to evoke profound, if vague, feelings of disquiet. The problem with this strategy was that in 301

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privileging emotion over reason—feelings over knowledge—the memorial universalized the Holocaust. By abstaining from teaching anything specific about the Nazi genocide, the feelings of unease that it produced were likely to be generic. To be sure, one might respond that the emotions produced by the memorial can easily inspire visitors to seek out the Information Center, where more historically specific information about the Holocaust is available. This might, in fact, be true of particularly motivated visitors. But if one assumes that the majority only see the aboveground section of the memorial and never descend into the Information Center, the memorial’s success in teaching about the past may be somewhat limited. A monument’s reception is not the only measure of its success, however. There is also the matter of its visibility. Robert Musil’s famous remark, “there is nothing in the world so invisible as [a] monument,” has led many scholars to pessimistically conclude that the eventual fate of all monuments is to be taken for granted and ignored.61 Of course, this has long been true of many traditional figurative monuments—epitomized by heroic statesmen on horseback—which retreat into the backgrounds of their environments and become resting places for pigeons. And yet, Musil’s cautionary remark notwithstanding, some monuments are better able to resist this fate than others. Not surprisingly, these include those that are endowed with the quality of monumentality: the Great Pyramids of Giza, the Arc de Triomphe, the Washington Monument, the Thiepval Memorial to the fallen soldiers of World War I, and so forth. In their vast scale and domination of space, physical objects that possess the quality of monumentality are impossible to ignore. This quality undeniably defines the Berlin Holocaust memorial. By virtue of its sprawling size, spread out over nearly five acres (and centrally located near the Brandenburg Gate), it has successfully avoided the peril of invisibility.62 This trait is notable given the relative inconspicuousness of Holocaust-related memorials across Germany’s urban landscape. For much of the postwar period, Germans have been ambivalent about, if not actively opposed to, openly commemorating the crimes of the Nazis in public fashion. A recent survey of German cities reveals a prevailing tendency toward selective remembrance, defined by a proclivity toward commemorating the experiences of German victims and marginalizing the deeds of German perpetrators.63 A good example is provided by the city of Munich. While the city has erected more than one hundred monuments and memorials to different aspects of the Nazi era during the postwar 302

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period, the vast majority of them have been devoted to German (that is, non-Jewish) victims. Most of them, moreover, have been erected in the relatively inconspicuous form of perfunctory, text-based plaques, and have been located in relatively marginal or hard to find locations in the city’s urban landscape.64 This pattern, which has been repeated in cities and towns nationwide, underscores the importance of Berlin’s memorial. With most German cities lacking prominent, centrally located memorials that can readily attract public attention, Berlin’s memorial is important precisely because of its unrepresentativeness. Of course, even visually prominent monuments may have difficulty preserving the memory of historic events. The problem for most monuments is that they may promote a passive rather than an active approach to remembrance within society. They can easily be seen as objects to which we outsource the task of remembering. Rather than prompting us to remember, they come to be regarded as doing the remembering for us. This is why James Young has argued that, in the process of erecting monuments, we partially “divest ourselves of the obligation to remember.” This being the case, Young has concluded that the “the surest engagement with memory may lie in its perpetual irresolution.”65 The longer we debate how memorials should approach the task of commemoration—how they should be designed, where they should be located, whom they should speak to—the better they will promote the cause of remembrance. In the end, this insight may be the most important of all for assessing Eisenman’s memorial. If debating the design of monuments helps to preserve memory, then debating their meaning surely does as well. If true, what some have seen as the chief liability of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe—its abstraction—may actually be its greatest asset. By facilitating discussion about the dilemmas and challenges of Holocaust representation, the memorial’s aesthetic and ethical ambiguities may paradoxically end up providing the best certainty we can hope for that the past will be kept alive in memory.

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15 Berlin Memorial Redux PETER EISENMAN

D

ECONSTRUCTIVISM was a term coined by Philip Johnson and

Mark Wigley to highlight an important exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in 1988 featuring eight architects. The title, as the exhibition, was intended to undercut the hegemony at the time of postmodernism, another style that Johnson himself had a part in creating. Deconstruction, which Johnson disliked conceptually, and constructivism, from the Russian art and architecture of the 1920s, were combined into one portmanteau word to form deconstructivism. One could argue that the term deconstructivism, along with the work present at the MoMA exhibition, takes the philosophical and moral weight out of deconstruction and turns it into a style. Deconstruction, as opposed to deconstructivism, is composed of these important aspects, which could characterize architecture and, in particular, the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. To categorize the memorial as deconstructivist is a misconception given that the term deflects the real thinking behind the memorial, which, in many ways, can be understood in the term deconstruction.

The Backstory The memorial in itself could be recognized as a unique project, independent of my work before or after, primarily due to the particular political nature of the commission. It is important to understand, first of all, that popular opinion in Germany was from its beginning against the idea of a 304

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memorial in general and to our memorial in particular. While our project had been chosen in an international competition, a memorial at the scale of our proposal in the heart of Berlin was a difficult gesture for Germans to accept. If a memorial were to be built, the general public most likely would have preferred a peripheral site that was reduced in scale. Perhaps the citizens imagined something figural like Rodin’s Burghers of Calais, somewhere away from the center of Berlin that could easily be passed over. In addition to the general public’s resistance toward the project, the memorial was also debated in political platforms at the time. Helmut Kohl, the then chancellor, supported the memorial and used it as part of his reelection campaign against Gerhard Schröder, who strongly opposed its construction. When Schröder defeated Kohl, the memorial was for all intents and purposes a dead issue. The project did not resurface in public discussion until a confounding sequence of political events unfolded, ultimately resulting in support for the memorial. Martin Walser, one of the more outspoken civic leaders against the memorial, would inadvertently become one of its facilitators. In his speech accepting the German Peace Prize in 1998, Walser alluded to something that seemed redolent with undertones of anti-Semitism. The possibility of the memorial rekindling a latent anti-Semitism was precisely the issue that originally fueled one aspect of the opposition against building the project. In reaction to Walser’s speech, Ignatz Bubis, head of the German Jewish community and one of the original opponents of the memorial, unexpectedly reversed his position. Fearing that the memorial’s opposition was beginning to show potential signs of anti-Semitism, Bubis announced that he would now support the building of the memorial. Once a whiff of anti-Semitism was injected into the discussion, it was difficult for politicians like Schröder and Michael Naumann, his secretary of culture, to sustain their opposition. As built, the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe provokes several important issues in architecture. It suggests that, in many cases, it is not sufficient to have a critical idea only on paper: it may be necessary to build an idea physically. The same holds true in literature. To have a literary idea is not the same as writing a book, or to have a painterly idea is not the same as making a painting. Even though one has an architectural or philosophical idea, it is the experience of the built work that often carries the intention. This is particularly true with the memorial, as it was impossible to predict the important nature of experiencing the space from a drawing. Other questions concerning the reception of the project 305

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philosophically, ethically, and historically could only be, in this case, resolved experientially. For example, on entering the site, would the memorial deploy a spatial difference and stand anomalous to generic ideas of the urban, built fabric of the city? If it were to be a place of no symbols— of no goal, of no reason to walk in it or around it, could it challenge received ideas of a memorial? These were the questions we proposed in the drawing. The project deliberately eschewed signs, had no overt symbols, which was to become part of its impact on the viewer. Parenthetically, this was what many in the Jewish community objected to, as they believed it was not Jewish enough. “We need more stars,” they would say. This reaction was due to the tradition of narrative monuments. However, this was to be no ordinary monument for no ordinary memory.

The Concept The initial idea for the memorial was to cover the entire site with two undulating topographical surfaces whose articulation would be independent of each other. One surface would be at ground level and the other at five meters above the ground surface. Each surface was marked by a rectangular grid, approximately ninety inches by thirty-three inches. This grid marked out the perimeter of each pillar, which would be separated by a thirty-three-inch interval in both directions. A perpendicular axis connected the center of each pillar from the top surface to the bottom surface, and its slight inclination was the result of the misregistration between the two surfaces. The pillars were to be precisely fabricated with steel forms in order to achieve a neutral concrete finish, giving each pillar a “nonmaterial” appearance. The rectangular pillars purposely had a 3:1 length-towidth ratio, so that intervals in the parallel direction created a different spatial sensation than in the perpendicular direction.

Memorial It could be argued that one does not have to be Jewish, or a survivor, or even German to engage with the memorial. When entering the field, one experiences something—a prima facie experience of difference from whatever else the city is. As one walks into the field, there is a sense that the pillars are too close together for two people to walk, compelling the individual to walk by him- or herself. The experience is of a compression in the space of one’s activity. This compression together with the absence of 306

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symbolism and the absence of orientation, of any prescribed route, or any goal of arrival, creates a sense of dislocation from the ordinary time of the city. The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe is not a memorial that entertains, like other thematic Holocaust museums. To make entertainment out of the Holocaust or to aestheticize it in any way is problematic. Additionally, the memorial is not about guilt, which third-generation Germans are still trying to get over. At this site, children run and play; people meet for lunch, relax, or sunbathe. Rather than guilt, the space is about the immemorable, the need to place such a structure in the heart of what was once Nazi Germany. One could argue, the project raises an important metaphysical issue, and that is the naming of the project. While the title Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe is very strong, there is an important difference between murder and extermination. The process of extermination does not deal with Poles, gypsies, homosexuals, Roma, Sinti, and all of the other people who were killed by the Germans. This difference caused me to change my mind about what the project should be; that the Jews and not the others were singled out for extermination and, therefore, the project should be about the Jews. The more I read about what had happened, the more I began to realize that Hitler, in January 1943, realized he could not win the war, but understood that the second war he was fighting was the extermination of the Jews. I believe then—and I am not a historian—that there was a speeding up of the processes of killing from January 1943 to the end of the war. I believe that our project is misnamed; murderers are easily identified, caught, brought to trial, and dealt with, but exterminators are not. Exterminators indict a whole generation, if not two or three generations, while murders indict individuals. I have argued that our project should be called the memorial to the exterminated Jews of Europe rather than the murdered Jews, which is why the existential issue of naming something is important.

The Commentary When the project opened, the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben wrote in Die Zeit (May 4, 2005) that the most important aspect of the memorial was that it embodied two kinds of memory. First was an immemorable memory (Unvergessliches; literally, that which is unforgettable), which is experienced in the field of pillars. Agamben says that this experience is 307

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not legible; there is nothing to read. The second kind of memory is archival (Erinnerbares; literally, that which can be remembered), which exists in the underground Ort der Information (place of information). This place consists of documents and historical evidence, from camp files to personal narratives. Its relationship to the field above is imprinted on the ceiling overhead. Together, the field and the Ort become a text, which does not answer, but instead questions, ideas of being, experience, and understanding.

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PART III

THE POLITICS OF EXCEPTIONALITY

T

HE THIRD PART of the volume places the notion of Holocaust ex-

ceptionality under critical scrutiny, a notion that has been—tacitly or explicitly—a central element of Holocaust remembrance for several decades. We understand Holocaust exceptionalism to be a broad category of historical interpretation that encompasses at least two different, yet overlapping perceptions of the event of the Final Solution. On the one hand, Holocaust exceptionalism refers to interpretations of the Final Solution that emphasize the unique historical features of the Nazi genocide, for instance, the exceptionally radical ideological disposition of the perpetrators, the unique institutional and technical attributes of the Nazi death camps, or, in more general terms, the Final Solution as the epitome of modernity’s dark side. On the other hand, Holocaust exceptionalism also includes interpretations of the Final Solution as an event that poses unique challenges for existing paradigms of historical interpretation, whether they be grounded in history, philosophy, literature, or the visual arts. One of the more radical variants of this line of thought posits that the Holocaust, unlike other events, eludes historical understanding altogether and thus demarcates absolute limits of historical comprehension. Both of these notions of exceptionalism consider the Holocaust to be the defining event of the twentieth century and the clearest testament to the failure of Western civilization. While the paradigm of Holocaust exceptionalism continues to hold considerable intellectual and political sway, all the authors assembled here, in one way or another, mark their distance from, or disinterest in,

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conventional forms of Holocaust exceptionalism; some have also developed new and compelling narrative formats for comparative genocide historiography and memory. Precisely because we may be witnessing a transition from Holocaust to genocide memory, it makes sense to call to mind the accomplishments of the paradigm of Holocaust uniqueness. That way, we are better prepared for the task of assessing the political and ethical value of alternative strategies for the collective recollection of human violence. The cause of Holocaust uniqueness had to overcome considerable political resistance before becoming a linchpin of popular and scholarly memory. In Cold War Europe and beyond, few groups and memory discourses had an affinity to Holocaust exceptionalism after 1945. The construction and institutionalization of Holocaust uniqueness as a widely shared theme of historical interpretation was an uphill battle and took several decades and a string of important memory events, including such different turning points as the Eichmann trial, the student movement, the Holocaust miniseries, the popularization of knowledge of the Holocaust through film, and the public debates over the Berlin Holocaust memorial. But one possible element of the story might not have received enough attention. In revisiting passionate performances of Holocaust exceptionalism from the 1980s and 1990s, one is struck by their discursive complexity. Self-confident claims of the world-historical significance of the Holocaust were accompanied by a noticeable sense of relief, which permeated these gestures of historical interpretation and still reverberates in today’s memory cultures. Many academics, politicians, writers, and memory culture professionals embraced the exceptionality paradigm as an opportunity to join an imagined community of self-reflexive individuals in the democratic West who had belatedly found an appropriate way to speak about and evaluate the Holocaust in history. Finally, there was a clearly laid out discursive pathway for acknowledging the burden of the past without reverting to problematic forms of national identity or engaging in shameful apologetics. The satisfaction of having acquired a feeling of interpretive certainty represents one of the most pervasive and powerful attractions of Holocaust exceptionality. In this way, Holocaust exceptionalism played a decisive role in forging a transnational memory culture, which could count among its greatest accomplishments that it managed to bring (West) German elites into the fold of self-reflexive memory. It is, for instance, highly unlikely that German politicians would have sponsored the Berlin Holocaust memo310

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rial if they had not been convinced of the uniqueness of the event—in terms of its unique size, significance, and centrality to European and world history. They assumed that the widely shared scholarly and political consensus of Holocaust exceptionalism constituted a foundational historical fact requiring public acknowledgment, especially in Germany. In the specific context of pre- and post-unification Germany, establishing a hierarchy of victimhood, which put particular emphasis on Jewish suffering, was a major, cross-national ethical achievement, something that still counts among the highlights of the history of twentieth-century collective memory and represents a key factor in the evolution of memory studies. The exceptionality paradigm played a similarly decisive role in extending much-deserved cultural capital to the survivors of the Shoah, which was then productively deployed in Holocaust and genocide education. The extraordinary recognition of the survivor in the era of the witness is difficult to imagine without the cultural paradigm of Holocaust uniqueness that dominated public perceptions at the end of the twentieth century. The paradigm retroactively gave meaning to the suffering of the Jewish victims of Nazi Germany and provided survivors with a legitimate vantage point from which to speak about the Holocaust and bear witness to the evils of racism. At the same time, one of the concept’s most remarkable features is that it provided a durable common denominator for establishing the memory of the victims in the land of the perpetrators. The unlikely memory axis Bonn/BerlinJerusalem-Washington,  D.C., formed a kernel of lasting reconciliation around which other groups and nations would also congregate. According to this story line, Holocaust exceptionalism has proven to be an extraordinarily robust and successful tool of social integration, uniting political and cultural elites and their audiences under the negative sign of Nazi anti-Semitism before and after the end of the Cold War. Holocaust memory, highly mobile and widely reproduced, placed its protagonists and consumers on the right side of history, which, in another important shift, was no longer a site of heroic national memory as it had been up to the 1960s, but a place where the international community contemplated its past wrongs and its responsibilities toward the victims of history, most prominently the survivors of the Shoah. All of these accomplishments arguably required the widely shared belief that Holocaust uniqueness is a fact, a truism of modern history. It is instructive to recall how the paradigm of Holocaust uniqueness became fact because most of the texts assembled in this section start to 311

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tell quite a different story. They criticize us (Western readers, many of whom are invested in one way or another in maintaining the uniqueness of the Holocaust) for our past beliefs, unexamined biases, and selective preferences of collective remembrance. Indeed, adopting their point of view may prompt the painful realization that in subscribing to Holocaust uniqueness as a self-evident truism, we committed a major ethical blunder, one that has reproduced a troublesome historical blindness and partakes in regrettable acts of symbolic violence. What is at stake, then, in replacing the master narrative of Holocaust exceptionality with more differentiated, more ethically complicated, and perhaps more globally oriented narratives of remembrance? In the context of the discussions about Holocaust exceptionalism in this volume, Omer Bartov is the scholar who has been most interested in highlighting the exceptional features of the Final Solution; however, judging by the present text, it is difficult to interpret that interest as an approval of the uniqueness paradigm. In an autobiographically framed intervention, Bartov declares that “he does not believe in unique events.” He considers the concept incompatible with scholarly research because it removes a given event from the realm of historiography, which relies on methods of comparison and contextualization. Bartov is similarly opposed to the political use of the concept of uniqueness. In his view, the neatly organized media narratives purporting Holocaust exceptionalism in popular culture fail to point out the global prevalence of genocidal regimes and practices since 1945. Moreover, in Bartov’s view, the uniqueness thesis has triggered a deplorable competition and hierarchy of victimhood, which might feed into “a vicious cycle of endless retributive violence,” as victims seek revenge and become perpetrators themselves. Bartov does not explicitly apply this line of thought to the IsraeliPalestinian conflict, but acknowledges “the state mobilization of the Shoah” in Israel and the presence of “colonial and racist undertones to right-wing and settler pronouncements and actions in Israel,” while also pointing out the “clear anti-Semitic undertones to radical Islamic and European right- and left-wing anti-Israel rhetoric.” Bartov finds all these discussions unhelpful for his primary scholarly interest—that is, writing integrated histories of genocide that put particular emphasis on the singular viewpoints and experiences of individual victims. This hardly sounds like a ringing endorsement of Holocaust uniqueness, and the uninitiated reader has to look long and hard for echoes of Holocaust exceptionalism in the present Bartov text. However, when en312

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gaging with important new research and narrative strategies, which frame the Final Solution as an incident of colonial genocide and constitute the primary dialogical focus of the present text, Bartov presents a few precise assessments highlighting unique features of the Holocaust. In his view, the Final Solution “remains unique within its national context,” especially for Jews and Germans; it had unique characteristics, including extermination camps and extreme anti-Semitic ideologies; and these particular features should not “be discarded in order to fit it into an interpretive framework to which it may not necessarily belong.” All of this sounds very reasonable, especially in light of conventional Holocaust uniqueness tropes that are so familiar to us. But the stakes of the debate become much more apparent when the protagonists of comparative and colonial genocide studies take center stage. In  A. Dirk Moses’s wide-ranging, direct response to Bartov’s reflections on the Holocaust as genocide, we read a different narrative of Bartov’s career and his political investments. According to Moses, Bartov has acted less consistently and changed his positions on several occasions during his career, for instance, after 9/11, the Second Intifada, and even in his text for the present volume, in which he takes distance from aspects of Holocaust uniqueness that he allegedly previously endorsed. Readers may decide which narratively constructed figure of Bartov they find more compelling, truthful, or appealing. Suffice it to note in this context that political consistency might not be the best standard of judgment when it comes to assessing a scholar’s career, and that if Bartov has indeed changed his position, as Moses’s evidence suggests, he finds himself in excellent company. Eminent historians and Holocaust experts like Tony Judt and Jeffrey Alexander had a similar change of heart and disavowed notions of Holocaust uniqueness they previously shared. In fact, these cases suggest that, quite aside from the author’s assessment of Bartov’s stance on exceptionality, the arguments presented by Moses and others have succeeded in defining a new scholarly paradigm in the field of contemporary history. Moses first takes issue with the often-repeated argument that the Holocaust is a uniquely shocking and emblematic event for modernity and Western civilization as a whole due to the fact that it was perpetrated by one of the most advanced nations in the West. The argument is not only based on simplistic notions of progress but abounds with xenophobic and racist prejudices easily graspable from Moses’s postcolonial viewpoint. After all, the alleged centrality and unique importance of the Holocaust 313

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for world history imply an exceptional relevance of modern German and Jewish history for Western civilization and world history in general, elevating Germans beyond all other perpetrators of crimes against humanity and elevating Jews beyond all other victims of racist and colonial violence. As Moses argues, it requires a great deal of “eliding terms, spheres, and levels of significance” to reach the conclusion that the Holocaust is the central collective crime of humanity or even of the twentieth century. Moreover and more important, the exceptional status of the Holocaust for world history implies, for instance, that “intra-African genocide is unsurprising, not shocking, and bereft of exemplary or didactic value for others”—and all of that in light of the fact that the majority of the inhabitants of this planet does not live in the West. For Moses, this line of thinking reflects a long tradition of Western hubris that bestows on Western accomplishments and catastrophes the exclusive label of global significance and relegates other peoples’ histories to events of secondary importance. Moses suggests that his critics, such as Bartov, are simply not comfortable with the idea that the Jews murdered by the Nazis are just another group of victims like so many other people who have been killed in genocidal campaigns before and after the Holocaust. As such, Moses’s critics resist inserting the Holocaust into overarching comparative narrative and analytical frames like colonialism, genocide, or totalitarianism. The provocative conclusion to be drawn from Moses’s chapter is that adherents to Holocaust exceptionalism remain mired in Western-centric, perhaps even colonial thinking, which might inadvertently reproduce the very prejudices that Holocaust memory was designed to combat. Michael Rothberg takes Moses’s research accomplishments as one of his points of departure, but shifts the focus from provocative comparisons of perpetrator history to the relatively calmer waters of genocide memory. Connecting his concept of multidirectional memory with intellectual archeology, he recovers the life story of memory activist and Holocaust survivor Marceline Loridan-Ivens, whose cultural activism in favor of Algerian liberation and against the Vietnam War exemplifies the “echoes, ricochets, and overlaps between apparently distinct memory traditions that define memory’s multidirectional drive.” Rothberg argues that this alternative emplotment more accurately captures the complex encounters and remediations of postwar memory culture, which have often been forgotten because they did not fit the conventional story lines of Holocaust exceptionalism. For Rothberg, this alternative, anticolonial internationalism helps “overcome racial and Eurocentric hierarchies” that 314

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tend to be inscribed in conventional forms of Holocaust memory, in particular, in sentimental notions of Holocaust uniqueness as well as topdown, cosmopolitan human rights discourses. In revealing transnational nodes of memory connecting different events and memory traditions, including war, slavery, colonization, decolonization, and genocide in nonhierarchical ways, Rothberg avoids some of the shortcomings of Holocaust memory focused exclusively on itself. In his conclusion, Rothberg calls for a new “ethics and politics of Holocaust memory ‘under the sign of suitcases’ ” that would abandon all concerns with the uniqueness or exceptionality of the referent in favor of a vehicular conception of testimony as creating “bodily and verbal connections between diverse sites of history, memory, and trauma.” Judith Butler’s exploration of the role of narrative and fiction after trauma also raises important questions about traditional master narratives of Holocaust memory and the new potential of multidirectional genocide memory. Engaging with research on cultural trauma, Butler argues that stepping out of narrative altogether might not be an option because narration might prove to be “essential to the task of survival.” Therefore, Butler compares different modes of narrating the self in the writings of Primo Levi and Charlotte Delbo in search of postnational, livable forms of solidarity and belonging. She concludes that under specific circumstances, especially when dealing with survivor’s guilt after trauma, refraining from self-accusation might constitute the most viable strategy for survival and thus the best ethical choice. Transposed to the level of collective memory, this conclusion highlights the ethical stakes of historical narration under conditions of cultural trauma in a particularly pointed and provocative way. After all, it is quite possible that in the 1980s and 1990s, conventional notions of Holocaust exceptionalism offered just the right measure of collective comfort and belonging after trauma for certain groups. The exclusive Western-centric focus on Nazi crimes, now identified in hindsight as a moral and political shortcoming of Holocaust memory, might have played a decisive role in creating unlikely ties of international solidarity across religious, ethnic, and national lines stretching between the United States, Israel, and Europe. Or, an even more provocative thought: perhaps the endless remediation of images and stories of Holocaust history and uniqueness, which dominated visual culture for many years and were clearly a source of entertainment and comfortable memory for many media consumers, represented a productive response of considerable ethical integrity to the challenges of collective 315

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bystander and perpetrator trauma. As the paradigm of Holocaust exceptionality fades, one wonders if stories of multidirectional memory, which are by definition highly relative, ambivalent, and fluid cultural constructs, are sturdy enough vehicles for identity formation. Can they be routinely deployed for the purpose of creating and maintaining transnational bonds of collective self-affirmation, especially on a popular scale? These are important and tough questions to which others can be added. In fact, Elisabeth Weber does just that by presenting a complicated, multidirectional constellation of political, juridical, and poststructuralist notions of Holocaust memory. Weber demonstrates how the Holocaust functions as a master screen memory, which has sometimes had the effect of preventing the recognition of other genocides or interpreting their significance through the lens of the Holocaust. This applies, for instance, to the politics of memory in the United States regarding the Armenian genocide and the genocide of first nation peoples. Similar dynamics of national interests and memory conventions derail the recognition of the Armenian genocide in Europe and the recognition of the Nakba in Israel. While many genocide researchers “are still struggling against the denial of the facts,” the Holocaust has achieved a degree of facticity—established and maintained by tremendous political, financial, and institutional scaffolding—that complicates those struggles. And all these theaters of memory coincide and interact with academic discourses that are deeply implicated in “the structural production of such imbalance” (something that, indeed, renders the Holocaust quite exceptional). We are thus dealing with a complicated situation of the simultaneity of the nonsimultaneous, that is, with the coexistence and competition between different regimes of memory that originated at different points in time, in different political settings, and that retain a great deal of legitimacy within their respective realms of memory but can also derail and undermine each other. Weber argues that in acknowledging their implication as theorists in the reproduction of discourses of violence, philosophers like Jacques Derrida (singularity) and Jean-François Lyotard (differend) and literary scholars like Michael Rothberg (multidirectional memory) have provided important intellectual tools for sidestepping debilitating memory competitions and claims of exceptionality by providing “deep acknowledgment of ‘entanglement’: of memories, of suffering, of catastrophes.” These tools delineate indispensable strategies of intellectual self-reflexivity. But are these deconstructive, archeological tools really the kind of political weapons that can help researchers struggling to establish crimes as facts? How does 316

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one successfully deploy concepts like the differend and multidirectional memory to bring Turkey, Israel, and the United States to the negotiation table and acknowledge past wrongs? Does that, perhaps, require robust, unidirectional concepts akin to the political power of Holocaust uniqueness? Weber reminds us that what counts as a “breakthrough” in a specific setting, for instance, breakthroughs of theoretical self-reflexivity in Holocaust memory or political breakthroughs of acknowledgment of or apology for crimes committed, might only be possible when national, military, institutional, and political interests have firmly established a baseline of factuality, something that is radically absent in other cases, such as the Armenian genocide. If the popularization of Holocaust collective memory has become “a way to avoid talking about other crimes . . . [by] strengthening collective identities,” the challenge remains how to acquire the ability to apprehend and listen to hitherto silenced memories, especially if the wrongs suffered are signified in idioms and languages quite different from those that speak to and commemorate the Holocaust. In this regard, each of the texts that follow helps us take stock of the political and ethical significance of an emerging—and still very much contested—paradigm shift in Holocaust studies, namely, how the memory and historiography of the Holocaust will be shaped if and when the event of the Holocaust is no longer considered exceptional.

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16 The Holocaust as Genocide Experiential Uniqueness and Integrated History O M E R B A R TOV

T

HIS CHAPTER concerns the complex, and at times fraught, relation-

ship between the study of the Holocaust and what has come to be known as genocide studies. In principle, there should not be any tension here. The so-called Final Solution was clearly a genocide. Indeed, the term genocide was coined by Raphael Lemkin while the Holocaust was taking place, and he was obviously influenced in his thinking by this event. The Genocide Convention of 1948 was also agreed on by the United Nations very much under the shadow of the recent genocide of the Jews. But at the same time, both Lemkin and the member states that agreed on the convention understood the Holocaust to be one specific instance of genocide within the context of a series of such events.1 The convention was meant to prevent the recurrence of genocide. Clearly, it failed in accomplishing this task. And thus we can say that genocide is a phenomenon that both preceded the Holocaust and has recurred many times since. Each genocide has its own unique characteristics. But they also have many features in common that make them part of the same phenomenon. The genocide of the Jews was one of them.2 All this would seem quite clear and obvious. But matters have been complicated both because of the evolving role of the Holocaust in our understanding of twentieth-century European history, and because of the reemergence of the concept of genocide as a paradigm for Western colonialism and hegemony. Within the framework of this chapter, I cannot do justice to this entire debate. My intention is merely to point out that the terms “uniqueness” and “integration,” which have often been seen as 319

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conflicting with each other, are better understood as complementary. While most historians will agree that unlike scientific experiments, historical events can never be precisely reenacted, the historical method is based on context and comparability. Hence, the notion of a unique event that is both incomparable and may not be contextualized threatens to extract it from the very fabric of history and catapult it into the spheres of metaphysics and myth. Conversely, recognition of the uniqueness of individual actors and experiences is crucial to the reconstruction of the past, especially when dealing with extreme events containing radically different perspectives, where one side attempts to eradicate another and thereby also to wipe out the record of its past existence and destruction— as in the case of genocide. Similarly, while the integration of events and perspectives into a larger matrix of the past is part and parcel of any historical reconstruction, by its very nature, the historical method also necessitates making distinctions between these events and perspectives in order to maintain nuance, facilitate judgment, and avoid falling into false or facile parallels. Over the years, I have become increasingly aware of what I now perceive as the productive tension between experiential uniqueness and historical integration. But, clearly, it has also produced blind spots, misunderstandings, and disputes. When I arrived at Oxford in 1980 to write a dissertation in modern German history, the Holocaust did not feature on the history curriculum there. At the time, that did not strike me as anomalous. In Israel, where I had my undergraduate training, the Holocaust was still largely taught in departments of Jewish history rather than as a component of European history. This exclusion of the Holocaust from the history of Europe as a whole was common in most European and American universities as well, and was similarly reflected in historical monographs.3 Personally, having grown up in Israel at a time when it was saturated with personal traumas and state mobilization of the Shoah, I was, in any case, skeptical about the viability of studying it as an academic field of inquiry. Instead, I chose to research the indoctrination of German combat troops and its impact on their conduct on the Eastern Front of World War II, a topic that interested me in part also because of my own experience in the Israeli military. Over the next decade, I taught and wrote about the brutalization of Wehrmacht soldiers, the mass murder of Soviet prisoners of war and citizens, the visions of a demonic Judeo-Bolshevik enemy that permeated the minds of the troops, and the vigorous attempts by German veterans and 320

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historians to suppress the war of extermination on the Eastern Front and create a myth of the Wehrmacht’s “purity of arms.” My work focused on a “view from below,” an attempt to understand the mentality and conduct of troops in a number of selected formations. This entailed empathy—an effort to delve into the minds, grasp the daily experiences, and understand the motivation of those young German men who had internalized such views, committed these crimes, and themselves eventually died in large numbers on the battlefields of the Soviet Union.4 By the 1990s, I had become increasingly interested in the wider context of war crimes and genocide in the twentieth century. In particular, I explored the links between the industrial killing of World War I and the industrial murder of World War II, especially as individual experience and representation. In part because of my focus on the origins and nature of modern violence, I grew increasingly disenchanted with the common popular representations of the Holocaust, especially in the United States. It appeared to me, as I wrote at the time, that the “common tendency to view the Holocaust as a well-ordered plot, in which antisemitism led to Nazism, Nazism practiced genocide, and both were destroyed in a spectacular, ‘happy’ end,” only “breeds complacency about our own world” and obscures the fact that “ultimately, the world we live in is the same that produced (and keeps producing) genocide.”5 One reason why the Holocaust refused to recede into the historical past like most other events was that it became part of a fierce “competition of victimhood,” in which past victimization was made into a central reference point for identity assertions and restitution claims, and the Holocaust came to be perceived as a measuring rod for all other cases of genocide and crimes against humanity.6 As I argued in 1998, “in a century that produced more victims of war, genocide, and massacre than all of previous recorded history put together,” the victim had become “both a trope and a reflection of reality.” This, I thought, was “a dangerous prism through which to view the world, for victims are produced by enemies, and enemies eventually make for more victims.”7 It was for this reason, too, that I found assertions about the uniqueness of the Holocaust unhelpful, indeed harmful, not least because any ranking of victimhood is inherently pernicious and potentially provides license for a vicious cycle of endless retributive violence.8 In retrospect, it seems to me that over the years I had been trying to grapple with the phenomenon of modern violence from two distinct but related perspectives. One was that of the individual’s experience, which 321

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was often obliterated by the vast forces put into play to wreak mass destruction; the other concerned the sociocultural context that bred and rationalized violence, and subsequently also determined the politics of memory.9 I have come to view individual experience as both unique and representative of the fate of humanity in times of crisis; and I have conceptualized the larger context of violent events as a way of integrating cataclysmic moments of destruction into the historical record and thereby gaining a better understanding of them. Clearly, this double perspective was meant to counter the much-popularized notion that arose out of World War I—and was subsequently, albeit belatedly, elaborated with even greater force after the Holocaust—of an event so extreme and unique that it defies historical explanation, becomes culturally unrepresentable, and remains perpetually incommunicable as individual experience and thus incomprehensible to humanity as a whole. As I saw it, both the popular morality tales about the Holocaust, which essentially removed it from the general record of the past by representing it as unique and incomparable, and the more sophisticated arguments about the event as indecipherable and ineffable, made it necessary to anchor the Shoah in a larger historical context. But what was the context of the Holocaust? Was it part of German, or Jewish history? Did it belong to the history of modern genocide, or perhaps of colonial-imperialist war and war crimes? Was it merely a European event or one with universal meanings and implications? The latter was, of course, an old question, manifested by the long-held discomfort of accommodating the Holocaust into specific academic disciplines.10 And any choice of context had clear implications for the interpretation of the event’s place in modern history and its relationship to other cases of genocide. My own approach to it has again been twofold. In recent years, I directed a multiyear project on interethnic coexistence and violence in Europe’s eastern borderlands, which spoke to the larger context of modern violence in that region specifically, and more generally to the relationship between interethnic communities and genocide.11 And at the present time, I am completing a monograph on communal violence in a single site with a focus on individual experience. By employing the method of “a view from below” that I had first used for my work on the Wehrmacht, I explore the collective “biography” of a multiethnic town over an extended period of time, seeking both what held it together and what eventually transformed it from a community of coexistence into a community of genocide. This work 322

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too has obvious ramifications for our understanding of numerous other cases of communal violence around the world.12 Especially as a consequence of working intensely with testimonies and other personal accounts by survivors of the Holocaust, in recent years, I have become all the more aware of the missing dimension of the individual voice of the victim in many studies of genocide, including the Holocaust. Many early works on the Final Solution focused primarily on the organization of genocide by the perpetrators.13 More recently, attempts to integrate the multiple perspectives of perpetrators, victims, and bystanders have naturally focused on a single genocide, most often the Holocaust.14 Conversely, studies that have tried to integrate several genocides in a comparative framework have felt unable to go beyond the perspective of the perpetrators.15 This is primarily a methodological issue: even integrated studies of the Holocaust will often choose only certain types of victims’ accounts, such as contemporary diaries, and leave out later testimonies and memoirs that are seen as tainted by time and external influences. And even comparative studies of genocide must choose some cases and omit others according to a more or less transparent set of categories.16 But here other arguments have also come into play. Some have averred that the Holocaust’s claim to “uniqueness” casts a shadow on the study of other genocides and that it therefore must be properly contextualized. It has also been said that this uniqueness assertion emanates from a Western-centric view that perceives a European genocide as essentially different from other genocides; that this view originates in the kind of humanistic discourse that was at the root of colonial expansion, subjugation, and genocide, and that it continues to operate in our postcolonial world by relegating past and present genocides to a secondary position on the scale of inhumanity. Finally, it has been suggested that Israeli leaders and their supporters exploit the focus on the Holocaust to justify Zionist occupation policies of Palestinian lands. These are not arguments that can or should be easily dismissed. As I have remarked elsewhere, like any other historical event, the Holocaust had unique features, such as the extermination camps, and features common to many other genocides, such as communal massacres; like any traumatic national event, it was and remains unique within its national context, particularly to the Jews and to some extent also to the Germans.17 But while I continue to think that presenting the Holocaust as an 323

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entirely unique event sacrifices its status as a concrete episode in the annals of human history, that does not mean that its specific historical characteristics should be discarded in order to fit it into an interpretive framework to which it may not necessarily belong. The perceived shadow cast by the Holocaust on other genocides should not compel us to extract it from its own context of origins and circumstances simply in order to minimize its magnitude or make it more easily comparable to other cases of genocide. Just as the long history of anti-Semitism is not a sufficient explanation for the Final Solution, so, too, the fact that colonialism predated the Holocaust does not mean that it originated it. This is not to say that the Holocaust was sui generis, but merely that, like all historical events, it had many origins, including imperialism and colonialism, anti-Semitism, and scientific racism, as well as the specific policies and circumstances of the Nazi regime. The very fact that Germany, which had the smallest and most short-lived colonial empire, conducted genocide in Europe, whereas France and Britain, with far larger and older empires, did not, indicates the limits of the colonial interpretation. Western prejudices and racism certainly played a role in the differing perceptions by Europeans of crimes committed in the colonies and in Europe. That was why Europeans were more shocked by World War I, in which white men industrially slaughtered other white men (although many colonial soldiers were also involved), than by colonial wars, where white men massacred nonwhites in what appeared to many to be nothing more than a manifestation of Western superiority. Because the serial killing of Europeans by each other was more traumatizing to them than the killing of non-Europeans, the genocide of Jews in Europe by a perceived civilized European state in a modern, bureaucratic, and industrial manner was also shocking. And yet the responses of many Europeans to the “removal” of Jews from their midst also indicated that Jews were still seen by wide sectors of European society as alien, foreign, and potentially dangerous. It can also be argued that precisely because popular antiSemitism had made the “disappearance” of the Jews more easily acceptable during the Holocaust, in the postwar period, the remnants of this sentiment, combined with the shame of complicity, contributed to the urge to universalize the Holocaust rather than viewing it as a specifically anti-Jewish undertaking in the heart of European civilization. A rather different position contends that the Holocaust’s “claim to uniqueness” relates it to “a long tradition of the West’s attempts to universalize its own values,” and that it was “those very claims to univer324

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salism” that “have themselves been at the heart of Europe’s violent interaction with the rest of the world.”18 Indeed, it has also argued that this claim to uniqueness creates a “benign view” of “colonial and imperial wars” and conflicts, which “precludes the question of genocide by equating it with the Holocaust of European Jewry.”19 In other words, it is suggested that whether by evoking the universal (Western) implications of the Holocaust, or by emphasizing its unique extremity, crimes committed by colonial and postcolonial powers are marginalized and minimized. At the same time, attempts have been made to both find a direct link between colonial genocides and the Holocaust, and to present the Holocaust itself as a colonial undertaking.20 As I noted above, there is little doubt that violence against or by nonWestern groups had often been and continues to be marginalized in the West for reasons that date back to colonial times, and clearly have to do with a Western sense of innate superiority and deeply ingrained notions about the depravity, backwardness, and violent predilections of non-Westerners. Whether assertions about the uniqueness of the Holocaust have much to do with this is less clear. It is also not entirely obvious that presenting the Holocaust as a colonial genocide akin to such events elsewhere has much analytical value. I have argued elsewhere that “the differences between what happened in Poland in 1939–44 and, say, German Southwest Africa in 1904, are so vast that putting them both in the same explanatory framework of genocidal colonialism does not appear particularly useful.”21 This is, of course, not to deny that various connections might be traced between colonial genocides and the Holocaust, even though scholars have found it difficult to establish direct links.22 Nor should one dismiss the importance of precedent and practice. Indeed, the genocide of 1904 had the distinction of being the first such case in the twentieth century, as well as of being carried out by a modern Western military organization that announced its intention to exterminate an African group. But a systematic comparison between colonial genocides and the Holocaust may well reveal more differences than similarities. Jürgen Zimmerer, a German expert of Southwest Africa, has offered a judicious assessment of the relationship between the genocide of the Herero and the Holocaust. As he puts it, “there are no monocausal explanations for Nazi crimes, nor is there a linear progression from German colonialism to the murder of the European Jews.” Rather, “the colonial example illustrates the genocidal potential already present in parts of the bureaucratic and military institutions of Germany.” Furthermore, “colonialism 325

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produced a reservoir of cultural practices that the Nazi thugs could appropriate for themselves,” or could at least “legitimize their actions by pointing to similarities with colonial time.” Hence, “of the numerous routes that fed the criminal policies of National Socialism, one originated in the colonies, and that path was neither minor nor obscure.”23 Here, Zimmerer illustrates both the value and the limitations of seeking the colonial roots of the Holocaust. He rightly implies that earlier generations of Holocaust scholars had missed this important connection; and yet he also concedes that no direct links between one event and another can be established or, indeed, need to be, not least because the genocide of the Jews also had deep European roots that were either only marginally or not at all related to overseas colonialism. But can one see the Holocaust itself as a colonial undertaking, or part of an even vaster colonization project? This has certainly been argued by scholars of Nazi Germany and the Final Solution, who have suggested that the genocide of the Jews was part of a vast plan, the so-called General Plan East, to entirely alter the demographic structure of Eastern Europe by ethnically cleansing its mostly Slav populations and resettling it with ethnic Germans. The plan could not be implemented because of Germany’s inability to win the war against the Soviet Union, and the only part of it that was fully carried out was the extermination of the Jews. This is not the place to discuss this interpretation, which has fruitfully contextualized the Holocaust within German wartime and colonization policy, yet has also been shown to have significant limitations as a comprehensive explanation of the Nazi genocidal dynamic against the Jews. But it is an important contribution to our understanding, adding a Nazi colonial dimension that was lacking from earlier interpretations.24 Some genocide scholars have pushed this interpretation further than most German scholars would go, suggesting that the Nazi occupation of Europe as a whole was a colonial undertaking akin to overseas colonialism, in which Europeans suddenly found themselves treated as colonial subjects by the Germans, leading them to revolt against oppression and exploitation. This view seems to elide the vast differences between the German occupation of such countries in Eastern Europe as Poland, which was completely devastated, and such Western European countries as France, which officially collaborated with the Nazi regime and experienced little relative damage by the Germans. It also suggests that Nazi policies toward European Jews were essentially the same as those practiced against non-Jews, in that all were treated as colonial subjects, whereas in 326

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fact, Jews were targeted for genocide and suffered greater relative loss of life than any other European group, with the possible exception of the much-smaller Sinti and Roma population. As one genocide scholar writes, “many Europeans were prepared to participate in the Nazi antiBolshevik reconfiguration of the continent and were only pushed into non-cooperation or resistance by the Nazis’ policies of plunder, which . . . were experienced as colonial”; they were “only shocked by Nazism when it treated them—including Jews—as colonial subjects to be exploited, enslaved and murdered.” But this equal treatment of all Europeans, it is claimed, “was screened out by depicting the Nazi genocide of the Jews as a massive hate crime.” And it was this focus on the Jews that subsequently “promoted blindness to genocidal episodes around the world because they did not resemble the Holocaust.”25 In his important study of the Nazi occupation of Europe, historian Mark Mazower has offered a useful distinction between the European overseas empires and Hitler’s Europe. The former, he writes, “had generally grown up over long periods of time, in what were still largely rural societies.” They “involved complex accommodations and compromises with local and native rulers, and . . . were themselves coming under strain in the interwar period from emergent colonial nationalist movements.” Conversely, the German occupiers of Europe “imposed their rule very suddenly in the midst of a war and . . . chose to inflict this on urbanized societies which had powerfully shaped and already formed senses of their own national identity. What was striking,” he stresses, “was not that Europeans resisted, but that they were mostly so hesitant to do so.”26 Consequently, Mazower is critical of Aimé Césaire, whose own ideas have influenced some current genocide scholars. Césaire, he writes, argued that Europeans “had needed Nazism, in a sense, to bring home to them what racial prejudice produced. They had failed to grasp the true nature of colonialism because racism had prevented them sympathizing with the plight of those they oppressed. They tolerated ‘Nazism before it was inflicted on them . . . because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples.’ ”27 In fact, observes Mazower, “while Victorian international law legitimized colonial rule, it did so by holding out the promise of liberation,” even if this was “a theory that was generally honoured only in the breach.” Conversely, “it was this promise of eventual (if always tenuous) political redemption that Nazism decisively rejected,” since it was “based upon the immutable truths of racial hierarchy,” and “the only alternative it envisaged to domination was oppression and 327

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national death.” In this sense, the Nazis were “tearing down the whole noble façade of nineteenth-century international law.”28 This is an important distinction, and as Mazower also suggests, many Europeans, who were in fact treated by the Nazis neither as badly as certain colonial subjects nor, much more visibly, as their Jewish neighbors, eventually came to the conclusion that once the Jews were gone, they might be next.29 But one should add that while this thinking applied to certain Slav populations, such as the Poles, who were from the beginning treated abysmally by the Germans—but not, for instance, to the Croats, who were allied with Germany—it did not quite apply to western and northern Europeans, who were never under any threat of extermination and, in many cases, would have been welcomed with open arms into the fold of an Aryan empire. Moreover, the growing resistance to collaboration with the Final Solution was largely fueled by rising fears of Allied retribution in view of an increasingly likely German defeat. Alongside the view that the Holocaust can be related to past colonial genocides, and that it was itself part of a German colonial undertaking akin to other European colonial ventures, is the assertion that the genocide of the Jews, and especially insistence on its uniqueness, has served to justify the Zionist colonization of Palestine. This, too, is anything but a vacuous argument; there is little doubt that in Israeli political and educational rhetoric, the slogan “never again” has been used both to legitimize the existence of the state as a haven for the Jews, and for giving it license to use any means needed to protect its existence. Parallels made by Israeli leaders and propagandists between such Palestinian organizations as the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and Hamas and the Nazis abound, just as Palestinian propaganda and anti-Israeli spokespeople and demonstrators in the West have a penchant for drawing parallels between Israeli and Nazi policies. This kind of rhetoric is largely confined to the admittedly wellpublicized realm of political demagogy, indoctrination, and ideological overkill. There are certainly colonial and racist undertones to right-wing and settler pronouncements and actions in Israel; and there are clear antiSemitic undertones to radical Islamic and European right- and left-wing anti-Israel rhetoric. The shadow of Nazism and the Holocaust rests heavily on everyone, and true to its nature, Nazism has a poisoning effect on all who exploit it. But the question is to what extent this predilection has also affected Holocaust historiography. To be sure, since the nineteenth century, historians have been deeply complicit, indeed, have often 328

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played a major role in the creation of ethnocentric nationalism, and Israeli historians have been no exception. But it is clearly an exaggeration to suggest, as one scholar does, that Israeli Holocaust “historiography is as much an ethical discourse, indeed a political theology, as a secular investigation.”30 One must also doubt that most Holocaust scholars would see themselves as belonging to either one of the “two rival narratives about the meaning of the Holocaust and the course of modern global history” that ostensibly dominate the discourse: one that “links Holocaust memory both to the universal values of human rights and the particular geopolitical agenda of Israel”; and another that “regards the Holocaust less as a racially-driven genocide against a helpless minority than the logical outcome of imperial-racial conquests that it holds Zionism to embody.”31 Instead, I would argue that this is a fatuous either-or view of Holocaust historiography, which reflects a tendency among some genocide scholars to perceive the Holocaust more as mobilized memory than as a historical event. In this sense, the call for the Holocaust to be “deprovincialized from its signification within an exclusively Jewish and western narrative about the triumphant achievement of human rights and genocide prevention” seems to reflect a frustration with the Holocaust as allegedly constituting an obstacle to fighting injustice in today’s world.32 Much of this debate curiously boils down to a very specific historical question, namely, did the Nazis target the Jews for genocide in a manner that was essentially different from their treatment of any other group under their rule? This purely factual question appears to be important not only in analyzing Nazi policies but also because different answers to it seem to affect the status of the Holocaust as unique. There can be little doubt that the Jews played a singular role in the Nazi imaginaire and that German Jewish policies distinguished them within the Nazi universe of murder and fantasy;33 but other groups clearly have been similarly targeted in other genocides. Hence, in order to assert the comparability of the Final Solution with other genocidal undertakings, there is no need to speak of a “uniqueness myth that the Nazis intended the total destruction of the Jews,”34 not least because most scholars of Nazism and the Holocaust would agree that the Nazi genocidal project was no myth.35 Nor do all genocide scholars agree on this point. As one prominent historian asserts, he had “always recognized the extremity of the Holocaust relative to other genocides . . . the extreme fervor of the Nazi pursuit of Jews across national boundaries, and the totality of the desire . . . to 329

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murder all Jews on whom hands could be laid.” He thus rightly concludes that “the extent of the ‘final solution’ was . . . shaped by an antisemitism that was colored by a different element over and above the racism and ethno-nationalism that explains the murder of other groups by Nazi Germany—that element being the view of ‘the Jews’ as an implacable, collective world enemy.”36 To be sure, this makes the Holocaust unique only within the context of the Nazi empire—and even under Hitler’s rule, things may have transpired differently under different circumstances—but not a unique, albeit certainly a very extreme form of genocide, if one may apply such an adjective to the “crime of crimes.” It certainly should not give license to create “a hierarchy that hinders the integrated study of genocides.”37 But while this warning by genocide scholars should be heeded, there does not seem to be much danger of such a hierarchy being maintained within the scholarly community (as opposed to political rhetoric). The difficult task is rather to create integrated histories of genocide—specific cases as well as comparative studies—that would do justice both to the perspectives of all protagonists and that would analytically sketch out differences and similarities between the variety of genocides that have plagued and keep plaguing our world. The Holocaust was one of several major genocides in the twentieth century. As noted, it was particularly extreme, and aspects of it were and have remained unprecedented, most especially the extermination camps. Some aspects of it were remarkably similar to other genocides, and have repeatedly occurred, such as communal massacres. As an event, it was highly complex and transpired in a variety of very different contexts—the killing of Jews in a little town in Galicia, the transport of Jews from Paris to Auschwitz, the Romanian massacres of Jews in Transnistria, and the starvation of Jews in the ghettos of Poland were all part of the same genocide but also vastly different, as were the Jewish communities that experienced these atrocities. To my mind, the history of the Holocaust, which was a European genocide in the middle of the twentieth century, is quite different from that of the Herero genocide in German Southwest Africa at the beginning of that century, or that of the Rwandan genocide toward its end. They were, of course, connected in various ways, although these links are often difficult to establish.38 But they were also related to their own particular histories, and must be analyzed and understood within their specific historical and geographical contexts. For this purpose, they need to be 330

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studied not just by scholars of Holocaust studies or genocide studies, but by area specialists who know the languages and histories of the perpetrators and victims. I still believe, as I did at the beginning of my own scholarly journey, that historians should not start off by specializing in an event but rather in a place and a time. Most important, they should be careful and meticulous with their facts, especially when these facts concern the mass murder of millions. Having spent decades studying modern violence, I am still grappling with the complexities of writing an integrated history of genocide. Over the years, I have always sought to identify the individual human being on whom history is enacted, but who, at the same time, is also its maker. I have never believed in unique events, but always highlighted the singular, personal experience that, collectively, makes up the fabric of human history. Perhaps because of my current preoccupation with the history of communal violence in a single town, I have become increasingly aware, as I commented some time ago, that “from the local perspective, it does not matter much which genocide one writes about; we will often encounter the same ethnically and religiously mixed communities, external forces triggering outbursts of communal massacres, and many instances of complicity and rescue, collaboration and resistance. But the witnesses of such events will also bring out the uniqueness of their experiences as individuals, as members of communities, of groups, of nations—a uniqueness that was denied them by the killers.”39 As I see it, precisely because genocide is about the destruction of groups as such, it is the duty of the historian to rescue these groups from oblivion, even if only in history and memory. One way to oppose the will of the génocidaires to obliterate both the existence and the memory of their victims is to let the victims speak and to listen to their voices, not least because they demand to be heard, and then to write down their accounts and integrate them into the historical record for the sake of a fuller reconstruction of the event. It is not true that history is always the story of the powerful and victorious; but it is up to historians to collect and record, write and integrate the fates of those who were trampled on and destroyed.40

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S WITH ANY GENOCIDE , scholars need to approach the Holocaust

with sensitivity because of the understandable emotions it evokes. It is not yet the kind of past about which all historians can easily write with detachment, as they do, say, of the sixteenth-century Reformation, which remained the subject of intense intra-Christian polemics until relatively recently. The Holocaust and other modern genocides remain “hot” rather than “cold” memory, in part because historians include(d) among their number surviving victims and perpetrators, witnesses, and their children, who, like everyone, are liable to the emotional pull of collective identification.1 A vivid sense of the past’s presence is conveyed by an online response to an article about Holocaust literature: The Holocaust, at least for we Jews, is a very real event in our own personal history. It has meaning and consequences for our lives far more immediate than any fiction could represent. Not even historical scholarship is adequate to the event. For us our understanding of its lessons within the context of our Diaspora experience represents nothing less than life and death.2

Scholars should not deny others the intense emotions they may feel about the subject, whether existential angst or anticipatory fear; experiencing them is all too human. Neither can they extract themselves entirely from such formative contexts, observed the famous Israeli historian Jacob L. Talmon, in an essay entitled “Uniqueness and Universality of Jewish History”: 332

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No historian . . . can be a complete rationalist. He must be something of a poet, he must have a little of the philosopher, and he must be touched just a bit by some kind of mysticism. The sorting out of evidence, the detective’s skill in ferreting out inaccuracy and inconsistency, are of little help when the historian strikes against the hard residue of mystery and enigma, the ultimate causes and the great problems of human life. Of the Jewish historian in particular, Talmon continued that he becomes a kind of martyr in his [sic] permanent and anguished intimacy with the mystery of Jewish martyrdom and survival. Whether he be Orthodox in belief or has discarded all religious practice, he cannot help but be sustained by a faith which can neither be proved nor disproved.3 That Talmon, who was born in Poland in 1916, wrote in such terms fifty years ago is hardly surprising given the calamitous lows and dizzying highs of Jewish experiences in the first half of the twentieth century. But can historians like Talmon speak for the communities they purport to ventriloquize? I know many historians of genocide who, though at times anguished, neither experience states of intimacy with mysteries of any kind, nor are tempted by the metaphysics of martyrdom. Even so, the patent continuity of intense anxieties about trends in Holocaust research and status of Holocaust memory indicates that Talmon’s observations obtain, at least for some scholars. Take Walter Reich, former director of the  U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., and currently Yitzhak Rabin Memorial professor of international affairs, ethics and human behavior at George Washington University in the United States. He itemized those anxieties in the following terms: • Distorting the very definition of the Holocaust—6 million vs. 11 million • Trivializing Holocaust memory • Dismissing the victimization of the Jews to advance the victimization of others • Distorting the Holocaust in popular culture, especially film • Academicizing the Holocaust • The effects of Holocaust kitsch • The effects of the seamier efforts to recover Holocaust assets 333

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• The effects of using the Holocaust to achieve political, diplomatic, and military ends4 Trivializing the Holocaust is a particularly common complaint, as is the objection to its categorization as “just another case of genocide” or an example of “man’s inhumanity to man.”5 In his contribution to this volume, Omer Bartov identifies an inverse set of anxieties about the Holocaust’s political meaning: • An anxiety that its claimed uniqueness “casts a shadow on the study of other genocides” to which it should be related in a nonhierarchical way • An anxiety that the uniqueness claim is a Western-centric and humanistic discourse at one with the colonial domination of the globe and consignment of other genocides to second-rank status • An anxiety that Israeli leaders and supporters mobilize Holocaust memory in the occupation of Palestinian territory I myself have observed a Palestinian anxiety about Holocaust memory, and others have written about the tortured reception of the Holocaust in the Arab world, ranging from denial to distortion, empathy to acknowledgment.6 Bartov attempts to chart a course between these incommensurable anxieties. That is a proper academic exercise: a scholar’s analytical rather than affective self should be prioritized when publishing in an academic forum. Self-control and critical self-reflection are preconditions for scholarship aspiring to secularity in the sense meant by Edward Said, who argued for “critical detachment” and eschewal of “political gods.” Though this ethic does not require an apolitical posture, as Said’s career amply demonstrates, it does entail renouncing “absolute certainties and a total, seamless view of reality that recognizes only disciples or enemies.”7 For the traumatized subject, however, absolute certainties may be a psychologically essential cognitive structure. Without the consolation of abiding truths, the suffering is literally unbearable.8 Historiography is thereby confronted with a challenge, for it presumes that “the living inhabit the present and . . . the dead inhabit the past.”9 How does it deal with the fact that historians of genocide can be emotionally implicated in its causes and consequences, and experience permanent and anguished intimacy with the mystery of martyrdom and survival? The AmericanPolish writer Eva Hoffman, daughter of Holocaust survivors, responds to this dilemma by positing a scholarly maxim: “It behooves us, with ut334

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most care and compassion, to use our vantage point outside traumatic history itself in order to bring to it interpretations that may not be available to the victims; and perhaps, even, in our thinking and analysis, to move beyond the point of trauma itself.”10 The historian need not be captured by the traumatic history, she is saying. This recognition runs counter to the questionable suggestion of two German historians that those belonging to victim groups are inevitably unable to achieve such a vantage point and thereby “ethnicize history.”11 No one says Hoffmann’s maxim is easy to follow. Although in his chapter in this volume, Bartov pleasingly adopts many of the positions he has rejected until very recently, it still contains unstated anxieties about some directions in Holocaust and genocide studies. I have my own concerns, which I also briefly discuss in the conclusion of this chapter. These anxieties have a history that precedes us. Contextualizing them reveals important conceptual blockages in these fields.

Centrality and Size: World Historical Significance and Western Civilization Bartov writes here that he finds “assertions about the uniqueness of the Holocaust unhelpful, indeed harmful, not least because any ranking of victimhood is inherently pernicious and potentially provides license for a vicious cycle of endless retributive violence.” This is a proposition with which many scholars are likely to agree.12 But the devil is in the detail. Although Bartov cites his own Mirrors of Destruction as a model of balance and repose, this book and other publications indicate that he holds fast to another version of uniqueness while disavowing that word. The new claim is that the Holocaust, rather than other phenomena, is modernity’s event of world historical significance: “the Holocaust is indeed a crucial event for Western civilization, and that however much we learn about other instances of inhumanity, we cannot avoid the fact that this genocide, in the heart of our civilization, perpetrated by one of its most important nations . . . can never be relegated to a secondary place.”13 Such arguments have largely replaced “uniqueness” and “unprecedentedness” in the idiom of specialness and distinction. We can detect this idiom, for example, when Robert Rozett, a historian at Yad Vashem inspired by Bartov, accuses Donald Bloxham and Timothy Snyder of “diminishing the Holocaust.”14 If the anxiety is not about centrality, then it concerns size and, sure enough, Bartov writes in this volume that we 335

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should not “minimize its magnitude or make it more easily comparable to other cases of genocide.”15 Not for nothing does Gavriel Rosenfeld count him among the “defenders of uniqueness” thesis.16 This new version of the uniqueness claim needs to negotiate complex relationships between the universal and the particular, the West and the rest. The Holocaust is made into a universal icon by a number of slippages: by making it unique in Jewish history and then in Western history, by making Jewish history unique in Western history, and finally by making Western civilization of universal significance for humanity. Consider two consecutive sentences by Shimon Samuels from the Simon Wiesenthal Center: “The Holocaust’s uniqueness within Jewish history is only a question of degree,” because of two thousand years of anti-Semitism that “climaxed in the Final Solution.” It is also unique in human history: “The durability, persistence, and pervasiveness in time and space of evermutating Jew-hatred have made the Holocaust a unique baseline among genocides.”17 The West is culturally superior because memory of the Holocaust in the West led to the criminalization of genocide in international law and to the field of genocide studies itself. It is the source of postwar morality, we are bidden to believe, both unique and universal.18 These claims are reconcilable if Jewish history is made to be both unique and universal—à la Talmon—and Jews are posited as the universal victims and/or representatives of Western civilization. Their intended destruction was, therefore, not “just another case of genocide,” as the anxiety has it, but a nihilistic attack on civilization itself, that is, on the monotheistic values that the Nazis denied and violated: “God, redemption, sin and revelation,” as the Israeli historian Uriel Tal called them.19 For this reason, Dan Diner refers to the Holocaust as a “profound civilizational break.”20 The implication is that because the history of Jews is exceptional, at least in Western civilization, the Holocaust is also special. And because Western civilization is universal in its morality, so, too, is the Holocaust.21 The same uniqueness effect is achieved when the perpetrators are said to represent the universal. Take Walter Reich again. Acknowledging the mass murder of Rwandan Tutsis as genocide, he concedes that “the deaths of six million white Jews are no more tragic than the deaths of 800,000 black Africans, except perhaps in terms of scale.” He distinguishes the Holocaust thus: it “was the tremendum of human experience. Nothing happened like it before and nothing has happened like it since”: again, the universal claim.22 The nature of this tremendum is indexed to civilization.23 336

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This type of argument is not new. The Canadian political scientist Frank Chalk spoke for many when he also figured the Holocaust’s meaning in terms of its German perpetrators as representatives of Western civilization: The Holocaust has a special meaning for Western civilization: unlike the dead of ancient genocides, unlike the Cathars, the Japanese Christians, the Pequots and the Hereros, unlike the Armenians and the victims of Stalin’s terror, the Jews and Gypsies were murdered in post-Enlightenment Europe by a people steeped in Western culture and rich in scientific knowledge. . . . We agree that in the challenge it poses to Western values from within our society, the Holocaust stands alone in the history of the West and in the history of genocide.24 As always, two claims are discernible here: first, the Holocaust’s embedding in an invoked but never defined Western civilization and, second, the claim of its universal relevance. Are they reconcilable? On the one hand, Chalk restricts the Holocaust’s signification to “Western culture” and “our society,” thereby excluding non-Western readers; on the other, he insists the Holocaust “stands alone . . . in the history of genocide,” which is a universal claim that exceeds the West. The West stands in for humanity as a whole. In this version, the Holocaust is special because it sprang from one of the most cultured and civilized societies, which happened to be a Western one: Germany. The land of Schiller and Goethe, Beethoven and Brahms represents world civilization, and implicitly serves as a metonym for humanity as whole. Hence, Bartov’s formulation: “in the heart of our civilization, perpetrated by one of its most important nations.” These arguments are questionable on a number of grounds. If these authors are saying that the Holocaust is special because it was perpetrated by civilized Germans, are they thereby suggesting that, say, intraAfrican genocide is unsurprising, not shocking, and bereft of exemplary or didactic value for others? Or do they maintain that the Holocaust has more to teach than, say, the Rwandan genocide because contemporary (Western?) civilization is closer to Nazi Germany’s? If so, then surely investing the profane, common genocides that they think non-Westerners routinely perpetrate against one another with world historical significance would better serve as a warning signal. After all, Rwanda occurred more recently, and most of humanity does not live in “the West.” The Holocaust 337

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can only become the twentieth century’s leitmotif for all humanity by eliding terms, spheres, and levels of significance.25 The unconscious slippage between Western and universal is designed to maintain the Holocaust’s central place in scholarship and memory as late modernity’s event of world historical significance. Like the new Canadian Museum for Human Rights with its core Holocaust gallery, other genocides and human rights violations must be contemplated with consciousness of the Holocaust’s special place.26 The hegemony of this position was recently revealed when a senior Swiss academic responded to a journalist’s question about the Ukrainian government’s use of the genocide concept for the famine-genocide of 1932–1933: “It is in fact a poorly chosen term,” he said. “When we think ‘genocide,’ and certainly in the context of the 1930s, we think foremost of the Holocaust.”27 This is one example of how the language of Holocaust centrality automatically marginalizes other historical phenomena that might be equally significant for “Western civilization,” like, say, Soviet crimes. Take as another example the first article of the Declaration of the Stockholm International Forum on the Holocaust, formulated by the International Taskforce on International Co-operation on Holocaust Education, Remembrance, and Research (ITF), and issued by forty-six governments in 2000: “The Holocaust (Shoah) fundamentally challenged the foundations of civilization. The unprecedented character of the Holocaust will always hold universal meaning.”28 The ITF’s cofounder, honorary chairman, and former director of the International Center for Holocaust Studies at Yad Vashem, Yehuda Bauer, elaborates this common view. The Holocaust, he writes, was a “conscious rebellion not just against the heritage of the Enlightenment, but against all the norms and traditions of western civilization. Its utopia was a racist hierarchy, not any sort of egalitarianism.”29 This often-repeated thesis about the Holocaust’s significance conceals as much as it reveals. Anyone who has studied how Western powers justified their imperial conquests will intuitively regard any claims about civilization and universal meanings with some suspicion, let alone raise an eyebrow at the omission of colonialism’s various racist utopias. Certainly, the Holocaust fundamentally challenged the foundations of European societies, but what about other phenomena of world historical significance? What about slavery, for instance, whose advocates argued that civilization depended on it, like the state of Mississippi in 1861: “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery—the greatest material interest of the world. . . . These products [produced by slaves] have 338

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become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization.”30 This was not an uncommon view at the time: in fact, it was the majority viewpoint until well into the nineteenth century. Ignoring this heritage and imperialism more generally, Great Britain’s new, government-sponsored Holocaust commission begins its terms of reference with this telling statement: “The Holocaust is unique in man’s inhumanity to man and it stands alone as the darkest hour of human history.”31 Equally problematic is the taken-for-granted prefix of “Western” before “civilization” that potentially stigmatizes Eastern Europe and Eastern Europeans—the principal site of the Holocaust, after all—as barbaric (inherently anti-Semitic), thereby licensing a comforting narrative of German and Western decline followed by postwar resurrection. The Western arrogation of civilization is also discernible in what Timothy Snyder calls the “colonial epistemic,” namely, the reconstruction of the Holocaust and Nazi violence generally in Eastern Europe solely on the basis of German language sources.32 The Holocaust-Western civilization dyad also occludes the new historiography’s linkages of the Holocaust with imperialism that Bartov has been impatiently waiving away until recently.33 Half a century ago, the political thinker Judith Shklar remarked on the apologetic function performed by Western civilization’s invocation— indeed invention—during and immediately after the Second World War: The conspicuous concentration on “the West” today is clearly a response to the Cold War and to the political organization of excolonial, non-European societies which now challenge the European world. These events have made us all culturally self-conscious. The result is a search for an identity, for a positive and uniquely Western tradition.34 With admirable poise, Shklar declined to join the fashionable rush to invent a Western political tradition: The question is whether it is valid to extract a quintessence of “the West” by subtracting from its history all that it shares in various degrees with the rest of mankind. The result inevitably gives Europeans an unwarranted appearance of consistency and uniformity. The aim of this exercise, moreover, is not difficult to guess: as always it is a matter of defending the “essential” West against other ideological forces, revolutionary, national, and violent. The difficulty is that these too are Western.35 339

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No such single Western tradition obtains, she insisted. Positing its existence was the dramatic ideological move of a “nostalgia of a liberalism that has ceased to look to the future and which seeks to maintain itself not as a hope but as an ancient possession, to be valued more for its familiarity and age than for its intrinsic merits.”36 A nostalgic liberalism—now a “liberalism of fear” based on the experience of totalitarianism and genocide— is anxious about its declining hegemony in the West.37 Holocaust memory is central to this liberalism. This is a relatively recent development. Until the early 2000s, Bartov’s claim about the Holocaust’s centrality for Western civilization was inspired by a critical-theoretical rather than an apologetic imperative. Adapting the views of Zygmunt Bauman, Detlev Peukert, and others, he figured the Holocaust as the most extreme case of modernity’s terrible potential for what he called industrial killing and militarized genocide.38 Since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the Second Intifada, and subsequent terrorism, he decided that Western civilization needs defending, as I detail further below. The Holocaust accordingly performed a different function: as the ultimate warning about the consequences of anti-Semitism. Having been rendered obsolete by the collapse of the Soviet Union after 1990, the Western civilization trope was reborn a decade later in opposition to the Islamic world. As it did during decolonization and the Cold War, “Western civilization” posits a vague community of liberal-conservative values that, ironically, are often violated in asserting Western interests. At the very least, there is an ambivalence in Bartov’s invocation of Western civilization. Like Talmon before him, who confessed to feeling “deeply committed to the Western tradition,” he regards it at once as the millennia-long Jewish intellectual and cultural home—the famed tension between Rome/Athens and Jerusalem—and the civilization that within living memory had murdered around 6 million Jews and millions of other Europeans.39

Subsumption and Erasure? Anti-Semitism vs. Imperialism Centrality and size are two anxieties. The Holocaust’s apparent erasure “as a concrete episode in the annals of human history” by fitting “it into an interpretive framework to which it may not necessarily belong,” as Bartov puts it, is another. This, too, is an old concern, especially regarding imperialism or colonialism. For many Israeli scholars in particular, an additional enduring anxiety is the accusation of Zionism’s complicity with imperialism, leveled not only by Palestinian Arabs since the early twen340

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tieth century but also by non-Jewish scholars like Arnold Toynbee, for whom, as Talmon wrote, “Zionism figures as an integral part of Western imperialistic rapacity.”40 Organs like the new Journal for the Study of Antisemitism maintain a close lookout for latter-day Toynbees in all shapes and sizes.41 Other concepts are also threatening. Nearly forty years ago, Saul Friedländer wrote an influential article, “The Historical Significance of the Holocaust,” to contest historiographical attempts to understand the Holocaust with concepts like totalitarianism, fascism, and economic exploitation.42 Such attempts were anxiously understood as subsumptions. Instead, Friedländer asserted the singularity of the Holocaust on the basis of the special Nazi motivation that set it off from previous genocides. “Thus, although there are precedents for an attempt at total physical eradication, the Nazi exterminatory drive was made unmistakably unique by its motivation.” This motivation was distinguished by its totality and absoluteness—the intended murder of all Jews—unlike the relative and pragmatic aims of destruction directed toward Slavs and “Gypsies.” Moreover, the genocide of the Jews was suffused with a millenarianism that transcended pragmatic concerns: it was driven by “a fundamental urge and a sacred mission, not a means to other objectives.” Friedländer did not yet use the term “redemptive anti-Semitism” that he later made famous: he referred to “murderous anti-Semitism, which was fueled by an element of true insanity.”43 Anti-Semitism is an irreducible, indeed primary causal factor in accounting for the Holocaust. In this vein, both Bartov and Dan Michman from Yad Vashem write that the Jewish experience was essentially different from that of other Nazi victims.44 These and other historians are driving at the perceived fundamental distinction of the anti-Semitic motivation foregrounded by Friedländer and others for forty years. It establishes, as Bartov writes, “the status of the Holocaust as unique . . . within the context of the Nazi empire.”45 This line of argument in research on Nazism has been so successful that Jürgen Zimmerer’s theses about structural parallels and continuities between colonialism and the Holocaust were long regarded as eccentric, if not scandalous.46 Behind this initial rejection lay the anxiety that drawing links to other genocides, especially colonial ones, could somehow either trivialize the Holocaust or subsume it into a framework that sidelines anti-Semitism. In previous publications and papers, Bartov denounced anyone as a revisionist—I am thinking of myself, Bloxham, Snyder, and Mark 341

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Mazower—who entreated frameworks that he feared diminished the Holocaust, that questioned its centrality in the heart of our civilization, that proposed an alternative framework, or that appeared to question this uniqueness.47 His chapter in this volume softens this hostility, but, as we shall see, does not completely transcend it:48 Just as the long history of anti-Semitism is not a sufficient explanation for the Final Solution, so, too, the fact that colonialism predated the Holocaust does not mean that it originated it. This is not to say that the Holocaust was sui generis, but merely that, like all historical events, it had many origins, including imperialism and colonialism, anti-Semitism, and scientific racism, as well as the specific policies and circumstances of the Nazi regime. Neither does he any longer “deny that various connections might be traced between colonial genocides and the Holocaust.” He is writing against his former self when he instructs readers: “Nor should one dismiss the importance of precedent and practice. Indeed, the genocide of 1904 had the distinction of being the first such case in the twentieth century, as well as of being carried out by a modern Western military organization that announced its intention to exterminate an African group.” Zimmerer made this point long ago. Whereas Bartov once cited Mazower’s Hitler’s Empire as an example of transgressive scholarship, he now places it approvingly in his footnotes. He is on the same page as global and colonial historians, and Hannah Arendt before them, who narrate the Nazi empire into general imperial history, and who invoke colonial analytics to discuss the Nazi project without experiencing vertigo.49 Making the Holocaust an episode in the history of empires does not preclude also making it one in the history of anti-Semitism. Both are necessary to explain the Holocaust.50 Even in this milder form, however, Bartov’s chapter can be read as an expression of the anxiety about the Holocaust’s apparent shrinkage, decentralization, and misframing. Now he takes aim at my own work— actually a single chapter—that places the Holocaust into the framework of imperial history. So does Michman.51 Both are anxious about “false or facile parallels,” and they ultimately end up arguing against any colonial connections.52 After all, France and Britain had longer-lasting and larger empires but did not unleash a Holocaust, avers Bartov, who prefers Leo Kuper’s distinction between “colonization-fueled genocides” and ones driven by totalitarian ideologies.53 His bottom line is this: the proposi342

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tion that the Holocaust “was itself part of a German colonial undertaking akin to other European colonial ventures” must be rejected, as well as the notion “that Nazi policies toward European Jews were essentially [again, that word “essentially”] the same as those practiced against non-Jews, in that all were treated as colonial subjects.” I do not know anyone who has advanced such a bald equation, other than perhaps Pete Kakel, whose books neither appear to have read.54 To mix metaphors, this red herring is functioning as a straw man to milden the subsumption anxiety. I have not mounted a case based on parallels, comparisons, or linear causation. Rather, I have posited colonialism and imperialism as enablers and formative contexts of the Nazi regime and the Holocaust.55 Whereas Bartov and colleagues invest anti-Semitism with the ontological status of a presence and drive through history, I observe a variety of anti-Jewish prejudices that were generated and mobilized in diverse contexts and in particular constellations. One of those contexts is colonial expansion outside Europe and imperial conquest within it. By the end of the nineteenth century, anti-Semitism and colonial racism in Europe became entwined: for reasons of space, I draw readers’ attention to various publications where the arguments are fleshed out.56 The entwinement of anti-Semitism and the language of colonialism is a textbook case of entangled histories or histoire croisée: of “mutual influencing, in reciprocal or asymmetric perceptions, in entangled processes of constituting one another.”57 Another context was the nation-building projects in southeastern Europe during the Second World War—ranging from “Greater Hungary” and “Greater Romania,” to “Greater Bulgaria”—that generated their own dynamism for ethnic cleansing and genocide of various unwanted minorities. Their interaction with the Nazi regime and its projects made the Holocaust an international affair, but one whose prehistories, impulses, and modalities cannot be sourced in Hitler’s fantasies about world Jewry or even in the German past alone. What is more, one cannot account for the fate of Jews in these countries without understanding their respective regimes’ plans for all minorities; their fates were related in complex ways. To a large extent, these patterns were typical of radical nationalisms since the Eastern Crisis, as Donald Bloxham laid out in The Final Solution: A Genocide.58 Indeed, they invite comparisons with other transnational minorities, like Christians in the Ottoman Empire, Muslims in the Christian successor states of that empire, and Chinese in Southeast Asia. This is an approach that Michman’s fixation on Hitler and Western Europe cannot accommodate, still less recognize. Such anxieties about the 343

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place of anti-Semitism in the study of Nazism and the Holocaust are getting in the way of contemporary thinking about them.59 That constructive engagement with this literature is possible is evident in the work of Roberta Pergher and Mark Roseman, who integrate into the imperial frame the Nazis’ demonic view of Jews and their crusade to eliminate them while preserving Jews’ distinct experiences and status; it is a model case of sublation rather than subsumption: If the war against the Jews was thus never dictated by imperial considerations narrowly defined, the striking fact is that the Holocaust was at the same time a thoroughly, perhaps unprecedentedly imperial genocide. However national-völkisch their ultimate aspirations may have been, conquest had brought the Nazis an empire, which they had to administer and through which they had to operate. It was thus through this empire and its structures that the Nazis sought to round up the Jews. The Nazis wanted to eliminate Jews not from particular regional trouble spots but from all areas under their rule. The Holocaust thus became perhaps the only genocide in human history to have been pursued across an entire empire, deploying all the varying regional and subordinate structures of power that existed in the different regions under Nazi rule.60 This is a thesis worthy of discussion given the fact that a staggering 96 percent of Jews killed during World War II were neither German nor Austrian. Combined with similar patterns of other out-group violence by the Nazi regime, Christian Gerlach rightly concludes that “it makes sense to place this violence in the context of imperialism.”61 Instead, we are subject to fretting about subsumption, equation, and “essential” difference. It is apparently unbearable that Bloxham, Mazower, Moses, and Snyder seem to render Jews as “simply another ‘enemy’ or ‘inferior’ ethnic group” and make anti-Semitism “simplistically . . . another group hatred.” We apparently do not appreciate the “unequalled” treatment of Jews, as Michman puts it. His anxiety is that we “tame”—his term—the Holocaust, and place the “Jewish dimension of the Holocaust in dire straits.” What an untamed Holocaust means is left unstated, but I take it to mean what Friedländer wrote in 1976: that it cannot be subsumed under or erased by broad, secular, and profane categories like colonialism, bloodlands, and genocide—those threatening successors of totalitarianism, fascism, and economic exploitation.62 In fact, none of the accused historians dispute the Holocaust’s distinctive features. They are saying that it was 344

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also an event (or events) that can be understood and necessarily explained by other paradigms. But because entertaining these propositions at the same time seems too challenging an intellectual (and emotional?) operation, we continue to be reminded that the Holocaust is irreconcilable with various narratives of the twentieth century.63

A Second Holocaust? “Islamofascism” and the “New Anti-Semitism” The context for this anxiety is the Arab-Israeli conflict and contemporary Islamism. The many advocates of the “Islamofascism” thesis hold that contemporary Islamism at once borrows anti-Jewish themes from Nazism and represents the same kind of threat that Nazism did in the 1930s.64 For example, Paul Landau wrote that Hamas’s ideology is suffused by a “millenarian and redemptive anti-Semitism.”65 A number of prominent scholars, like Benny Morris, even warn of a “second Holocaust.”66 The appearance of serious historians making this type of alarmist public statement indicates that the tidy distinction between the public-political and scholarly domains is unsustainable. Because of such links between scholarly and political writings—that is, the insistence on the essential difference of anti-Semitism—devoting a section to the latter is necessary. Bartov is only one of many convinced that the 9/11 attacks and Second Intifada signaled a crisis of the West’s relationship with the rest of the world. They frustrated historical progress and revived historical demons.67 The terrorism of the 2000s was a rupture in two respects.68 In the first place, Islamist anti-Semitism reminded many of Nazism; here the West is regarded as the potential victim of Islamists’ genocidal terrorism and “the new antisemitism.”69 Second, these alarmed scholars are dismayed by the Western academy’s supposed refusal to share their apprehension.70 The anxiety is heightened by binding together Islamists and Western intellectuals as examples of an underlying trend that supposedly continues the genocidal potential of the past. This operation is possible by investing anti-Semitism with ontological status.71 The operation then links hardcore anti-Semitism with the “ ‘soft core’ of this poisonous rhetoric . . . among some sectors of European and American intellectuals and academics,” collapsing the two as manifestations of the same problem.72 This anti-Semitism can reveal itself in a variety of symptoms: “Chronic diseases like anti-Semitism cannot be understood by a spot check at a 345

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given moment in time. They linger, become endemic, and occasionally, when circumstances allow, blossom into a full-blown illness.”73 The crisis of the West’s relationship to the rest of the world is the fertile ground that nourishes this disastrous blossoming.74 The perversion of globalization in a rich West and poor global South, he continues, fuels “seething rage” against the former, especially Jews, the perennial scapegoat. Vigilance is therefore imperative and the warning is simple:75 given that Islamists share sociological origins and ideology with the Nazis, take them seriously, and literally.76 This familiar villa-in-the-jungle story draws on long-standing Orientalist tropes about Islam and modernity, as well as Western rhetoric during decolonization, when subduing national liberation movements was couched in terms of protecting (Western) civilization from jihadist Muslims (during the Algerian independence struggle, for instance) and modernizing them by banning the veil and promoting women’s rights.77 Britain and France did their best to avoid the application of the Geneva Conventions in their various dirty wars, while the United States lavished funds on sterilizations and other demographic measures to stem the alarming growth of global South populations.78 The other blossom is contained within the West itself, namely, the apparently excessive criticism of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories and  U.S. foreign policy generally.79 These critics downplay the threat of Muslim/Arab/Palestinian extremism. Most liberal-minded, optimistic, well-meaning people are loath to believe this [about Islamic fundamentalism and its anti-Semitic threat]. They would rather think that fanaticism is merely an “epiphenomenal” façade for politics, that opinions can be changed, that everyone can be corrected and improved. In many cases, this is true—but not in all cases, and not in the most dangerous ones. There are those who practice what they preach and are proud of it. They view those who act otherwise, who compromise and pull back from ultimate conclusions, as opportunists, as weaklings, as targets to be easily conquered and subdued by their own greater determination, hardness, and ruthlessness. When they say they will kill you, they will kill you—if you do not kill them first.80 Killing them first was the point of the  U.S. “war on terror” and Israeli policy of targeted assassinations. The problem is the academics who do criticize them.81 346

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Another way of expressing concern about such intellectual appeasement is to assert that the failure to condemn anti-Semitism was “the beginning of complicity” with it.82 Earlier, Bartov had justifiably criticized German intellectuals and professionals for aiding and abetting the Nazis regime and its crimes.83 Then he set himself the task to “speak out” again about “contemporary fundamentalist Islamic global terrorism” and the “liberal, left-wing acquiescence in anti-Semitism tinged with a genocidal potential.”84 On the basis of this disease/symptom, soft-core/hard-core model, it is easy to see threatening enemies in every corner.

Victim Perspective as Punctum Archimedis? Mention of anxiety about victimization leads to the anxiety about the status of the victim in Holocaust and genocide scholarship. A number of historians have written in censorious terms about colleagues who do not measure up to their posited standards of probity for representing victims’ voices. They are accused at once of epistemological error and moral turpitude tantamount to genocide itself, even if metaphorically. Elie Wiesel set the tone about memory’s imperatives when he declared that “to forget would be not only dangerous but offensive; to forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time.” They become “today’s victims.”85 Bartov, taking aim at Donald Bloxham’s book The Final Solution: A Genocide, continued this line of reasoning: Writing the history of genocide only from the perspective of the killers, however good one’s intentions may be, blocks the historian from empathizing with the victims, and must necessarily lead to writing a history of atrocity lacking a human face, thereby becoming complicit in the depersonalization, not to say dehumanization of the victims sought by the perpetrators.86 Tough words. And there are more. Alexandra Garbarini, casting a cold eye on Dan Stone, rejected his argument that understanding perpetrator motivation might enable genocide prediction and even prevention by suggesting that historians like him were merely “getting in touch with their own ability to violate others’ human rights.”87 The tendency to question the integrity of colleagues by analogizing between them and Nazis is widespread. Consider again Bartov who, in his book on cinematic depictions of “the Jew,” denounced those who wished to banish humor from Holocaust films as “curiously veer[ing] to the side of the perpetrators.”88 347

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Engaging critically with colleagues is normal practice; morally disqualifying them signals a deep-seated anxiety about the recurrence of the Holocaust or its reperpetration on the victims. A restrained case about the perceived erasure of victims is advanced by Carolyn Dean. She is concerned that the critique of an allegedly hegemonic “wound culture” leads to an aversion to victims, who, moreover, are compelled to present themselves publicly in psychologically asphyxiating ways that domesticate their trauma. Western culture’s simultaneous overidentification with and aversion to victims entails the destruction of the space for trauma’s working through. The upshot is “psychological violence done when victims’ sufferings go unacknowledged or are memorialized finally in an empty rhetoric or kitsch and hence only satisfactorily and problematically.”89 Garbarini would likely agree. She has been pleading for victims’ perspectives to be integrated into Holocaust historiography.90 These historians give the impression that attention to perpetrators has dominated the field for decades, despite the vast sales of Holocaust memoirs, the widespread use of survivors to give educational talks on their experiences for organizations like the Holocaust Educational Trust, the Yale Fortunoff archives, the thousands of recorded testimonies at the Spielberg archive and Yad Vashem archive, the survivor testimonies used at various Holocaust museums, and the prominence of Elie Wiesel, among others. Foregrounding the victims’ perspectives has in fact long been central to the field thanks to the influential Jerusalem School of Holocaust historiography, for which conceptualizing Jews as a “living active [national] collective” was understandably central. One of the Jerusalem School of Historiography’s founders, Ben-Zion Dinur, also emphasized survivor testimony, a thread taken up by Friedländer, who replaced the agency of the collectivity (“the Jews”) with the individual Jewish victims.91 The field abounds with significant works on Nazi victims.92 Moreover, to say that victims have been marginalized from scholarship misunderstands how complex research fields are structured and how scholars work. Not each article or book on the subject is purporting to present a fully comprehensive picture; how could they? Bloxham’s The Final Solution: A Genocide reconstructs the radicalization of the European states system, especially in the south and the east, since the 1870s to answer a question about the origins of the Holocaust. He has written about its victims in other work, indeed, at greater length than his critics. Stone has published a large book on the liberation of the camps.93 Many 348

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questions animate historians, who cut their cloaks according to their cloth. The books published in the series on war and genocide that I edit with Bartov cover the gamut of topics.94 Moreover, the ontological status of “the victim” is not as stable as often presumed. Dean’s point about the constrictive performative expectations of Holocaust victims, in which they must perform cool mastery of their traumatic wounds to gain public recognition, at least recognizes that “the victim” is an intersubjectively constructed category. (The point also applies to Palestinians, who, according to Lori Allen, must package their experiences in disciplined and nonemotional performances to attain international recognition.)95 In Dean’s critique of these expectations for Holocaust survivors and, indeed, of historiography itself, it is unclear whether, pace Eva Hoffman, she is inviting historians to inhabit the trauma of their subjects in order to disrupt their public disciplining. If so, it is equally unclear whether her imperative is compatible with secular scholarship, and how historians would adjudicate between different, certainly rival claims to victimhood in public spheres like, say, Australia, where Holocaust survivors, who settled there after the war, occupy a different space than indigenous people, victims of Australian colonialism in a variety of ways.96 Charles S. Maier, who noted a “surfeit of memory” over twenty years ago, has recently addressed the question of victim testimony and historical writing.97 As before, he is skeptical that victims’ perspectives can serve as historians’ Archimedean point, however much the latter should honor the former’s experiences and integrate them in their work. The witness recounts his or her experiences, but the historian “asks for explanation”— namely, “a comprehensive account or explanation of causation” and “systematic understanding”—through retrieval, which includes accounting for the perpetrators’ murderous criminality. If he can be trusted, if he is authentic, the witness has given us the experience of the victim; he has inscribed in our consciousness the awfulness of degradation, deprivation and death. But the historian has to explain how and why this system of human devastation, of mass homicide, could take place.98 Maier is not deaf to the cries of suffering; he implores historians to register the impact of their testimony. Ultimately, though, he and Hoffman entreat a secular scholarship distinct from the domain of trauma: “Not to mourn fixatedly but to understand as best we can what beliefs, structures 349

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and ultimately what emptying of moral restraint finally allowed these events to happen.”99 To be sure, this is a historiographical agenda that is posing “why” questions. “How” questions are equally legitimate: part of an era’s historical sensibility consists in how its victims experienced it. Reconstructing this experience is also an important historical task, though not as straightforward as one might suppose. If no one denies the reality of suffering, what makes some victims more visible and recognizable than others? By what cultural operations is victimhood transformed from a natural, individual fact into a social object? How and why do some kinds of suffering become grievable, while others do not?100 These are some questions posed by anthropologists who study the category of “the victim.” They are interested not only in the politics of victimhood but also in what kind of politics is entailed by bids for victimhood; they often identify an antipolitics, not unlike recent claims about human rights.101 Dean’s mild constructivism shies back from the anthropologist’s habitual perspectivism. For the latter, studying victimhood means staying aloof from “the binaries and exclusive claims generated by victim discourses,” still less enacting “victim politics”—similar advice to Hoffman.102 Such an approach, Hadas Yaron avers, contextualizes and historicizes the category in order to recognize changes in power relations and augmentations of subject positions.103 What is more, who is to say that victims’ voices can be neatly narrated into the historical melodramas that Amos Goldberg has identified as one of the dominant literary styles in Holocaust historiography?104 The political construction of “the victim” can also be studied at a transnational level, as Ran Zwigenberg shows in his book about Hiroshima and the Holocaust. His temporal classification and analysis of various memory regimes provides an important context for the current anxieties in Holocaust and genocide studies. Briefly, he identifies three stages in memory work concerning victims of the American atomic attacks on Japan and the Jewish victims of the Holocaust. In the first, from 1945 to the 1960s, triumphalist narratives incorporated the victims as a collective into the risen/surviving nation. Individual survivors were largely ignored in this period of reconstruction that celebrated the pacifist or the partisan. In the second, which lasted until the late 1970s, the victims’ voices came to the fore as subjects of identification and empathy; now they were the heroes. Since the 1980s, in the third and ongoing phase, other victim groups emerged to challenge Japanese and Jewish claims to unique victim status. I do not have the space here other than to provide 350

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this skeletal version of the argument, but it is sufficient for us to detect in the various defenses of Holocaust uniqueness and the victims’ perspectives the nostalgia of some historians for the second memory phase, during which many of them were socialized and came of age.105 In view of these considerations, there are reasons to question the innocence of invocations of victims’ voices. In Mirrors of Destruction, for example, Bartov was also skeptical of their use: “The individual suffering of innocents under any regime and in any historical context,” does “not tell us a great deal about the political circumstances in which it occurs”; indeed, they could be used to relativize the Holocaust, as in the Historikerstreit, by eliding the distinctions between murderous regimes; after all, from a victims’ perspective, all murderous regimes could appear the same.106 If, in 2000, it was necessary for Bartov to emphasize perpetrator intention in order to highlight the specificity of Nazi criminality, a decade later, it seemed politic to invert the equation by invoking victims against what he regards as the “self-serving politicization of historical tragedies”: that is, the victims’ perspective—which he homogenizes—will somehow challenge the big picture constructions of historians.107 The only consistency in this position is the mixing of the scholarly and political. Thus, although Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands is full of victim voices, Bartov denounced it anyway, this time because he thinks the book flattens out unique differences between Jewish and non-Jewish experiences.108 It is, then, the various historical framings of the Holocaust by Bloxham and colleagues to which he, Michman, and others object. Instead of stating that objection outright, however, they question motives.109

Worrying about the Anxieties At the start of this chapter, I signaled that I have concerns, even anxieties of my own. They are easy to state: I am anxious about the anxieties I analyze above. There are a number of them. I worry that Holocaust and genocide studies are corrupted by politics, even if the domains can never be separated entirely. A number of recent examples can be adduced. At an event honoring Raoul Wallenberg that I attended at the Cardozo Holocaust, Genocide and Human Rights Program in New York in September 2014, I heard the Canadian international lawyer and former government minister Irwin Cotler deliver an address on the lessons of genocide in which he invoked Hamas’s and Iran’s hostility to Israel that had played out so violently in July and August of that 351

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year.110 The same university program has as a visiting professor Thane Rosenbaum, the author of a book entreating the ethics of revenge, who during the 2014 Gaza War wrote that all Gazans are effectively combatants and, therefore, legitimate military targets.111 Differences of opinion on the Gaza War are natural, but the degree of partisanship expressed by both these figures is incompatible with teaching students about Holocaust and genocide studies. The same partisanship is on display in the support of the Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide and Jerusalem Center for Genocide Prevention for the position of “Combat Genocide: A Jewish and Universal Organization” for Israel to derogate from the Refugee Convention in view of its supposedly “special nature.”112 Like Avraham Burg and Idith Zertal, I also worry about the uses to which Holocaust memory is put, even if obliquely, such as the endorsement by Elie Wiesel—“the living embodiment of the martyred six million of the holocaust”—of an extremist settler group that is evicting Palestinians from their homes in East Jerusalem.113 The politicization of scholarship takes various forms. Rozett’s Yad Vashem colleague, Dan Michman, who heads its International Institute for Holocaust Research, speculates on the motivations of those accused of diminishing the Holocaust. He is concerned about the “enmity among genocide scholars towards Holocaust studies, partially resulting from ‘competition of victimhood’ among scholars that reject the Holocaust’s public and scholarly centrality.” This enmity has two sources: first, “political attitudes regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.” And, second, the methodological difference between generalizing social science and particularizing history. He concludes, thus: “from the historian’s view, it is precisely the exceptional dimension(s) of the Holocaust that should draw attention.”114 Michman’s invocation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict opens a Pandora’s box whose contents may not be to his liking. As Bartov knows, manipulations of Holocaust memory for national political purposes in Israel are ubiquitous. Take the popular writer and journalist Ari Shavit, whose recent book, My Promised Land, was widely hailed in the United States and elsewhere. In it, he describes the Holocaust as “Zionism’s ultimate argument,” and told interviewers that “we’ve lost this basic understanding that we are the ultimate victims of the 20th century” who remain threatened today.115 Such examples could be multiplied. In view of these historical instrumentalizations and Michman’s employment in a highly political state institution, one wonders whether he is in a position to accuse scholars of “political correctness” for questioning his particular 352

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interpretation of the Holocaust’s world historical status. When living in West Bank houses, don’t throw stones.116 What is more, Michman’s dated distinction between nomothetic social science and idiographic historiography ignores the fact that the scholars against whom he rails are historians using mainstream approaches developed since the Methodenstreit more than a century ago, where he appears to be stuck.117 In his naïve positivism, he takes uniqueness as an empirically settled fact doubted only by the obtuse or malicious. Others see it as an interpretation. The cultural contingency of such interpretations about the world historical status of major events or phenomena is indicated by the half-forgotten point that during the 1950s, “Hiroshima” (that is, atomic weapons) was routinely paired with “Auschwitz” (that is, the Holocaust). From Bertrand Russell in 1945, to E. P. Thompson as late as 1980, such weapons were seen as the principal challenge to human civilization.118 Beliefs about uniqueness can change: this is the source of anxiety, as a young Israeli historian found when he compared memories of the Holocaust and Hiroshima: Bringing back Hiroshima does not diminish the importance of the Holocaust. This is not the view of many of my compatriots. For many in Israel, and among Jews especially in the USA, the Holocaust was a unique event that cannot be compared or tied to any other tragedy. This view is the lynchpin of a peculiar form of Jewish nationalism that centers on victimization and precludes any wider view of the tragedy. In the many presentations and talks I have given on the topic, I have always been confronted by some version of that view. In some cases, even the possibility of comparison is frowned upon. Many Israelis and Jews seem to fear even the suggestion of looking at the Holocaust in the context of postwar history in general; fearing context might lead to relativization and downgrading of the horror.119 This specter is haunting some colleagues. All scholars possess an analytical and an affective self; our professional disciplining tames the latter with the former, or at least separates them as much as possible. We have to control our affective selves, not only for the sake of our scholarship but also to avoid the unconscious cultivation of aggression experienced as self-defense against putative attacks. Unfortunately, since 9/11, many colleagues began to see themselves as realistic 353

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potential victims of Islamist genocidaires, aided and abetted by academic fellow travelers in the West.120 The force of these assumptions led them to a single, terrible conclusion about perceived enemies: “If you do not destroy them, they will destroy you. There are precedents for this.”121 Accordingly, they seemed to interpolate colleagues’ differing contributions to the study of genocide as symptoms of a pernicious political trend: one that needs to be destroyed. This style of feeling and reasoning is not confined to Holocaust scholarship. Wherever the fate of human groups is at stake, hypervigilance can intrude into scholarship. Good—that is, secular—scholarship heeds the advice of Eva Hoffman, whose reflective capacities honed by the professional study of literature enable her to articulate and practice the necessary, almost austere self-discipline: “we need to achieve a certain thoughtful separation from received ideas as, in our personal lives, we needed to separate ourselves, thoughtfully and with sympathy, from our persecuted parents.”122 Studying genocide, then, requires two operations: loosening oneself from all participants’ perspectives, and engaging in comparative analysis in time and place. The benefit of hindsight confers an epistemological privilege: “an international, cross-cultural, or culturally intermingled perspective comes to us as easily as certain kinds of exclusive ethnic and religious attachments came to our ancestors,” writes Hoffmann. “Translated backwards, this can lead to a comparative approach to history.” Hoffmann understands the social scientific challenge for all scholars of genocide: “If we want to call upon the Shoah to deepen our comprehension of atrocity, then we need to study not only anti-Semitism but the process of ethnic and religious hatred, the patterns of fanatical belief, the causes of neighborly violence, and the mechanisms through which these can be contained.”123 Such an approach means studying the circumstances in which lethal ideologies of difference like anti-Semitism are generated rather than taking their existence for granted. This is the program that Raphael Lemkin entreated in the scholarly study of genocide.124 Cross-fertilization between Holocaust and genocide studies is finally under way, but extrascholarly anxieties regarding the crisis of nostalgic liberalism have led to distracting debates about civilizational clashes, wars on terror, and competitions for grievable suffering.125

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18 The Witness as “World” Traveler Multidirectional Memory and Holocaust Internationalism before Human Rights M I C H A E L R OT H B E R G

I

N THE TWO DE CADES since the publication of Saul Friedländer’s

landmark edited collection Probing the Limits of Representation (1992), a great deal has happened.1 Indeed, the volume and the 1990 conference from which it emerged took place on the threshold of enormous world historical change—change that has had epochal geopolitical, economic, and cultural consequences. The conference fell squarely between the unanticipated dismantling of the Berlin Wall and the equally rapid process of German unification. The subsequent collapse of the Soviet Empire and the end of the Cold War led to new, sometimes genocidal wars in Europe (and beyond), and also brought with them a new phase of economic globalization, as a now-uncontested neoliberal capitalism declared “the end of history” and sought to establish the universal reign of “free markets.” At the same time, related technological developments fostered accelerated and unprecedented cultural change; in particular, the expansion of the Internet and other forms of new media starting in the mid-1990s and continuing on to our present has reconfigured flows of culture and unsettled intellectual production. Uniting these linked transformations at the levels of politics, economy, and culture has been a turn toward the transnational dimensions of social processes; local conditions and events are now understood as thoroughly enmeshed in the global. Friedländer’s conference and volume also emerged at what would prove to be a pivotal moment in the cultural memory of the Holocaust; they were both part of that moment and contributed to it by provoking critical discussions about historical representation that continue to this 355

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day. The year following the appearance of Probing the Limits saw the opening of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington and the worldwide success of Steven Spielberg’s film Schindler’s List. Such was the impact of these two developments that the ABC news show Nightline declared 1993 “The Year of the Holocaust”—a name also meant to capture the unease created by the troublesome, violent events in the Balkans and an apparent rise in European neo-Nazi activity, including the murderous firebombing of the homes of immigrants and asylum seekers in Germany.2 When the international community largely stood by in 1994 as Hutus slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Tutsis (along with moderate Hutus) in the Rwandan genocide, it both confirmed the ongoing relevance of Holocaust memory and raised questions about the efficacy of its most famous slogan—“Never again!” In the wake of the renewed attention to the Holocaust and to contemporary genocide in the early and mid-1990s, the two central issues Friedländer highlighted in his introduction to Probing the Limits— “historical relativism and aesthetic experimentation”—have continued to generate controversy and debate.3 Yet, despite the continuities that link our present to Friedländer’s forward-looking volume, a significant discontinuity also separates us from the moment of Probing the Limits: the “globalization” of Holocaust studies that has accompanied the broader, increasingly transnational social processes of the post–Cold War era sketched above. By globalization in the context of Holocaust scholarship, I mean first of all the emergence of a robust field of comparative genocide studies since the 1990s and of comparison as an unavoidable question in the study of the Holocaust.4 While the contributors to Probing the Limits were legitimately concerned about the historical relativism at stake in the Historikerstreit and related controversies in the 1980s, today, space has become available for nonrelativistic debate about the relation between the Holocaust and other instances of extreme violence that preceded it, followed it, or even coexisted alongside it. Comparison remains controversial, of course, and not all comparisons are equally legitimate, but in the wake of Bosnia and Rwanda—and now in the aftermath of Timothy Snyder’s thesis in Bloodlands about the relation between Stalinist and Nazi violence—comparison cannot simply be banished as inevitably tarnishing the singularity of the Holocaust.5 Parallel to the increasingly comparative nature of genocide studies, a newly “cosmopolitan” memory culture has emerged. As the sociologists Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider have argued in their influential, if con356

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troversial work, “at the beginning of the third millennium, memories of the Holocaust facilitate the formation of transnational memory cultures, which in turn, have the potential to become the cultural foundation for human rights politics.”6 The link between Holocaust memory, cosmopolitanism, and human rights has “normative and institutional” correlates, according to Levy and Sznaider, and has been facilitated by the “decontextualization” of the Nazi genocide and its reconfiguration as an “abstract” symbol of “good and evil.”7 Levy and Sznaider’s primary concern, as I understand it, is neither to affirm nor to condemn this cosmopolitan turn, but rather to describe a new disposition of remembrance that has become hegemonic in the years since the Friedländer volume. Many of the essays in Probing the Limits retain their relevance despite the legion of political, economic, and cultural changes I have outlined. Yet, the absence of a cosmopolitan perspective focusing on human rights in the volume and its dearth of comparative investigation—beyond the contestation of the relativizing moves of German conservatives in the Historikerstreit—now appears especially striking, even if, as I go on to argue, the focus on human rights and cosmopolitanism comes with its own limits. In order to grasp the distance between the Friedländer volume and the perspective tracked by Levy and Sznaider, note, for example, that Raphael Lemkin, who coined the concept of genocide, does not appear anywhere in the volume’s index; nor is Lemkin’s concept used in the volume outside its specific reference to the Nazi genocide of European Jews. Other genocides that preceded publication of Probing the Limits, such as the Armenian and Cambodian genocides, are simply absent from discussion. Finally, and most relevant here, no reference to genocide, racism, and violence in colonial contexts appears in Probing the Limits, with the singular exception of the essay by Vincent Pecora, who presciently draws on Frantz Fanon and Edward Said to ask about the limits of the critique of Western modernity in dominant discussions about the singularity of the Holocaust. Symptomatic of the times, Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism—whose provocative, if problematic juxtaposition of imperialism, anti-Semitism, Nazism, and Soviet terror has inspired recent comparative scholarship—receives no mention, even as a couple of essays reference her other writings on Eichmann and on the camps. These absences are particularly significant because in the years since Probing the Limits, the study of the Nazi genocide and its legacies has taken what I have called a “colonial turn,” with numerous scholars around the world now actively involved in the post-Arendtian project of tracing the myriad, 357

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multidirectional links between colonialism, decolonization, and genocide.8 Participants in this turn, such as Dirk Moses and Jürgen Zimmerer, have been tracking both the colonial antecedents of the Holocaust and the entangled legacies of different histories of extreme violence that have emerged in the decades since the defeat of National Socialism.9 I draw two conclusions from this contextualization of Probing the Limits of Representation. First, the point is not to criticize Friedländer’s collection for the absence of comparative and postcolonial perspectives—for such absences are, precisely, symptomatic and not peculiar to this work—but, instead, to use reference to this highly sophisticated and influential volume to mark the conceptual distance between 1992 and today. That distance provides an analytical lever for thinking about the ethics and politics of Holocaust memory cultures across different periods. Yet, second, we should not misconstrue the significance of that distance. The transnational, colonial turn in Holocaust memory does not, in fact, derive uniquely from the period after Probing the Limits and the epochal changes mentioned above—as Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism and other early postwar works exemplify. Rather, the comparative turn of the past twenty years has helped bring into view heterogeneous Holocaust memory cultures that were there all along but never entered into dominant understandings of the past. These memory cultures deserve exploration not because they represent ideal, unproblematic alternatives to later developments, but because, despite being embedded in circumstances now distant, they may nevertheless productively challenge the politics of memory and human rights in our own changing times. A revised look at the period before the globalization of Holocaust consciousness in the 1990s suggests a conception of transnational memory that looks quite different from the normative and institutional cosmopolitan memory described by Levy and Sznaider. The earlier, 1960s moment of globalized memory culture I pursue here does not emerge in tandem with the rise of human rights; rather, it precedes it, if we follow Samuel Moyn’s revisionary history of human rights, and instead aligns itself with anticolonial movements. As Moyn has demonstrated, these movements focused on “collective liberation, not human rights”: “insofar as anticolonialism gazed beyond the state, it was in the name of alternative internationalisms, in a spirit very different from that of contemporary human rights.”10 Such alternative internationalisms come with their own pitfalls, to be sure, yet also with their own, now largely forgotten potentials for thinking about the ethics of Holocaust memory: in particular, a 358

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vision that does not rely on the abstract and decontextualized discourse of human rights understood by Levy and Sznaider as the motor of cosmopolitan memory. In place of the predominantly liberal, individualist, and moralist model of human rights, which too often situates those lacking the protection of human rights as passive victims in need of “Western” humanitarian intervention, anticolonial internationalism foregrounds collective, political movement and solidarity among co-implicated agents involved in an antagonistic struggle. In seeking to overcome the racial and Eurocentric hierarchies that a later human rights regime risks reproducing, anticolonial internationalism also enables a more multidirectional understanding of the place of the Holocaust in transnational memory cultures.11 Such a multidirectional approach redraws the boundaries of Holocaust memory by refusing to take disciplinary, ethnic, geographical, and temporal borders for granted and by exploring how the memory of the Holocaust has always been in a mutually constituting dialogue with histories and memories of racism, slavery, and colonialism that both preceded and followed the events of the Shoah. In this chapter, I develop this multidirectional remapping of Holocaust memory by drawing on theories of media and mediation. Levy and Sznaider understand mediation as fundamental to the decontextualized cosmopolitan memories of the human rights regime and argue that mediation “by definition requires a certain form of abstraction.”12 Referencing recent theories of media and cultural memory, I offer an alternative perspective in which mediation does not signal abstraction but rather reembodiment and cultural translation; it can thus underwrite a multidirectional memory culture with an ethics and politics different from that of contemporary human rights. In order to demonstrate the constitutive multidirectionality of processes of mediation, I turn to one of the discursive genres most responsible for the globalization of Holocaust memory in the last half century—testimony—and explore processes of mediation in relation to one Holocaust survivor’s ongoing, long-term testimonial project. The multifarious testimonies of Marceline Loridan-Ivens produce what I call a “Holocaust internationalism” that has rarely been glimpsed, no less taken seriously by scholars of the genocide, even those who have probed some of its most extreme limits. Born Marceline Rozenberg in France in 1928 to Polish-Jewish immigrant parents, Loridan-Ivens (also known as Marceline Loridan or, simply, Marceline) was deported to the Nazi camps as a teenager along with her father.13 After returning home alone, she 359

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entered the “era of the witness” in 1961—an epochal year for Holocaust memory and testimony—when she told her story in public for the first time on film.14 In the fifty years since then, she has been a globe-traversing, politically engaged documentarian, a septuagenarian autobiographical feature filmmaker, a memoirist, and a talking head representative of what “being Jewish in France” means. Following the trajectory of Loridan-Ivens’s life and work helps us recalibrate our understanding of the relation between the past and present of Holocaust memory and prompts us to think differently about the ethics and politics of remembrance at a moment of generational transition. Loridan-Ivens’s testimonial project exemplifies what the philosopher María Lugones calls “ ‘world’-travelling”: “Through travelling to other people’s ‘worlds’ we discover that there are ‘worlds’ in which those who are the victims of arrogant perception are really subjects, lively beings, resistors, constructors of visions, even though in the mainstream construction they are animated only by the arrogant perceiver and are pliable, foldable, file-awayable, classifiable.”15 Characterized by an “openness to surprise” and set against forms of domination that rely on the separation of worlds or on imperial conquest, Lugones’s notion of “ ‘world’-travelling” resonates with Loridan-Ivens’s testimonial project, which encompasses both her experiences as a survivor of Auschwitz and the decolonizing contexts of Algeria and Vietnam, in which she went on to produce films.16 Ultimately, I argue, the “ ‘world’-travelling,” Holocaust internationalism of Loridan-Ivens offers a politicized form of remembrance that contests both the sacralization and sentimentalization of the Holocaust’s uniqueness and the liberal cosmopolitanism of human rights that have dominated memory culture in recent decades.

The Politics of Circulation: Testimony between Mediation and Memory Writing in a 2003 issue of the journal Discourse dedicated to The Future of Testimony, Anne Cubilie and Carl Good suggest that “Testimonial studies . . . at times seem to be rigidly divided between two poles, emphasizing either the politically interventionist aspect of the testimonial articulation (testimonio, subaltern studies, human rights discourse) or the aporetic unrepresentability of traumatic experience (Holocaust studies and the psychoanalytic dimension of trauma studies).”17 More than a decade later, the situation remains predominantly as Cubilie and Good de360

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scribe it, even if some countermovements can be detected and human rights has become a more generalized reference point.18 The multiple testimonies of Loridan-Ivens represent an opportunity to pursue a new synthesis beyond this polarization because they cut across the divides that have shaped the field until now: they mobilize both the idiom of trauma and the idiom of politics; they embody the specificities of intimate experience, while also moving in a distinctly transnational realm; and they bring Holocaust memory into dialogue with anticolonial interventions. In addition, they suggest a promising terrain on which such a synthesis might take place by foregrounding two crucial, interrelated issues that have until now largely been neglected in approaches to testimony in Holocaust studies: mediation and circulation. Mediation and circulation may seem at first like risky terrain for testimony, since bearing witness seems to rely on immediacy, presence, and the topographical situatedness of the witness.19 Yet, far from constituting the ruin or abstraction of testimony, mediation and circulation are actually portals into testimony’s constitutive futurity and can be vehicles of alternative internationalisms not premised on the abstractions of the globalized human rights regime. Recent work in the field of cultural memory studies can help us develop a methodology to accompany this insight about testimony’s mediation. Astrid Erll and Ann Rigney have sought to advance the study of cultural memory by developing a “dynamic” approach that contrasts to the static approach they associate with Pierre Nora’s model of lieux de mémoire (sites of memory). In reworking Nora, they also supplement Maurice Halbwachs’s notion of the social frameworks of memory with a focus on “medial networks”: “the specifically medial processes through which memories come into the public arena and become collective.”20 In order to specify how medial networks inflect the dynamics and frameworks of cultural memory, Erll and Rigney draw on the concepts of “premediation” and “remediation” developed by the media theorists Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin. As Erll writes, “it is the ‘convergence’ of medial representations which turns an event into a lieu de mémoire,” and that convergence takes place through two fundamental processes of “intermedial network[ing]”: in premediation, existing media images and narratives “provide schemata for new experience and its representation”; conversely, in remediation, the now-constituted event circulates through a variety of media forms.21 An approach guided by premediation looks at the enabling conditions of memory in preexisting technologies, narratives, genres, schemata, and images, while remediation focuses on the afterlife 361

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that keeps memory “present.” These processes coexist and should be studied in tandem as two axes of memory work. Each act of memory, in other words, invokes a (pre)mediated past while calling for a (re)mediated future.22 If premediation and remediation are so ubiquitous and so plastic, how are they useful conceptually and methodologically? For Erll and Rigney, media networks facilitate the process of convergence that turns a mere place into a semantically loaded site of memory: the tracing of those networks allows us to establish, after the fact, the conditions under which cultural memory emerges and under which testimony may find addressees. But we can also derive a further implication from that insight: approaches to the networked nature of mediation provide a method for tracing the webs of transfers and translations that make memory multidirectional. In other words, once taken up into processes of premediation and remediation, acts of memory and testimony transgress their “proper” places and circulate in heterogeneous networks of historical reference. The echoes, ricochets, and overlaps between apparently distinct memory traditions that define memory’s multidirectionality derive, at least in part, from the infrastructure of medial networks. Mediation opens up memory and testimony to transcultural exchange and serves as a terrain of political intervention. The effectivity of such intervention is not guaranteed, however, because politics always involves confrontation with power. But focusing on mediation grants insight into the questions of power that contour the circulation of memory and testimony. If memory and testimony come into being through their circulation in media forms, both premediation and remediation are themselves made possible through articulation with the channels of cultural, economic, political, juridical, and military power— although, I would insist, these channels of power never fully determine them, but, rather, provide an arena of contestation. In the realm of testimony, in particular, the convergence promised by media networks constitutes the grounds on which a struggle takes place over what South African scholar Fiona Ross calls “a voice with a signature”—that is, the possibility for a witness to maintain some form of ownership over her testimony as it circulates beyond her immediate control (Ross’s examples concern testimony at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission).23 Although in the wake of deconstruction we may be rightly suspicious of terms such as “voice,” “signature,” and “ownership,” “a voice with a signature” can still serve as a valuable regulative ideal for thinking about 362

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the mediation and circulation of testimony. That ideal can contribute to what Ross calls “a critical ethical theory of risk and vulnerability,” a theory that can help us understand “subjectivities forged in and inhabiting globalized linguistic forms” like testimony.24 Rethinking cultural memory as a dynamic process shaped by media networks and channels of power in addition to social frameworks helps us elaborate a public concept of testimony that usefully supplements the more-dialogic model that has largely guided Holocaust studies.25 As my primary example illustrates, the dynamics of mediated memory do not primarily produce abstraction but rather new forms of embodied remembrance and “ ‘world’travelling” agency that suggest a politics beyond the dominant human rights regime.

Rethinking the “Era of the Witness” At the origins of my concept of multidirectional memory was a testimony I discovered in the 1961 cinema verité experiment Chronique d’un été (Chronicle of a Summer), an important work in film history and a clear precursor to Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, but at that time, little known by scholars of Holocaust memory and testimony.26 With the filming of Chronicle of a Summer, Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin set out to document everyday life in Paris in the summer of 1960 through direct interviews with a range of Parisians—students, workers, political activists, and ordinary men and women, who were asked, “Are you happy?” by interviewers the filmmakers sent out into the streets. The year 1960 was a potentially tumultuous moment in France, as decolonization was rapidly remaking the political order. It was a time of violent transition in the Congo and a tense moment in the already six-year-old Algerian War of Independence. Although these events are briefly mentioned or hinted at in the film, fairly little of this dramatic political context actually made it into the film’s final cut—quite deliberately, but also quite understandably, given the massive state censorship around the Algerian conflict.27 Instead, the surprising center of Chronicle of a Summer turns out to be the testimony of Marceline Loridan, as she was then known, seen early in the film as one of Rouch and Morin’s street interviewers and only later revealed as a survivor of Auschwitz in a powerful scene where the camera silently tracks down to her tattooed arm. Rouch and Morin later film the testimony of Marceline in two linked sequences, one in which she walks through the Place de la Concorde and another in which she enters the old 363

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market building Les Halles.28 In these scenes, she bears witness in a condensed testimony to her deportation to the camps as a young teenager along with her father, scenes of violence in the camps, and her painful return to her surviving family—without her father—after liberation.29 Marceline’s passage through the streets, her absent-minded humming of a song of the French resistance, and her clearly affected demeanor as we seem to “overhear” her story make this a powerful example of testimony’s site-specific, embodied force that appears to offer itself to us in its “immediacy.” Yet, the many factors that make Marceline’s testimony important and powerful all involve processes of mediation. First, the testimony marks an important stage in film history because its very recording relies on innovations in camera and sound technology that allow Rouch and Morin to capture the testimony in a public space—with the use of a lightweight and mobile camera—while also preserving the intimacy of her address, through a portable microphone and Nagra recorder that the witness carried with her while strolling through Paris. As Loridan put it in a 1961 interview, “the rhythm of my steps led me to share those memories.”30 In other words, far from “abstracting” Marceline’s testimony, new possibilities of technological mediation enable a form of testimony harmonized with the movements of the body in public and in proximity to the grain of the voice. In addition, this medium-specific event mediates and is mediated by state politics. From the point of view of the history of Holocaust memory, Marceline’s testimony could not have come at a more significant time. Filmed in the year that Israeli agents arrested Adolf Eichmann and released in the year that survivor testimony at Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem would permanently change our understanding of the Nazi genocide and help usher in what Annette Wieviorka has called the “era of the witness,” Marceline’s presence in Chronicle of a Summer helps provide an alternative genealogy of Holocaust testimony and cultural memory. Instead of emerging through the carefully staged—and judicially debatable—context of Israeli state pedagogy in the Eichmann trial, Marceline’s staged appearance aligns at least indirectly with a challenge to the French state in a moment of war and crisis. That is, Marceline’s testimony possessed a mediated, allegorical significance in the moment of its appearance: her tale of suffering in the recent past occupies the place of those testimonies to contemporary political violence that could not be told openly in decolonizing France because of state censorship and were thus forced to pass 364

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through either underground and extralegal paths or, as in this case, indirect evocation. Marceline’s testimony takes on this allegorical meaning because of the careful way Rouch and Morin situate her testimony in the wake of brief discussions among its cast of real-life characters about the Algerian War and about the ongoing processes of decolonization reported daily in the news. Although the Holocaust as historical event differs immeasurably from France’s late colonial war, Holocaust testimony at that moment cannot be separated from testimony to colonial violence; rather, the two forms of testimony mediate each other. But the mediation of Marceline’s testimony is even more complex. First of all, it is premediated by two significant postwar films. The testimony sequence is immediately preceded by an uncomfortable scene on the roof of the Musée de l’Homme, in which Rouch draws attention to Marceline’s tattoo and asks two African students if they understand its significance. They admit that they do not, although one of the students then mentions having seen a film about the camps, probably Night and Fog. Although it is not mentioned in Chronicle of a Summer, Night and Fog had held one of its first screenings in the Musée de l’Homme, a site during World War II of resistance activity, and its director, Alain Resnais, considered the film an allegorical protest against the just-begun Algerian War.31 But another Resnais film also figures here: as Marceline Loridan later wrote, in giving her testimony, she imagined herself as Emmanuelle Riva in Resnais and Duras’s new-wave classic Hiroshima mon amour, which had recently appeared and featured Riva meandering through the streets, much as Marceline does while giving her testimony. Through premediation, Marceline’s testimony already participates in the network of associations between different scenes of violence made available by Resnais’s films. Two further steps are necessary. First, if the conditions of possibility for Marceline’s testimony in Chronicle of a Summer lay in its premediation by a range of discourses, texts, and technologies, the multiple remediations of her testimony subsequently established it as a publically meaningful and politically vital act. In the urgent struggle over Algeria, the testimonial form and staged dialogue established by Rouch and Morin’s film reappeared frequently. Chronicle opened in Paris in the fall of 1961, in the midst of one of the major crises of the late colonial state: the October 17 massacre of dozens—and roundup of thousands—of peacefully demonstrating Algerians in the streets of the French capital. In the weeks immediately following the massacre, the anticolonial New Left 365

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newsweekly France-Observateur published two interview-based pieces that, like Chronicle, linked the Holocaust with the violence of decolonization. In “Les deux ghettos” (The Two Ghettos), Marguerite Duras, whose Hiroshima, mon amour premediated Marceline’s testimony, now remediates Chronicle: she uses the documentary’s interview form to juxtapose discussions with two Algerians and a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto, whom Duras dubs “M” (a possible echo of Marceline).32 Two years later, strikingly similar connections are also made in another text that seems to remediate Chronicle—African American writer William Gardner Smith’s novel The Stone Face (1963), the first novel to treat the Paris massacre, which also features at its center a female Holocaust survivor whose name begins with “M.”33 In Duras and Smith, as in Rouch and Morin’s film, the encounter between a female Holocaust survivor and colonized men of color serves as a gendered and racialized trope of intersecting memories and a tension-filled solidarity across difference. Such intersecting solidarities do not exhibit the process of abstraction and the polarization of good and evil that Levy and Sznaider find in the later moment of human rights; rather, they involve embodied encounters and complex and ambivalent affective translations. Second, by becoming a filmmaker and later a memoirist, Loridan herself very deliberately remediates the testimonial impulse, sometimes at great personal risk and often as an expression of internationalist solidarity. For the last half century, she has sought to craft for herself what Ross calls “a voice with a signature,” but she has also sometimes put that voice into service for projects that move beyond the reproduction of her own past and extend into a future defined by an encompassing vision of collective liberation. Already in the year after Chronicle’s appearance, Loridan went from being in front of the camera to being behind it—where she has remained ever since. She traveled to the newly independent Algerian state and made a forty-minute documentary with Jean-Pierre Sergent, who also appears in Rouch and Morin’s film. Algérie, année zéro (Algeria, Year Zero [1962]), like Chronicle, seeks to assess the state of life in a moment of historical transition. Because of its politics, it was banned in France for more than forty years, an indication of how seriously state power takes the force of circulation. Loridan would continue the process of remediating her own testimony in a series of films she went on to make with her companion Joris Ivens, the important Dutch communist documentarian she met through her role in Rouch and Morin’s film. (“I could marry that woman,” Ivens report366

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edly said after seeing Chronicle—and he did.) Together, Ivens and Loridan (later Loridan-Ivens) made documentaries such as Comment Yukong déplaça les montagnes (How Yukong Moved the Mountains [1976]), a twelve-part, twelve-hour series about everyday life in China in the wake of the Cultural Revolution, described by one contemporary critic as “témoignage direct” (direct testimony) about China, even as the film was also criticized for its clearly partial portrait of the country.34 After Ivens’s death and now in her mid-70s, Loridan-Ivens made her first feature film, La petite prairie aux bouleaux (The Birch-Tree Meadow, that is, Birkenau [2004]), a fictionalized autobiographical account of an Auschwitz survivor who returns to Poland for the first time decades after the war. One of the films made with Ivens, Le 17e parallèle: La guerre du peuple (The Seventeenth Parallel: The People’s War [1968]), provides a powerful example of how testimony and mediation have continued to intersect in the alternative internationalism that Loridan-Ivens continued to foster after first giving public testimony about her deportation and return.35 Filmed by Ivens and Loridan beneath falling American bombs in 1967 on the front lines in Vietnam, The Seventeenth Parallel follows Algeria, Year Zero in transforming the testimonial impulse beyond the autobiographical subject into a collective militant practice: instead of dramatizing their own process of bearing witness to decolonization, the filmmakers provide a forum for ordinary Vietnamese to testify to their experience of war and the struggle for national liberation.36 Part war documentary, part exploration of daily life in extreme circumstances, and part revolutionary propaganda, The Seventeenth Parallel uses a collective voice-over narration in French—attributed to a woman from the Vihn Lihn region where the film was made—together with direct and indirect address to the camera in Vietnamese by peasants and local party members.37 The film documents the peasants’ attempts to continue tending their rice paddies, to construct elaborate underground shelters, and to contribute to the war effort against “the enemy,” the Americans. Using a language associated with the Holocaust, they testify that they will “never forget” the crimes of the Americans. One of the predominant (perhaps self-reflexive) motifs of the film is the ingenuity of the villagers in transforming—we might say remediating—the weapons of war: parts from downed American planes and rockets are turned into bicycles and a printing press, while bomb craters become fishponds. Through their collaboration, the filmmakers also remediate the war, turning it into an aural testimony. The nature of the collaboration that 367

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lies behind The Seventeenth Parallel—between the older, established male documentarian Ivens and the younger, lesser-known, female Loridan—is a complex one, but one that bears on the questions of mediation and testimony. In early accounts, Loridan is often referred to merely as an assistant, but more recently her contributions have been granted codirector status (for instance, on the new DVD edition of Ivens’s films).38 However one resolves the issue of authorship and addresses the gender asymmetries that lie behind it, Loridan’s contribution in The Seventeenth Parallel is both clear and clearly indebted to her earlier experience with what was then considered “new media” in Chronicle of a Summer (a film that also emerged from collaboration): the lightweight camera and recording technology used to elicit her testimony in Rouch and Morin’s film.39 As JeanPierre Sergent reports, it is through Loridan that Ivens discovered “direct sound,” a technique still relatively new and crucial for the testimonial effect produced by The Seventeenth Parallel.40 Direct sound—and direct cinema, a genre related to cinema verité—involves the simultaneous recording of sound and image in “real-world” settings, a process that we now take for granted, but that was technically complicated until the early 1960s. Indeed, synchronous sound may be the most powerful form testimony takes in The Seventeenth Parallel: the persistent roar of American jets and the explosions of American bombs throughout the film (as well as the clatter of Vietnamese antiaircraft weapons) take the place of a musical soundtrack and bear aural or sonic witness to the risks involved in the filming and to the seemingly impossible conditions in which the villagers were living and resisting their fate.41 Aural testimony is also linked to a recoding of trauma. In the book accompanying the film, Loridan describes situating herself in a hole fifty meters from the village where they are staying in order to capture the sounds of an American air attack; she uses a Nagra recorder, precisely the kind she carried while Rouch filmed her testimony in the summer of 1960.42 Yet the recordings Loridan makes do not simply reproduce the traumatic testimony at the center of Chronicle of a Summer. For one, Loridan’s subject position has shifted from first person to third person witness and from surviving victim to implicated subject offering solidarity. With this shift in location, the “sound” of testimony also shifts. Returning to the village after the end of the attack, the filmmakers visit a school where a fourteen-year-old girl had died a few days earlier in a previous American shelling. While they are in the underground school, the alarm 368

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rings for yet another attack and, Loridan reports, “without panic, very orderly, the children arrange their things carefully: pen, ink, books, notebooks are their weapons. And they descend into the shelter joyously, as during recreation. The tape that I recorded mixes strangely [mêle drôlement] the whistle of airplanes and their laughter.”43 If Loridan’s presence with a Nagra recorder suggests that Rouch’s cinema verité technique has premediated The Seventeenth Parallel, the latter film also remediates the earlier scene of testimony. Chronicle had staged a highly mediated Holocaust testimony that itself became the occasion for the articulation of other traumatic histories, as I have shown. Now Loridan, as sound recorder, has herself become the medium for an address from and to a new set of others. But not only the channels of mediation have changed; the message has shifted as well: from an articulation of personal traumatization to the laughter of collective resilience in the face of overwhelming violence. This affirmative account of the Vietnamese anticolonial struggle brings with it in turn a more aggressive political message than we find in Rouch and Morin’s film or in discourses of human rights. On the classroom wall, above where the young victim of American bombing used to sit, a sign now hangs: “We must work even harder to avenge the memory of our little sister Xuan.”44 In the spirit of militant documentary, Ivens and Loridan’s Vietnam film recodes trauma as the occasion for a new, antagonistic politics of memory. In recoding trauma and memory, Loridan also commits to a new politics of testimony. Both the politics and the form of this commitment deserve critical discussion; certainly, neither is unproblematic, especially when viewed with the clear vision of hindsight. In the views of both Ivens and Loridan, there is, for instance, the evident risk of a romanticization of “Third World” resistance and the imposition of too homogenous a view of collectivity.45 In retrospect, Loridan-Ivens would concur and has described her commitments of the time as “false, naïve, and simplistic.”46 Even more serious is the obscuring or forgetting of crimes committed in the name of the Communist internationalism that motivated them. Such a political error, especially relevant to the case of their post–Cultural Revolution China film, How Yukong Moved the Mountains, ended up weighing heavily on the filmmakers. Loridan-Ivens describes a deep “inner depression” whose “cause was the Paradox we discovered: we believed what the Chinese in front of the camera said that they believed, but it all turned out to be a bitter illusion. This crisis, a political, artistic, 369

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philosophical and ideological crisis, would last a few years.”47 Seeking to confront the prejudices of the capitalist West, Ivens and Loridan ended up implicated in another kind of state violence. In the wake of that crisis, Loridan-Ivens turned in new directions—and turned back to the “original” trauma that defined her life: Auschwitz. After Ivens died in 1989, Loridan-Ivens writes, “I was left behind with my grief . . . and with the next film that I would have to make without him. About Auschwitz. Joris encouraged me to tackle it. And now that he has passed away, I have the space to return to my own origin, to my Jewish background. And I have the courage to return to the stench of corpses, the dull colors, the moaning in the hell of Auschwitz.”48 The film that emerged from this return, The Birch-Tree Meadow, is decidedly more autobiographical and less multidirectional and internationalist than the works of the 1960s.49 My reason for evoking the anticolonial, internationalist era of Loridan’s productivity has not been to celebrate it as a model that can be applied “immediately” to the present, but rather to make a point about the history of memory and the future of testimony: the turn to militant cinema that Loridan takes in collaboration with Ivens is both inscribed in the experimental genesis and political context of Loridan’s first public testimony in Chronicle of a Summer and is yet an outcome that could never have been foreseen in any deterministic account. There is no straight path from Auschwitz via a Holocaust testimony during the Algerian War to the filming of testimony under falling bombs in Vietnam. Yet this itinerary suggests a Holocaust internationalism shared by others that offered an actually existing alternative to the canonization of the Holocaust’s uniqueness taking place at the same time.50 It also continues to offer an alternative narrative of the globalization of Holocaust memory centered on collective political struggle instead of cosmopolitanization in the age of liberal human rights.51 The Seventeenth Parallel is not a Holocaust testimony, and yet it emerges from the unexpected testimonial project of a Holocaust survivor who, enabled by processes of mediation that were anything but abstract, found herself engaged with and implicated—bodily and politically—in a history allegedly “not her own.” For Loridan—and I suspect for many other survivors of traumatic events—testimony is not the culmination of an experience, but an essential step in the fashioning of a future that helps her to move: a “departure,” in Cathy Caruth’s terms.52 Of course, 370

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movement into the future is not absolute freedom: the witness takes her baggage with her.

Coda: Under the Sign of Suitcases In 2008, Loridan-Ivens produced another iteration of her testimonial project: her memoir Ma vie balagan. In that text, whose multilingual title draws on the Hebrew/Yiddish word for chaos, Loridan-Ivens sums up her life with a pithy epigram: “Je vis sous le signe des valises [I live under the sign of suitcases].”53 With this phrase, Loridan-Ivens activates a polyvalent figure for the post-Holocaust work of memory and testimony. Most obviously, given her history, the suitcase calls up one of the icons of concentrationary memory. In Loridan-Ivens’s words, these are the suitcases “we had to abandon on arrival in the camp, the ones that accumulated at Auschwitz, with their labels and their names.”54 In a further turn, the suitcases come to figure memory and repression simultaneously: “And then there are the ‘container’ suitcases. . . . Full of diverse souvenirs that you would prefer not to see again. Sometimes you open the suitcase, you see the too burdensome past, and you close it up again.”55 But if the suitcase is a potent symbol of dispossession as well as a kind of crypt, containing “deep” memories too traumatic to handle directly, it also has yet other, potentially more affirmative associations. It marks the life of a “world” traveler: these are suitcases that suggest the compulsion she shared with Joris to “go elsewhere, [into] exile.”56 Additionally, the valise might be the bag Marceline carries (holding the Nagra recorder) as she gives her testimony in Chronicle of a Summer—a testimony she reiterates in the documentary Being Jewish in France (2007)—and it thus serves as a reminder of that testimony, an act linking personal experience and public space in a manner that at the time was practically unprecedented. Finally, the chapter title from which the memoir’s suitcase discussion is taken—“La porteuse de valises” (The Carrier of Suitcases)—refers explicitly to Loridan-Ivens’s activities as one of a small number of French women (and men) who “carried suitcases” for the underground Algerian independence movement.57 Indeed, as Jean-Pierre Sergent has recently clarified, those suitcases of money for the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) were sometimes stored in Loridan-Ivens’s apartment—at great personal risk.58 Thus, for Loridan-Ivens, the rhetoric of suitcases suggests the proximity of trauma, travel, mediation, and anticolonial, internationalist 371

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politics. Although not necessarily a harmonious mix, the very heterogeneity of these associations may provide the grounds for a synthesis of the best features of the internationalist and cosmopolitan models. What would it mean to place the ethics and politics of Holocaust memory “under the sign of suitcases”? The suitcase is a medium that assists a human agent in an act of transportation. The sign of suitcases references testimony as a medium for meanings and actions that take place when one leaves home and circulates in the public realm; when one becomes implicated in the world and creates a bodily and verbal connection between diverse sites of history, memory, and trauma. For LoridanIvens, the suitcase is simultaneously the form, medium, and content of testimony—at once the burden of suffering and the means for making it public and moving with it into futures not yet written. For those of us concerned about the shape of Holocaust remembrance in the new millennium, the example of Loridan-Ivens offers an additional message: an ethical future for Holocaust memory demands that we cultivate what Lugones calls an “openness to surprise” and a desire to uncover alternative pasts that resist the familiar stories of the present.

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19 Fiction and Solicitude Ethics and the Conditions for Survival JUDITH BUTLER

O

NE QUESTION that emerged from the debates in Holocaust histo-

riography over historical writing is whether history can be conducted without narrative forms, and whether, as a consequence, history is implicated in fictional devices in order to chronicle the past.1 Of course, the linking of those two questions presumes that the fictional implies the false. We want to be able to distinguish false and true testimony, and we need the latter to refute nefarious forms of revisionism. When the debate is cast in terms such as these, however, we fail to consider that narrative may well be a way to communicate certain historical truths, including what Hayden White has termed their “emotional reality.”2 Indeed, it may be that narrative and poetic forms alike are the only way to communicate certain dimensions of historical experience, including its historical effects on language itself. Moreover, they can, as in the work of Paul Celan, show us how certain kinds of historical traumas have inflicted damage on the very models of transparent communication that we rely on in order to establish an irrefutable historical record. Celan’s poetry effectively registers a shattering of language in which words appear as stray bits of refuse, partial monuments, or animated ruins.3 The work of Cathy Caruth has prompted us to ask, under conditions of trauma, what is still speakable? What happens to language under conditions of historical trauma such that our very capacity to narrate (1) may well fail to report what we have experienced, and (2) may well continue to register and reenact trauma within its own terms?4 The debate about narrative forms in Holocaust historiography first centered on the question of how it may be possible to use testimony, itself 373

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invariably dependent on narrative forms, to establish and defend the historical record against revisionism. The value of narrative seemed to rely on establishing different kinds of truth claims. But this focus tended to overlook the function of narrative and poetic forms for survivors and, more specifically, whether literary language, including narrative fiction, proved essential to the task of survival. In fact, literary texts can help us see what forms of language, specifically modes of address, enable or disable the very possibility of survival. Although establishing the sorts of historical testimony that effectively answer revisionism is ethically imperative, it is surely equally important to make room for extrajudicial forms of testimonial writing that allow us to understand the conditions of survival, not only in the camps but in their aftermath as well.5 My point is not that language is the cause of suicide, or that certain forms of language allow for survival by virtue of their form alone; rather, it is to underscore that the way the experience in the camps is organized by voice and address becomes crucial to understanding how those who survived physical destitution and the traumatic exposure to massive and arbitrary killing in the camps survive or succumb. My thesis is that certain forms of self-address that emerge in the course of literary narrative allow us to understand those forms of fatal self-accusation that sometimes go by the name of “survivors’ guilt,” as well as the techniques of voice and narration that have on occasion allowed for resistance to a form of self-vilification tantamount to an internalized death penalty. Indeed, there may be no way of understanding the psychic damage done by the concentration camps on those who survive them, even on those who bear the psychic costs of that trauma in the next generation without some understanding of the figural and phantasmatic forms that can seize a mind and not let go. Although previous debates on the relation between fiction and history have focused on the ethical requirement of historical documentation, implying that fictions are perilously allied with forms of revisionism, those debates focused on the ethical imperative to establish what atrocities and atrocious conditions happened, or even to affirm that they did happen. The urgent point was not only to completely reject those who refused to accept the historical record but also the obscene suggestion that the camps were somehow phantoms or fictions devised by those who sought to garner sympathy or advance particular political aims. So a very strong form of ethical concern of this kind confronts any attempt to reopen this question of the place of fiction in the communication of genocide or the sufferings of those who survived, 374

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or the fate of those who survive only for some time before committing suicide. The task is thus to distinguish between revisionist (or negationist) forms of fiction (more often than not, accusations that the historical record is fictional and, hence, not true) and fictional forms of narration that give us a way to understand what happens to the fundamental sense of time and space, of sequence and horizon, under conditions of unbearable suffering. But also, what forms of moral reasoning take hold to make sense of unbearable and undeserved forms of loss and suffering? This latter dimension of suffering is one that the psyche takes over (that first takes over the psyche, which takes it over) and that can lead to forms of self-vilification that, unchecked, can lead—and has led—to suicide. I hope to make this clear in what follows and then, toward the end of this essay, to make some distinctions among moral frameworks for thinking about the descriptive and ethical dimensions of fiction in coming to terms with this phenomenon. Most of the published biographies of Primo Levi query whether or not he committed suicide, although it surely seems that he could not have simply fallen accidentally down all the stairs of his spiral staircase.6 But the fact remains that he left no note, and that all people know is that he collected his mail that day, and that his mail typically consisted of letters thanking him for his writing, his testimony, and offering him more testimony. He walked upstairs with those letters in hand, and then no one saw how he ended up at the bottom of those stairs. So he fell or threw himself down the stairs of his apartment and was found dead. The death left open the question of whether this was an accident or a purposeful action. The question, then, is whether he lost or gave up his footing. There was no one else there, no witness, so we are left trying to give witness to a death that no one saw, not an unfamiliar situation in genocide studies more generally. Some claim he could not have been pushed, since no one was there to push him. And yet, can we understand suicide as a way of pushing oneself into certain peril? I want to suggest that surely one can be pushed without someone else literally there to do the pushing—one translation of “Trieb,” the German word for drive,” is push, which can be taken as a verb or a noun, or both (perhaps the history of psychoanalysis would have been different if we had been referring throughout the twentieth century to the “death push”). Of course, the difference between a push and a fall is a complex one, as Levi himself points out in the first vignette he relays in his text Moments of Reprieve.7 This is a text composed of a series of short character 375

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studies. In “Rappoport’s Testament,” Levi writes about an Italian man interned at Auschwitz who stumbles and falls regularly. Levi apparently watched this falling, and wrote that every time the man fell, it seemed like an accident, yet there was something purposeful about the fall: “Unlike the rest of us, Valerio fell continually, more than anyone else. It took the slightest bump, and not even that. It was obvious that at times he let himself fall on purpose, if someone just insulted him or moved to strike him.” Valerio took the blow before the blow, or perhaps sought to evade it by letting himself fall first. Levi invokes a compulsion that beset this man, some difficulty staying standing, relying on gravity and finding and keeping ground. We might quite reasonably wonder how it might have been to try to stand and walk in the camps, no longer to rely on gravity as an ally, to lose an implicit understanding that an earth is there to support standing and walking. And, surely, if we also think about all the brutal pushing that took place there, what makes us think that the force of that pushing ceased at the moment that physical contact with the body ceased—or that the pushing did not precede the physical act? Indeed, why wouldn’t that push continue to have a life its own, pushing on beyond the physical push, exceeding the physicality of the push to achieve a psychic and somatic life with an animating force of its own? So perhaps Valerio falls, but is also in some sense pushed, figuring an ambiguous zone of agency. Do we perhaps need the middle voice (verbum modi) to capture this double sense of being pushed or purposefully falling?8 The ones who push him or others not only shatter a proprioceptive ground of experience, but give way to an experience of losing one’s ground repeatedly and traumatically. Can Valerio’s fall help us to think about Levi’s final fall? Does understanding Levi’s death as a suicide depend on how we understand the way that a relation to oneself and to the ground can absorb, and be transformed by, trauma? If the strikes and blows of the torturer, can be said to “fall upon” the experiences of oneself as a being with ground on which to stand, then perhaps some traumatic force was falling upon Primo Levi as he fell or tripped or let himself drop, or even exploited gravity for his suicidal purposes. Was it in some sense a murder/suicide or, at least, a scene in which agency proves to be ambiguous? Levi himself gives us some ways to think about suicide. In The Drowned and the Saved, he writes: “Suicide is born from a feeling of guilt that no punishment has attenuated.”9 He does not say it is born from a feeling of 376

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guilt for which no attenuation is possible,” but it seems that no punishment is severe or effective enough to eradicate the guilt (and if punishment is understood as the only way to eradicate guilt, then the guilt is deemed infinite, unstoppable). Immediately following that, he remarks that imprisonment was generally experienced as punishment and then, within parentheses—and this is odd, since it is an important point—he adds: “If there is punishment, there must have been guilt.” At this moment, he is giving us the thought process of someone who takes the fact of punishment to be a sign of guilt, a view that assumes punishment can never be wrong or reckless or radically unjustified. In other words, what Levi offers here is an account of a certain guilt that takes hold as a consequence of punishment, a guilt based on an inference that one has done something to deserve the punishment (here, one might think of Freud’s small essay “The Pale Criminal” as another way of tracking this phenomenon when the sense of criminality gives rise to the criminal deed—in both cases, the guilt seems correlated to no prior crime).10 This guilt, of course, is preferable when the alternative is to grasp the utter contingency and arbitrariness of torture, punishment, and extermination. At least with guilt, one continues to have agency, and one can supply a reason for an inexplicable suffering. With the arbitrary infliction of torture, one’s agency is annihilated as well. This “guilt,” which receives a knowing account within parentheses, nevertheless becomes, within Levi’s text, a fact, a given, even a framework, such that he then begins to ask, mercilessly, whether he did enough in the camps to help others; he remarks that everyone felt guilty about not helping others (78). And then he asks a second question, more general still, of his reader and himself: Do any of us have the proper moral armature to fight the seductions of fascism? At this point, self-accusation seems to get the better of him and he turns precisely to those actions by inmates that might be construed as belonging to the “grey zone”—neither complicity nor resistance. Although sometimes Levi simply says that there were two groups in the camps: victims and executioners; at other times, in speaking about the “grey zone,” it is clear that lines of accountability are more difficult to ascertain. In that zone, he points to the actions that prisoners took under constraint, indeed, under the threat of death, in order to show that even though they participated in activities that could be said to maintain the infrastructure of the death and labor camps, their actions were in large part coerced. Here, again, there is a question of how to understand agency: is it one’s act or is it the coercive action of another, and is part of the 377

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“hell” that one goes through under such conditions precisely not knowing—no longer knowing—how to distinguish the two? He portrays yet other prisoners, though, who became the notorious “kapos” and identifies them as belonging to the lower ranks of the SS, engaging collaborationist practices that he finds morally repugnant. So, sometimes a zone opens up for him—by him—that is free of accusation, a grey zone of suspended moral judgment for those coercively interned, but other times the accusations of other survivors and himself are quite unequivocal. Guilt seems to be the form that self-accusation takes for surviving at all, or for doing even the minimal amount required in order to survive. Levi argues that inmates who concluded that they must be guilty of something—for why else would they be imprisoned?—lived their days in a tireless effort to expiate a guilt that was nameless, unstoppable, and yet without any basis in reality. Sometimes, Levi seems to know this last fact, that the punishing treatment was radically unjustified, but other times, his own stringent standards of moral accountability hold him responsible for not having done enough, and he leaves the “grey zone” for the very blackand-white zone of infinite self-reproach. He calls attention to the fact that the reason why suicide was so high among survivors after the camps were liberated was that there was no longer the opportunity to expiate their guilt that the camps provided, and without that daily ritual of expiation, the guilt of survival became overwhelming. Sometimes, it appears that Levi understands it is by accident that he himself survived (for instance, he came down with an illness that landed him in an infirmary at the time when the rest of his barracks was taken out for a death march in the late spring of 1944, leading to his inadvertent survival and rescue). At other times, though, it would appear that Levi came to believe he survived at the expense of someone else, and that it was unbearable that he should survive when another could not. At such a moment, he seems to reason that he survived only because someone else did not, implying that his very life constitutes an illegitimate usurpation of another person’s place in life, or that he was “selfish” enough to live when someone else could not. One can see how this latter kind of reasoning would lead to a belief that one’s survival is the cause of another’s death, for if he had died, then someone else could have lived. If one accepts this either/or way of thinking, it follows that wishing for one’s own death might be a way of compensating for, expiating, a sense of one’s life as an unremitting crime, a complicity with murder. In reading Levi’s biographies and writings, it seems clear that he suffered from that sense of baseless but acute guilt over survival 378

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as such, but that is merely speculation on my part. If this wager is right, then we can return to the scene of ambiguous agency in which he hurled himself or somehow fell,11 and ask about the force of self-accusation— whether he fell, in part, from an internal sense of condemnation that pressed upon him, and that dealt him a death penalty for surviving. Was the force of punishment pushing on him then, and can we understand it as a transmuted effect—and psychic continuation of—the blows he and others suffered? We can think about the figure of Valerio from Moments of Reprieve as a vignette that Primo Levi told as illuminating how traumatic treatment fractures the sense of a body that might still be able to stand or move with a sure sense of place and balance. Traumatic blows surely shake and scatter the proprioceptive coordinates of embodiment, such that a basic sense of agentic standing and moving proves no longer reliable. But what is the significance of this vignette or story as narrative? Is it being offered as testimony that might work in a court of law, or is its testimonial function extrajudicial? And what about its fictional status? Is fiction simply a vehicle for the communication of historical truths, or does it participate in history in another way? My suggestion is that Levi tried to tell the stories of Auschwitz again and again, not only to keep the historical record straight and refute revisionists—although he clearly understood and opposed the dangers of revisionism. He wanted to understand his own position in the camp and perhaps exculpate himself for his relative safety as a chemist working within the camp. But he also understood that his storytelling was part of a broader effort to make sure that such genocidal regimes would not recur in history. Storytelling was a way of honoring the ethical demand on him to document those who were lost, but it also allowed him to reconfigure the past in his own terms, exercising a certain agency in language. Such an undertaking is, of course, an endless one, but endless for various reasons. For Levi, the need for witnessing was infinite, not only because there was always yet another person whose name remained unknown and whose life received no mark and no story. The infinite need to expiate guilt became the impossible task of Levi, the witness and survivor, and this doubtless correlated with the fact that not every story could be told. And yet, if we consider other paths of thinking that Levi pursued, we can see that he also sought to find a zone of suspended judgment that would allow for another kind of ethical relation to the concentration camps. Although “the grey zone” is time and again underscored 379

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as a zone of complicity, it also offers a way of thinking about witnessing as something other than expiating guilt. Indeed, witnessing may well belong to a sphere of responsibility (centered on a relation to the other) that is not centered on guilt (and, hence, self-accusation, the heightening of reflexivity to the point of excluding all relations to others). What we are calling guilt, following Levi, is what we might also call “depression,” understood as a withdrawal from worldly relations into a reflexive form of hell, that is, a psychic form of suffering that opens onto a terrible infinity in which the cruelty of the other passes over into a cruelty against the self. This passage can take place precisely through guilt. In other words, it may be that the beatings one receives become the beatings that are dealt to the self in the form of moral self-castigation. In this way, the pangs of guilt continue the beatings, which means that the moral self-flagellation becomes as infinite as the task of giving testimony. This happens when one indicts oneself as the cause of the suffering one sees others endure, or which one endures oneself, or of the countless deaths that followed. In seeking to find in oneself the cause or reason for such suffering as a way of trying to make arbitrary violence rational, one continues the violence against oneself. Or, perhaps, it might be better to say that the self is constructed now through a moralizing structure that continues the beatings one endured, or that others endured. Even then, however, can we say that one acts alone? Or is one also acted on by a traumatic history as one acts? What is the possibility that the “grey zone” could have given Primo Levi a way to understand, and take distance from, this fatal risk of guilt? And if expiation and exculpation were not such primary goals, could mourning and testimony have assumed another form? After all, the hyperreflexivity of suicidal guilt closes out the world of others before suicide itself negates that world. If expiation belongs to melancholia, what is the affective disposition that belongs to mourning? And when the task of mourning is, by definition, incomplete, and in relation to the nearly 10 million deaths caused by the Nazi regime, effectively infinite, what form can such mourning take? For Levi, the writing of those stories and vignettes continues to work away on that infinite task, to be sure. And perhaps it matters that on the day he died, he had just collected a new spate of letters from survivors who wanted him to know or tell their stories. There he was, carrying the weight of those letters up the stairs— more testimony accumulated every day. Did those letters weigh on him as he took the stairs? Did he lose his bearings under the weight of those 380

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letters, knowing that this day would be followed by the next, and more letters? Did they in some sense bring him down precisely because they consolidated his unending guilt? And would matters have come out differently had he found an unending practice of mourning and testimony that was not anchored in guilt, expiation, and exculpation? Of course, I do not have an answer to the question I pose. One worry Levi voiced at the beginning of The Drowned and the Saved was that, as he told these stories time and again, they became “crystallized” (24) in his mind—a chemical metaphor for the rigidification and transformation of form. At a certain point, he no longer knew whether the story really correlated with a memory that he had—the repeatable story took on a life of its own, and his relation to the story was no longer the same as his relation to the memory. Indeed, as the relation to the story became increasingly independent, its relation to memory became less clear. Of course, from a certain perspective, such a situation is alarming: the story is meant to confirm something about a life that is lost—it must remain tethered to a memory for the reliability of the narrator to be plausible. And yet, we might want to ask what function that storytelling assumed that became unmoored from the task of preserving memory. What is the chance that by telling the story he was not reliving the past or consolidating a memory, but allowing the testimonial function of language to serve other purposes? It may be that the story animated certain characters or allowed for a world to be conjured in the present, even creating a time that was not immediately absorbed by the past. Or perhaps it is only by forgetting certain things that he could survive, since no human creature could have survived that ordeal without some forgetfulness. Did writing allow him a new world, a different configuration of space and time, a provisional sense of agency in the midst of the testimonial? Did it even serve the purpose of securing a certain forgetfulness that was necessary for survival itself? Perhaps the testimonial writing became a linguistic way of living on, corralling the powers of linguistic animation, a linguistic form of giving life. For Charlotte Delbo, writing and memory are configured differently. After having survived a brutal internment in Auschwitz, she explained in her extraordinary book Auschwitz and After that she arrived at a distinction between two forms of memory. She wrote: “When I talk to you about Auschwitz, it is not from deep memory [sense memory, or memoire profonde], but from memoire externe [external memory, which she sometimes calls “memoire ordinaire”], memory linked with thinking.”12 The first form of memory is unthinkable and unbearable; the second permits 381

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a history and a story. Indeed, this last form of memory is needed to establish the history of what happened and does not relive the event in order to tell it. I take it that this second form of memory is what characterizes witnessing. As she understands it, if she were reliving it, she would not be able to tell it. Indeed, in her own work, that narrative capacity occasionally breaks down as sense memory interrupts what she calls external memory. At one point, she relates a story about standing in the roll call at Auschwitz in the early hours of the morning in freezing weather. She writes that as she stood there she thought to herself, one day I will tell the story of standing here at roll call. In the next sentence, she says, that is actually not true at all: “I was thinking nothing. I could not think at all. And this is why it is not reasonable to think that anyone who underwent this experience would be able to give an account of it. They are not.” I would only add the following: what she writes does not imply that no written account of such events should be given. Paradoxically, it means that precisely because one cannot give an account, one must give an account and let language collapse as it must in the telling. This is doubtless one reason why narrative form is less important for Celan. Perhaps the suspended or debilitated form of narration, one that takes the form of poetry or broken stanzas, one that allows muteness and no transition to stand, is one way that traumatic nonmemory makes itself felt through the collapse of narrative structure. Maybe that is what happens when Levi puts something into brackets or tells one anecdote without any transition to the following one. And Delbo, when she reflects on the veracity of her own account, concludes that she does not know whether it is true, but she does know it is truthful. We probably could not rely on her stories in a court of law, but we might still consider them part of the extrajudicial domain of the testimonial. I find myself asking not only whether this writing can and does communicate something truthful about what she and others endured, but also whether, in writing, in bringing language to the task of communicating memory visually and truthfully, there is some living on, some permission to live, some mode of survival that is achieved. If language or writing is part of external memory, could we say that it is also part of an external language, one that is, in a certain way, outside of her, a refuge from the self who remembers in that sensory way? In other words, over and against the hyperreflexivity of guilt and the linguistic violence of the self-inflicted death sentence, Delbo lets us understand something of what it is to give language over to a reality that is outside oneself. 382

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Indeed, one of the most noticeable features of her prose is the absence of a strong and centering “I”—it is as if the perception and the description takes place through a seeing that is already exterior to the “I”—it is not an interrogation of subjectivity per se, not a turning inward, but a mode of perceiving given over to what is happening, to what there is to see. The first section begins with the simple statement: “People arrive.” And then, as that installment proceeds, we read: “There are boardingschool girls” and “There is a mother” (7); “There are those who having journeyed for eighteen days lost their minds.” But she never writes: “I journeyed all day and all night.” There is only an experience from which an individual self has been separated in order to narrate what is happening. Sometimes what she writes is simply: “All day all night” (8). Is there something saving her in escaping from that overloaded first person pronoun? Is there a way of taking in—speaking from—the experience of others, or from a plural pronoun that produces the external memory that indicates something about how she could survive? When the “I” does arrive, it is always unbearable. So Delbo more often writes in the language of the “we,” as if all the women undergo everything together: “we are waiting”; “we wait”; “today we are waiting longer than usual.” Becoming separated off from the group is the sign that death is coming, a confrontation with certain and brutal death. So that when the women fall or complain, they are escorted to block 25, prepared for the crematorium. She finds solace and survival in that “we.” So survival seems to require separating from her own experience; the plural “we” allows her to maintain a kind of solidarity at the textual level (she was also a communist, which may make some sense in this respect). And she also knows that to be literally separated from the “we” would spell her own death. Death seems to indicate a lack of solidarity. And yet, here are the ways she both states her doubts and moves beyond them: “Death is reassuring. I would not feel it” (67). And then, in quotation marks, as if speaking to herself: “You’re not afraid of the crematorium, so what is there to fear? How fraternal death can be. Those who depicted it as hideous never saw it. However, revulsion wins out. I do not wish to pass by, carried on the small stretcher. I know then that all those who pass by are passing for me, that all those who died, died for me.” And where we might expect some indication of guilt, something else happens. She continues: “I watch them passing and I say no.” The first person suddenly arrives! “To slide into death, here, in the snow. Let yourself slide. No, 383

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because there is the little stretcher. I do not wish to pass by carried on the small stretcher.” She imagines her own body passing by, invoking the posthumous perspective of some other survivor. Her own voice splits into two as she petitions herself to let herself slide, and then interrupts with a contravening voice: “no.” The moral equation is all set up to establish her survival as guilty, only then to be refused as a mode of logic. As she gives voice to that refusal, the “I” appears in a different way: “I hear my heart beating and I speak to it . . . I talk to my heart.” And later, “only surrounded by the others is one able to hold out” (104). The fatal form of reflexivity in which the “I” lets itself go into death is countered by an “I” that not only bespeaks resistance, but collectivity as well. Of course, Delbo is writing about surviving in the camps, and here is not addressing the question of how to survive the aftermath, one that Levi addressed explicitly. But we find a similar kind of moment in Levi’s world of suspended judgment where the severity of condemnation is refused, recalling Delbo’s refusal to let self-faulting become a death sentence. Writing retrospectively, Delbo accepts that she had to lose one form of her memory in order to preserve another. And this was made possible by seeking refuge in linguistic perspectives that released her from more fatal forms of reflexivity in which voice commands the self to enter into the punishment of death. What she found in her narrative technique was a way to respond firmly to the punishing voice in order to resist death. The moralized death sentence or even the voice that bespeaks the vast exhaustion of surviving could be countered by another voice, a splitting of the first person perspective that pressed the borders between the “I” and the “we” rather than collapse under the weighty judgment that equated survival with moral failure. She wrote in a way that repeatedly reenacts this duality, invoking a voice to counter another voice, even years after the liberation: “Auschwitz is so deeply etched on my memory that I cannot forget one moment of it. ‘So you are living with Auschwitz?’ ‘No, I live next to it.’ Auschwitz is there, unalterable, precise, but enveloped in the skin of memory, an impermeable skin that isolates it from my present self” (xi). Like Primo Levi, she has to find some distance from the memory in order to survive. And language helps to establish that distance. Was she able to find a refuge in language that Primo Levi could not? Or did he find it only periodically? Did it also turn against him? She accepted the need for forgetfulness in order to survive, the loss of profound, sensory memory in exchange for the refuge of external memory. She also found a way to edge beyond the finitude of the first person through the use of both free indi384

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rect discourse and the invocation of the plural “we.” Writing in that way did not allow her to escape death—that was luck. But it did give her a way to survive “after Auschwitz.” But for Levi, it appears, the two forms of memory seemed confused, if not morally troubling. If forgetfulness was what he needed to survive, then that seemed to strike at the very possibility of continuing to give testimony. So the forgetfulness he perhaps needed in order to live only made him ever more incapable of accomplishing the already infinite task of testimony. At the same time, he gives us the very chronicle we need of what it means to suffer psychically with that moralization of oppression that establishes those who survive terrible violence as its “agent”—cruel and effective ruse, whereby the moralization of the psyche proves complicit with the oppressor. Who or what pushes Primo Levi when he falls? That equivocal and spectral agency is precisely the psychic mechanism whereby reflexive action, animated by a push it cannot fully understand, eliminates the self. It is not always possible to speak back to the voice that is animated by that death push, but surely sometimes it was. Where do we find the chronicle of this painful struggle with the surviving voices that may have propelled him over the banister and down the stairwell? The analysis of language, including voice and address, proves crucial for documenting this dimension of extrajudicial testimony. Finally, then, how do we return to the question of fiction in relation to forms of moral reasoning and the elaboration of an ethical framework for Holocaust historiography on the basis of this brief analysis? It is not my place to make broad claims about Holocaust historiography, a field in which I am no specialist. But like many in my generation who lost family members to the Nazi genocide, we have a strong commitment to understanding the reverberations of a history that we each continue to live. My sense is that there is no one ethical framework that can fulfill all the ethical tasks that someone engaged in this kind of historical work must honor. But that claim ought not to be taken as a justification for relativism. On the contrary, the task is to conceptualize a capacious enough ethical framework so that historians remain unwavering in their opposition to forms of revisionism that seek to wish away the established record of atrocity, and at the same time to distinguish between forms of fiction that are negationist, explicitly or implicitly, and those forms of fiction that are central to the testimonial task of relaying human suffering as part of that very record. If it turns out that certain forms of suffering require fiction to be relayed, or work precisely through the animating of fiercely 385

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effective phantasms in psychic life, then we have to find out more exactly how they work in order to know more specifically what has happened. Psychic suffering is part of what happened, even as it cannot always be understood as a discrete event or a recountable fact. Further, we see that one distinct form of psychic suffering is the intensification of superegoic forms of self-vilification that effectively impute culpability to the one made to suffer. Given this phenomenon, it is important to distinguish between those forms of moral reasoning that emerge from survivor suffering (and even function as its symptoms) and a broader ethical imperative to find a way to understand how such suffering comes about and what interventions, if any, can be made to ameliorate its effects, especially its alliance with suicide. The comparative reading of Levi and Delbo might help us in this instance, since we can discern the difference between a response that heightens the individual accountability of the prisoner in ways that are as equally impossible or implausible as they are lethal and a response that seeks to establish solidarity under extreme conditions of precarity. I do not mean to suggest that we find no instances of the latter in Levi; on the contrary, his testimonial writings are acts of solidarity. Indeed, one can track the wavering in both Levi and Delbo between the lure of suicide and the gesture of solidarity at the limits of the livable. I want to suggest that these forms of solidarity do not always appear “in the record,” though we can find them very explicitly in writers like Jorge Semprun and Robert Antelme; they constitute ways of thinking about ethics as it emerges within the very scene of suffering. So perhaps it is necessary to distinguish between (1) the ethics of recounting ex post facto the history of the Holocaust in such a way that revisionism is negated (although more precise and fuller histories may well require a revising of former accounts); (2) the distinction between the recounting of events and practices, institutional organizations, modes of death dealing, and the numbers of the dead and the survivors; and (3) recounting in ways that rely on fiction to convey and affirm the experience for survivors of suffering, persistence, and nonpersistence, where examples of the latter include the loss of one’s mind or giving up one’s own life. Fiction arrives in yet a different form when (4) we consider as part of survivor suffering the force of the phantasm that takes over the mind, installing a heightened and irrefutable form of moral culpability that directs the death drive, understood as unbridled cruelty against the survivor, sometimes leading to suicide, conceived psychically as a just punishment for surviving. It is at this 386

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junction that we can also see the difference between a form of potentially suicidal self-vilification that heightens the isolation of the individual and a form of solidarity, even if it is a solidarity of the thwarted or broken gesture. In Delbo’s writings as well as those of Robert Antelme, there are moments of exchange among the imprisoned and the condemned that take place quite apart from severe language barriers. The Communists are suddenly in contact with the Poles, and the Jews from one part of Europe in contact with Jews from another part. These are forms of solidarity that do not end at the limits of known forms of belonging. They establish modes of longing beyond the constraints of nation, language, and religion, and include homosexuals, Communists, resistance fighters and other political prisoners, gypsies, Jews, the “racially impure,” and the infirm. Levi, a chemist, famously remarked that Jewish blood is no different from the blood of other people, suggesting that neither religious nor national belonging ought to restrict our ideas of whose lives should be valued and, when lost, deserve to be mourned. His remark was made in response to an Israeli colleague who asked whether he did not care about Jewish blood, suggesting that the losses Israel suffered in its war in Lebanon in the early 1980s were more important than the losses that it caused or permitted. Levi offers a vision of solidarity that is not so very different from those small but crucial acts of solicitude that passed from one national or religious group to another within the camps themselves. At the end of Robert Antelme’s The Human Race, he finds himself in an infirmary when the liberation is announced, and a Polish inmate is there beside him. He lights up a cigarette and shares it with this man. They have no common language, but they have come to understand German. That language learned through having to obey abusive commands, instilling the fear of death, nevertheless becomes, paradoxically, the language in which they say, “Ja, wir sind frei” (Yes, we are free). The language undergoes a significant shift at such a moment. Indeed, both tobacco and German pass between them, opening modes of exchange that might not immediately seem utopian, but held a certain promise not only of freedom but of a new social tie. How can such ethical moments or gestures help to delineate the final sense of the ethical that ought to become part of a more capacious framework in approaching these matters? For Levi, and surely for Antelme, that gesture becomes a way of establishing a social bond, articulating an ethical tie. That ethical tie has at least two meanings: first, that ethical bond 387

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is cross-national, perhaps even postnational, suggesting a form of solidarity with those who are not immediately recognized as belonging to one’s own community; the very sense of community is enhanced beyond communitarianism. Can historiography of the Holocaust take as its point of departure the forms of ethical solicitude and solidarity that emerged on occasion among the imprisoned and condemned? How might that alter the national or political frames for documentation, narration, and memorialization? Second, this form of solidarity is also crucial to these accounts of surviving since, as we saw, the social connection calls Delbo away from the lure of suicide. Durkheim famously claimed that every suicide indicts the world from which he departs, and we can certainly read Levi’s departure from this world as such an indictment. But to the extent that he may well have also indicted himself for whatever work he did in the camps and for surviving itself, he was made to pay with his life for a crime he did not commit. The difference between self-vilifying guilt and ethical solicitude and exchange highlights two different forms of moral reasoning born of traumatic suffering: one became more intimately allied with suicide and another seemed to offer at least provisional possibilities of survival. As we continually seek to learn and to teach what happened during and after those years of war, we have to pose the question, to whom did this Holocaust happen? And how do we account for the plurality of those who were killed or tortured, who survived the aftermath and who did not? My point is not only the political one, namely, to learn from the solidarity of the oppressed the ethical importance of marking and honoring all those lives, and with whatever means of translation is possible (cigarettes, German, gestures). It is also to make sure that the history of survival can be told in ways that help us to ask the question for the future of our own world: what made and what makes survival possible? For one of the key ethical tasks with which we are still confronted is to understand the conditions under which humans might survive. In this way, we not only honor the ethical demand to know the history of the Nazi genocide, but to include an understanding of embodied and psychic survival and nonsurvival as part of that history. We are tasked, as well, with understanding the general conditions of survival so that the world might become for all of its inhabitants not only survivable, but livable. And that possibility seems to reside in forms of unexpected cohabitation, across languages, with and beyond the communities we already know, in acts of solicitude that gesture toward solidarity. 388

20 Catastrophes Afterlives of the Exceptionality Paradigm in Holocaust Studies ELISABETH WEBER

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HE HOLOCAUST was at the center of critical debates in the hu-

manities and social sciences for several decades in the second half of the twentieth century. It deeply marked new theorizations of the forms and limits of representation, the relationship between history and memory, narrative and testimony, and it required the humanities to acknowledge the relevance of concepts previously unheard of in disciplines like history, philosophy, and literary studies. Notions like Jacques Derrida’s “trace,” Emmanuel Levinas’s “persecution” and “trauma,” Jean-François Lyotard’s “differend,” Jacques Lacan’s “second death,” Maurice Blanchot’s “unavowable community,” for example, even though they all are indebted to thinkers of previous generations (Freud, Nietzsche, Heidegger), were crucial for approaching the question of the unrepresentability of the Shoah in new ways. While earlier generations of Holocaust scholars, especially historians, argued that their work provided evidence of an unquestionable exceptionality of the destruction of European Jewry by Nazi Germany, sometimes accusing differing approaches to be tantamount to a trivialization of the Shoah, in recent years, comparative genocide studies as well as research within Holocaust studies have made the claim to exceptionality untenable. In particular, Michael Rothberg has analyzed the dangers of the exceptionality or “uniqueness discourse” as implying a “morally offensive . . . hierarchy of suffering” between the Shoah and other genocides. The “uniqueness discourse” also runs the risk of contributing to an understanding of the memory of the Shoah as “taking part in a zero-sum-game of competition with the memory of other histories,” a 389

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“zero-sum struggle over scarce resources.”1 Against this understanding of “collective memory as competitive memory,” Rothberg proposes a “shift” toward considering “memory as multidirectional: as subject to ongoing negotiation, cross-referencing, and borrowing; as productive and not privative.”2 In the introduction to this volume, Wulf Kansteiner and Todd Presner raise the question of whether the exceptionality paradigm has become attached to the “theoretical culture” associated with Holocaust studies. If Holocaust studies as a field has yielded “theoretical breakthroughs,” are there such breakthroughs associated with non-Holocaust genocide studies? And if indeed there are, the editors ask provocatively, why have they “not been made part of larger cultural scholarly conversations”? The perceived absence of “theoretical breakthroughs” in genocide studies in less dominant cultures than those of the English-speaking world might, of course, mirror the lack of attention, knowledge, and resources granted to regions with less political, economic, and military clout. As Jacques Derrida once remarked, “one does not count the dead in the same way from one corner of the globe to the other,”3 and, especially in the area of genocide studies, it is our duty to never forget this. The following reflections examine some of the circumstances surrounding the persistence of the “exceptionality paradigm” accorded to the Holocaust in American academic “theory.”

Institutional Context The perception or assertion of the exceptionality paradigm in theory cannot be separated from the institutions in which this paradigm is maintained or questioned. Those institutions do not exist in a vacuum. Therefore, it is indispensable to ask in which ways theory formation is embedded in, dependent on, or struggling against political discourses, international law, diplomatic institutions, the media, and financial and military power.4 For example, in 1990, the ambassador of Turkey to the United States sent a letter to Robert Jay Lifton in which he attacked the references to the Armenian genocide that Lifton had included in his 1986 book The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide. The letter had not been composed by the ambassador or his aides, but by Heath Lowry, who at the time was director of the Institute of Turkish Studies, 390

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and who four years later would become the first Atatürk chair of Ottoman and modern Turkish studies at Princeton University. Both the Institute of Turkish Studies and the chair of Turkish Studies at Princeton University were fully funded by the Turkish government. The correspondence sent to Lifton provides evidence of Turkey’s attempt to influence scholarship on what to this day it refuses to acknowledge as the genocide of the Armenians—the Aghet, Armenian for “the Catastrophe.”5 Conversely, in 1997, the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), “refused to allow the Turkish government to fund a chair in Ottoman studies because the government attached conditions to their $1 million offer that would have forced scholars to ignore the 1915 genocide of Armenians.”6 This counterexample is a case in point, for the absence of funds can quickly lead to an absence of scholarship. In 1999, Richard Hovannisian, then a professor of Armenian studies at UCLA, summarized the problem surrounding research on the Armenian genocide as follows: “Denial and rationalization as attack on true and honest representation of the past have been institutionalized in the Armenian case. In an introduction to his study on the Holocaust, Michael Marrus states contemptuously: ‘I have had no difficulty excluding from this book any discussion of the so-called revisionists—malevolent cranks who contend that the Holocaust never happened.’ Those who study and write about the Armenian Genocide cannot be so unequivocal, because the denial has been institutionalized by a government, its supportive agencies, its influential political and academic collaborators, and by extension, its powerful military allies and trading partners.”7 The ongoing back and forth in Congress regarding whether or not to recognize the Armenian genocide,8 President Obama’s and former secretary of state Hillary Clinton’s back and forth between their preelection commitment to recognition and their postelection backpedaling, the December 2011 discussion in one of the Knesset’s committees on the question of the recognition of the Armenian genocide (a first in Israeli history), and the recent intervention by the Israeli foreign minister opposing such recognition,9 all raise the question of the interconnectedness of institutional discourses with political, diplomatic, economic, and military considerations. This case shows the political stakes that weigh on the debate: the question whether the Aghet can be addressed as a genocide depends on no less than the American war efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan, and, in the case of Israel, the issues surrounding the Gaza Strip and 391

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its blockade. It would be naïve to assume that research is immune to such contexts. Theoretical “breakthroughs” might less likely occur in a context in which massive national interests are openly put above scholarship.

International Law Just as it is necessary for a discussion of the “exceptionality paradigm” (even if the exceptionality is now limited to the Holocaust as a source of “theory”) to consider the surrounding institutional and political discourse, it is indispensable to consider the context of international law. Ben Kiernan notes that “until as late as 1995 . . . no international forum had ever prosecuted a genocide perpetrator for breaching the [genocide] convention—despite its status as statutory international criminal law. It took exactly 50 years, from 1948 to 1998, to register the first international judicial conviction for genocide. Until the late 1990s, then, perpetrators contemplating genocide could have easily dismissed the prospect of any such legal action against them.”10 It is also necessary to recall the well-known fact that the Genocide Convention cannot be applied retroactively, that is, to genocides committed prior to 1948. Until 1995, then, the only genocide that had been on trial was the Shoah. The fact that the Nuremberg trial did not punish the perpetrators for “genocide,” but for “crimes against humanity”—since the genocide convention became law only in 1951—does not diminish its symbolic significance: that even without the legal concept of genocide, the crimes resulting in genocide were successfully prosecuted. This was possible because at least some of the executioners were accessible, and because the political powers—in this case, the Allied Forces—did not shield them from being accessible. Thus, there is no doubt that, in legal terms, the Holocaust was for half a century exceptional: There was a trial, and at least some of the high-ranking perpetrators were punished. The question then emerges, as formulated by Marc Nichanian: What if “the executioner remains inaccessible”?11 This question includes the following: What if the executioners or their legal successors are protected from becoming accessible? The recent initiative by French lawmakers to criminalize the denial of all genocides in the same way that the denial of the Shoah is already criminalized points to the timeliness of this question. It certainly registers in all kinds of ways, including scholarly and “theoretical” ways, consciously and unconsciously, that this initiative was ultimately rejected (and that similar ones have been rejected before in 392

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France and Germany), and that this rejection was celebrated, including in the United States, in the name of freedom of expression. The French are now in a very peculiar legal situation: It is illegal to deny crimes against humanity, as defined by the International Military Tribunal of Nuremberg (that is, in particular, the Shoah). This was set into law by the Loi Gayssot of 1990. There is, however, no specific law in the French penal code that recognizes the Shoah as genocide. On January 29, 2001, a law with a single article was passed that read: “France recognizes publicly the Armenian genocide of 1915. The present law will be executed as law of the State.”12 Notwithstanding this law, the attempt to extend the Loi Gayssot to all other genocides, in particular, the Armenian genocide, was rejected in January 2012 by the French Constitutional Council (Conseil constitutionnel) as contrary to the freedom of expression. In French and in German law, the Shoah is exceptional in legal terms: It is against the law and thus punishable by law to deny it, whereas it is not against the law and not punishable by law to deny other genocides. In the French case, the reasoning seems to be, in Sévane Garibian’s words, that the Loi Gayssot refers to “criminal actions that have [already] been the object of judiciary decisions” (in the case of the Shoah, the Nuremberg trial) and are thus “endowed with the ‘authority of the res judicata,’ ” that is, the authority of a matter already judged, or no longer under appeal. According to Garibian, this would have the disturbing implication that “a judge’s word alone can guarantee the truth of facts”:13 If one understands correctly, there would thus exist two types of negationism, and two types of crimes against humanity: the negationism which concerns crimes “recognized by the law” (such as the Armenian genocide), justifiable in France in the name of freedom of expression, and the negationism concerning other crimes not “recognized by the law” (such as the Shoah), unjustifiable and penally reprehensible because it would correspond to an abuse of that same freedom of expression. Otherwise put, negationists could alternatively be protected or not by the freedom of expression, depending on whether or not the crimes against humanity which they contest have been “recognized” by French law or . . . or what? What then would be the key element that would justify this differentiation between crimes, and their negation? What then do those crimes that are not “recognized by law” possess, or what do those that are, lack? [Qu’ont-ils donc de plus, ceux 393

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qui ne sont pas “reconnus par la loi,” ou qu’ont-ils de moins ceux qui le sont?] The word of the judge perhaps? Would this indeed be the non-said, the key, the implicit content in the Sages’ [that is, the constitutional council’s] reasoning? The absence of judgment? In one word: Impunity? Would the difference reside from now on in the authority of who “recognizes”?14 As Garibian underlines, “the argument of impunity is partially false,” since some of those responsible for the Armenian genocide were convicted and sentenced to death during the trials held in Turkey in 1919 and 1920, before the Kemalist government abolished the competent courts in 1921, freed those who had been incarcerated, and pronounced a general amnesty in 1923. The decisive matter, however, remains: “how to understand the aporia in which the problematic argument of impunity imprisons us.” For, in the French case, impunity is used “as the justification of a new deprivation of rights of the victims and their families.”15 These recent developments confirm an analysis already offered by Marc Nichanian in 1999: On this side of the black box, there is no fact, no “reality” of the fact. No master narrative, no political consensus at all will be able to establish or retrieve the reality. At this point, when the historian’s responsibility goes beyond the characterization, when it regards essentially the “reality” of facts, that is, their validation, only the law (le droit) can establish facts; only the law can decide that the fact is a fact. French jurisprudence has drawn the consequences from this state of affairs by implementing a law (Loi Gayssot) which punishes any denial of crimes against humanity committed during World War II. Only jurisdiction and jurisprudence can cut short the contradicting opinions of historians.16 In the context of international law, one needs to consider that it took the United States forty years to “access” the Genocide Convention. When it did, it did so (like some other states) only with a set of “reservations,” and, most significant, at the condition that it cannot be prosecuted under it without its “specific consent.”17 Jacques Derrida’s above-mentioned remark is again relevant here: “One does not count the dead in the same way from one corner of the globe to the other,”18 and it remains our duty to recall this. What are the effects of such legal exceptionality on the formation of theory? It certainly makes a difference in the development of 394

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scholarship, whether or not perpetrators of genocide are or have been brought to trial, whether denial is legal or illegal, and whether or not there are institutional barriers to exploring questions potentially embarrassing for the most powerful states, questions that carry the risk of exposing double standards or active falsification. In June 2008, Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper officially apologized during a well-publicized event in a packed House of Commons to “tens of thousands of indigenous people who as children were ripped from their families and sent to boarding schools” in order to, quoting the official formulation, “kill the Indian in the child.”19 As DeNeen Brown explains, in 2006, the Canadian government had reached “a $2 billion settlement, the largest class-action settlement in Canadian history. Officials promised to pay 80,000 former residential school students $10,000 each for the first year they attended the schools, and $3,000 for each subsequent year. The settlement included additional compensation for sexual and physical abuse and established a truth and reconciliation commission, the first of its kind in an industrialized country.”20 Harper’s apology included detailed descriptions of the abuses these children suffered, and the catastrophic effects that continue to this day: “The government of Canada built an educational system in which very young children were often forcibly removed from their homes, often taken far from their communities. . . . Many were inadequately fed, clothed and housed. All were deprived of the care and nurturing of their parents, grandparents and communities.” Harper continued, “Languages and cultural practices were prohibited in these schools. Tragically, some of these children died while attending residential schools, and others never returned home.” Former students “told of being beaten with sticks for speaking their language and of forgetting their own names because they had to answer to numbers. Social workers say the effects can still be seen throughout Canada, in the arms of indigenous drug addicts who walk the streets of Vancouver; in the eyes of children in Labrador who sniff gasoline; in Saskatoon, where police drove intoxicated aboriginal men to the outskirts of town and let them freeze to death; and in the Arctic, where suicide is considered an epidemic.”21 In the United States, too, a massive campaign to “kill the Indian” and “save the man,” according to the official formulation, was conducted over almost one hundred years, during which native children were forcibly taken from their families and communities and brought to residential schools where half of them perished.22 Of course, this campaign followed 395

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four centuries of colonization and warfare that resulted in what by many, if not all, criteria implied in Raphael Lemkin’s definition would need to be called “genocide.”23 U.S. senators Sam Brownback (R, Kansas) and Byron Dorgan (D, North Dakota) unsuccessfully proposed the Native American Apology Resolution (S.J.RES. 14) as a stand-alone resolution in 2008 and 2009. In December 2009, a resolution was finally passed, but it was, as Robert Longley put it, “stealthily tucked away in an unrelated spending bill.”24 Longley’s title “Did You Know the US Apologized to Native Americans?” is a rhetorical question: while the bill was signed by President Obama on December 19, 2009, it was, as Rob Capriccioso notes, “never announced, publicized or read publicly by either the White House or the 111th Congress.”25 The resolution’s formulations are cautious: the bill recognizes “years of official depredations, ill-conceived policies, and the breaking of covenants by the Federal Government regarding Indian tribes” and “urges the President to acknowledge the wrongs of the United States against Indian tribes in the history of the United States in order to bring healing to this land.”26 Rob Capriccioso’s question deserves to be underscored: By signing the document as part of the defense spending bill, did Obama fulfill the resolution? Or, does he have an obligation to say the apology out loud and to let tribes know he signed the resolution? According to White House spokesman Shin Inouye, there are “no updates at this time” on how Obama might proceed. Inouye also confirmed that a press release was issued by the White House regarding the president’s signature of the defense appropriations bill, but not one on the apology resolution—nor did the defense release mention that the apology was part of that legislation.27 The bill also specifies that “nothing in this section (1) authorizes or supports any claim against the United States; or (2) serves as a settlement of any claim against the United States.”28 To reiterate Capriccioso’s question: Is an apology that is hardly known to the victim, and practically unknown to the public, an apology? And can the recognition of a massive crime that is tucked away or “buried” in a paragraph,29 in a nonrelated bill—“never announced, publicized or read publicly”—be considered a recognition? The recognition of “wrongs,” of “years of official depredations, ill-conceived policies, and the breaking of covenants . . . , many instances of violence, maltreatment, and neglect inflicted on Native Peoples by citizens of the United States” studiously 396

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avoids naming the near annihilation of native peoples. In what Rothberg criticizes as “memory competition,”30 official Holocaust memory may “function as a ‘comfortable horrible’ memory, possibly allowing Americans,” as Edward Linenthal observes, “to reassure themselves that they are engaging profound events, all the while ignoring more indigestible events that threaten Americans’ sense of themselves more than the Holocaust.”31 As Wulf Kansteiner observes: Memories are at their most collective when they transcend the time and space of the events’ original occurrence. As such, they take on a powerful life of their own, “unencumbered” by actual individual memory, and become the basis of all collective remembering as disembodied, omnipresent, low-intensity memory. This point has been reached, for instance, with regard to the memory of the Holocaust in American society. As a result, millions of people share a limited range of stories and images about the Holocaust although few of them have any personal link to the actual events. For many consumers the stories and images do not constitute particularly intense or overpowering experiences, but they nevertheless shape people’s identities and worldviews.32 Given that there is “no natural, direct connection between the real and the remembered,” collective memory can also be decidedly selective. As Kansteiner continues: On the one hand, collective memories might exclude events that played an important role in the lives of members of the community (for instance, the memory of WWII in Japan). On the other hand, socially and geographical distant events might be adopted for identity purposes by groups that had no involvement in their unfolding (as in the case of Holocaust memory).33 One stark exclusion from American politics of memory, and thus from identity-forming collective memory, alluded to by Kansteiner, is the use of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. According to Richard Falk and David Krieger, these two events would most likely have been tried by the international community as war crimes, possibly as crimes against humanity, had the United States not been one of the victors of World War II.34 The identity-forming collective memory of the Holocaust could provide, in David Stannard’s formulation, a “screen” 397

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behind which “governments today attempt to conceal their own past and ongoing genocidal actions.”35 In this sense, Holocaust collective memory became a way to avoid talking about other crimes and, instead, was the basis of strengthening collective identities. To cite Kansteiner again, “in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Holocaust became a cornerstone of American Jewish identity and was enlisted for a whole range of Jewish and non-Jewish political objectives.”36 A similar strategy is employed in the above-mentioned ambassador’s letter to Robert Lifton. The emphatic recognition of the Holocaust conceals the determination to deny the Armenian genocide.37 The absence of recognition and manifest impunity subject the victims and their descendants to a second death. Trauma research has shown how victims themselves are made to doubt their own experiences due to the enormity of the crime and its unimaginable scope. This is especially the case if on the side of the perpetrators and their descendants, the enormity of the crime is coupled with denial and impunity. “Denial,” as Richard Hovannisian recalls, is the final phase of genocide. Following the physical destruction of a people and their material culture, memory is all that is left and is targeted as the last victim. Complete annihilation of a people requires the banishment of recollection and the suffocation of remembrance. Falsification, deception, and half-truths, reduce what was to what may have been or perhaps what was not at all. History becomes “something that never happened, written by someone who wasn’t there.” Senseless terror gives way to reason, violence adapts to explanation, and history is reshaped to suit a contemporary agenda. By altering or erasing the past, a present is produced and a future is projected without concern about historical integrity. The process of annihilation is thus advanced and completed by denial.38

Theory Saul Friedländer’s oeuvre was pathbreaking in methodologically “disrupting” what he called, with Thomas Laqueur’s words, “business as usual historiography” that “necessarily domesticates and ‘flattens’ ” the “representation of mass extermination.” For Friedländer, it is necessary 398

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to introduce, in the historiography of the Shoah, the voices of “unexpected ‘cries and whispers’ that time and again compel us to stop in our tracks.”39 As he explains his methodology: Only the integration of the fate of the individual victim into the historical narration could eventually enable the historian to overcome the dichotomy between the unfathomable abstraction of the millions of dead and the tragedy of individual life and death in the time of extermination. . . . The integration of the victims’ voices radically widens the narrative span of history. It has to be complemented by the historian’s effort to find correspondingly new concepts that would express, however inadequately, the breakdown of all norms and the dimensions of suffering that traditional historiography cannot easily deal with.40 As Hayden White comments, the “fetishism of the facts and nothing but the facts” of “conventional professional historiography” is insufficient for “representational modes, explanatory models, and ethical attitudes.”41 Susan Derwin has shown that the “fetishism of the facts” is also insufficient for narrative explorations of the psychological aftermath of traumatic victimization.42 In stark contrast, genocides other than the Shoah are still faced with rejection through refusal to acknowledge even the “facts.” That the “fetishism of the facts” would become the all-decisive criterion for or against the recognition of other genocides is all the more problematic since, as Marc Nichanian elaborates in his discussion of an earlier text by White, the “genocidal will” is precisely concerned with the “destitution of the fact by the destruction of the [historical] archive.”43 While in the case of the Shoah, it has been widely recognized that it is “indecent to think that one could prove and validate it . . . with the discourse of proof and the coherence of testimonies,”44 in other words, “the realism of the fact . . . constitutes an insult to the emblematic name ‘Auschwitz,’ ” researchers of other genocides are still struggling against the denial of the fact, and thus are confined to the “realism of the fact” and its entanglement with the “genocidal will.” In the case of the Shoah, it is widely accepted that it is the historian’s responsibility to take into account “not only the damage (something that can be articulated in a court by speaking in an audible and refutable language, in exchange for which one can receive damages),” “but also the wrong (for which no audible language exists, no language that could enter into the game of historical and 399

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juridical refutations)”; not just “reality . . . the collection of facts in the archive—[which] is fully coextensive with what can be proven, documented, archived,”45 but “meta-reality . . . which is the destruction of reality; not [only] testimony . . . , but that which remains when testimony has been destroyed (in its validity, if not in its archive).”46 The “genocidal will” consists in the “suppression of death by way of the suppression of the archive.”47 While, again, this has been acknowledged for the Shoah, the energy of scholars of other genocides is still consumed with the battle to establish “facts” and the perversity of such a battle. Is it possible within “theory” that what has been recognized for one genocide, the Shoah, has failed to be recognized for other genocides? According to Lyotard, “the differend is the unstable state and instant of language wherein something which must be able to be put into phrases cannot yet be. This state includes silence, which is a negative phrase, but it also calls upon phrases which are in principle possible. . . . What is at stake in a literature, in a philosophy, in a politics perhaps, is to bear witness to differends by finding idioms for them.”48 May it be the case that “a philosophy, a politics perhaps,” and “theory” have failed other genocides in this regard? Nichanian analyzes the “machinery of genocide and denial” as “the first philosophical machinery of the twentieth century,” which he directly relates to the refusal of leading intellectuals to question the exceptionality paradigm.49 According to Nichanian, this is “one of the greatest moral stakes of our epoch.”50 The all-decisive question is, again, the “validation of facts.” A longer quote is necessary to understand the scope of Nichanian’s argument: The validation by narration, benefiting from the consensus of veracity, is duplicated in our modern era by the recourse to the archive in the most general possible meaning of this term. As long as this modern duplication of narrative by the archive has not been analyzed, it will be impossible to understand anything about the phenomenon of genocide as such. . . . There exists, in fact, a single case (labeled “genocide” or whatever one wishes) where the consensus no longer plays a role, where the current mechanism for position and validating of facts does not work. This was an open door to madness for those who found themselves at the center of a murderous event that has not been registered in human memory as a commonly validated fact. There is “genocide” only where the 400

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scene of validation, the scene on which the facts acquire a reality, is dominated by the archive. [This] modern duplication of the narrative by the archive [is] heavy with consequences of all kinds. Nichanian continues: I know the exact circumstances of the death not only of my relatives but also of hundreds and thousands of people. For decades, the survivors have recounted, written, and published. They have elicited and collected the testimonies of men and especially women who were often illiterate, who would not have written in any case, and yet “every single one of them had a tragic and atrocious story to tell.” However, even if I knew all the details of all deaths, there would still be, in spite of all this knowledge, a fact which would never find validation through this device: the “crime of genocide.” We can deal with individual deaths, deaths in groups, or deaths in great masses. We can even deal with the Catastrophe. We never encounter the “genocide.” In addition, there is never any memory by the survivors, never any testimony, direct or indirect, from the victims or third persons which could provide indisputable proof of genocidal intention and action. In the case of the Armenians we know that the executioners did not leave official or unofficial documents behind that would reveal their intentions and decisions. The perpetrators did even better: from the beginning, they made the genocidal machinery work as a machinery of denial, in accordance with the modern requirements of validation by the archive.51 Nichanian argues that historians of international renown such as Bernard Lewis, Eric Hobsbawm, and Raul Hilberg, as well as philosophers of the reputation and sophistication of Jean-Luc Nancy have contributed in the 1990s to the “philosophical machinery” by insisting on the “uniqueness” and thus exceptionality of the Shoah. While asserting that their comparisons are not meant “to reduce the other massacres to insignificance,” they espouse what amounts to the Turkish revisionist version, namely, that the deportations were at most intended to achieve “ethnic purification,” not systematic eradication. In other words, the “ ‘genocidal’ intention” would be lacking in the Armenian case.52 Hobsbawm, for example, sets this “philosophical machinery” in motion in a reflection on the nature of “facts”: 401

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We cannot invent our facts. Elvis Presley is dead, or not. One can answer this question unambiguously by relying on evidence to the degree that such evidence exists, something that happens from time to time. The Turkish government, which denies the existence of an attempted genocide against the Armenian people of 1915, does or does not speak the truth. For most of us, a serious historical discourse will reject the negation of this massacre, even though any conclusion remains ambiguous as to the different versions of the event or as to its integration into the larger context of History.53 The last sentence corresponds exactly to the line of argumentation the Turkish government has maintained for decades. Nancy, too, unwittingly espouses the argument of the executioners’ heirs. Asserting that the Turks perpetrated an act of “ethnic cleansing” (as Nichanian remarks, a notion that had only recently been coined, notably by the perpetrators of the crimes, during the war in Bosnia), Nancy characterizes the Shoah as a “ ‘total’ crime . . . against humanity,” whose “uniqueness lies in the plan to remake or recreate man [sic].” In other words, here too, the catastrophe is “reduced to what the executioners wanted.”54 Such “philosophical machinery” becomes particularly catastrophic when coupled with Nichanian’s earlier question: What if the perpetrators remain inaccessible? In the case of the genocide against Native American peoples, the executioners have never been made accessible—and, in all likelihood, their political successors never will be. There is no publicly acknowledged recognition of genocide, let alone of the metareality of the destruction of reality and the destruction of testimony. In spite of what David Stannard has described as “extraordinary outpouring of recent scholarship” about the “deadly impact of the Old World on the New,” the debate about such recognition is confined to small enclaves of concerned communities and academic institutions.55 Lyotard forged the notion of “emblematic name”—in the case of the Shoah, “Auschwitz”—that “designates ‘that which has no name in speculative thought, a name of the anonymous,’ ” and that is able to remove the event from the realist “insult.” What “emblematic names” are forged for the genocide of the Native Americans, especially given the annihilation or near annihilation of their languages? Here, the “genocidal will,” apart from being openly and unambiguously expressed by government officials, takes on a vast additional dimension by annihilating the very medium in which the victims could keep memory alive.56 402

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Lyotard’s definition of “the differend” succinctly names some of the problems the victims of genocide and their surviving communities are facing: “Reality is always the plaintiff’s responsibility.”57 If “reality” is reduced to the “facts,” the “facts” recognized as such only if archived, and the archive destroyed, the plaintiff is reduced to utter defenselessness. This condition is captured in the following two definitions by Lyotard, which find a stark confirmation in the above-mentioned U.S. “apology” to Native Americans: “A case of differend between two parties takes place when the ‘regulation’ of the conflict that opposes them is done in the idiom of one of the parties while the wrong suffered by the other is not signified in that idiom.” Or, to quote Lyotard again: “The differend is signaled by [the] impossibility to prove. The one who lodges a complaint is heard, but the one who is a victim, and who is perhaps the same one, is reduced to silence.” From this perverse state of affairs, Lyotard draws the conclusion that the thinker’s approach requires new structural rules: “To give the differend its due is to institute new addressees, new addressors, new significations, and new referents in order for the wrong to find an expression and for the plaintiff to cease being a victim. This requires new rules for the formation and linking of phrases.”58 Lyotard’s appeal resonates with Friedländer’s attempt “to find correspondingly new concepts that would express, however inadequately, the breakdown of all norms and the dimensions of suffering that traditional historiography cannot easily deal with.”59 Among the questions that beg to be asked are then the following: Are our institutions and are we as scholars able to hear such “impossibility of proving” in other cases than that of the Shoah, especially if the wrong suffered signifies in another idiom than that of “theoretical breakthroughs”? The idiom of “theoretical breakthroughs” would not only perpetuate the “differend,” but also lament the absence of “theoretical breakthroughs” in other idioms. Which are the languages and idioms practiced and listened to in the disciplines of “theory formation”? The exceptionality paradigm, even if limited to “theory,” goes beyond representation—however much this concept might be questioned—to “mold the past,”60 and thereby to mold the present. Lyotard’s “differend” is one of the concepts within “theory” that undermines the hypothesis of the exceptionality paradigm in theory. Another such concept is “singularity” in Jacques Derrida’s usage, distinguished from and contesting “exceptionality.” Derrida tirelessly analyzed how 403

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exceptionality determines many of the pivotal concepts of Occidental thinking and its myriad of violent exclusions, and how it unfolds what he called its explosive “auto-immunity”—its potential of catastrophe. Singularity, in contrast, as a “dynamic,” to use Ann Rigney’s expression,61 implies the urgency and indispensability to listen: to as many voices as possible, including the silenced ones, in as many languages as possible, including the silent ones. Derrida’s and Lyotard’s contributions to the reflection on the Shoah, then, are pathbreaking, precisely because they highlight the political stakes of the theoretical imbalance in genocide studies, not shying away from revealing, within the philosophical tradition that they are deeply and self-reflectively indebted to, the structural production of such imbalance and its ultimately catastrophic memory competition. Well aware of the stakes, Michael Rothberg’s concept of “multidirectional memory” allows us to leave the “memory competition” behind and to consider the “dynamic transfers that take place between diverse places and times during the act of remembrance.” Moreover, such an approach “helps explain the spiraling interactions that characterize the politics of memory.”62

In the Shadow Given the long persistence of the exceptionality paradigm of the Shoah, it is necessary to ask, as the editors of this volume do, to what extent the Holocaust has “cast its own shadow over the studies of other genocides, and to what extent has it been mobilized in the service of other (largely political) priorities”?63 Again, Michael Rothberg’s approach of “multidirectional memory” is exemplary in allowing such questions to be addressed: “Just as it is important for scholars in the United States and other settler colonies to acknowledge the force of indigenous claims, it is also crucial for scholars of the Holocaust to acknowledge the ways their topic intersects with another ongoing conflict, [namely,] Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land.”64 Not only did “Al Nakba,” “the Catastrophe” of the violent expulsion of seven hundred thousand Palestinians from their villages by the Jewish armed forces in 1948 occur “in the shadow of the Holocaust,”65 but its repercussions also dominate much of the U.S. involvement in Middle Eastern politics. In her 2010 book Co-memory and Melancholia: Israelis Memorialising the Palestinian Nakba, Ronit Lentin espouses Uri Davis’s somber assessment: “Each one of us, 404

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Israelis and Jews—has a shadow, the shadow of the 1948 Palestinian refugees.”66 One of the most renowned Israeli historians, Benny Morris, drawing his data mainly from Israeli army archives, presents “enormous detail about the acts of transfer and the massacres that took place in 1948” in his landmark study of 1987, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem 1947–1949, and shows in his follow-up study of 2004, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited, “that active expulsion by the Jewish forces, the flight of civilians from the battle zones following the attacks of Jewish forces, psychological warfare, and fear of atrocities and random killing by the advancing Jewish forces were the main causes for the Palestinian refugee problem.”67 But Morris reaches the conclusion that “the need to establish this state [Israel] in this place overcomes the injustice that was done to the Palestinians by uprooting them. . . . Even the great American democracy could not have been created without the annihilation of the Indians. There are cases in which the overall, final good justifies harsh and cruel acts that are committed in the course of history.”68 Morris goes on to suggest that “the whole country—the whole land of Israel, as far as the Jordan River” should have been “cleansed,” and that it may yet turn out that failing to do so was Ben-Gurion’s “fatal mistake.”69 Morris accepts only “written documents as the definite source for the historian,” which leads inevitably to the aporia of the perversity of the archive. As Ahmad Sa’di notes, “since Palestinian society disintegrated as a political entity during the war, and thus has not established national archives, it is unable, according to Morris, to put together a credible narrative regarding its own Nakba.”70 Morris’s approach then dismisses oral testimonies from a population of which, in 1944, two-thirds were “agrarian with low literacy,” and purposefully ignores the looting of Palestinian records, archives, and library collections.71 While in the case of the Shoah, the necessity for “disruption” of “business as usual historiography” in the form of oral testimonies has long been accepted as a methodological imperative, this approach is devalued in the Palestinian case, even though (or perhaps precisely because) oral history, in Nur Masalha’s formulation, “is not merely a choice of methodology. Rather its use can represent a decision as to whether to record any history at all.”72 In the words of Elias Sanbar in 1948, “a country and its people disappeared from maps and dictionaries,”73 and, we may add, historiography. The 1948 war that led to the creation of the State of Israel was 405

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made to “symbolize” the Jewish people’s “rebirth within a decade after their persecution in Europe and subjection to the Nazi genocide.” Lila Abu-Lughod and Ahmad H. Sa’di continue: Israel’s creation was represented, and sometimes conceived, as an act of restitution that resolved this dialectic, bringing good out of evil. The Palestinians were excluded from the unfolding of this history. Their catastrophe was either disregarded or reduced to a question of ill-fated refugees, similar to the many millions around the world . . . Excluded from history as the remnant of a nation whose right to independence, statehood, and even existence was denied, Palestinian refugees were seen, at best, as a humanitarian case.74 The events that resulted in the massive expulsion and flight of Palestinians were “not genocidal but ‘spacio-cidal,’ with land being the main target.”75 The Israeli historian Ilan Pappé documents this process meticulously in his discussion of the Jewish National Fund (JNF), the agency in charge of “land ownership, forestation and the Hebraicization of Palestinian place names.” Ronit Lentin summarizes Pappé’s analyses thus: “In 1948 the JNF prepared the ground for the Nakba with the ‘village files’—a complete mapping of each Palestinian village that served the actual plans, culminating in Plan D, devised by the Zionist leadership, aimed at killing the Palestinians’ elite, damaging their sources of livelihood and water supply, and bringing about their systemic and total expulsion from their homeland.” Pappé thus refutes the arguments that “the expulsion of the Palestinians was an unfortunate consequence of war.”76 The elimination of Palestinian memory is highlighted, as Lentin goes on in her presentation of Pappé’s work, by the “central role of Israel’s national parks, where forests of imported European conifers replace indigenous Palestinian olive, almond and fig trees, erasing the memory of the Nakba and of pre-Nakba Palestinian life. The parks, built on destroyed Palestinian villages whose ethnically cleansed inhabitants now reside in refugee camps or in exile, replace Palestinian sites of trauma and memory with Israeli ecologically correct spaces of leisure and entertainment.”77 The connection to the Shoah is consciously established, as Nur Masalha explains: “Israel’s reforestation policies enjoy international support. Planting a tree confirms the undeniable ethical value of Israel (and by extension the West’s project in the East). Afforestation is also linked, materially and symbolically, to the Holocaust, and thousands of trees have been planted in memory of 406

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the lost communities and individual victims. For Palestinians, however, few things encapsulate better the most notorious role of the JNF since the Nakba.”78 Masalha describes the ecological consequences of the “greenwashing” of the Nakba: “The evacuated Palestinian lands were forested by non-indigenous conifers, pine trees (native to the northern hemisphere) and cypress trees, after the uprooting of indigenous trees and destruction of the terraced landscape and the ethnic cleansing of over 500 villages in the areas that are now supposedly ‘forested.’ This has been an ecologically very destructive policy pursued largely for political purposes to wipe out the ancient landscape and render the newly acquired areas Jewish European.”79 Thus, “the landscape itself” becomes “the site of memoricide rather than memory.”80 What occurred “in the shadow of the Holocaust” continues to this day in the destruction of “the existence and self-determination of Palestinians as a people, politically, economically, socially and culturally in a deliberate and deliberative process Baruch Kimmerling has characterized as ‘politicide,’ ”81 and that David Theo Goldberg has analyzed as “racial palestinianization” physically based on “land clearance underpinned by an accompanying, if not pre-dating, moral eviction. Territorial clearance in Israel’s case has been prompted historically in terms of ‘redemption of land.’ ”82 At this point, another stark methodological problem presents itself that is closely related to the question of theory formation. The Druze writer and activist Salman Natur, quoted by Ronit Lentin, cautions against a situation in which “because of their better resources, the antiZionist Palestinian narrative will be written by Israeli Jews”—and, one might add, by Western academics.83 Lentin also reminds her readers of bell hooks’s observation that “social researchers often collect testimonies of the oppressed whose voice is used as data while the analysis is left to the more powerful researcher.”84 The assumption of the persistence of the exceptionality paradigm in theory unwittingly underwrites such stark disparity in power and resources. This problem also affects Palestinian oral testimonies when they are collected by Israeli Jews, seen as “members of the perpetrator community”: The problem of the perpetrators using victim testimonies goes beyond historical accuracy. Refracting Palestinian refugee testimonies through the voices of members of the colonising collectivity, often in mediated or attenuated format so as to make them palatable 407

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to a hostile Israeli Jewish public, runs the risk of perpetuating their victimhood, and separating the Nakba past from present Palestinian reality.85 She further points out that this is all the more so since Palestinians are internally dispossessed, [living] side by side with those who repossessed their lands, continue to confiscate their lands, deprive them of their refugee identity, triumph at their expense, and erase the memory of their catastrophe through legal and governmental technologies which cast them as second-class citizens.86 Michael Rothberg analyzes Benny Morris’s assertions and their context. Rothberg’s reflections merit to be quoted extensively, given their relevance to all the questions surrounding the exceptionality paradigm: The category of multidirectional memory allows us to begin to approach the simultaneously political and psychic nature of the excess [in discourses such as Morris’s] because it insists that we take seriously the crosscutting nature of public memories. While memory wars such as those that continue to roil the Middle East can provoke despair at the reduction of politics to crude stereotypes and name calling, the uncomfortable proximity of memory is also the cauldron out of which new visions of solidarity and justice must emerge. Thus, crucially, even as Morris propounds a politics of separation, his own language betrays the mutual implication of histories and the complicities that colonial and genocidal violence inevitably create. The unspeakable acknowledgment that “enemy” peoples share a common, if unequal, history is the utopian moment underlying the ideology of competitive victimization. I draw two corollaries from the kinds of memory conflicts emblematized by the Israeli/Palestinian dispute. First, we cannot stem the structural multidirectionality of memory. Even if it were desirable—as it sometimes seems to be—to maintain a wall, or cordon sanitaire, between different histories, it is not possible to do so. Memories are mobile; histories are implicated in each other. Thus, finally, understanding political conflict entails understanding the interlacing of memories in the force field of public space. The only way forward is through their entanglement.87 Rothberg’s concluding words make it clear that the stakes could hardly be higher: What is at stake in the preservation or the abandonment of 408

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the exceptionality paradigm, including in “theory,” is an understanding of the very “force field of public space.” In that force field, conflicting memories, enemy memories are “interlaced,” “entangled,” “implicated,” always and inextricably. In that force field, enemies too cannot but live—together.88 The exceptionality paradigm, even if confined to “theory,” perpetuates memory competition and its catastrophic afterlives. Yet, the force field of public space in which one cannot but live together requires the deep acknowledgment of “entanglement”: of memories, of suffering, of catastrophes.

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Epilogue Interview with Saul Friedländer

Wulf Kansteiner: Do you remember what made you think about having the first conference, “Probing the Limits of Representation”?1 Do you remember when you first had the idea to invite people to discuss the question of the limits of representation in the context of Holocaust studies? What were the anchoring texts that raised this question for you? Saul Friedländer: It was not a text, but rather an event. Hayden White gave a lecture at UCLA [University of California, Los Angeles] in 1989 presenting his theses about history. The atmosphere was quite tense, given White’s ideas—at the time, he was much more forthright than later on, that is, he hadn’t yet put water in his wine—and Carlo Ginzburg exploded.2 Ginzburg saw White’s theories of history as eliminating the boundary between fact and fiction and dismissing history as we understand it. I think this initial clash influenced the work that both of them undertook subsequently. I was in the audience and was myself surprised by the extreme position taken by White. This led to the idea of having a conference in which White’s ideas would be put to the test in a wider framework. I thought that his theses would be shown to be highly problematic when applied to the history of Nazism and the Final Solution since they could lead to revisionism and negationism. I asked White whether he would be ready to submit himself to this kind of intellectual scrutiny. He said yes and the rest is history. 411

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Kansteiner: What were your expectations? What do you think was the likely intellectual yield of that conference? Friedländer: I didn’t have any expectations regarding my own work because my research was following a very traditional form at the time, but I was keen to put Hayden White in a difficult position—that is, to make him see that he couldn’t relativize history as he did without falling into some kind of revisionist trap. This being said, we also invited people who were on his side, such as Sande Cohen, Berel Lang, and Dominick LaCapra. We tried, if you remember, to have a balanced participation: postmodernists, on the one hand, and more traditional historians including Perry Anderson and Carlo Ginzburg, on the other. Ginzburg based his arguments on White’s previous texts and ideas, while White had produced, in the meantime, a new text that was much more nuanced.3 For example, he limited the kind of emplotments applicable to modern catastrophes such as the Holocaust, excluding comic or pastoral representations from the range of adequate narrative accounts. Since then, White has been writing about the nature of history, the question of representation, issues of narrativity, and so forth in a way that appears strongly influenced by the debates at this first conference. Todd Presner: It seems to me that as much as Hayden White was at the center of this initial event, he represented something a lot bigger. Was the conference perhaps a referendum on postmodernism? That is to say, was the conference designed to test theories that had come primarily out of literary studies and were in many ways at loggerheads with mainstream thinking about history and historiography at that time? Would you agree that White was the lightning rod, but in terms of the broader issues, the conference and subsequent book were really responses to postmodernism? Friedländer: I don’t think the conference was a formal response to postmodernism because, of course, you had postmodernist participants, but it was certainly linked to the issue of postmodernism in history. Although the text was not included in the conference volume, the opening lecture was delivered by Jacques Derrida, and that was an event in itself, with literally a thousand people trying to get into the lecture hall and many of them sitting on the stage.4 It surely showed 412

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the pull that this facet of postmodernism exercised on students. It also showed the theoretical openness of the conference. Presner: One of the contributors to this new volume, Marc Nichanian, a philosopher and Armenian genocide scholar, takes up precisely that lecture by Derrida, which was published separately as “The Force of Law.” He cites Derrida’s idea of the “historiographic perversion” to discuss genocide. Building on Lyotard’s notion that the Holocaust represented an “off-scale” event,5 he argues that Nazism destroyed the “factuality of the fact,” that is to say, not only people, but the evidence of people, and, most troublingly, factuality itself. How do you see this ontological problematic reflected in the debates of the 1990 conference? It seems to me that it is almost absent in the book, but it became very important for a certain group of thinkers who build on the ideas of Lyotard, Derrida, and even Maurice Blanchot, including Shoshana Felman, Marc Nichanian, and many others. I don’t see it being taken up by historians, then or later. Friedländer: I think the Lyotardian and Derridian positions were pursued to a certain extent by Cohen, by Lang who is a philosopher not a historian, and White himself, of course. But more to the point, I had talked with Derrida about this one or two years earlier, when he was giving his annual seminar in Irvine, and asked him how he saw the possibility not of “fact in text” but of “fact in action.” If there is a constant flux because each step is subject to deconstruction, you can never act because you can never establish on what firm basis you can gauge your action. This makes it impossible to speak of political action or engagement. And his answer was that there are moments of stabilization in both text and action, which to me sounded like a possible answer, but also a way out for Derrida and deconstruction in general. As applied to history, one could say that there are periods when a paradigm is accepted and considered stable and, then, something new emerges and the whole thing changes. You have to reconsider change, rethink the previous paradigm, and replace it. Then, you are in a new period of stability. Of course, all this was sketched by Thomas Kuhn in his Structure of Scientific Revolutions.6 I would call it deconstruction by phases, and perhaps one might think of deconstruction as a process in which one moves from framework to framework with the understanding that one never ultimately reaches a 413

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stable answer. So, in practice, even Derrida seems to combine two different positions. Claudio Fogu: Speaking of Derrida and his developing positions, I’d like to ask you about the place and role of the “archive” today.7 It seems to me that, compared to the 1990 conference, more than twenty-five years later, the archive has become a much more central point of reference for many people in Holocaust studies, perhaps more so than “narrative.” This is emblematically represented, among other places, in Yael Hersonski’s A Film Unfinished, the proliferation of archives of testimony, and museological practices writ large. Do you see the place and role of archives to have changed in your own work and Holocaust historiography in general as a result of theoretical reflections such as Derrida’s Archive Fever or the opening up of Soviet archives, or the mass digitization of archival collections? Friedländer: The problems inherent in official archival documents have not changed. At the same time, history cannot be written without the voices of those who were implicated in the events—and, in the particular case of the history of Nazism and the Final Solution, that means the voices of the perpetrators, the bystanders, and the victims. In The Years of Extermination, I used those voices more than I ever did before. I found them in diaries dispersed throughout dozens of archives. But interpreting the cries and whispers of these voices is not a science; it’s a matter of intuition. The text is an absolutely essential point of departure, but you can never grasp exactly what is being said. Of course, you can grasp some basic facts, but the fascinating aspect of listening to these voices is that they represent more than facts. You don’t really listen to them in order to get facts; you listen to them to get the sense of an atmosphere. When you hear a thirteenyear-old boy describing events that he witnesses in total naivety or incomprehension, it gives you not only an image of this boy at that moment; it also gives you the image of a whole climate. Often I do not comment on the voices because I want them to carry their own meaning. Other historians, like Raul Hilberg, expressed great skepticism about memoirs and diaries, so much so that he excluded them entirely in his last book.8 By contrast, I lived, in a sense, by the diaries, not only of the Jews, but also of German soldiers, and by the letters they wrote. There is an abundance of this material spread throughout innumerable archives. In fact, I am aware of at least 500 unpublished 414

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Jewish diaries. Of course, I worked with the documented facts that I knew well for years and years. But in writing The Years of Extermination, I also began to sense that Hayden White was not altogether wrong about the poetics of representation, especially when, in composing my text, I decided that a given voice had to be juxtaposed with another voice and so on. Kansteiner: It is interesting to hear you describe the evolution of your writing. How do you think that organizing Probing the Limits changed both your own writing and your ideas about historiography as such? In other words, are the two volumes of Nazi Germany and the Jews directly influenced by your reflections on the limits of representation? Friedländer: I was directly influenced by that conference because it compelled me to reconsider how I narrate events, not so much in the first volume, but crucially for the second. I was always aware that for The Years of Extermination I would need to use an approach that was different from mainstream historical narrative. As I considered White’s comments and our discussions at the conference, I moved away from traditional historiography because of the necessity of creating what I call an “integrated history” without a unifying concept.9 That is to say, I had concluded from years of thinking about the Holocaust that there is no conceptual framework that can explain it, be it the Sonderweg theory, or anti-Semitism in general, or German anti-Semitism as a special case, or a purely functionalist explanation of institutions moving in the direction of cumulative radicalization under fascism, totalitarianism, modernity, and so on, and so forth. In the absence of a single explanatory concept, I had to construct a narrative in which each segment would carry its own conceptual weight: a history of the Holocaust through a series of conceptual miniframeworks. Yet, I was still left with the problem of how to narrate, as there was no clear-cut difference between abstract conceptualization and conceptualization emerging from these miniframeworks. A further difficulty derived from the spatial scope: Since I was dealing with the whole of Europe, I couldn’t work in a linear way. There was no unity of place, and the situation in each country had its own dynamics. Furthermore, there was no unity of action because every order was not directly coming from Berlin. Orders and action could originate in Vichy or Bucharest. Thus, I had to create temporal frameworks that could function like sequences do in a film, allowing you to cut and move 415

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between different scenes. Take the period 1939–1940, as an example: at the center, we find German policies and the decision to go to war, but all around it we have what happened in Poland, the interpretation of German actions seen from Paris, for example, and then the views of Jews looking at those events from Poland, Romania, France, and other places, all trying to interpret their significance. In order to make sense of it all, I decided to work in very tight temporal frames, cutting from one place to another, but relying on the fact that the time frame was short enough for people to remember it and be able to follow its multiple facets. So, I guess, one could say that for The Years of Extermination, I used cutting techniques as you would in a film— which may sound somewhat strange for a history book. Kansteiner: That seems to imply that you did not face the same problems in the first volume because there was more unity of time and space. Friedländer: Yes. Kansteiner: Do you think that there was also more conceptual coherence in volume 1? Friedländer: In the first volume, I consider different schools of interpretation of German policies, and in some cases, I do stress the intentionalist argument that sees Adolf Hitler as the key agent in driving antiSemitism towards extermination. Staying within Germany, one can easily observe different phases and see how the anti-Jewish measures expanded from one stage to the next. Some people have argued that this is the effect of hindsight, that is, reading history backwards, but I believe it is not. The stages followed one another; at some points you may hesitate about this or that interpretation, but basically the narrative is very linear and the first volume did not present any major problem of writing. I divided the work into two volumes precisely because I knew how to finish the synthesis of the prewar period, but I was unsure how to go about the second part because of the narrative and conceptual challenges it presented. Kansteiner: So, however much you confirm the importance of intentionalism and anti-Semitism on an explicit conceptual level, in terms of the construction and writing of the narrative, you would argue that these two important concepts cannot contain the multitude of 416

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historical factors at work, especially once we enter the second phase, in 1939–1940. Friedländer: Yes. Presner: Would you then say that the second volume, The Years of Extermination, is a kind of “modernist historiography,” perhaps appropriate for narrating what Hayden White calls “modernist events”? I’m thinking of a later essay by White, in which he argues that the scale and complexity of events like the two world wars and the Holocaust make them “modernist” and therefore require modernist techniques of emplotment, precisely because these events don’t appear to follow the traditional unities (time, place, and action) that we conventionally attribute to historical events that appear to have story-like structures and are amenable to the techniques of storytelling that one finds in realist histories.10 Modernist historiographies, by contrast, would seem to borrow techniques from writers like Woolf, Kafka, Joyce, and others, in which narratives are fragmented, multiperspectival, even multitemporal, and convey a tone of doubting and uncertainty through their very structure. Friedländer: White creates an opposition between what he calls the realist school of history writing and that of high modernism. I don’t think he really explained very clearly why suddenly this distinction came about; perhaps it would have been clearer had he spoken of postmodernism. But high modernism in literature goes back to the eve of World War I or even before, with the early Kafka, with Joyce, and so on. I am not very clear about what White meant when he differentiated between realist representation or realist writing of history and modernist versions. In literature, we know where the line can be drawn. In historiography, however, the trend was towards greater conceptualization, at least regarding the very influential Annales School; narrative history maintained its hold in the Anglo-Saxon world but, again, it did not show any characteristic equivalent to literary high modernism. So, I cannot really answer your question without knowing what White had in mind. Kansteiner: Perhaps high modernism or maybe postmodernism in philosophy is a way of representation in which the narrative structures—the structures of the text—convey a sense of semantic failure 417

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and this instability is one of the key messages of the texts in question. If you think about narrative overdetermination in the books of Woolf or Joyce in this way, the comparison to your work doesn’t appear farfetched. The Years of Extermination does create—in its multivoicedness, in its multiperspectival writing—a significant degree of narrative excess that cannot be reduced to conventional notions of the historical process and concepts of causality. In that precise sense, there seems to be a correlation between what White perceives as modernist types of writing and the kind of narrative strategies that you have inductively developed in volume 2. Friedländer: Very well put. Kansteiner: So, could we say that today you are much more comfortable with being defined as a high modernist historian than you might have been before our conference? Friedländer: I find it amusing to be considered the first high modernist historian. . . . We all agree that literary high modernism—Proust, Joyce, Kafka—creates a much more fluid, much less determined presentation of action (or inaction), of speech, of voices, and so on, than conventional realism. Yet, there is a strange homology in White’s theory between a class of modernist events that includes not only the Holocaust and the Gulag, but also the assassination of JFK [John F. Kennedy], and their corresponding techniques of modernist representation. This is strange because the assassination of JFK has nothing to do with what we would consider typically modern catastrophes like genocides or mass events that have no clear borderlines—that flow in several directions at once, and may thus demand this kind of modernist historiography. White includes events that in themselves have occurred many times throughout history, and I don’t see what makes them modernist. Kansteiner: I think the connection between these disparate types of events might be found in your way of thinking about voices and narrative constellations that capture atmosphere and mood. Rather than revealing the essence of some kind of historical event through narration, you highlight the multidirectional reverberations of that event in past societies. Considered from this vantage point, even a seemingly conventional event, such as an assassination, might assume a compli418

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cated afterlife as a media event and trigger multidirectional reception processes best reflected in kaleidoscopic strategies of representation. Friedländer: Yes, if you look at it that way. Presner: Perhaps this is good point, then, to return to the cinematic aspect of your historiography. You had mentioned your writing of history in terms of the editing processes of film. Is it perhaps like Vertov or Eisenstein? Can you say more? Friedländer: Of course, Eisenstein. The idea of “the cut” is, indeed, a cinematic method. But it is also used in literature. Nobody mentions John Dos Passos anymore, but for me, his modernist writing is a kind of multifaceted transposition of cutting and editing in literary form. In film, cutting is of the essence. But whereas for me this method solved a technical problem, it had nothing to do with White’s textual field in which he combines and, therefore, levels the difference between fiction and history. Whatever I did in those two volumes, I never did it without a basic reference to the archive—notwithstanding the indeterminacy of interpretation in the case of some archives. By contrast, in analyzing my work, White compared it to  H.  G. Adler’s novel The Journey, arguing that this was actually an autobiographical description of an experience Adler and his family went through in Theresienstadt and therefore some sort of high modernist history.11 In fact, Adler changed the names, invented the dialogue, and called it a novel. Had he wanted to call it a memoir, he would have called it a memoir, but he called it a novel. White simply erases the distinction between writers of literature and historians. The latter are bound by reference to the archive, even if the archive presents certain problems. The documents remain quite tangible and allude to events that actually took place. White, instead, pushes towards the elimination of all distinctions, as when he analyzes my work exclusively in terms of my use of certain literary tropes and techniques, such as epigraph, synecdoche, and so forth. He tries to pull the historical text into modernist fiction and that is where he goes one step too far. Kansteiner: If I may, I want to complicate this on the basis of your writing. Traditionally, when it comes to the Holocaust, historians have tried to reconstruct the plans and actions of the perpetrators and integrate these details into overarching models of historical causality. The 419

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emphasis was very much on what happened or what a person did at a particular point in time, at a given location. Now, The Years of Extermination explodes that paradigm by engaging with a completely different category of referential relationships: the mood, the atmosphere, and the voices and feelings of the victims. You have introduced a different class of past things to be reconstructed, things that are more fluid, more subjective, more emotionally jarring than the traditional subject matter of historical writing. And you pursue these things as referential objects in their own right, regardless of their possible relation to modes of causality. So, as the referential framework seems to change in important ways, you are entering a realm of narration that is perhaps more relative than the narrative realms in which most historians feel comfortable. It’s much more relative because you are, for instance, no longer exclusively focused on Hitler’s whereabouts at a certain point in time, the kind of information he received, and how his reactions contributed to subsequent events. Instead, you are also picking through a wide array of autobiographical texts in pursuit of subjective sentiments, selecting the text fragments that you feel, on the basis of your intuition, do accurately reflect the spectrum of feelings that people had at the time. You have to be selective; you have to trust your intuition; and all of this becomes not just fragmented and dispersive but also highly subjective. Hence, I am wondering if this does not result in a significant overlap, both in terms of structure and referentiality, between fiction and history because you’re now using a fragmented narrative language to convey feelings in quite similar ways to the modernists, who also conveyed feelings of unease, confusion, and relativity by way of narrative fragmentation. It seems that there is more at stake than narrative strategy. You seem to share with literary writing a certain referential curiosity about the representation of feelings and perceptions. And this means that The Years of Extermination differs markedly from the works of, say, historians of modern Germany like Richard Evans and Ian Kershaw or Holocaust historians like Peter Longerich and even Raul Hilberg, and it puts you closer to the referential concerns of Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and people who are writing about feelings, moods, and mourning in similarly subjective, self-reflexive, and self-confident ways. And in that precise sense, the borderline between fact and fiction appears somewhat permeable, in the writing of history as you practice it. 420

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Friedländer: You are right that introducing the quasi-interactive ensemble of voices and placing them into my text, not to illustrate the text, which is what is generally done in history, has the effect of breaking the text in a certain way and creating an element of fluidity, which, indeed, brings me into the realm of literary choices. But the gist of your argument is about the voices as such, that is, as sources. And this relates to the earlier question of the archive as both expanded and also weaker. Diaries are not the same kind of document you find in a typical archive, and they are not meant to be utilized and rendered in the same way. Perhaps, I can best illustrate this with an example: In the first part of volume 2, when the war starts with the Germans invading Poland, I use four Jewish voices—one in Dresden, two in Warsaw, and one in Lodz—to offer four perspectives on the world historical situation. Whatever their thoughts may be, it doesn’t demand a massive effort on the part of the historian to prove that there is no doubt that these diaries exist, and that in them these witnesses wrote their thoughts about what was happening and expressed their hopes and fears. The diaries help convey an atmosphere. The nature of what has to be achieved here by using such a device is not something that demands to be proven beyond doubt by archival references in the classical sense; instead, it is meant to suggest the indeterminate atmosphere surrounding the events. My aim, as I defined it in the introduction, was to write a very precise history and, at the same time, one faithful to those moments when the reader, in unison with the writer, recognizes that something is “unbelievable.” You have the written voice of the past and our mental voice in the present saying, “I can’t believe this.” Immediately, you know that it happened, but for a moment you are taken aback. It’s a kind of cognitive dissonance, an unconscious, split-second reaction to an event. Traditional history writing tends to domesticate the unbelievable. Kansteiner: I want to follow up with this question of eliciting disbelief in the reader because it seems to me to contain an element of a didactic program: to represent the victims’ perceptions and feelings in order to induce a faint echo of them in the reader, so that the reader might identify with the victims, their hopes, anxieties, and fears echoed in their voices. The question is, then, whether other historians who have attempted to write a narrative synthesis of the Holocaust—such as Raul 421

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Hilberg, Christopher Browning, Peter Longerich—have, in a sense, domesticated the Holocaust. Friedländer: They were motivated by a very different perception of how the history of the Holocaust should be written. If Hilberg is taken as the iconic example of traditional historiography, I would say that it was a kind of domestication in that he largely left out the victims’ voices, but with an eerie effect. To put the victims at the end of the volume meant that they were a passive collectivity and not really part of the main story. But we must not forget that his 1961 synthesis was the first comprehensive history of the Holocaust. As such, I would be careful in saying that Hilberg just described the machinery of destruction in a traditional way. He had a kind of acerbic, ironic tone in his writing, something that I, too, used in volume 1 [of Nazi Germany and the Jews]. I think you are almost compelled to irony because of what appears as the sheer stupidity of many of the sayings and actions of the Nazi characters. Presner: I’d like to broaden our conversation by turning to changes in the landscape of Holocaust studies between 1992, when Probing the Limits of Representation was published, and the present. It’s not an overestimation to say that Holocaust studies has matured and blossomed, with numerous defining moments that bespeak the creation of a global Holocaust consciousness: one need only mention the international success of Schindler’s List; the opening of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum; the proliferation of monuments, memorials, and memory cultures in the United States, Germany, Israel, and many other places; the explosion of eyewitness testimony and the entry of personal memoirs into the public sphere. You also have Holocaust studies emerging as an intellectual field at almost every college and university, and much more. I’d be curious to know, first, what you would identify as the key landmarks in the wake of the first conference and, second, for you to think forward to the next twenty years. What are the questions and issues that remain unanswered? Where is the field going? Friedländer: You are absolutely correct in your description of the main changes between the early 1990s (maybe the mid-1980s) and now. The multiplicity of representations of the Holocaust, the teaching of the Holocaust, and so on, have grown wildly and not always in the best ways. I’m quite critical of some aspects of it, but this growth is some422

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thing that has its own dynamic, and it has now reached a plateau, I think. We see this plateau on the theoretical level with the establishment of genocide studies as a field, connected to, but also distinct from, Holocaust studies—and our 2012 conference is, in a way, representative of this plateau. And in historiography and perhaps even popular culture, we see a certain fatigue about the topic. I may be mistaken about this, but my feeling is that in a few years, the intensity of what you describe will not disappear, but it will weaken for a very simple reason: the people who directly experienced the events will be dead. It’s true that they have transmitted a sort of traumatic memory to their children, and that the children often react in a very similar manner to some of the psychological issues experienced by their parents. Indeed, there are many studies in clinical psychology about the impact of that trauma on the second and now third generations. Most probably, though, the trauma is going to fade with time. The memories of the Holocaust and the various activities you described will not disappear, but they will become more ritualistic, with a weakening charge of emotion and urgency. Presner: Our generation is certainly going to see the last witness at some point, and this means that the appeal that witnesses currently have for political programs and memory cultures will change. Of course, every event has its last witness. How much of a cultural impact will the recession of the eyewitness generation have? Friedländer: Let me answer by taking World War I as an example. In terms of its horror for the soldiers on all sides, its massiveness, and the shock it created, it stands as a traumatic event in world history, surely in European history. Some of the greatest works of literature and film came just a few years after the war ended. And you had in every village and town in Germany, France, England, and other countries, the building of monuments, of lieux de mémoire [places of memory] that carried the names of the fallen. On every 11th of November in the 1920s and 1930s, you had large crowds who would gather at such monuments, and you would hear speeches, usually with one of two messages: nationalist or nation-oriented, on the one hand, or pacifist, on the other. This went on through World War II and, although it didn’t disappear, it changed completely in texture. The main reason for the change is that the cult of the nation as a sacred explanation for everything had gone by the wayside after World War II, at 423

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least in Europe. Hence, there was a drastic diminution of these ceremonies. In the culture that emerged, the individual became much more central than the metanarrative of the nation. This is reflected in the United States, too, as evidenced by the Vietnam War Memorial, which is primarily a list of inscribed names, in which the national metanarrative has disappeared altogether. So, to answer your question, I think we are in the midst of a demographic and biological shift, but also of a cultural change that is taking us in the direction of understanding modern catastrophes in more general, perhaps global or transnational terms. Kansteiner: On the one hand, the waning of national frames of remembrance and history writing seems like a blessing—one may only think in this context of Martin Broszat’s puzzling claim that German historians are able to be more objective about the Nazi past than Jewish historians.12 On the other hand, I perceive a certain wistfulness in your remarks. Do you think that losing a sense of national belonging visà-vis the past might hamper rather than foster self-reflexive representations of events like the Final Solution? Friedländer: In the introduction to Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution, I suggested, building on an insight of LaCapra, that the issue of “transference” with regard to this past cannot be avoided since one always speaks from a subject position, at a particular place in time.13 You have to say very clearly: I am a German historian of a specific generation, with a particular relationship to the events described, precisely so that the reader knows from where you are coming. I wouldn’t call it a bias, since there is no neutral place to stand, but it does indicate a mode of perceiving, reacting, and describing. Sometimes “national” historians have been unable to define the place from where they were speaking, and, as such, they have met with real limitations. We saw that in French historiography until an American, Robert Paxton, wrote the first responsible and honest history of the Vichy regime.14 Fogu: While you spoke earlier of the waning of national frames for the memory and history of the Holocaust, I wonder about the persistence of one particular national frame of reference for the Holocaust, namely, that connected to the foundation of the State of Israel and the competing narratives of displacement, suffering, and exceptionality. In conclusion, can you speak toward this issue? 424

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Friedländer: For many Jews, the Holocaust is an exceptional catastrophe that cannot be compared with anything else. There may be sound historical reasons for viewing the Holocaust as a particular case until now and a measuring rod for other modern catastrophes. Yet, exceptionality is partly a subjective perception: most national, ethnic, or religious groups consider the catastrophes that befell them as exceptional. The essential question is not whether exceptionality can be defined as such, but rather what signification is given to it within the group. Among Jews, particularly in Israel, the notion of exceptionality of the Holocaust has been linked to the idea of an exceptional history defined by centuries of persecution. In terms of nationalist ideology, it supposedly demands exclusive self-reliance in confrontations with the outside world and mostly excludes compromise. Other Israelis—and I count myself among them—view the Holocaust as calling for a particular attunement to the suffering of others, especially of those who live next to us, the Palestinians. In fact, there are many Jewish-Israeli historians who write the history of the Holocaust without trying to erase Palestinian suffering. The Holocaust should not be instrumentalized to justify brutality against the Palestinians or used to monopolize the question of rights for Israel. The historian Yehuda Elkana, who was a survivor of Auschwitz and president of the Central European University in Budapest, wrote about this in Ha’aretz back in 1988.15 He argued for “the need to forget” and even to eradicate from the daily life of Israelis this culture of remembrance, which, he maintained, encourages brutality against the Palestinians and others. Indeed, there are many voices in Israel, not a single voice on this issue. There must be an ethics connected to speaking and writing about the Holocaust that does not lead to nationalist politics. It can be a catalyst for thinking about a global human ethics. Instead of becoming some sort of mantra to justify all forms of national egoism and violence, the reference to the Holocaust should serve, within all possible circumstances, the striving for a broader concept of human justice and peace. This, I would say, is the grand challenge ahead for Holocaust studies in the twenty-first century.

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Introduction 1. Saul Friedländer, ed., Probing the Limits of Representation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). 2. Specific didactic-political value has, for instance, been attributed to the long public discussion preceding the construction of the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin. See the insightful assessment of the memorial’s history by Claus Leggewie and Erik Meyer, “Ein Ort, an dem man gerne geht”: Das Holocaust-Mahnmal und die deutsche Geschichtspolitik nach 1989 (Munich: Hanser, 2005); James Young, At Memory’s Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000); and the exchange between Gavriel Rosenfeld and Peter Eisenman in this volume. For divergent assessments of contemporary German memory cultures, see Aleida Assmann, Das neue Unbehagen an der Erinnerungskultur (Munich: Beck, 2013); and Dana Giesecke and Harald Welzer, Das Menschenmögliche: Zur Renovierung der deutschen Erinnerungskultur (Hamburg: Körber, 2012). 3. See the extensive description and critique of totalitarianism and fascism as political framing devices and scholarly concepts in Ian Kershaw, The Nazi Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation, 4th ed. (London: Bloomsbury, 2000), 20–46. 4. Dan Michman, Die Historiographie der Shoah aus jüdischer Sicht: Konzeptualisierungen, Terminologie, Anschauungen, Grundfragen (Hamburg: Dölling und Galitz, 2002), 262–264; see also the detailed case studies in parts 2 and 3 of David Bankier and Dan Michman, eds., Holocaust Historiography in Context: Emergence, Challenges, Polemics and Achievements (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2008), 83–323; the contributions to David Cesarani and Eric Sundquist, eds., After the Holocaust: Challenging the Myth of Silence (London: Routledge, 2012); and for 427

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France especially Johannes Heuman, The Holocaust and French Historical Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). 5. Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1961); Gerald Reitlinger, The Final Solution: The Attempt to Exterminate the Jews of Europe 1939–1945 (London: Valentine Mitchell, 1953); and Leon Poliakov, Harvest of Hate: The Nazi Program for the Destruction of the Jews of Europe (London: Elek, 1956). 6. Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), 132–134, 144–145; Tom Segev, The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993). For Annette Wieviorka, the Eichmann trial marks the beginning of the era of the witness: “[With] the trial the survivors acquired the social identity of survivors because society now recognized them as such” and acknowledged them as “an embodiment of memory.” Annette Wieviorka, The Era of the Witness, trans. Jared Stark (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), 88. 7. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin Books, 1963). 8. David Cesarani, Becoming Eichmann: Rethinking the Life, Crimes, and Trial of a “Desk Murderer” (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo, 2004), 325. 9. Tom Lawson, Debates on the Holocaust (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2011), 52–85. 10. On the fleeting impact of the Eichmann trial on popular memory, see, for instance, Cesarani, Becoming Eichmann, 336–339. The postwar reception of atrocity films and photos in German society has been carefully analyzed by Habbo Knoch, Die Tat als Bild: Fotografien des Holocaust in der deutschen Erinnerungskultur (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2001); and Ulrike Weckel, Beschämende Bilder: Deutsche Reaktionen auf alliierte Dokumentarfilme über befreite Konzentrationslager (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2012). 11. Hannah Arendt mentions Hilberg’s name on twelve occasions and explicitly acknowledges him as her most important source, in Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 282. 12. Looking back in 1996, Hilberg recalled with typical understatement that he “could sense a general unpreparedness” for the subject matter when The Destruction of the European Jews first appeared. See Raul Hilberg, The Politics of Memory: The Journey of a Holocaust Historian (Chicago: Ivan Dee, 1996), 124. 13. This applies, for example, to Karl Schleunes and Uwe Dietrich Adam, who wrote insightful studies about the genesis of Nazi anti-Jewish policies. Their books laid the empirical foundation for some of the structuralist arguments that scholars like Hans Mommsen and Martin Broszat advanced in the late 1970s and 1980s, in the famous discussions between intentionalists and structuralists about the causes of the Final Solution. Like Hilberg, Schleunes and Adam never achieved tenure in an institution granting PhDs in European history; Karl Schleunes, The Twisted Road to Auschwitz, 1933–1939 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1969); and Uwe Dietrich Adam, Judenpolitik im Dritten Reich (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1972). 14. See the self-critical remarks by Martin Broszat, “ ‘Holocaust’ und die Geschichtswissenschaft,” Vierteljahreshefte für Zeitgeschichte 27 (1979): 285–298. 428

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On the media event Holocaust in the United States, see Jeffrey Shandler, While America Watches: Televising the Holocaust (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 155, 159–178; on Holocaust in Germany, see Peter Reichel, Erfundene Erinnerung: Weltkrieg und Judenmord im Film und Theater (Munich: Hanser, 2004), 249–263, and Martina Thiele, Publizistische Kontroversen über den Holocaust im Film (Göttingen: Lit, 2001), 298–338; on Holocaust as a transnational memory event, see Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider, Erinnerung im globalen Zeitalter: Der Holocaust (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2001), 131–134. 15. Annette Insdorf, Indelible Shadows: Film and the Holocaust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 5. 16. Lawrence Baron, Projecting the Holocaust into the Present: The Changing Focus of Contemporary Holocaust Cinema (Lanham, MD: Roman and Littlefield, 2005), 262–263. 17. Elie Wiesel, “Trivializing the Holocaust: Semi-fact and Semi-fiction,” in Against Silence: The Voice and Vision of Elie Wiesel, ed. Irving Abrahamson (New York: Holocaust Library, 1985), 1:157–158; for a contextualization of Wiesel’s critique, including his subsequent more measured assessments and the construction of Wiesel himself as a TV icon, see Shandler, While America Watches, 168–170, 203–210. 18. Saul Friedländer, Reflections of Nazism: An Essay on Kitsch and Death, trans. Thomas Weyr (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 19, 131. 19. Ibid., 20–21. 20. Quentin Tarantino’s counterfactual history of Nazism sheds a rather factual light on American and Jewish exceptionalism, nationalism, and triumphalism in the post-9/11 era. 21. The key texts are captured in James Knowlton and Truett Cates, eds., Forever in the Shadows of Hitler? Original Documents of the Historikerstreit (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1993). The transfer of knowledge from Hitler studies to Holocaust history and the intensification of the discussions after the broadcast of Holocaust are nicely captured in the footnotes of Kershaw, Nazi Dictatorship, 59–67. 22. Yehuda Bauer, The Holocaust in Historical Perspective (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1978); Eberhard Jäckel, Hitler in History (Lebanon, NH: Brandeis University Press, 1984); Klaus Hildebrand, The Third Reich (London: Routledge, 1984). 23. Hans Mommsen, “Die Realisierung des Utopischen: Die ‘Endlösung der Judenfrage’ im ‘Dritten Reich,’ ” in Der Nationalsozialismus und die deutsche Gesellschaft: Ausgewählte Aufsätze, ed. Hans Mommsen (Reinbek, Ger.: Rowohlt, 1991 [1983]), 184–232, esp. 186, 214, 217. 24. Martin Broszat, “Hitler und die Genesis der ‘Endlösung: Aus Anlass der Thesen von David Irving,’ ” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 25 (1977): 737–775. For a vivid description of one of these post-Holocaust clashes, see especially Nicolas Berg, Der Holocaust und die westdeutschen Historiker: Erforschung und Erinnerung (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2003). 25. Harald Welzer, Täter: Wie aus ganz normalen Menschen Massenmörder werden (Frankfurt: Fischer, 2005); Steven Baum, The Psychology of Genocide: 429

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Perpetrators, Bystanders, and Rescuers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 26. Christopher Browning, The Path to Genocide: Essays on Launching the Final Solution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 88; Dan Stone, Histories of the Holocaust (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 69–70. 27. The seams are, for instance, quite visible in Christopher Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939– March 1942 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004); see the close reading of this book by Wulf Kansteiner in this volume. 28. Pathbreaking and exemplary for this line of inquiry is Götz Aly and Susanne Heim, Architects of Annihilation: Auschwitz and the Logic of Destruction (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002); originally published in German in 1991. 29. Winfried Schulze and Otto Gerhard Oexle, eds., Deutsche Historiker im Nationalsozialismus (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1999); see also Rüdiger Hohls and Konrad Jarausch, eds., Versäumte Fragen: Deutsche Historiker im Schatten des Nationalsozialismus (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 2000). 30. Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: HarperCollins, 1992). Daniel Goldhagen’s best seller pursued similar research questions from a political science perspective, but was rejected by historians who criticized his monocausal thesis of eliminationist anti-Semitism, and were probably also disturbed by his unusual use of extensive and very graphic descriptions of violence in his scholarly narration, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York: Knopf, 1996). 31. For a representative sample, see Ulrich Herbert, ed., National Socialist Extermination Policies: Contemporary German Perspectives and Controversies (New York: Berghahn, 2000). 32. Ulrich Herbert, Best: Biographische Studien über Radikalismus, Weltanschauung und Vernunft, 1903–1989 (Bonn: Dietz, 1996); Michael Wildt, An Uncompromising Generation: The Nazi Leadership and the Reich Security Main Office (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009); originally published in German in 2002. 33. Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution, 1933–1939 (New York: HarperCollins, 1998); Friedländer, The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945 (New York: HarperCollins, 2007); and compare to the Holocaust synthesis by Leni Yahil, who extensively reported about the victims of the Holocaust without elevating their perspectives into the position of a key narrative vector of her narrative world, in The Holocaust: The Fate of European Jewry, 1932–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). 34. For an extensive discussion of the concept of empathetic unsettlement with regard to historical writing, see Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma, 2nd ed. (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), xxxi, 41, 97. 35. Wulf Kansteiner, “Success, Truth, and Modernism in Holocaust Historiography: Reading Saul Friedländer 35  Years after the Publication of Metahistory,” History & Theory 47, no. 2 (2009): 25–53; for diverse interpretations and contextualizations of Friedlander’s synthesis see the contributions in Christian 430

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Wiese and Paul Betts, eds., Years of Persecution, Years of Extermination: Saul Friedländer and the Future of Holocaust Studies (London: Continuum, 2010). 36. See, for example, the contributions in Omer Bartov and Eric Weitz, eds., Shatterzone of Empires: Coexistence and Violence in the German, Habsburg, Russian and Ottoman Borderlands (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013). 37. For a discussion of various concepts of Holocaust exceptionalism and a range of comparative case studies, see Alan Rosenbaum, ed., Is the Holocaust Unique? Perspectives on Comparative Genocide (Boulder, CO: Westview, 2009). 38. Eberhard Jäckel, “The Impoverished Practice of Insinuation: The Singular Aspect of National Socialist Crimes Cannot Be Denied,” in Forever in the Shadows of Hitler? Original Documents of the Historikerstreit, ed. James Knowlton and Truett Cates (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1993), 76. 39. Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews, 3rd ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 1075. 40. Yehuda Bauer tried to establish Holocaust uniqueness by differentiating between total and partial destruction, although that differentiation does not appear to correspond to the historical record: Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 10–11. In the 1990s, Steven Katz launched an attempt to prove Holocaust uniqueness on an empirical level, but later abandoned that project: Katz, The Holocaust in Historical Context, vol. 1 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). 41. Saul Friedländer, Memory, History, and the Extermination of the Jews of Europe (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 49, 57, 113, 131. 42. See Friedländer, Years of Extermination. 43. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York: Continuum, 1988). 44. Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics (New York: Continuum, 1990), 362, 365. 45. Jean-François Lyotard famously considered Auschwitz as an event at the limits precisely because, like an earthquake that shattered the very instruments used to measure earthquakes, it seemed to be a historical caesura that could not yet be “put into phrases” using the commonsensical techniques of historians. See Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998). 46. Friedländer, Probing the Limits of Representation, 4. 47. This interpretation is suggested by Marc Nichanian in The Historiographic Perversion, trans. Gil Anidjar (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 60. 48. Jacques Derrida, “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority,’ ” in Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, ed. Drucilla Cornell, Michel Rosenfeld, and David Gray Carlson (New York: Routledge, 1992), 3–67. The second half of this essay was read at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) conference on April 26, 1990, but already committed to publication in the aforementioned edited volume. 49. Derrida, “Force of Law,” 60. 50. Nichanian, Historiographic Perversion, 1. 51. Ibid., 73. 431

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52. Lyotard, Differend, 57–58. 53. Derrida, “Force of Law,” 63. 54. Carlo Ginzburg, “Just One Witness,” in Probing the Limits of Representation, ed. Saul Friedländer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 89–90. 55. Roland Barthes, “The Reality Effect,” in The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 141–148, esp., 144. The discussion below draws from Todd Presner, “‘What a Synoptic and Artificial View Reveals’: Extreme History and the Modernism of W. G. Sebald’s Realism,” Criticism 46, no. 3 (Summer 2004): 341–60; and Presner, “Subjunctive History? The Use of Counterfactuals in the Writing of the Disaster,” Storiografia, no. 4 (Winter 2000): 20–38. 56. Ibid., 147 (italics in original). 57. Georg Lukács, The Historical Novel, trans. Hannah and Stanley Mitchell, introduction by Fredric Jameson (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983 [1937]). 58. For more on this distinction, see Reinhart Koselleck, “Geschichte, Historie,” in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, ed. Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, and Reinhart Koselleck, vol. 2 (Stuttgart: E. Klett, 1975). 59. Leopold von Ranke proclaimed these words in the preface to his Histories of the Romantic and Germanic Peoples (1824), quoted in Georg  G. Iggers, The German Conception of History: The National Tradition of Historical Thought from Herder to the Present (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1983), 67. 60. Hayden White shows how historians always make use of tropological figures for imagining and narrating the reality of the past in his Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), and The Tropics of Discourse (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978). 61. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. William R. Trask, introduction by Edward Said (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003). 62. Hayden White, “Historical Emplotment and the Problem of Truth in Historical Representation,” in Figural Realism: Studies in the Mimesis Effect (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 41. 63. Hayden White, “The Politics of Historical Representation: Discipline and De-Sublimation,” in The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins, 1987), 74–75. 64. Hayden White, “Historical Emplotment and the Problem of Truth,” in ibid. 65. See Claudio Fogu, The Historic Imaginary: Politics of History in Fascist Italy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003); and Fogu, “Figuring White in Metamodernity,” Storia della Storiografi 65, no. 1 (2014): 47–60. 66. Hayden White, “The Modernist Event,” in Figural Realism, 66–86, esp., 70. 67. White, “Historical Emplotment and the Problem of Truth,” 50. 68. White, “Modernist Event,” 70. 69. Judith Butler, “Fiction and Solicitude: Ethics and the Conditions for Survival,” chap. 19 in this volume. 432

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70. Cf. Hayden White, “Figural Realism in Witness Literature,” Parallax 10, no. 1 (2004): 113–124. 71. For Hirsch, postmemory “characterizes the experiences of those who grow up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth, whose own belated stories are evacuated by the stories of the previous generation shaped by traumatic events that can be neither understood nor recreated.” Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 22. 72. Hirsch, Family Frames, 39–40. 73. Binjamin Wilkomirski, Bruchstücke: Aus einer Kindheit [Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood], 1939–1948 (Frankfurt am Main: Jüdischer Verlag/ Suhrkamp, 1995). 74. Ibid., 8. 75. Philip Gourevitch, “The Memory Thief,” New Yorker, June  14, 1999, 48–68. 76. Quoted in Gourevitch, ibid., 50 (our emphasis). 77. See Marc Nichanian, “The Death of the Witness; or, The Persistence of the Differend,” chap. 7 in this volume. 78. Ginzburg, “Just One Witness,” 96. 79. Annette Wieviorka, Era of the Witness, 138. 80. Nichanian, “Death of the Witness.” 81. Primo Levi, “Shame,” in The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 83–84. 82. Shoshana Felman, “The Return of the Voice: Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah,” in Testimony: Crisis of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, ed. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub (New York: Routledge, 1992), 206 (italics in the original). 83. Felman, “Return of the Voice,” 211 (italics in the original). 84. The reference of being “stricken by and seeking reality” is to Paul Celan’s “Bremen Speech” (1958), which Felman discusses in this context. Shoshana Felman, “Education and Crisis; or, The Vicissitudes of Teaching,” in Felman and Laub, Testimony, 28. 85. Paul Celan, “Ansprache anlässlich der Entgegennahme des Literaturpreises der freien Hansestadt Bremen,” in Gesammelte Werke in fünf Bänden (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1983 [1958]), 3:185–186. 86. According to the argument of Elisabeth Weber, the very exceptionality of the Holocaust—when compared to other genocides—is to be found in the extraordinary documentary efforts of historians and the legal profession, not to mention the massive investment of resources and power that have gone into producing this documentation. See her contribution to this volume, chap. 20, “Catastrophes: Afterlives of the Exceptionality Paradigm in Holocaust Studies.” 87. Jacques Derrida, Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan, ed. Thomas Dutoit and Outi Pasanen (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 75. 88. Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); and Cathy Caruth, ed., Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 433

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1995). See also the important application of the concept of cultural trauma in the field of cultural sociology: Jeffrey Alexander, Trauma: A Social Theory (Cambridge: Polity, 2012). 89. Geoffrey Hartman, The Longest Shadow: In the Aftermath of the Holocaust (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1996), 155. See also Dominick LaCapra, Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994). 90. Dori Laub, “Bearing Witness or the Vicissitudes of Listening,” in Felman and Laub, Testimony, 57. 91. This formulation is very much influenced by the ethical philosophies of Emmanuel Levinas. For a fuller discussion of Levinas vis-à-vis testimony, see Geoffrey Hartman, “The Ethics of Witness: An Interview with Geoffrey Hartman,” in Lost in the Archives, ed. Rebecca Comay, interview by Ian Balfour and Rebecca Comay (Toronto: Alphabet City Media, 2002), 492–509. 92. See, for example, Ruth Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000); Jose Brunner and Nathalie Zajde, eds., Holocaust und Trauma: Kritische Perspektiven zur Entstehung und Wirkung eines Paradigmas (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2011); Anne Rothe, Popular Trauma Culture: Selling the Pain of Others in the Mass Media (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2011); Susannah Radstone, “Trauma Theory: Contexts, Politics, Ethics,” Paragraph 30, no. 1 (2007): 9–29; Wulf Kansteiner, “Genealogy of a Category Mistake: A Critical Intellectual History of the Cultural Trauma Metaphor,” Rethinking History 8, no. 2 (2004): 193–221. 93. Gert Buelens, Sam Durant, and Robert Eaglestone, eds., The Future of Trauma Theory (New York: Routledge, 2014); Stef Craps, Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma Out of Bounds (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); Roger Luckhurst, The Trauma Question (New York: Routledge, 2008). 94. For an overview of some of the main examples and debates, see James Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993); James Young, At Memory’s Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000). 95. Judith Keilbach, Geschichtsbilder und Zeitzeugen: Zur Darstellung des Nationalsozialismus im bundesdeutschen Fernsehen (Münster: Lit, 2008); Wulf Kansteiner, In Pursuit of German Memory (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006); and Shandler, While America Watches. 96. Roots, American Broadcasting Company (ABC), broadcast in eight parts between January 23 and 30, 1977. 97. The quote comes from Miriam Bratu Hansen’s discussion of Schindler’s List. Hansen, “Schindler’s List Is Not Shoah: The Second Commandment, Popular Modernism, and Public Memory,” Critical Inquiry 22 (Winter 1996): 292–312, 298. 98. For a brief overview of the history workshop movements in Germany and the United Kingdom, respectively, see Thomas Lindenberger, “ ‘Alltagsgeschichte’ oder Als um die zukünftigen Grenzen der Geschichtswissenschaft noch gestritten wurde,” in Zeitgeschichte als Streitgeschichte: Grosse Kontroversen seit 1945, ed. 434

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Martin Sabrow, Ralph Jessen, and Klaus Große Kracht (Munich: Beck, 2003), 74– 93; and Wade Matthews, The New Left, National Identity, and the Break-Up of Britain (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2013), 19–23 passim. 99. The turn to heritage and memory is reflected in key publications of the 1980s, such as David Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), and Pierre Nora, Les Lieux des Memoire, 3 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1984–1992); for succinct contextualizations of heritage and memory from an academic perspective, see John Carman and Marie Louise Stig Sørensen, “Heritage Studies: An Outline,” in Heritage Studies: Methods and Approaches, ed. Marie Louise Stig Sørensen and John Carman (New York: Routledge, 2009), 9–28; and Astrid Erll, Memory in Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 1–5. 100. On the notion of Holocaust memory as civil religion see Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), 200–201; Jeffrey Shandler, Jews, God, and Videotape (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 95–98; Jennifer Hansen-Glucklich, Holocaust Memory Reframed: Museums and the Challenges of Representation (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2014), 20–25, 196–198; and for a critical discussion of the Stockholm Declaration as civil religion see Larissa Allwork, “Holocaust Remembrance as Civil Religion: The Case of the Stockholm Declaration (2000),” in Revisiting Holocaust Representation in the Post-Witness Era, ed. Diana Popescu and Tanja Schult (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 288–304. 101. Edgar Reitz, Heimat, 1984; Claude Lanzmann, Shoah, 1985; Steven Spielberg, Schindler’s List, 1993; Ken Burns, The War, 2007. For TV representations of Holocaust history in the United States and Germany, see Shandler, While America Watches; and Kansteiner, In Pursuit of German Memory. 102. Generation War, Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen (ZDF) German television, three parts broadcast March 17–20, 2013; for an insightful review, see A. O. Scott, “A History Lesson Airbrushed: ‘Generation War’ Adds a Glow to a German Era,” New York Times, January 14, 2014. 103. Spielberg estimated that 300,000 survivors would need to be interviewed and recorded. See Wieviorka, Era of the Witness, 111. 104. See Perry Anderson’s essay “On Emplotment: Two Kinds of Ruin” on Hillgruber’s Zweierlei Untergang: Die Zerschlagung des Deutschen Reiches und das Ende des europäischen Judentums (1986) in Friedländer, Probing the Limits of Representation, 54–65. 105. See the discussion of Vertov in Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), xiv–xxxvi. 106. Eric Lichtblau, “The Holocaust Just Got More Shocking,” New York Times, March 1, 2013; see http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/03/sunday-review/the -holocaust-just-got-more-shocking.html?pagewanted=all. 107. The seven-volume encyclopedia is being published by Indiana University Press under the general editorship of Geoffrey P. Megargee; see http://www.ushmm .org/research/publications/encyclopedia-camps-ghettos. 108. See http://www.ushmm.org/information/press/press-releases/monumental -united-states-holocaust-memorial-museum-encyclopedia-project-unc. 435

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109. The term “synoptic” is used by Anne Knowles and her collaborators to describe how Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and mapping provide a  methodology for large-scale comparisons with various levels of granularity of  detail. Anne Knowles, Tim Cole, and Alberto Giordano, eds., Geographies of the Holocaust (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014), 20, 42, 175, 185. 110. Johanna Drucker, SpecLab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 9. 111. Siegfried Kracauer, History: The Last Things before the Last (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969). 112. Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books, 2010). 113. Jan Gross, Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland (New York: Penguin Books, 2002); Browning, Ordinary Men. 114. Friedländer, Years of Extermination, xvi, xxv–xxvi. 115. See chapter 1 in this volume; Kansteiner, “Success, Truth, and Modernism;” and Kansteiner, “Gefühlte Wahrheit und ästhetischer Relativismus: Über die Annäherung von Holocaust-Geschichtsschreibung und Geschichtstheorie,” in Den Holocaust erzählen? Historiographie zwischen wissenschaftlicher Empirie und narrativer Kreativität, ed. Norbert Frei and Wulf Kansteiner (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2013), 12–50. 116. Franco Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature,” in New Left Review 1 (January/February 2000): 54–68; Moretti, Distant Reading (London: Verso, 2013). Also, see Matthew Jockers, Macroanalysis: Digital Methods and Literary History (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013). 117. Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000). 118. Sebald uses these words to describe how eyewitness accounts of the firebombing of Hamburg need to be supplemented by a “synoptic and artificial view” offered by literature, one that he offers in the text in a modernist realist mode. W. G. Sebald, Luftkrieg und Literatur: Mit einem Essay zu Alfred Andersch (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1999); the English translation is Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction, trans. Anthea Bell (New York: Random House, 2003), 26. For a discussion, see Todd Presner, “ ‘What a Synoptic and Artificial View Reveals’: Extreme History and the Modernism of W. G. Sebald’s Realism,” Criticism 46, no. 3 (Summer 2004): 341–360. 119. See chapter 17 in this volume, A. Dirk Moses, “Anxieties in Holocaust and Genocide Studies.” 120. Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life, 9. 121. For a critique of the “victim trope” and the “competition of victimhood,” see Omer Bartov, “Defining Enemies, Making Victims: Germans, Jews, and the Holocaust,” American Historical Review 103, no. 3 (June 1998): 771–816. 122. See, for example, the work of Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), and also his contribution to this volume, chap. 18, “The Witness as ‘World’ Traveler: Multidirectional Memory and Holocaust Internation436

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alism before Human Rights.” For a more strident call for “[deprovincializing the Holocaust] . . . as an exclusively Jewish and Western narrative about the achievement of human rights and genocide prevention” in order to loosen its “metahistorical signification” and promote more global, world-historical approaches to studying genocide, see  A. Dirk Moses, “Revisiting a Founding Assumption of Genocide Studies,” Genocide Studies and Prevention 6, no. 3 (2011): 289–302; esp., 297, 295; see also Omer Bartov’s critique of Moses’s position in this volume. 123. See Omer Bartov, “The Holocaust as Genocide: Experiential Uniqueness and Integrated History,” chap.  16  in this volume. For an argument framed around a comparison of Soviet and German crimes in Eastern Europe, see Snyder, Bloodlands. 124. Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972), 3; originally published as Discours sur le colonialism (Paris: Presence Africaine, 1955). 125. See Elisabeth Weber, “Catastrophes: Afterlives of the Exceptionality Paradigm in Holocaust Studies,” chap. 20 in this volume. 126. For some of the ways in which the uniqueness of the Holocaust has become integrated into Israeli collective memory and tactically deployed to advance national politics, see Idith Zertal, Israel’s Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). In addition, see the discussion by Judith Butler, “Primo Levi for the Present,” in Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 181–204; as well as Ronit Lentin, Co-memory and Melancholia: Israelis Memorialising the Palestinian Nakba (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2010). Nitzan Lebovic’s chapter 12 in this volume, “Freeze-Framing: Temporality and the Archive in Forgács, Hersonski, and Friedländer,” concludes with a discussion of the Holocaust in Israeli national cinema. 127. See, for example, the argument of Timothy Snyder, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning (New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2015). 128. Friedländer, Years of Extermination, 613–620, 640–642. 129. Donald Bloxham, The Final Solution: A Genocide (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 251. 130. See ibid. Also, Donald Bloxham and  A. Dirk Moses, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 131. Snyder, Bloodlands. 132. Donald Bloxham and Robert Gerwarth, eds., Political Violence in TwentiethCentury Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 133. Moses, “Revisiting a Founding Assumption of Genocide Studies,” 296. 134. A. Dirk Moses, “Empire, Colony, Genocide: Keywords and Philosophy of History,” in Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern Resistance in World History, ed. A. Dirk Moses (New York: Berghahn, 2008), 3–53, esp. 39. 135. This articulation comes from the seminal study by Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 45. 437

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Part I: The Stakes of Narrative 1. Marc Nichanian, “The Death of the Witness; or, The Persistence of the Differend,” Chap. 7 in this volume. 2. In the epilogue to this volume, the editors asked Saul Friedländer to reconsider Hayden White’s position by focusing on ways in which his historical narration deploys modernist literary and filmic techniques to create a sense of disbelief. 3. Jean-François Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), xi. Further citations are documented parenthetically. 4. Derrida’s essay had been committed to a different publisher. See the introduction for a fuller discussion. 5. Ann Rigney, “Scales of Postmemory: Six of Six Million,” Chap. 5 in this volume. 6. Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 22. 7. Marc Nichanian, The Historiographic Perversion, trans. Gil Anidjar (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 1.

1. Historical Truth, Estrangement, and Disbelief 1. Hayden White, “Historical Discourse and Literary Theory,” paper presented at the Institut für Zeitgeschichte, Jena, June 2011, in Norbert Frei and Wulf Kansteiner, eds., Den Holocaust erzählen? Historiographie zwischen wissenschaftlicher Empirie und narrative Kreativität (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2013). 2. Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution, 1933–1939 (New York: HarperCollins, 1998); Friedländer, The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945 (New York: HarperCollins, 2007). 3. I had in mind Jean-François Lyotard’s metaphor of an earthquake that not only destroys large tracts of land and buildings but also the very instruments by which to measure the source, span, and intensity of the tremor. Jean-François Lyotard, The Differend (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988). 4. See Saul Friedländer, ed., Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution” (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 7. Friedländer writes: “For most historians a precise description of the unfolding of events is meant to carry its own interpretation, its own truth.” This statement is similar to that of R. G. Collingwood, who argued that when you know what happened, you already know why it happened. 5. I am indebted to two analyses of Friedländer’s work: Wulf Kansteiner, “Success, Truth, and Modernism in Holocaust Historiography: Reading Saul Friedländer Thirty-Five Years after the Publication of Metahistory,” History and Theory 47 (May 2009): 25–53; and Dominick LaCapra, “Historical and Literary Approaches to the ‘Final Solution,’ ” History and Theory 50 (February 2011): 71–97. 438

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6. See the foreword to Toni Morrison’s Beloved (New York: Vintage International, 2004), xvi–xvii: “The historical Margaret Garner is fascinating, but, to a novelist, too confining. Too little imaginative space there for my purposes. So I would invent her thoughts, plumb them for a subtext that was historically true in essence, but not strictly factual in order to relate her history to contemporary issues about freedom, responsibility, and women’s ‘place.’ The heroine would represent the unapologetic acceptance of shame and terror; assume the consequences of choosing infanticide; claim her own freedom. The terrain, slavery, was formidable and pathless. To invite readers (and myself) into the repellent landscape (hidden, but not completely; deliberately buried, but not forgotten) was to pitch a tent in a cemetery inhabited by highly vocal ghosts” (my emphasis). 7. Friedländer, Probing the Limits of Representation, 19–20: “Whether one considers the Shoah as an exceptional event or as belonging to a wider historical category does not impinge on the possibility of drawing universally valid significance from it. The difficulty appears when this statement is reversed. No universal lesson requires reference to the Shoah to be fully comprehended. The Shoah carries an excess, and this excess cannot be defined except by some sort of general statement about something that must be able to be put into phrases [but] cannot yet be. Each of us tries to find some of the phrases.” 8. Richard J. Evans, The Third Reich in Power (New York: Penguin Press, 2007). Evans’s text is a perfect example of conventional narrative historiography—Evans tells a story, the story has a plot, and the plot functions to tie up the end of the story to its beginnings: it shows how “the Nazis’ headlong rush to war contained the seeds of the Third Reich’s eventual destruction. How and why this should be so is one of the major questions that runs through this book and binds its separate parts together” (xvi). The mode of presentation of this story is spelled out in the preface, which says: This book tells the story of the Third Reich, the regime created by Hitler and his National Socialists, from the moment when it completed its seizure of power in the summer of 1933 to the point when it plunged Europe into the Second World War at the beginning of September 1939. The approach adopted in the present book is necessarily thematic, but within each chapter I have tried . . . to mix narrative, description and analysis and to chart the rapidly changing situation as it unfolded over time. . . . A narrative thread is provided by the arrangement of the chapters, which move progressively closer to the war as the book moves along. . . . I hope that [the thematizing] decisions about the structure of the book make sense, but their logic will only be clear to those who read the book consecutively, from start to finish. (xv) Evans’s statement can be viewed as both an instruction on how to read his book and a promise to the potential reader: the author effectively contracts to deliver a conventional kind of narrativized (or storified) account of the Nazis’ consolidation of power in Germany between 1933 and 1939. And what follows are 712 pages of thematized narration, augmented by 113 pages of notes, 41 illustrations, 439

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22 maps, 73 pages of bibliography, and an index of 41 pages (for “anyone who wants to use [the book] simply as a work of reference”). Professor Evans has certainly fulfilled his contract with his potential readers and in a prose that has been described as “brilliant,” “magisterial,” “gripping,” “vivid,” “impressive,” fluent,” and “often magisterial.” 9. The transformation of the relation between logos and mythos from a complementary into an oppositional one is a topos of modern philosophy of science. They were not so conceived in Classical Greek. Logos had the meaning of “discourse” and mythos that of “plot.” Their modern meanings are “reason” and “myth,” respectively, as if there could be no rationality in myth and no myth in rationality. 10. Here is another translation of this passage: “I clearly feel how I am losing my strength; how [I feel] more and more sultry . . . Fight for a personal rescue becomes hopeless . . . Here, on this side of the wall . . . But this is not important. Because I am able to complete my report and I trust that it will see the light of day in a proper time. . . . And people will know how it was . . . And [they] will ask if this is true. In advance I will answer: no, it is not true, this is only a small, it is like part, a tiny fragment of truth. This essential, absolute, true Truth cannot be represented even by the best pen. Because it is so incredibly cruel, fantastic that it escapes in its totality and fragments the perception of normal human imagination. Normal brain, even exercised in the time of these long months and years to note down all perceived and heard atrocities, would not be able to absorb and to memorize this bottomless evil. Eyes were seeing, ears were hearing, but consciousness could not comprehend, grasp, and heart already did not feel. Because it was not for humans.” This translation of Stefan Ernest, O Woine Wielkich Niemiec z Aydami Warszawy, 1939–43 (Warsaw: Czytelnik, 2003), 354, is by Wlad Godzich. I thank Katrina Stoll, currently doing research in Warsaw, for finding the Polish text for me. Friedländer does not cite the source of the version he used for an epigraph, but I presume that it comes from Lucjan Dobroszycki, ed., The Chronicle of the Lodz Ghetto, 1941–44 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984), listed in his bibliography. 11. Friedländer, Years of Extermination, viii. Friedländer’s version of this passage from Ernest’s diary differs from another published translation of it by Michal Grynberg: I am hiding in a pit, lingering on without fresh air, without steady nourishment, without sufficient plumbing, without any prospect of change, and every passing hour is worth its weight in gold. I can feel my strength fading away, feel myself suffocating for want of air. The struggle for my personal survival is becoming hopeless. Here, on this side of the wall—but that doesn’t matter, because I will finish my account, and I have faith that in the proper time it will see the light of day and people will know how it was. [no ellipsis] And they will ask if this is the truth. I will answer in advance: No, this is not the truth, it is only a small part, a tiny fraction of the truth. [no ellipsis] The essential truth, the real truth, cannot be described even with the most powerful pen. 440

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Quoted in a review by Tim Cole of Michal Grynberg et al., in History in Focus: Guide to Historical Sources: Issue 7: The Holocaust (London: Institute of Historical Research, June 2004). 12. An interviewer for the Daily Jewish Forward asked Friedländer: “You take your book’s epigraph from the diary of one Stefan Ernest, a Jew hiding in ‘Aryan’ Warsaw in 1943. . . . It seems here that you are trying to sound a note of humility. But am I wrong in sensing a hint of bravado here, too? Do you see yourself as wielding ‘the mightiest pen’?” To which Friedländer replied: “I don’t want to underestimate my work. It would, in a way, be grotesque to write and then say, ‘This is worthless.’ But I meant the epigraph very simply and directly: Don’t let us have any illusions. We try, and we have to try, but this is not even a fragment of a fragment of the truth” (my emphasis). “I meant the epigraph very simply and directly. Don’t let us have any illusions, etc.?” If that is what Friedländer meant, he could have simply and directly said that. Instead, he used a trope, the epigraph. 13. The Polish version by Ernest, as edited by Marta Mlodkowska, is: Walka o osobisty ratunek staje się beznadziejna . . . Tu, po tej stronie muru . . . Ale to nieważne. Bo sprawozdanie moje mogę doprowadzić do końca i ufam, że ujrzy ono światło dzienne we właściwym czasie . . . I ludzie będą wiedzieć, jak to było . . . I zapytają, czy to prawda. Z góry odpowiem: nie, to nie jest prawda, to jest tylko niewielka cząstka, drobny ułamek prawdy. Ta istotna, cała, prawdziwa Prawda nie da się przedstawić najtęższym choćby piórem. Bo jest ona tak nieprawdopodobnie okrutna, fantastyczna, że wymyka się ona w całości i szczegółach postrzeżeniu normalnej wyobraźni ludzkiej. Normalny mózg, choćby w ciągu długich tych miesięcy i lat zaprawiony do notowania wszelkich dostrzeżonych i zasłyszanych okropności, nie mógł być w stanie wchłonąć i spamiętać owego bezdennego zła. Oczy patrzały, uszy słyszały, ale świadomość nie mogła pojąć, ogarnąć, a serce dawno nic czuło. Bo to nie było dla ludzi.  See Stefan Ernest, O wojnie wielkich Niemiec z Żydami Warszawy 1939–1943, Przedmowa, opracowanie, przypisy (Marta Młodkowska, Warsaw, 2003), 354. 14. Friedländer, Years of Extermination, viii. 15. Ibid. 16. Epigraphs play an important role in Friedländer, Years of Extermination. In the preceding volume, Years of Persecution, there is only one epigraph. It introduces the whole book and consists of a single, direct statement by one of the architects of the Final Solution: “I would not wish to be a Jew in Germany” (Hermann Göring, November 12, 1938). The difference between this epigraph and the one taken from Ernest’s diary indicates the difference between the two volumes of Friedländer’s text: the one about “persecution,” the other about “extermination.” 17. The concept of literary writing as distinguished from the mystifying concept of “literature” is crucial for my thesis. Literary writing is identifiable by the dominance of what Roman Jakobson calls the poetic and metalinguistic functions of the speech event. Prior to the advent of literary modernism, realistic writing was identified with the dominance of the referential function and the world of fact. 441

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Modernist writing no doubt problematizes the notion of referentiality and attenuates it in the degree to which emphasis shifts from the referent to the problem of the modes and means of referring. In modernist literary writing, reality and even “history” are present, but as ambiguated and hidden rather than as given to sight and sound. 18. See Joel Fineman, “The History of the Anecdote: Fiction and Fiction,” in The Subjectivity Effect in Western Literature (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991). Against the idea that anecdote and even anecdotage are low genres, Fineman seeks to redeem the anecdote as the basic unit of historiographical writing (the historeme) that gets lost or at least subdued in the process of narrativization. The irreducibility of the anecdote serves to remind the narrativizer of the “reality” of that historical process that he or she is trying to incorporate into the “plot.” 19. Friedländer, Years of Extermination, 3. 20. I had suggested H. G. Adler’s Eine Reise as a model of what I had in mind, which, in my view, could be considered a veritable lexicon of figures and tropes for representing the Holocaust with all of the “facts” left out. Friedländer and I disagree over whether Adler’s book is to be considered a “fiction.” I consider it to be a deconstruction of the fact-fiction dichotomy when it comes to the problem of representing the Holocaust. It is neither factual nor fictional but metafictional, in Linda Hutcheon’s and Amy Elias’s sense of the term. It shows how the contrast between fictional and factual presentations of an event like the Holocaust cannot do justice to all of the ghostly aspects of that event, the ways in which the facts seem grotesque and the fictions more truthful to them than any simple chronicle or history of them might be. For a survey both of the postmodernist novel in the West and the theoretical issues raised by the revival of the historical novel as a dominant genre, see Amy Elias, Sublime Desire: History and Post-1960 Fiction (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001). Some time ago, Linda Hutcheon pointed out that the postmodernist novel was given to the production of what she called “historiographical metafiction,” which she characterized as showing “fiction to be historically conditioned and history to be discursively structured,” in A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (New York: Routledge, 1988), 120. 21. On this “referentialist” conception of “fiction,” see Dorrit Cohn, The Distinction of Fiction (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999). 22. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 476. 23. The genre of the ekphrasis (description) is typically used by art historians to extract the symbolic meaning from the literal description of the visual elements of a work of art. 24. I wrote to Friedländer asking him about the omission of the photograph from his book, and he responded that he had not made a conscious decision not to publish it, but that his description of the photograph would have been the same even if he had published it. From a textological point of view, it is the fact that the photograph was not published and that a verbal description of it is put in its place that makes it a trope. 25. Friedländer, Years of Extermination, xxiv. 442

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26. Ibid., xiv. 27. In his introduction to Years of Persecution, Friedländer speaks of “shifts” in his “narration” required by his desire to “juxtapose entirely different levels of reality . . . with the aim of creating a sense of estrangement counteracting our tendency to ‘domesticate’ that particular past and blunt its impact by means of seamless explanations and standardized renditions. That sense of estrangement seemed to me to reflect the perception of the hapless victims of the regime, . . . of a reality both absurd and ominous, of a world altogether grotesque and chilling under the veneer of an even more chilling normality.” Friedländer, Years of Persecution, 5. 28. Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 59–61. 29. Friedländer, Years of Extermination, xxvi (my emphasis). 30. Ibid., 26. 31. Ibid., 663. 32. Ibid., xxvi. 33. The epigraph in Friedländer is taken from Moses Flinker, Young Moshe’s Diary: The Spiritual Torment of a Jewish Boy in Nazi Europe, ed. Shaul Esh and Geoffrey Wigoder (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1971). The original was in Hebrew. 34. Friedländer, Years of Extermination, 595.

2. On “Historical Modernism” 1. Hayden White, “Historical Emplotment and the Problem of Truth,” in Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the Final Solution, ed. Saul Friedländer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 37–53. 2. Ibid., 52. 3. H.  G. Adler, The Journey: A Novel (New York: Random House, 2008). Hayden White cites Adler in note 20 of his essay, “Historical Truth, Estrangement, and Disbelief,” Chap. 1 in this volume. 4. Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative: Volume 1, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 82. 5. For a presentation of the aims of my work, see the introduction to Saul Friedländer, The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945 (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), xiii–xxvi. 6. For a different interpretation of the documents, see, for example: Christopher R. Browning, with contributions by Jürgen Matthäus, The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939–March 1942 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004). 7. Quoted in Friedländer, Years of Extermination, epigraph to the book. 8. White, “Historical Truth, Estrangement, and Disbelief.” 9. Ibid. 10. Hayden White, “Historical Discourse and Literary Theory,” in Den Holocaust erzählen? Historiographie zwischen Wissenschaftlicher Empirie und narrative Kreativität, ed. Norbert Frei and Wulf Kansteiner (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2013). 11. White, “Historical Truth, Estrangement, and Disbelief.” 443

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3. Sense and Sensibility 1. Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in NineteenthCentury Europe (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973); for an excellent intellectual biography of White, see Hermann Paul, Hayden White: The Historical Imagination (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2011); for a contextualization of White within the history of the philosophy of history, see Robert Doran, “Choosing the Past: Hayden White and the Philosophy of History,” in Philosophy of History after Hayden White, ed. Robert Doran (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 1–33. 2. For strong endorsements of White’s position, see Keith Jenkins, At the Limits of History: Essays on Theory and Practice (London: Routledge, 2009), 255–269; Frank Ankersmit, Historical Representation (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 249–161; Alun Munslow, The New History (Harlow, UK: Longman, 2003), 6; and the contributions in Frank Ankersmit, Ewa Domanska, and Hans Kellner, eds., Re-Figuring Hayden White (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009); for critical theoretical rejoinders, see Jörn Rüsen, History: Narration, Interpretation, Orientation (New York: Berghahn, 2005), 9–12; and Allan Megill, Historical Knowledge, Historical Error: A Contemporary Guide to Practice (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2007), 185. 3. For an extensive critical response to White by a narratologist, see Ansgar Nünning, Von historischer Fiktion zu historiographischer Metafiktion (Trier: WVT, 1995), 1:129–152; for other narratologists’ definition of fictionality and the confirmation of the divide between fictional and factual narrative texts, see Wolf Schmid, Narratology: An Introduction (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2010), 21–33, 195–197; Monika Fludernik, Einführung in die Erzähltheorie (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2006), 11–13; and Jakob Lothe, Narrative in Fiction and Film: An Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 4–5. 4. The last sustained wave of critical responses by historians dates back to the late 1990s; see, for example, Richard Evans, In Defense of History (New York: Norton, 2000), 119–120 passim; Mary Fulbrook, Historical Theory (London: Routledge, 2002), 21–30; and Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob, Telling the Truth about History (New York: Norton, 1994), 262–266. For the reception of White’s theories in previous decades, see Richard Vann, “The Reception of Hayden White,” History and Theory 32, no. 2 (1998): 143–161; and Wulf Kansteiner, “Hayden White’s Critique of the Writing of History,” History and Theory 32, no. 3 (1993): 273–295. 5. For notable exceptions, see Ann Rigney, The Rhetoric of Historical Representation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); and Sande Cohen, Historical Culture: On the Recoding of an Academic Discipline (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). 6. Christopher Browning, with contributions by Jürgen Matthäus, The Origins of the Final Solution (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2004). 7. Ibid., 277. 8. From the perspective of Saussurean and post-Saussurean linguistics, it would be easy to demonstrate that even single factual statements have no direct link to extralinguistic reality because they are part of arbitrary and functionally diverse 444

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sign systems; see, for example, John Joseph, “The Linguistic Sign,” in The Cambridge Companion to Saussure, ed. Carol Sanders (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 59–75; and Carl Bache, “Grammatical Choice and Communicative Motivation: A Radical Systemic Approach,” in Systemic Functional Linguistics: Exploring Choice, ed. Lise Fontaine, Tom Bartlett, and Gerard O’Grady (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 72–94. But in the discussions about the epistemological status of historical writing, this linguistic perspective has never played an important role because poststructuralist-inclined critics of the historical profession like Hayden White, Keith Jenkins, and Frank Ankersmit have always stressed that the historical profession is quite capable of generating agreedupon historical facts and that the problem of epistemological relativism only arises on the level of narrativization, especially large-scale narrativization. The contradiction in White’s and Ankersmit’s philosophies of history caused by their combination of narrativist relativism on the level of plot with empirical positivism on the level of single existential statements has been effectively exposed by Chris Lorenz, “Kann Geschichte wahr sein? Zu den narrativen Geschichtsphilosophien von Hayden White and Frank Ankersmit,” in Konstruktion von Wirklichkeit: Beiträge aus geschichtstheoretischer, philosophischer und theologischer Perspektive, ed. Jens Schröter and Antje Eddelbüttel (Berlin: de Gryuter, 2004), 33–63, 56; see also Kalle Philainen, “Narrative Truth,” Metatheoria 4, no. 1 (2013): 37–53, 38–39. 9. Dan Stone, Histories of the Holocaust (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 64–112. 10. Seymour Chatman, Coming to Terms: The Rhetoric of Narrative Fiction and Film (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), 9; Chatman adds in his notes that the text type argument generally “presupposes difference of opinion,” 207. Compare Chatman’s concept of argumentation to narratologist Mieke Bal’s more comprehensive definition of this nonnarrative text type: “Argumentative textual passages do not refer to an element (process or object) of the fabula, but to an external topic. From this definition, it appears that the term ‘argumentative’ should be taken in the widest sense. Not only opinions but also declarations on the factual state of the world fall under this definition: for instance, sentences like ‘water always boils at 100 degrees,’ or ‘Poland lies behind the Iron Curtain.’ ” Bal, Narratology: Introduction to Narrative Theory, 3rd ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), 32. With historical prose, the problem immediately arises that such statements may very well not refer to an external topic and are likely to be part of the fabula and its narrative universe. 11. Fludernik, Einführung in die Erzähltheorie, 72–73. 12. See, in this context, the thoughtful rejoinder to Fludernik by Julia Lippert, who supports the need for a historiographic narratology: Lippert, “A ‘Natural’ Reading of Historiographical Texts: George III at Kew,” in Narratology in the Age of Cross-Disciplinary Narrative Research, ed. Sandra Heinen and Roy Sommer (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2009), 228–243, 231–232; see also Vera Nünning and Ansgar Nünning, “Produktive Grenzüberschreitung: Transgenerische, intermediale und interdisziplinäre Ansätze in der Erzähltheorie,” in Erzähltheorie transgenerisch, intermedial, interdisziplinär, ed. Vera Nünning and Ansgar Nünning (Trier: WVT, 2002), 1–22. 445

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13. The importance of analysis, logic, and argument in the work of historians that are inevitably and unavoidably “corrupted” by narratively constructed assumptions and interpretations is, for instance, conveyed in P. C. Hoffer, The Historian’s Paradox: A Study of History in Our Time (New York: New York University Press, 2008). The historical theorist Jörn Rüsen has tried to capture the analyticalargumentative integrity of historical writing through the abstract concept of an intersubjectively valid “regulative idea of practical coherence”: Jörn Rüsen, History, 69–72, 71. 14. Arthur Danto, Narration and Knowledge (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 112; see also Danto, “Hayden White and Me: Two Systems of Philosophy of History,” in Doran, Philosophy of History after Hayden White, 109–118. 15. Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution, 4–5. 16. The kind of large-scale narrative claims developed in this passage are most likely to occur in introductions and conclusions and are particularly well suited for narratological analysis (which might explain why theoretical analyses of historiographical prose tend to focus on the introductions of historical monographs). Incidentally, in a gesture of disarming honesty, the quoted passage highlights its conceptual-epistemological instabilities by putting the anachronistically deployed terms “modernization crisis” and “social losers” in quotation marks. 17. Jean-François Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988). 18. Hayden White has, for instance, operated with the terms history versus chronicle and primary versus secondary referent: White, Metahistory, 5; White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987, 24–25, 43). Consider also in this context Roland Barthes’s structuralist concept of the “reality effect” as “unformulated signified, sheltered behind the apparent omnipotence of the referent”: Roland Barthes, The Rustle of Language (New York: Hill and Wang, 1986), 139; not to be confused with Barthes’s chapter on a differently conceived reality effect included in the same volume, 141–161. 19. White, Content of the Form, 76–80; Hayden White, Figural Realism: Studies in the Mimesis Effect (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 27–42; White, “Figural Realism in Witness Testimony,” Parallax 10, no. 1 (2004): 113–124; White, “Introduction: Historical Fiction, Fictional History, and Historical Reality,” Rethinking History 9, no. 2 (2005): 147–157; and White, The Fiction of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory, 1957–2007 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 255–262, 330. 20. White, Metahistory; White, Content of the Form; Saul Friedländer, ed., Probing the Limits of Representation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). 21. Saul Friedländer, The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945 (New York: HarperCollins, 2007). 22. For an emphasis on Friedlander’s use of elements of unreliable narration, for instance, through the construction of a highly “self-reflexive narrator voice,” see Stephan Jaeger, “Unreliable Narration in Historical Studies,” in Unreliable Narration and Trustworthiness: Intermedial and Interdisciplinary, ed. Vera Nünning (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2015), 371–394, 3–4. 446

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23. Wulf Kansteiner, “Success, Truth, and Modernism in Holocaust Historiography: Reading Saul Friedlander 35 Years after the Publication of Metahistory,” History and Theory 47, no. 2 (2009): 25–53; Kansteiner, “Gefühlte Wahrheit und ästhetischer Relativismus: Über die Annäherung von Holocaust-Geschichtsschreibung und Geschichtstheorie,” in Den Holocaust erzählen? Historiographie zwischen wissenschaftlicher Empirie und narrativer Kreativität, ed. N. Frei and W. Kansteiner (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2013), 12–50. For an interesting comparison of Hilberg’s and Friedländer’s synthetic histories, see Michael Wildt, “Raul Hilberg and Saul Friedländer: Two Perspectives on the Holocaust,” in Years of Persecution, Years of Extermination: Saul Friedländer and the Future of Holocaust Studies, ed. C. Wiese and P. Betts (London: Continuum, 2010), 101–113. 24. Peter Longerich, Politik der Vernichtung: Eine Gesamtdarstellung der nationalsozialistischen Judenvernichtung (Munich: Piper, 1998). 25. Ibid., 321. As we have seen, during the first phase of war in the East the special units received the task of liquidating a vaguely identified Jewish leadership group (precisely without adhering to Heydrich’s order of focusing on “Jews who occupied positions in party and state”). In this context the special units relatively quickly began to perpetrate massacres among the (male) Jewish population (or had them organized by local collaborators) immediately after the occupation of cities and villages. The massacres either served the purpose of eliminating Jews as “potential enemies” or constituted acts of “punishment” or “revenge” for real or alleged actions of the Soviet state apparatus. It can be noted that several police battalions adopted a similar modus operandi during the first weeks (translation WK). 26. The frequent use of quotation marks in the passage indicates that the narrator himself senses a lack of distance between his own language and a Nazi point of view. The quotes, which are not referring to any concrete documents or texts, constitute the narrator’s problematic attempt to extensively deploy Nazi terminology, perhaps for precision’s sake, and simultaneously extricate himself from the gravitational pull of Nazi ethics. 27. Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: Harper Perennial, 1992). 28. See, for example, ibid., 71. 29. Daniel Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioner: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1996). 30. In essence, in the afterword, the narrator faults Goldhagen for having failed to acknowledge the gap, first, by failing to engage in any meaningful way with the existing interpretive diversity in Holocaust studies and, second, by having claimed to have proven a rigid narrative model of explanation, that is, eliminationist antiSemitism, that violates the diversity inherent in Goldhagen’s own data. 31. In the case of The Origins of the Final Solution the coauthorship results in an interesting diversity of narrative perspectives. The preface is related from the point of view of an explicit collective narrator (“we”), whereas the bulk of the book is told from the perspective of an implicit and impersonal narrator who emerges as a problematic narrator because the narrative worlds of chapters 7 and 8 cannot easily be reconciled with each other. That tension offers two interesting options: one can assume the presence of two different narrators or develop the more radical 447

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conclusion that The Origins of the Final Solution presents the intriguing case of an unreliable nonfiction narrator, see Schmid, Narratology, 66–67; and Nünning, Unreliable Narration. 32. Browning, Origins of the Final Solution, xi. Further citations are documented parenthetically. 33. Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution, was originally conceived of as the second volume of a three-volume project covering also prewar Nazi anti-Jewish policy and the implementation of the Final Solution. But the other two volumes apparently have not yet been published. 34. In this decision, the narrators replicate the narrative scope of the introduction of Raul Hilberg’s The Destruction of the European Jews (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 11–35. 35. For a succinct contextualization and critique of the Sonderweg master narrative, see Cornelius Torp and Sven Oliver Müller, introduction to Imperial Germany Revisited: Continuing Debates and New Perspectives, ed. Sven Oliver Müller and Cornelius Torp (New York: Berghahn, 2011), 1–17. 36. Stone, Histories of the Holocaust, 54ff. 37. Friedländer, for instance, has been identified as a moderate intentionalist by Omer Bartov, Holocaust: Origins, Implementation, Aftermath (London: Routledge, 2000), 4. The author Browning has on previous occasions identified himself as a moderate functionalist; see Christopher Browning, The Path to Genocide: Essays on Launching the Final Solution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 88. I nevertheless prefer the label intentionalist for the narrator of chapter 8 because he focuses so clearly on Hitler and his intentions and, in that sense, differs substantially from the functionalist narrative commitments of the narrator of chapter 7. 38. Stone, Histories of the Holocaust, 68–72; Yehuda Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 4–5; Ian Kershaw, The Nazi Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation (London: Edward Arnold, 1993), 60–68, 81–88. 39. The narrative redeployment of facts even works in cases in which the language of the primary documents appears to be closely aligned with one of the competing lines of interpretation, as Matthäus’s deconstruction of the phrase “direct order” illustrates. The absence of tight logical-semantic ties between facts and interpretations obviously does not preclude close symbolic-rhetorical links. 40. Browning, Ordinary Men, 4, 9, 10, 26. 41. Browning, Origins of the Final Solution, see esp. 424–426; Hitler is mentioned on ninety pages of the book. 42. Incidentally, the opinion conveyed in the second sentence serves to qualify the story’s main interpretive trajectory of the primacy of center agency and thus attests to the presence of analytical excess. 43. J. Garde-Hansen,  A. Hoskins, and  A. Reading, eds., Save as . . . Digital Memories (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). 44. Cristopher Browning, Remembering Survival: Inside a Nazi Slave-Labor Camp (New York: Norton, 2010); about Remembering Survival, see Kansteiner “Gefühlte Wahrheit,” 33–37. 448

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45. Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009). 46. See the thoughtful remarks by Jouni-Matti Kuukkanen, Postnarrativist Philosophy of Historiography (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); and Chris Lorenz, “Historisches Wissen und historische Wirklichkeit: Für einen ‘internen Realismus,’ ” in Schröter and Eddelbüttel, Konstruktion von Wirklichkeit, 65–106.

4. A Reply to Wulf Kansteiner 1. Peter Longerich, Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution of the Jews (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), devotes five pages to ghettoization in this period. In various publications, Götz Aly treats the ghettos as the locally conceived means to either liquidate the Jews or create “impossible circumstances” that would pressure the central government to do so. 2. Peter Witte, Michael Wildt, and Martina Voigt, eds., Der Dienstkalender Heinrich Himmlers 1941/42 (Hamburg: Christians, 1999), 191. 3. Landgericht Köln, Ks 1/52, vol. 3, 747–755 (testimony of Erwin Schulz, February 3, 1953). Otto Rasch had two doctorates and used the double title Dr. Dr. 4. For more on Erwin Schulz, see: Michael Wildt, Generation des Unbedingten (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2003), 561–578; Ralf Ogorreck, Die Einsatzgruppen und die “Genesis der Endlösung” (Berlin: Metropol Verlag, 1996), 190–191; Hans-Heinrich Wilhelm, ed., Rassenpolitik und Kriegführung: Sicherheitspolizei und Wehrmacht in Polen und der Sowjetunion (Passau: Wissenschaftsverlag Robert Rothe, 1991), 220–227. 5. Yitzhak Arad, Shmuel Krakowski, and Shmuel Spector, eds., The Einsatzgruppen Reports, 137 (No. 86, September  17, 1941) (New York: Holocaust Library, 1989). 6. U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) Archive, RG 15.l007m, 8/103/45–62 (Höppner Aktenvermerk, September 2, 1941, and cover letter to Eichmann and Ehlich, September 3, 1941). 7. Christopher R. Browning, with contributions by Jürgen Matthäus, The Origins of the Final Solution (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004), 285–287, 310–311. 8. Ron Rosenbaum, Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of Evil (New York: Random House, 1998).

5. Scales of Postmemory 1. Daniel Mendelsohn, The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (New York: HarperPerennial, 2007); originally published 2006. All further references are given in the text. 449

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2. Mendelsohn quoted in Marianne Hirsch and Nancy K. Miller, eds., Rites of Return: Diaspora Poetics and the Politics of Memory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 108–109. 3. Marianne Hirsch, “The Generation of Postmemory,” Poetics Today 29, no. 1 (2008): 103–128; see also Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). 4. Hirsch, “The Generation of Postmemory,” 105–108. 5. Ibid., 108. 6. Ibid., 114. 7. Ibid., 107. 8. For details, see http://www.danielmendelsohn.com/books/the-lost-reviews (accessed July 1, 2015). 9. Lee Child, “By the Book,” New York Times Book Review, December 23, 2012; http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/23/books/review/lee-child-by-the-book.html?_r=0 (accesssed July 1, 2015). 10. On Foer’s use of the “power of the false,” see Doro Wiese, The Powers of the False: Reading, Writing, Thinking beyond Truth and Fiction (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2014). 11. Derek Attridge, The Singularity of Literature (London: Routledge, 2004). This work draws largely on Jacques Derrida, Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (London: Routledge, 1991); see also Jonathan Culler, “Derrida and the Singularity of Literature,” Cardozo Law Review 27, no. 2 (2005): 869–875; Peter Hallward, Absolutely Postcolonial: Writing between the Singular and the Specific (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002). For a valuable discussion of the concept of the singular drawing on Deleuze’s further elaboration of this concept, see Birgit  M. Kaiser, “The Singularities of Postcolonial Literature: Preindividual (Hi)stories in Mohammed Dib’s ‘Northern Trilogy,’ ” in Postcolonial Literatures and Deleuze: Colonial Pasts, Differential Futures, ed. Lorna Burns and Birgit  M. Kaiser (London: Palgrave, 2012), 123–144. 12. Attridge, Singularity of Literature, 20–21. This definition of the aesthetic in terms of singularity marks a clear departure from the Aristotle-inspired view voiced by Lawrence Langer in 1996 and underscoring the incompatibility of literature and representations of the Holocaust because of the generalizing tendencies of the former: “Literature generalizes human experience, while the events of atrocity we call the Holocaust, insist on their singularity,” in Lawrence Langer, Admitting the Holocaust: Collected Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 77. 13. David Grossman, “Confronting the Beast,” Guardian, September 15, 2007; http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/sep/15/featuresreviews.guardianreview2 (accessed July 14, 2013). 14. On multiscalarity as an analytic perspective, see Geraldine Pratt and Victoria Rosner, eds. The Global and the Intimate: Feminism in Our Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012). 15. Charles Simic, New York Times; quoted on http://www.danielmendelsohn .com/books/the-lost-reviews (accessed July 1, 2015). 450

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16. Hayden White, “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality,” in The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 1–25. 17. In this use of amplification, The Lost stands in an interesting contrast to the understatement and minimalism characteristic of earlier works such as Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five where the small number of words always seems to fall short of the enormity of the events implicitly depicted; see Ann Rigney, “All This Happened More or Less: What a Novelist Made of the Bombing of Dresden,” History and Theory 48, no. 2 (2009): 5–24. 18. Illustrative of this digressive style: a portentous event is announced in the context of the author’s recollections of his bar mitzvah (31), but this is only explained seven pages later (38); his arrival in Bolechow is mentioned (80), but the account of what happened when he got there comes only twenty-seven pages later (107), and this account is then broken off only to be resumed another seven pages later: “When our car pulled up in the tiny, unkempt square, there wasn’t a single person there” (115). 19. The emphasis on narration illustrates the point made by Hayden White that writings on “Holocaustal events” are more about Vorstellung than Darstellung, as much about the act of narration as a presentation of events in themselves; Hayden White, “The Modernist Event,” in Figural Realism: Studies in the Mimesis Effect (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998). On the particular importance of commentary in narrations of the Holocaust, see also Saul Friedländer, Memory, History, and the Extermination of the Jews of Europe (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 132–133. 20. Ann Rigney, Imperfect Histories: The Elusive Past and the Legacy of Romantic Historicism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), 99–120. 21. Maurice Halbwachs, Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire (Paris: Albin Michel, 1994 [1925]). 22. Jean-Luc Nancy, Être singulier pluriel (Paris: Galilée, 1996). 23. Hirsch, “Generation of Postmemory,” 111. 24. W.  G. Sebald uses numbers in a similar way to conjure up the gap between numbers and lived experience in his Luftkrieg und Literatur: Mit einem Essay zu Alfred Andersch (Frankfurt: Fischer, 2001), 11. A good example of Mendelsohn’s insistent use of numbers is found on the occasion of his trip to Copenhagen, where he relates how 8,000 Danish Jews escaped in small boats, comparing this number to the 464 Jews deported to Theresienstadt and to the figures for Bolechow (403). 25. Friedländer, Memory, History, and the Extermination, 133. A similar point is made by Geoffrey Hartman, who argues that historians’ establishing of facts and figures is primarily of importance as a corrective to mythical and distortive representations, while imagination and empathy is needed to turn the past into experience; Geoffrey H. Hartman, “Public Memory and Its Discontents,” in The Uses of Literary History, ed. Marshall Brown (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 73–79. 26. In one of the sharpest and most vocal critiques to date of Mendelsohn’s work, Ruth Franklin complained of Mendelsohn’s overinsistence on the factual 451

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above “all other ways of conjuring the past—particularly art”; Ruth Franklin, “Taking Issue with Daniel Mendelsohn’s Lost,” Slate Magazine, September  29, 2006; www.slate.com (accessed 14 July 2013). While agreeing with much of Franklin’s critique, I believe that the charge she makes to Mendelsohn of wanting to deny the role of the imagination is based on a misreading of his project and on a narrow understanding of the literary. 27. Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 102. 28. Michael Rothberg, “From Gaza to Warsaw: Mapping Multidirectional Memory,” Criticism 53 (2011): 523–548. 29. On the competition between the Holocaust and the Holodomor for a place at the center of European memory, see in particular, Claus Leggewie, Der Kampf um die Europaïsche Erinnerung: Ein Schlachtfeld wird besichtigt (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2011), 127–143. 30. Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009). 31. See http://www.bolechow.org/ (accessed July 14, 2013). 32. For more on the concept of mnemonic procreativity as a feature of the “social life of texts,” see Ann Rigney, The Afterlives of Walter Scott: Memory on the Move (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 49f. 33. Michael Rothberg, “Multidirectional Memory and the Implicated Subject: On Sebald and Kentridge,” in Performing Memory in Art and Popular Culture, ed. Liedeke Plate and Anneke Smelik (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 39–58 (40). 34. “Dans un premier temps, j’ai eu du mal à y “entrer” et j’ai failli le refermer, me rangeant à deux trois critiques lues ici et là, disant que non, ce n’est pas un chef d’oeuvre. Puis, petit à petit, je me suis laissée prendre, ces Disparus sont devenus miens”; posted January 6, 2008, under the title “Merci  M. Mendelsohn”; see http://www.amazon.fr/Les-disparus-Daniel-Mendelsohn/dp/2290016020/ref=sr_1 _1?ie=UTF8&qid=1373920754&sr=8–1&keywords=les+disparus (accessed July 14, 2013). For up to 2,000 reviews by nonprofessional readers (many of whom refer to the demands made by the length of the book in combination with different rewards), see http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/112286.The_Lost. While many of these reviews point to the similarities with their own family history, others flag themselves as outsiders; see, for example, the review dated October 27, 2007, by self-confessed Ukrainophile “Leanna.” 35. Avishai Margalit, The Ethics of Memory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).

6. Interview with Daniel Mendelsohn, Author of The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million 1. Daniel Mendelsohn, The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (New York: HarperCollins, 2006), subsequent page references are provided in the text. 452

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7. The Death of the Witness; or, The Persistence of the Differend 1. See Marc Nichanian, Le Roman de la Catastrophe (Geneva: MétisPresse, 2008). 2. Shoshanna Felman, “In the Era of Testimony: Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah,” Yale French Studies 79 (1991): 41 (italics in the original). 3. Ibid., 53. 4. Marc Nichanian, The Historiographic Perversion, trans. Gil Anidjar (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 1. 5. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, 1985), 451. All the quotations are taken from 451–453 without further notice. 6. David Rousset, Les Jours de notre mort (Paris: Hachette, 1993–2008), 584. The volume is published with a preface by Maurice Nadeau, which appeared for the first time in the journal Lignes (May 2000). The same issue of Lignes contains a beautiful analysis by Catherine Coquio of the two books written by Rousset in 1947 and 1948: L’Univers concentrationnaire and Les Jours de notre mort. 7. Idelber Avelar, The Letter of Violence: Essays on Narrative, Ethics, and Politics (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). The lines I am citing and commenting on are from the end of the first chapter, entitled “From Plato to Pinochet: Torture, Confession, and the History of Truth.” 8. Ibid., 47. 9. Ibid., 48. 10. The most important among these include: Cathy Caruth, ed., Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995); and Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crisis of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (London: Routledge, 1992), which includes the famous essay on Lanzmann’s Shoah. Felman’s essay was first published in French (in a translation done by Lanzmann himself, in collaboration with Judith Ertl) in Au sujet de Shoah (Paris: Belin, 1990), 55–154. 11. Avelar, Letter of Violence, 49. 12. Hayden White, “The Politics of Historical Interpretation: Discipline and DeSublimation,” Critical Inquiry 9, no. 1 (1982), republished in White, The Content of the Form (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 58–82. 13. Jean-François Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 56–57. 14. Ibid., 57. 15. Ibid. 16. Carlo Ginzburg, “Just one Witness,” in Probing the Limits of Representation, ed. Saul Friedländer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 96. 17. Felman “In the Era of Testimony,” 53. It is in this sentence that Shoshana Felman designates the nature of the catastrophic event and, at the same time, negates it. She assigns a function of refutation and historicization to the testimonial operation, a function that is from now on allotted to art. Thanks to this turn of events, which is obviously Christian in its essence, the witness resuscitates from his 453

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ashes, he comes back from the dead. This is what comprises the déni that I mention earlier. 18. Lyotard, Differend, 57–58. 19. Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York: Zone Books), 164. 20. See Marc Nichanian, Mourning Philology (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014). See also Nichanian, “On the Archive III: The Secret; or, Borge at Yale,” trans. Gil Anidjar, Boundary 2 40 (Fall 2013): 3, 1–38. 21. Maurice Blanchot, La Folie du jour (Paris: Gallimard, 2002), 29. 22. See The Fiction Hill Blanchot Reader: Fiction and Literary Essays (Barrytown, NY: Station Hill, 1995), 199. 23. James Hulbert, the translator of “Living On,” quotes Lydia Davis’s translation word for word, but changes the phrase “I had lost the sense of the story” into “I had lost the thread of the narrative,” which is not better. See Deconstruction and Criticism (New York: Seabury, 1979), 97. Avital Ronell always keeps Davis’s translation, but when Derrida himself once uses the expression “orienté par le sens de l’histoire” (Parages [Paris: Galilée], 248), she hesitates and translates “oriented by a sense of history or his story” (Critical Inquiry [Fall 1980]: 78; and Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge [New York: Routledge, 1992], 248). 24. Here is Derrida’s precise formulation: “If Freud suffered from mal d’archive, his case stems from a trouble de l’archive, he is not without his place, simultaneously, in the archive fever or disorder we are experiencing today, concerning its lightest symptoms or the great holocaustic tragedies of our modern history and historiography.” See Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 90. 25. Carlo Ginzburg, History, Rhetoric, and Proof: The Menahem Stern Jerusalem Lectures (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1999), 50. 26. Jacques Derrida, “Force of Law,” trans. M. Quaintance, in Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar (New York: Routledge, 2002), 296. 27. Ibid. 28. Nichanian, “On the Archive III” (see the French original in my book, Le Sujet de l’histoire. Pour une phénoménologie du survivant [Paris: Lignes, 2015]), 53–114. 29. Here, I am following James Hulbert’s translation in “Living On. Borderlines.” This phrase translates Derrida’s “la sur-vérité de la survie.” 30. Maurice Blanchot, The Madness of the Day (Barrytown, NY: Station Hill, 1981). 31. Franz Kafka, “Josephine, or the Mouse Singer,” in The Metamorphosis and Other Stories (New York: Vintage Books, 2002), 148. 32. Harold Bloom, Deconstruction and Criticism (London: Routledge and Henley, 1979), 133–134. 33. I am following Lydia Davis’s translation in Maurice Blanchot, The Last Man (New York: Ubu Editions, 2007), 4. 34. Ibid., 11. 35. Ibid. 36. I slightly modified Lydia Davis’s translation. The French original says: “Il ne fallait pas qu’il se dédoublât.” 454

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37. Ibid., 7–8 (italics in original). 38. Ibid., 11. Part II: Remediations of the Archive 1. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 16–17 (italics in original). 2. Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 53. 8. The Ethics of the Algorithm The research presented here owes a significant debt of gratitude to USC Shoah Foundation, particularly Stephen Smith and Samuel Gustman, for providing the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) digital humanities research team with a copy of the entire database of metadata related to the testimonies in the Visual History Archive. All the analyses in this chapter were performed at UCLA under the direction of Todd Presner. This chapter represents his views and the team’s research and does not necessarily represent the views of USC Shoah Foundation. I would like to thank Zoe Borovsky, Rachel Deblinger, Yoh Kawano, Mahati Kumar, David Shepard, and Monit Tyagi. In addition, I would like to thank Alan Liu, David Myers, Eric Rentschler, Judith Ryan, Bill Seaman, Kristine Stiles, Hayden White, and other colleagues at UCLA, Harvard, and Duke University for their valuable feedback on earlier versions of this chapter.

1. See http://www.joodsmonument.nl/?lang=en (accessed June 1, 2014). In April 2016, a new version of the memorial launched, replacing the version discussed here. The updated memorial uses much of the same data but has a new, zoomable interface based on the names and photographs of the victims, rather than pixel boxes. 2. USC Shoah Foundation Institute Thesaurus (June 2010); https://sfi.usc.edu /sites/default/files/docfiles/USC_SF_Thesaurus_101212_0.pdf. 3. Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000). 4. Edwin Black, IBM and the Holocaust (New York: Dialog, 2001). 5. In 2014, the Shoah Foundation added nearly 2,000 testimonies from San Francisco’s Jewish Family and Children’s Services (JFCS). The analysis presented here does not include the recent addition of these testimonies from JFCS, which have not (as of this writing) been fully indexed. 6. See the discussion by James Young, At Memory’s Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000). 7. Hayden White, “The Modernist Event,” in Figural Realism: Studies in the Mimesis Effect (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 66–86. 8. Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller: Reflections of the Works of Nikolai Leskov,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 83. 455

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9. For an excellent overview, see Noah Shenker, Reframing Holocaust Testimony (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015). 10. David Boder interviewed 130 survivors, in 9 languages, in displaced persons (DP) camps during the summer of 1946. The archive is available online at http://voices.iit.edu/david_boder. For an account of Boder’s work, see Alan Rosen, The Wonder of Their Voices: The 1946 Holocaust Interviews of David Boder (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). Rosen points out that Boder did not use the term “testimony,” but rather called his DP interviews “narratives, reports, personal histories and documents, stories, and even ‘tales,’ ” 12. Moreover, Boder, reacting to the flood of newsreel footage of the liberation of concentration camps, considered the visual to be silent, in need of narrative and voices. In this regard, his wire recordings were aimed to provide “first-hand auditory material . . . that sought to augment—and, perhaps, to challenge—the camera’s work,” 130. 11. Annette Wieviorka, The Era of the Witness, trans. Jared Stark (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006). 12. Geoffrey Hartman, The Longest Shadow: In the Aftermath of the Holocaust (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 133. 13. Geoffrey Hartman, “The Ethics of Witness: An Interview with Geoffrey Hartman,” by Ian Balfour and Rebecca Comay, in Lost in the Archives, ed. Rebecca Comay (Toronto: Alphabet City Media, 2002), 492–509, esp. 495, 501. 14. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crisis in Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York: Routledge, 1992), 72, 85. 15. Ibid., 58. 16. Ibid., 67. Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz, trans. Stuart Wolf (New York: Collier Books Macmillan, 1993), 60. 17. Hartman, “Ethics of Witness,” 492. This call of humble readiness (“Here I am”) is uttered not just by Abraham to God (Genesis 22:1) but also by God, as a warning, in Isaiah (“I was ready to be sought by those who did not ask for me . . . I said Here I am, Here I am, . . . but when I called, no one answered, when I spoke they did not listen” (Isaiah 65:1–2, 66:4). “Here I am” is also said by Jacob (Genesis 46:2), Moses (Exodus 3:5), and Samuel (I Samuel 3:4). 18. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 29. 19. Ibid., 46. 20. Compare “Guidelines for the Construction, Format, and Management of Monolingual Controlled Vocabularies” (ANSI/NISO Z39.19–2005) (Bethesda, MD: National Information Standards Organization, 2005). 21. Patent 5,832,495. 22. Claude Shannon’s foundational ideas of information theory were articulated in his article, “A Mathematical Theory of Communication” (1948), in which the goal of a communication system was to transmit a message over a channel to a receiver with the minimal amount of noise possible. Available online at http://cm.bell -labs.com/cm/ms/what/shannonday/shannon1948.pdf. 23. The reference is to Friedrich Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800/1900, trans. Michael Metteer, with Chris Cullens (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990). 456

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24. Alan Liu, Local Transcendence: Essays on Postmodern Historicism and the Database (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 216. 25. See http://themediapreserve.com/index.html. Preservation Technologies LLC is owned by another company called Digital Innovation LLC, which acquires patent technologies and licenses them to other companies. Since 2011, its subsidiary, Preservation Technologies, has instigated a litigation campaign against more than a dozen companies involved in digital media streaming and digital library platforms, including Hulu, Netflix, Vimeo, ESPN, CBS, Sony, Fox, Dish, and New York Times Digital, based on patent infringement. 26. Patent 5,832,495, “Summary of Invention,” 3. 27. Johanna Drucker, SpecLab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 9. 28. Samuel Gustman, conversation with author, February 6, 2012. 29. Patent 5,832,495, 10. 30. While the testimonies are in thirty-nine different languages, the database is only in English. Because all content is tagged with English metadata, the database also represents a profound translation effect that loses the linguistic and cultural specificity of the terms used by the survivors. 31. “Guidelines for the Construction, Format, and Management of Monolingual Controlled Vocabularies,” 2. 32. The thesaurus and database structure were designed to be modular in that they can be applied to testimonies about other genocides. The foundation has already begun the indexing of testimonies from the Armenian genocide and the Rwandan genocide, using a revised version of the thesaurus to include different place names and experiences (such as “roadblocks,” a key term in Rwanda), as well as to remove certain terms that do not apply to these genocides. With the new testimonies from San Francisco’s Jewish Family and Children’s Services, there are also possibilities of using indexing terms from other genocides (such as “reconciliation,” a term that appears frequently in the Rwandan testimonies) to tag Holocaust testimonies. As my work on this project continues, I hope to explore questions of comparative genocide studies through these comparative information architectures. For a thoughtful discussion of some of the challenges involved in avoiding the “one size fits all” model of producing testimonies of genocide, see Noah Shenker, “Through the Lens of the Holocaust: The Holocaust as a Paradigm for Documenting Genocide Testimonies,” History and Memory (Spring/Summer 2016), 141–175. 33. Krispin Brooks, conversation with the author, February 6, 2012. 34. Our digital humanities team at UCLA is analyzing all of the data in the database in order to develop “normativity indexes” for each testimony ID based on patterns in the data. The “normativity index” is based strictly on the data in the database and is meant to provide a baseline to determine the effectiveness of the tagging process and also identify which testimonies (from the standpoint of the data) are “outliers.” To do this, we looked at both narrative form and content in order to measure the likelihood that certain indexing categories would be assigned at a given percentage point in a testimony (form), as well as the likelihood that certain experiences or themes would be discussed (content). These indexes are intended to help make the database better by providing flags for the Visual History 457

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Archive (VHA) to identify testimonies that have not been indexed very well, as well as identify the widest possible range of experiences described and narrative strategies used by survivors. 35. Berel Lang, Act and Idea in the Nazi Genocide (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992). 36. “Indexing Guidelines,” Shoah Foundation, Visual History Archive, 5. 37. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. Roy Harris (Chicago: Open Court, 1998). Also, discussion by Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 230–231; and  N. Katherine Hayles, “Narrative and Database: Natural Symbionts,” PMLA 122, no. 5 (October 2007): 1603–1608, esp. 1606. 38. Boder developed an extensive method to quantify trauma based on a “traumatic inventory” of sufferings recounted by survivors: David Boder, “The Impact of Catastrophe: I. Assessment and Evaluation,” Journal of Psychology 38 (1954): 3–50. 39. Manovich, Language of New Media, 237. 40. See also Hayles, “Narrative and Database.” 41. See the discussion by Stephen Ramsay, Reading Machines: Toward an Algorithmic Criticism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011), 85. 42. Saul Friedländer, The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945 (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), xvi, xxv–xxvi. 43. Franco Moretti first explored this notion of “distant reading” in an article called “Conjectures on World Literature,” New Left Review (January–February 2000): 54–68. A more thorough and wide-ranging analysis of the practice is found in Moretti, Distant Reading (London: Verso, 2013). 44. Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature,” 57. 45. Analogously, Moretti argues that the vast majority of books are simply never read by human beings, amounting to what he calls the great “slaughterhouse of literature.” In his estimation, 99.5 percent of the novels published in nineteenthcentury Britain are never read or taught; instead, literary scholars are fixated on a tiny canon of works that are radically unrepresentative of the massive number of books, authors, publishing houses, and markets of that period, and that this fixation on the canon greatly skews our understanding of its cultural texture and social history. Franco Moretti, “The Slaughterhouse of Literature,” Modern Language Quarterly 61, no. 1 (March 2000): 207–227. 46. Noah Shenker analyzes a related issue of canonicity within the Shoah Foundation, namely its internal protocols for assigning ratings (from “exceptional” to “unexemplary”) to particular interviews. See his discussion in Reframing Holocaust Testimony, 135–147. 47. Our UCLA digital humanities team is currently developing a series of alternative front-end interfaces based on network graphs that would allow users of the VHA to “browse” the entirety of the database from a multiplicity of perspectives and entry points. 48. Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2006), 49–50. 49. Drucker, SpecLab, 17. 458

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9. On the Ethics of Technology and Testimony 1. Sima Wagner, “Interview 9508,” Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation, 2013. September 7, 2013. 2. Note that the spelling of their family name changed from Wajner to Wagner after their arrival in America. This means that the daughter who did not survive has a different family name than her parents when they gave testimony. This is one example of many ways in which personal names and geographic names changed or had spelling variations for the same person or place. “Cataloguing Guidelines,” USC Shoah Foundation, Institute for Visual History and Education, 2006. https://sfi .usc.edu/vha/indexing, September 7, 2013. 3. Rubin Wagner, “Interview 9594,” Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation, 2013. September 7, 2013. 4. See, for example: Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), xxiv–xxv. 5. Most search engines retrieve and rank information based on relevance. This is a combination of matching the keywords with the most frequently accessed material. Put another way, the more web content is accessed, the higher up in the rankings it appears because the search engine is programmed to find the material that is relevant to more people. Frequency of access becomes a virtuous cycle: the more a page is accessed, the higher up in the rankings it appears, which means it is more likely to be retrieved and accessed during a search and therefore more likely to be accessed again, thereby improving its rankings further. 6. As described earlier in the chapter, “bit-level preservation” ensures that if any single unit—one bit—of digital information is lost within any master file, the systems will identify the loss anywhere in the four petabytes of video data that now make up the archive, and restore the missing information from one of three identical files. The system does this automatically by checking every file every three months.

10. A “Spatial Turn” in Holocaust Studies? 1. Jorge Luis Borges, “On Exactitude in Science,” in Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley (New York: Penguin, 1998 [1954]), 325. 2. See Charles W. J. Withers, “Place and the ‘Spatial Turn’ in Geography and History,” Journal of the History of Ideas 70, no. 4 (2009): 637–658. 3. Anne K. Knowles, Tim Cole, and Alberto Giordano, eds., Geographies of the Holocaust (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014). 4. See Hayden White, “The Politics of Historical Interpretation: Discipline and De-Sublimation,” Critical Inquiry 9, no. 1 (1982): 113–137; White, “Historical Emplotment and the Problem of Truth,” in Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the Final Solution, ed. Saul Friedländer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 37–53; White, “The Modernist Event,” in The Persistence 459

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of History: Cinema Television and the Modern Event, ed. Vivian Sobchack (New York: Routledge, 1996), 17–38. 5. U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Geographies of the Holocaust; http://www .ushmm.org/learn/mapping-initiatives/geographies-of-the-holocaust/; Stanford Humanities Lab, Holocaust Geographies; http://www.stanford.edu/group/spatialhistory /cgi-bin/site/project.php?id=1015. 6. Knowles, Cole, and Giordano, Geographies, 2. 7. Ibid. 8. White, “Historical Emplotment,” 29–30. 9. Ibid., 30. 10. Ibid., 31. 11. Ibid., 40. 12. White, “Modernist Event,” 29. 13. See Knowles, Cole, and Giordano, Geographies, 5, 150, 230. 14. Ibid., 180, 183. 15. Ibid., 13. In addition, the chapters are disseminated with a linguistic turn type of awareness: from references to “close readings” of documents, to approving comments about postmodern theorists such as Giorgio Agamben and Edward Soja, to the ubiquitous utilization of distancing scare quotes. 16. Ibid. 17. Ibid., 12, 80. 18. Ibid., 1. 19. Ibid., 230. 20. Ibid., 3. 21. Ibid., 58, 22, 5. 22. Joseph Frank, “Spatial Form in Literature: An Essay in Two Parts,” Sewanee Review 53, no. 2 (1945): 239. 23. Knowles, Cole, and Giordano, Geographies, 5, 13. 24. I have counted nineteen instances. 25. Knowles, Cole, and Giordano, Geographies, 25–26. 26. Three paragraphs for “the universe of the camps,” ibid., 26–28; two for the ghettoization of Budapest Jews by Nazi “doctors of space,” ibid., 123–126; seven for the longest direct narrative of the “hunt for Jews” in fascist Italy, ibid., 54–57. 27. Ibid., 23, 64, 53. 28. I thank Todd Presner for having pointed out this important connection between GoH and White’s notion of middle-voicedness. 29. White, “Historical Emplotment,” 48–49 (emphases in the original). 30. Knowles, Cole, and Giordano, Geographies, 9, 63, 64. 31. Ibid., 24, 8. 32. Ibid., 128. 33. Donna Haraway, “Deanimations: Maps and Portraits of Life Itself” in Picturing Science, Producing Art, ed. Caroline A. Jones and Peter Galison (New York: Routledge, 1998), 184. 34. Bruno Latour, “How to Be Iconophilic in Art, Science, and Religion,” in Jones and Galison, Picturing Science, Producing Art, 419. 460

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35. Bruno Latour and Valery November, “Entering a Risky Territory: Space in the Age of Digital Navigation,” Environment and Planning: Society and Space 28 (2010): 589. 36. Ibid., 586 (emphasis in the original). 37. Ibid., 589. 38. Haraway, “Deanimations,” 185, 184. 39. Knowles, Cole, and Giordano, Geographies, 8, 12. 40. Ibid., 129–131. 41. Ibid., 145. 42. Ibid., 21. 43. Ibid. 44. Saul Friedländer, Reflections of Nazism: An Essay on Kitsch and Death (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 21. 45. Ibid., 26–28. 46. Knowles, Cole, and Giordano, Geographies, 18. 47. Ibid., 27. 48. Ibid., 23. 49. W. J. T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 5–6. 50. Friedländer, Reflections of Nazism, 12. 51. Ibid., 94–95. 52. Knowles, Cole, and Giordano, Geographies, 8. References to the connection between geography and visual knowing are also at the following pages: 12, 44, 63, 81, 131, 175–176,179. 53. The quotes are in Knowles, Cole, and Giordano, Geographies, 214, and are referred to image 7.5 on the same page. Another example of “visual symbology” is image 4.6 on page 105. 54. Ibid., 213. 55. Ibid., 222. 56. Ibid. 57. Ibid., 222, 8. 58. Ibid., 6, 177, 187. 59. Ibid., 209, 210. 60. Ibid., 110. 61. Ibid., 211. 62. Ibid. 63. Ibid. 64. Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 15. 65. Ibid., 17. GoH authors often use the same term, “synoptic,” to define their approach. See, for example, 20, 42. 66. Ibid., 589. 67. Martin Jay, Songs of Experience: Modern American and European Variations on a Universal Theme (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). 68. Ibid., 6. 69. Ibid., 404. 461

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70. The “experience turn” in philosophy of history is identified with Frank Ankersmit, Sublime Historical Experience (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005); and Eelco Runia, “Presence,” History and Theory, 45, no. 1 (2006): 1–29. Along similar lines, see also Hans Gumbrecht, Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004). For more on these issues, see also Anton Froeyman, “Frank Ankersmit and Eelco Runia: The Presence and the Otherness of the Past,” Rethinking History 16, no. 3 (2012): 393– 415; Presence: Philosophy, History, and Cultural Theory for the Twenty-First Century, ed. Ranjan Ghosh and Ethan Kleinberg (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013). On the disturbing cultural roots of the “presence” paradigm in the fascist vision of history, see Claudio Fogu, “Actualism and the Fascist Historic Imaginary,” History and Theory, 42, no. 2 (2003): 196–222. Finally, for useful discussions of the “experience turn” in historiography, and the humanities at large, see Dominic LaCapra, History in Transit: Experience, Identity, Critical Theory (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004); and Mary Pickering, History, Experience and Cultural Studies (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997). 71. Knowles, Cole, and Giordano, Geographies, 141, 209. 72. Ibid., 177, 187. 73. Ibid., 197. 74. Jay, Songs of Experience, 2; but Jay’s reference is to Hans Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Seabury Press, 1975), 310. 75. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 361–400. 76. Jonas Grethlein, “Experientiality and ‘Narrative Reference’: With Thanks to Thucydides,” History and Theory 49, no. 3 (2010): 331. 77. Alon Confino, “Narrative Form and Historical Sensation: On Saul Friedländer’s The Years of Extermination,” History and Theory 48, no. 3 (2009): 209, 218. 78. Wulf Kansteiner, “Success, Truth, and Modernism in Holocaust Historiography: Reading Saul Friedländer Thirty-Five Years after the Publication of Metahistory,” History and Theory 48, no. 2 (2009): 33, 35. 79. Knowles, Cole, and Giordano, Geographies, 185. 80. Ibid., 200 (emphasis in the original). 81. Ibid. (emphasis in the original). 82. Ibid., 113 (emphasis added). 83. Marc Bloch, The Historian’s Craft (New York: Vintage, 1964), 36–37. 84. See Claudio Fogu, “Digitalizing Historical Consciousness,” History and Theory: Theme Issue 47 (2009): 103–121. 85. Hayden White, “The Burden of History,” History and Theory 5, no. 2 (1966): 114.

11. Interview with Anne Knowles, Tim Cole, Alberto Giordano, and Paul B. Jaskot, Contributing Authors of Geographies of the Holocaust 1. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (Middlesex, UK: Penguin Books, 1963). Arendt famously argues in this text that 462

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the genocidal goal of killing one entire human group challenges the very essential nature of humanity, that is, its diversity. 2. Barbara Maria Stafford, “The Visualization of Knowledge from Enlightenment to Postmodernism,” in Good Looking: Essays on the Virtue of Images (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 20–40. 3. See Paul B. Jaskot, Anne Kelly Knowles, and Chester Harvey, “Visualizing the Archive: Building at Auschwitz as a Geographic Problem” and Anne Kelly Knowles and Paul B. Jaskot, “Mapping the SS Concentration Camps,” in Geographies of the Holocaust, ed. Anne K. Knowles, Tim Cole, and Alberto Giordano (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014), 158–191 and 18–51, respectively. 4. Andrew Charlesworth, “Towards a Geography of the Shoah,” Journal of Historical Geography 18, no. 4 (1992): 464–469; Andrew Charlesworth, “The Topography of Genocide,” in The Historiography of the Holocaust, ed. Dan Stone (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 216–252; Tim Cole and Graham Smith, “Ghettoization and the Holocaust: Budapest, 1944,” Journal of Historical Geography 21, no. 3 (1995): 300–316; Tim Cole, Holocaust City: The Making of a Jewish Ghetto (New York: Routledge, 2003); Tim Cole, Traces of the Holocaust: Journeying in and out of the Ghettos (London: Continuum, 2011). 5. Johanna Drucker, Graphesis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014). 6. Saul Friedländer, Reflections of Nazism: An Essay on Kitsch and Death (New York: Harper and Row, 1982). 7. Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). 8. For the panopticon, see, famously, Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977). 9. W.  G. Sebald, Austerlitz, trans. Anthea Bell (New York: Modern Library, 2001). 10. Denis Wood, “Unleashing the Power of the Map,” in Rethinking the Power of Maps (New York: Guilford Press, 2010), 39–66. See also Denis Wood and John Fels, “The Propositional Logic of the Map,” in The Natures of Maps: Cartographic Constructions of the Natural World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008): 26–33. 11. Richter is one of innumerable postwar artists who have taken up the theme of the Nazi past and the need to memorialize its victims. See Paul B. Jaskot, The Nazi Perpetrator: Postwar German Art and the Politics of the Right (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012). 12. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981). 13. Friedländer, Reflections of Nazism. 14. Simone Gigliotti, Marc J. Masurovsky, and Erik Steiner, “From the Camp to the Road: Representing the Evacuations from Auschwitz, January 1945,” in Knowles, Cole, and Giordano, Geographies of the Holocaust, 209. 15. Waitman Wade Beorn, “Killing on the Ground and in the Mind: The Spatialities of Genocide in the East,” in Knowles, Cole, and Giordano, Geographies of the Holocaust, 112. 463

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16. Gigliotti et al., “From the Camp to the Road,” 208–209. 17. Hilene Flanzbaum, “‘But Wasn’t It Terrific?’: A Defense of Liking Life Is Beautiful,” Yale Journal of Criticism 14, no. 1 (2001): 273–286. 18. Compare Hayden White, “Historical Emplotment and the Problem of Truth,” in Probing the Limits of Representation, ed. Saul Friedländer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 37–53. 19. Joseph Frank, The Idea of Spatial Form (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1991). 20. See White, “Historical Emplotment,” 41–42. 21. Hayden White, “The Modernist Event,” in Figural Realism (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 66–86. 22. Jan Gross, Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland (New York: Penguin, 2002). 23. Beorn, “Killing in the Mind and on the Ground,” 88–119. 24. Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books, 2010). 25. Alberto Giordano, Anne Kelly Knowles, and Tim Cole, “Geographies of the Holocaust,” in Knowles, Cole, and Giordano, Geographies of the Holocaust, 1. 26. Tim Cole and Alberto Giordano, “Bringing the Ghetto to the Jew: Spatialities of Ghettoization in Budapest,” in Knowles, Cole, and Giordano, Geographies of the Holocaust, 151. 27. Paul B. Jaskot and Tim Cole, “Afterword,” in Knowles, Cole, and Giordano, Geographies of the Holocaust, 232. 28. Thomas Bender, “Theory, Experience, and the Motion of History,” in Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice 11, no. 4 (2007): 495–500.

12. Freeze- Framing I would like to thank Samuel Gilbert and the editors of this volume for their helpful comments on this chapter. 1. Saul Friedländer, introduction to Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution,” ed. Saul Friedländer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 3. 2. Ibid., 332. 3. Saul Friedländer, The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945 (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), xxv. 4. In an interview he gave to Deborah Lipstadt, Friedländer told her that after a publisher criticized his first draft of When Memory Comes (1979), he hesitated and asked himself, “ ‘What do I do now?’ and I called Claude Lanzmann and asked him maybe a dialogue would help me to say things, you know we would record it, and that would be a dialogue, and he agreed.” See “Holocaust Denial on Trial,” Emory University; http://www.hdot.org/en/learning/podcasts/friedlander.html (accessed May 25, 2015). See also the epilogue interview with Saul Friedländer in this volume. 464

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5. Anton Kaes, “Holocaust and the End of History: Postmodern Historiography in Cinema,” in Probing the Limits of Representation, 221. 6. Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 41. 7. In Probing the Limits of Representation, Saul Friedländer and Carlo Ginzburg, addressing the question of narrating the Holocaust without any reference to film, interpreted the difficulty as part of the ontology of language as it is exposed in and through the Holocaust. Ginzburg quoted Jean-François Lyotard’s metaphor of the Holocaust, and Auschwitz in particular, as “an earthquake [that] destroys not only lives, buildings, and objects but also the instruments used to measure earthquakes, directly and indirectly.” Though Ginzburg declared himself unconvinced by Lyotard’s pessimistic assessment of the role of the historian in shedding light on what happened at the most infamous of the death camps, his rejection was not absolute. See Carlo Ginzburg, “Just One Witness,” in Probing the Limits of Representation, 96. See also an interview Amos Goldberg conducted with Friedländer for the Shoah Resource Center at Yad Vashem: “An Interview with Saul Friedländer,” December 29, 1997; http://www.yadvashem.org/odot_pdf/Microsoft%20Word%20 -%203854.pdf (accessed May 1, 2013). 8. Friedländer, The Years of Extermination, xvii. 9. For the problematic reception of Night and Fog in Israel, see Nitzan Lebovic, “Alain Resnais’ Nuit et Brouillard in the Israeli Mind: The Reception Of Holocaust Images,” in Regaining Memory: Picturing the Holocaust with Night and Fog, ed. Ewout van der Knaap (London: Wallflower, 2005), 86–105. 10. Idith Zertal, Israel’s Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 2. 11. Magid is following here Jaob Neusner’s understanding, taken from Neusner, The Jewish War against the Jews: Reflections on Golah, Shoah, and Torah (New York: Ktav, 1984), 62, 71. Quoted and developed in Shaul Magid, American PostJudaism: Identity and Renewal in a Postethnic Society (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 205; Barbie Zelizer, Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory through the Camera’s Eye (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 204. 12. I use here Idith Zertal’s translation, taken from a reception for the veterans of the First Zionist Congress, August 17, 1947, In the Battle, E, 213–215. Idith Zertal, Israel’s Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 47. 13. Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, vol. 1, The Years of Persecution, 1933–1939 (New York: HarperCollins, 1997), 1–2. 14. Telephone interview with the author, April 7, 2012. 15. In an interview in which he blasted Spielberg’s aesthetic of historical recreation in Schindler’s List, Lanzmann once said the following about the possible value of found Nazi film footage: “If I had stumbled on a real SS film—a secret film, because filming was strictly forbidden—that showed how 3,000 Jewish men, women, and children were gassed in Auschwitz’s crematorium 2, not only would I not have shown it but I would have destroyed it.” Claude Lanzmann, “Why Spielberg Has Distorted the Truth,” quoted in Miriam Bratu 465

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Hansen, “Schindler’s List is not Shoah: The Second Commandment, Popular Modernism, and Public Memory,” Critical Inquiry 22 (Winter 1996): 292–312, esp. 301. 16. Telephone interview with the author, April 7, 2012. 17. Bernstein defines backshadowing in the following way: “Backshadowing is a kind of retroactive foreshadowing in which the shared knowledge of the outcome of a series of events by narrator and listener is used to judge the participants in those events as though they too should have known what was to come.” Michael A. Bernstein, Foregone Conclusions: Against Apocalyptic History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 16. 18. Gertrud Koch, Die Eingestellung ist die Einstellung: Visuelle Konstruktion des Judentums (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1992), 9. 19. Kracauer, Theory of Film, 41. 20. Libby Saxton, Haunted Images: Film, Ethics, Testimony and the Holocaust (London: Wallflower, 2008). 21. Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988), 24. 22. Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, vol. 1, The Years of Persecution, 1933–1939 (New York: HarperCollins, 1997), 5. 23. Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1947), 152. 24. Dominick LaCapra, Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 14. 25. I would like to thank Claudio Fogu and Todd Presner for pointing out this important aspect. 26. Saul Friedländer, Reflections of Nazism: An Essay on Kitsch and Death, trans. Thomas Weyr (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 93. 27. Telephone interview with the author, May 22, 2015. 28. Bill Nichols, “Documentary Reenactment and the Fantasmatic Subject,” Critical Inquiry 35, no. 1 (2008): 74. 29. Ibid., 73. 30. Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto: The Journal of Emmanuel Ringelblum, trans. and ed. Jacob Sloan (New York: Schocken Books, 1975). 31. Yael Hersonski, “Sicha: Sh’tikat Ha’Archion” (A Conversation: Silence of the Archive [A Film Unfinished]), Teoria UVikoret 40 (2012): 282. 32. Bill Nichols and Michael Renov, eds., Cinema’s Alchemist: The Films of Péter Forgács (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 225. 33. For an analysis of “the prophetic” element in Nazi rhetoric, following Klemperer and others, see Andreas Musolff, “The Reception of Antisemitic Imagery in Nazi Germany and Popular Opinion—Lessons for Today,” in Analyzing Fascist Discourse: European Fascism in Talk and Text, ed. Ruth Wodak and John E. Richardson (New York: Routledge, 2013), 56–57. 34. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harvest, 1976), 349. 35. Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1:199. 36. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 350. 466

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37. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 38. Ilan Avisar, Screening the Holocaust: Cinema’s Images of the Unimaginable (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 25. 39. Nichols and Renov, Cinema’s Alchemist, 17. 40. Telephone interview with the author, May 22, 2015. 41. Ibid. 42. Zertal, Israel’s Holocaust, 2, 10. 43. Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, “Racism and Ethics: Constructing Alternative History,” in Impossible Images: Contemporary Art after the Holocaust, ed. Shelly Hornstein, Laura Levitt, and Laurence Silberstein (New York: New York University Press, 2003), 125; Adi Ophir, “On Sanctifying the Holocaust: An AntiTheological Treatise,” in Impossible Images, 196. 44. Ezrahi, “Racism and Ethics.” 45. Phone interview, conducted on May 22, 2015. 46. Friedländer, Reflections of Nazism, 26. 47. Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 3. 48. Ernst van Alpen, “Toward a New Historiography: The Aesthetics of Temporality,” in Cinema’s Alchemist, 61. 49. Thomas Elsaesser, German Cinema: Terror and Trauma, Cultural Memory since 1945 (New York: Routledge, 2014), 49. 50. See, Nurith Gertz and Gal Hermoni, “History of Violence: From the Trauma of Expulsion to the Holocaust in Israeli Cinema,” in Deeper than Oblivion: Trauma and Memory in Israeli Cinema, ed. Boaz Hagin and Raz Yosef (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), 223–262. In their chapter, Gertz and Hermoni follow the five decades of Israeli films that explored the inherent connection that ties the trauma of the Holocaust to the trauma of the Arab expulsion in 1948, a fusion that is “constituting a covert trauma, hidden beneath the overt trauma of the Holocaust. . . . The two traumas feed off each other, rendering impossible healing and working-through” (248). 51. Telephone interview with the author, May 22, 2015. 52. Derrida, Archive Fever, 64.

14. Deconstructivism and the Holocaust 1. Theodor Adorno’s famous quotation appeared in his essay, “Cultural Criticism and Society,” which was published in 1951. Quoted in Neil Levi and Michael Rothberg, The Holocaust: Theoretical Readings (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003), 281. 2. Adorno wrote, “The so-called artistic representation of the sheer physical pain of people beaten to the ground by rifle butts contains, however remotely, the power to elicit enjoyment out of it.” Cited in “Commitment,” in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, ed. Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt (New York: Continuum, 1982), 304. 467

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3. Levi and Rothberg, Holocaust, 287. 4. Mark Godfrey, Abstraction and the Holocaust (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 9–12. 5. Between the end of the Second World War and the mid-1960s, many figures in Western culture confronted the Holocaust’s legacy. To cite merely a few examples, the memoirs of Elie Wiesel, Primo Levi, and Jean Améry; the novels of John Hershey, André Schwarz-Bart, and Jerzy Kosinki; the plays of Rolf Hochhuth and Peter Weiss; the poems of Paul Celan and Nelly Sachs; and the paintings of Barnett Newman, Morris Louis, and Mark Rothko all registered the Holocaust’s impact in different ways. See Gavriel D. Rosenfeld, Building after Auschwitz: Jewish Architecture and the Memory of the Holocaust (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), 46–47. 6. Modern architects Percival Goodman and Louis  I. Kahn in 1949 and 1966, respectively, tried but failed to realize their visions for commemorating the Holocaust in New York City. See Rosenfeld, Building after Auschwitz, 66–68, 123–126. 7. Ibid., 157–166. 8. For a broader discussion of Eisenman’s career, see Rosenfeld, Building after Auschwitz, 160–179. 9. Peter Eisenman, “The Futility of Objects: Decomposition and the Process of Difference,” Harvard Architectural Review 3 (Winter 1984): 65. 10. Peter Eisenman, “Editorial: Post-Functionalism,” Oppositions 6 (Fall 1976): n.p. 11. Peter Eisenman, “The End of the Classical: The End of the Beginning, the End of the End,” in K. Michael Hays, Architecture Theory since 1968 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 533, 537n22. 12. “Interview Robert Venturi and Peter Eisenman,” Skyline, July 1982, 14. 13. Author interview with Peter Eisenman, December 5, 2006. 14. “Interview: Leon Krier and Peter Eisenman,” Skyline, February 1983, 14. In 1985, Eisenman declared that, as a “cultural Jew [like] . . . Walter Benjamin . . . for whom Jewishness was a state of mind . . . outside the reality of religion, [I believe] in an architecture which attempts to stand outside the Graeco-Christian tradition . . . [and] talks about the condition of Diaspora . . . [and] wandering.” Janet Abrams, “(Mis)Reading between the Lines,” Blueprint, February 1985, 16–17. 15. “Interview: Peter Eisenman,” Transition 3, no. 3/4 (April/July 1984): 37; author interview with Peter Eisenman, December 5, 2006. 16. “Interview: Peter Eisenman,” Transition, 42. 17. For a general discussion of these buildings, see Cynthia Davidson and Stan Allen, eds., Tracing Eisenman: Peter Eisenman, Complete Works (New York: Rizzoli, 2006). 18. Anja Reich, “Berlin ist wie Washington. Und Washington ist tot,” Berliner Zeitung, May 8, 2004. 19. “Spiegel Interview with Holocaust Monument Architect Peter Eisenman: ‘How Long Does One Feel Guilty?’ ” Der Spiegel, May 9, 2005; http://www.spiegel .de /international /spiegel -interview -with -holocaust -monument -architect - peter -eisenman-how-long-does-one-feel-guilty-a-355252.html. 468

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20. Quoted in “Ein Ort, nichts,” Frankfurter Rundschau, May 10, 2005. 21. Peter Eisenman, “The Silence of Excess,” in Holocaust Memorial Berlin: Eisenman Architects (Baden, Switzerland: Lars Müller, 2005); Deyan Sudjic, “Feuds? I’ve Had a Few,” Observer, December 18, 2004; http://www.guardian.co .uk/artanddesign/2004/dec/19/architecture. 22. “Warnung vor der Vernunft: Interview with Peter Eisenman,” Aufbau 65, no. 15 (1999); http://www.archive.org/stream/aufbau6465199899germ#page/n485 /mode/1up (accessed May 12, 2016). 23. Davidson and Allen, Tracing Eisenman, 290. 24. Peter Eisenman, “The Silence of Excess,” in Holocaust Memorial Berlin: Eisenman Architects (Baden, Switzerland: Lars Müller, 2005), n.p. 25. Philip Gessler and Jörn Kabisch, “Jetzt übernimmt das Denkmal,” TAZ, August 16, 2003. The insecure line is in R. Wolff, “Seid bitte nicht zu nett,” Frankfurter Rundschau, May 7, 2005. 26. Sudjic, “Feuds? I’ve Had a Few.” 27. “Das Eisenman-Revier,” TAZ, August 10, 2002, 27; “Eisenman Interview II,” FAZ, February 1, 2001. 28. “Warnung vor der Vernunft.” 29. Peter Eisenman, “Silence of Excess.” 30. Peter Eisenman, “Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe,” Leo Baeck Memorial Lecture (New York: Leo Baeck Institute, 2005), 11. 31. Ibid. 32. The leading German historian on the memorial planning board, Eberhard Jäckel, emphatically supported the idea of the Holocaust’s uniqueness. Following extended debate, this position was accepted by the German government in 1999. See Bill Niven, Facing the Nazi Past: United Germany and the Legacy of the Third Reich (New York: Routledge, 2001). 33. “Warnung vor der Vernunft.” 34. Author interview with Peter Eisenman, December 5, 2006. Eisenman added: “People in Israel are not Jews. They are Israelis.” See also “Warnung vor der Vernunft.” 35. “Das Denkmal soll seelische Schwelbrände auslösen,” FAZ, August  17, 2003. 36. “Spiegel Interview with Holocaust Monument Architect Peter Eisenman.” 37. Ibid. 38. “Warnung vor der Vernunft.” 39. “Das Denkmal soll seelische Schwelbrände auslösen.” 40. Eisenman, “Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe,” 3. 41. Ibid., 9. 42. “Warnung vor der Vernunft.” 43. Ibid. Eisenman noted that “abstraction was the precondition of the cosmopolitan society of the 20th century. The Nazis were precisely opposed to it: everything cosmopolitan and Jewish.” 44. Wolff, “Seid bitte nicht zu nett”; “Im stelengang,” FAZ, August 16, 2003. 45. Wolff, “Seid bitte nicht zu nett”; “Jetzt übernimmt das Denkmal,” TAZ, August 16, 2003. 469

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46. “Die Deutschen sollen nie wieder schweigen,” Stuttgarter Zeitung, August 18, 2003. 47. “Public Disrespect: Berlin Holocaust Memorial Used as Toilet,” Spiegel, January  29, 2007; http://www.spiegel.de/international/public-disrespect-berlin -holocaust-memorial-used-as-toilet-a-462801.html. “Holocaust-Mahnmal zieht Bilanz”; http://www.n-tv.de/panorama/Holocaust-Mahnmal-zieht-Bilanz-article755354 .html_list%5B0%5D=besucherzahl. 48. Claus Leggewie and Erik Meyer, “Ein Ort, an den man gerne geht”: Das Holocaust-Mahnmal und die deutsche Geschichtspolitik nach  1989 (Munich: Hanser, 2005), 23–24. 49. Rainer Haubrich, “Ort der Kontemplation,” Die Welt, May 10, 2005; Jörg Schindler, “Ein Ort, nichts,” Frankfurter Rundschau, May 9, 2005. 50. Gerhard Matzig, “Eine Form der Möglichkeit,” SZ, May 9, 2005. 51. “Am Rand der Mitte,” SZ, May 9, 2005. 52. Rainer Haubrich, “Ort der Kontemplation,” Die Welt, May 10, 2005. 53. Ernst Cramer, “Geteiltes Gedenken,” Die Welt, May 10, 2005. 54. Jürgen Leinemann, “Feld ohne Eigenschaften,” Spiegel, November  19, 2005, 35. 55. “Kein ‘steinerner Schlusspunkt,” Frankfurter Rundschau, May 10, 2005. 56. “Ist das Holocaust-Mahnmal gescheitert?” Christ und Welt, November 5, 2011; http:// www.christundwelt.de/detail/artikel/ist-das -holocaust-mahnmal -gescheitert/. 57. “Public Disrespect.” 58. “EasyJet Pulls In-Flight Magazine over Holocaust Fashion Shoot,” Guardian, November 24, 2009; http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/nov/24 /easyjet-holocaust-fashion. 59. “Spiegel Interview with Holocaust Monument Architect Peter Eisenman.” 60. “Das Mahnmal ist ernst und macht trotzdem Spass,” Tagesspiegel, May 9, 2006; http://www.tagesspiegel.de/berlin/das-mahnmal-ist-ernst-und-macht-trotzdem -spass/709452.html. 61. Robert Musil, Gesammelte Werke (Reinbeck bei Hambug: Rowohlt, 1978), 506. 62. Ironically, this very quality of the memorial was initially viewed as a liability and almost led to its defeat. When the jury of the original memorial competition was debating Eisenman’s design, some members were opposed to its monumental scale, arguing that monumentality as such had been rendered politically suspect by the monumental architectural projects of the Nazi and Soviet regimes in the 1930s. 63. Gavriel  D. Rosenfeld and Paul  B. Jaskot, eds., Beyond Berlin: Twelve German Cities Confront the Nazi Past (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008). 64. Gavriel  D. Rosenfeld, Munich and Memory: Architecture, Monuments, and the Legacy of the Third Reich (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). 65. James Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 5, 21. 470

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16. The Holocaust as Genocide 1. Raphael Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress, 2nd ed. (Clark, NJ: Lawbook Exchange, 2008 [1944]), esp. 79–95, and introductions by William A. Schabas and Samantha Power, vii–xvi and xvii–xxiii, respectively; Donna-Lee Frieze, ed., Totally Unofficial: The Autobiography of Raphael Lemkin (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), esp. 112–179. 2. There is a vast literature on this by now. See, for example, William A. Schabas, “The ‘Odious Scourge’: Evolving Interpretations of the Crime of Genocide,” Genocide Studies and Prevention 1, no. 2 (2006): 93–106. 3. See further in Omer Bartov, “Genocide and the Holocaust: Arguments over History and Politics,” in Lessons and Legacies: Lessons and Legacies XI, ed. Karl Schleunes and Hilary Earl (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2014), 11–12. 4. Omer Bartov, The Eastern Front, 1941–45: German Troops and the Barbarisation of Warfare (London: Macmillan, 1985); Omer Bartov, Hitler’s Army: Soldiers, Nazis, and War in the Third Reich (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). 5. Omer Bartov, Murder in Our Midst: The Holocaust, Industrial Killing, and Representation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 53. 6. Jean-Michel Chaumont, La concurrence des victimes: Génocide, identité, reconnaissance (Paris: Édition la Découverte, 1997); Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999); Tom Segev, The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust, trans. Haim Watzman (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993). 7. Omer Bartov, “Defining Enemies, Making Victims: Germans, Jews, and the Holocaust,” American Historical Review 103, no. 3 (June 1998): 811–812. 8. Omer Bartov, Mirrors of Destruction: War, Genocide, and Modern Identity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 5–6. 9. On the larger context in Eastern Europe, see Omer Bartov and Eric D. Weitz, eds., Shatterzone of Empires: Coexistence and Violence in the German, Habsburg, Russian, and Ottoman Borderlands (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013); on the politics of memory there, see Omer Bartov, Erased: Vanishing Traces of Jewish Galicia in Present-Day Ukraine (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007); and John-Paul Himka and Joanna B. Michlic, eds., Bringing the Dark Past to Light: The Reception of the Holocaust in Postcommunist Europe (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013). 10. This difficulty is articulated in Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989). 11. Papers from the project were published in Bartov and Weitz, Shatterzone of Empires. 12. Omer Bartov, The Voice of Your Brother’s Blood: Buczacz, Biography of a Town (New York: Simon and Schuster, forthcoming). See also Omer Bartov, “Genocide in a Multiethnic Town: Event, Origins, Aftermath,” in Totalitarian Dictatorship: New Histories, ed. Daniela Baratieri, Mark Edele, and Giuseppe Finaldi (New York: Routledge, 2014), 212–231; Omer Bartov, “The Voice of Your Brother’s 471

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Blood: Buczacz, Biography of a Town,” in Jewish Histories of the Holocaust: New Transnational Approaches, ed. Norman Goda (New York: Berghahn Books, 2014), 104–134. 13. See, esp., Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1961). 14. Most prominently Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution, 1933–1939 (New York: HarperCollins, 1997); and Friedländer, The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945 (New York: HarperCollins, 2007). 15. Donald Bloxham, The Final Solution: A Genocide (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). 16. Saul Friedländer chose to use only diaries. See also Alexandra Garbarini, Numbered Days: Diaries and the Holocaust (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006). For choices made in comparative studies of genocide see, for example, Eric D. Weitz, A Century of Genocide: Utopias of Race and Nation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003); Benjamin A. Valentino, Final Solutions: Mass Killing and Genocide in the 20th Century (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004); Jacques Semelin, Purify and Destroy: The Political Uses of Massacre and Genocide, trans. Cynthia Schoch (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). 17. Bartov, “Genocide and the Holocaust,” 6. 18. Bloxham, Final Solution, 318. 19. A. Dirk Moses, “Empire, Colony, Genocide: Keywords and the Philosophy of History,” in Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation and Subaltern Resistance in World History, ed.  A. Dirk Moses (New York: Berghahn Books, 2008), 25. 20. A. Dirk Moses, “Revisiting a Founding Assumption of Genocide Studies,” Genocide Studies and Prevention 6, no. 3 (2011): 296. 21. Bartov, “Genocide and the Holocaust,” 20. 22. Isabel V. Hull, Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005); Jürgen Zimmerer, “The First Genocide of the Twentieth Century: The German War of Destruction in South-West Africa (1904–1908) and the Global History of Genocide,” in Lessons and Legacies VIII: From Generation to Generation, ed. Doris L. Bergen (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2008), 34–64. 23. Zimmerer, “First Genocide of the Twentieth Century,” 35–36, 58–59. 24. Götz Aly, “Final Solution”: Nazi Population Policy and the Murder of the European Jews, trans. Belinda Cooper and Alison Brown (New York: Hodder Education, 1999); Christopher R. Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939–March 1942 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004); Omer Bartov, Germany’s War and the Holocaust: Disputed Histories (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), 79–98. See also Wendy Lower, Nazi Empire-Building and the Holocaust in Ukraine (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005). 25. Moses, “Revisiting a Founding Assumption,” 296. 26. Mark Mazower, Hitler’s Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe (New York: Penguin Books, 2009), 8. 472

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27. Ibid., 585, citing Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000), 36. 28. Mazower, Hitler’s Empire, 586–587. 29. Ibid., 414–415. 30. A. Dirk Moses, “The Holocaust and World History: Raphael Lemkin and Comparative Methodology,” in The Holocaust and Historical Methodology, ed. Dan Stone (New York: Berghahn Books, 2012), 274. This echoes the argument made by German historian Martin Broszat, that Jews “remain adamant in their insistence on a mythical form of this remembrance” of the Holocaust, while “German historians and students of history” are “operating only in scientific terms.” Martin Broszat and Saul Friedländer, “A Controversy about the Historicization of National Socialism,” in Reworking the Past: Hitler, the Holocaust, and the Historians’ Debate, ed. Peter Baldwin (Boston: Beacon Press, 1990), 106, citing letter by Broszat dated September 28, 1987. 31. Moses, “The Holocaust and World History,” 275. 32. Ibid., 281. 33. See, for example, Jeffrey Herf, The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda during World War II and the Holocaust (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006); Peter Longerich, Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). 34. Moses, “The Holocaust and World History,” 285–286. Moses contends that this is Bloxham’s argument, which is not precisely the case. See Bloxham, Final Solution, 245–246. 35. On the intellectuals who conceived and implemented the genocide of the Jews, see Ulrich Herbert, Best: Biographische Studien über Radikalismus, Weltanschauung und Vernunft, 1903–1989 (Bremen, Ger.: Temmen, 1997); Michael Wildt, An Uncompromising Generation: The Nazi Leadership of the Reich Security Main Office, trans. Tom Lampert (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009); Christian Ingrao, Believe and Destroy: Intellectuals in the SS War Machine, trans. Andrew Brown (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013). 36. Donald Bloxham, “Holocaust Studies and Genocide Studies: Past, Present, and Future,” in Genocide Matters: Ongoing Issues and Emerging Perspectives, ed. Joyce Apsel and Ernesto Verdeja (New York: Routledge, 2013), 63. 37. Ibid. 38. See note 22, above, as well as Jürgen Zimmerer and Joachim Zeller, eds., Völkermord in Deutsch-Südwestafrika: Der Kolonialkrieg (1904–1908) in Namibia und seine Folgen (Berlin: Links, 2003); Gérard Prunier, The Rwanda Crisis: History of a Genocide (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995). On another major genocide of the century, see Ronald Grigor Suny, Fatma Müge Goçek, and Norman M. Naimark, A Question of Genocide: Armenians and Turks at the End of the Ottoman Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). 39. Bartov, “Genocide and the Holocaust,” 21. See also note 12, above, and Omer Bartov, “Interethnic Relations in the Holocaust as Seen through Postwar Testimonies: Buczacz, East Galicia, 1941–44,” in Lessons and Legacies VIII, ed. Doris Bergen (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2008), 101–124; Omer Bartov, “Wartime Lies and Other Testimonies: Jewish-Christian Relationships 473

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in Buczacz, 1939–44,” East European Politics and Societies 25, no. 3 (2011): 486–511. 40. On early effort to document the facts after the Holocaust, see Laura Jockusch, Collect and Record! Jewish Holocaust Documentation in Early Postwar Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). 17. Anxieties in Holocaust and Genocide Studies Thanks to Avril Alba, Donald Bloxham, Alon Confino, Belinda Davis, Amos Goldberg, Chris Lorenz, Raz Segal, Dan Stone, and Natasha Wheatley for helpful comments on previous drafts. They are neither responsible for the views expressed nor for any errors committed here. 1. Charles S. Maier, “Heißes und kaltes Gedächtnis: Über die politische Halbwertszeit von Nazismus und Kommunismus,” Transit 22 (2001/2002): 153–165. 2. David Turner comment on Marc Tracy, “Higher Truth,” Tablet Magazine, December 2, 2010. The original site was http://www.tabletmag.com/arts-and-culture /books/51978/higher-truth. The comment is now on Turner’s blog: http://israelzion ismdiaspora.blogspot.it/2010/12/conversations-with-holocaust-denier.html. 3. Jacob L. Talmon, “Uniqueness and Universality of Jewish History,” in The Unique and the Universal: Some Historical Reflections (London: Martin Secker and Warburg, 1965), 89. 4. Walter Reich, “The Use and Abuse of Holocaust Memory,” American Enterprise Institute Online, November 14, 2005; http://www.aei.org/print?pub=speech &pubId=23492&authors=Walter%20Reich. 5. Michael Shafir, “The ‘Comparative Trivialization’ of the Holocaust,” East European Perspectives 5, no. 2 (January  22, 2003); http://www.rferl.org/content /article/1342472.html. 6. Gilbert Achar, The Arabs and the Holocaust: The Arab-Israeli War of Narratives (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2009). 7. Edward Said, Representations of the Intellectual (New York: Vintage, 1995), 120. 8. A. Dirk Moses, “Genocide and the Terror of History,” Parallax 17, no. 4 (2011): 90–108. 9. Chris Lorenz, “Blurred Lines: History, Memory and the Experience of Time,” International Journal of History, Culture, and Modernity 2, no. 1 (2014): 55. 10. Eva Hoffman, After Such Knowledge: Memory, History and the Legacy of the Holocaust (New York: Public Affairs, 2004), 196. 11. Martin Broszat and Saul Friedländer, “A Controversy about the Historicization of National Socialism,” in Reworking the Past: Hitler, the Holocaust, and the Historians’ Debate, ed. Peter Baldwin (Boston: Beacon Press, 1990), 106; Christian Gerlach, Extremely Violent Societies: Mass Violence in the Twentieth-Century World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 264–265. 12. Gavriel  D. Rosenfeld, “Between Uniqueness and Universalization: Holocaust Memory at a Dialectical Crossroads,” Dapim: Studies on the Shoah 25 (2011): 1–11. 474

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13. Omer Bartov, Mirrors of Destruction: War, Genocide and Modern Identity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 6 (emphasis added). 14. Robert Rozett, “Diminishing the Holocaust: Scholarly Fodder for a Discourse of Distortion,” Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs 6, no. 1 (2012): 53–64. Rozett attacked Donald Bloxham’s The Final Solution and Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands, and refers approvingly to Bartov’s contribution to a forum on Bloxham’s book: Bartov, “Locating the Holocaust,” Journal of Genocide Research 13, no. 1 (2011): 121–129. 15. Sympathetic readers interpret him in this way: Hilary Earl and Karl  A. Schleunes, introduction to Lessons and Legacies XI: Expanding Perspectives on the Holocaust in a Changing World, ed. Hilary Earl and Karl A. Schleunes (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2014), viii–ix. 16. Gavriel  D. Rosenfeld, Hi Hitler! How the Nazi Past Is Being Normalized in Contemporary Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 435n11. 17. Shimon Samuels, “Applying the Lessons of the Holocaust,” in Is the Holocaust Unique? Perspectives on Comparative Genocide, ed. Alan Rosenbaum, 3rd ed. (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2009), 259. The next sentence insists that the Holocaust can serve as a paradigm for other genocides, despite its uniqueness. 18. In this and other respects, Bartov follows Leo Kuper: Omer Bartov, “Genocide and the Holocaust: Arguments over History and Politics,” in Lessons and Legacies XI, 16. 19. Uriel Tal, “Forms of Pseudo-Religion in the German Kulturbereich prior to the Holocaust,” Immanuel, no. 3 (1973/74): 68–73. 20. Dan Diner, Beyond the Conceivable: Studies on Germany, Nazism, and the Holocaust (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 3. 21. By contrast, Alon Confino reconstructs how the Nazis attacked Jews and the Jewish bible because Nazis believed they represented time and morality rather than himself claiming that Jews and the Jewish bible in fact represent time and morality. Alon Confino, Foundational Pasts: The Holocaust as Historical Understanding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Confino, A World without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014). 22. Reich, “Use and Abuse of Holocaust Memory.” 23. Ibid. (emphasis added). 24. Frank Chalk, “The Ultimate Ideological Genocide,” in The History and Sociology of Genocide: Analysis and Case Studies, ed. Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), 325 (emphasis added). 25. Omer Bartov, “The Holocaust as Leitmotif of the Twentieth Century,” in Lessons and Legacies VII: The Holocaust in International Perspective, ed. Dagmar Herzog (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2006), 3–28. 26. A. Dirk Moses, “The Canadian Museum for Human Rights: The ‘Uniqueness of the Holocaust’ and the Question of Genocide,” Journal of Genocide Research 14, no. 2 (2012): 215–238; Moses, “Protecting Human Rights and Preventing Genocide: The Canadian Museum for Human Rights and the Will to Intervene,” in The Idea of a Human Rights Museum, ed. Adam Muller, Karen 475

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Busby, and Andrew Woolford (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2015), 40–69. 27. “Ukraine’s Enduring Holodomor Horror: When Millions Starved in the 1930s,” Euronews, November  22, 2013; http://www.euronews.com/2013/11/22 / ukraine - s - enduring - holodomor- horror- when - millions - starved - in - the - 1930s. Quoted is Professor André Liebich from the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva. 28. See http://www.holocaustremembrance.com/about-us/stockholm-declaration. 29. Bauer admitted to being “a major influence in the ITF, as its academic guide, since its inception.” Yehuda Bauer, “Fighting Our Friends instead of Our Enemies,” Jerusalem Post, July 26, 2009; Bauer, “Reviewing the Holocaust Anew in Multiple Contexts,” Jerusalem Center for Public History, no. 80, May 1, 2009; Bauer, “Remembering Accurately on International Holocaust Remembrance Day,” Jerusalem Post, January  24, 2010. Bauer’s later successor at Yad Vashem, Dan Michman, makes a similar argument about Jews representing equality for Nazis: Dan Michman, “The Jewish Dimension of the Holocaust in Dire Straits? Current Challenges of Interpretation and Scope,” in Jewish Histories of the Holocaust: New Transnational Approaches, ed. Norman J. W Goda (New York: Berghahn Books, 2014), 24, 34. 30. A Declaration of the Immediate Causes which Induce and Justify the Secession of the State of Mississippi from the Federal Union, January 9, 1861; http://www.civilwar.org /education /history /primarysources /declarationofcauses .html#Mississippi. 31. “Prime Minister Launches Holocaust Commission”; https://www.gov.uk /government/news/prime-minister-launches-holocaust-commission. Prime Minister’s Holocaust Commission: Terms of Reference; https://www.gov.uk/government /uploads /system /uploads /attachment _data /file /275198 /Terms -of -Reference -PM -Holocaust-Commission.pdf. 32. Timothy Snyder, “Commemorative Causality,” Modernism/Modernity 20, no. 1 (2013): 77–93, and Eurozine, June 6, 2013, http://www.eurozine.com/articles /2013–06–06-snyder-en.html. 33. A critical and comprehensive appraisal of this literature is Thomas Kühne, “Colonialism and the Holocaust: Continuities, Causations, and Complexities,” Journal of Genocide Research 15, no. 3 (2013): 339–362. 34. Judith N. Shklar, Legalism: An Essay on Law, Morals and Politics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964), 20–21. 35. Ibid., 22. 36. Ibid. 37. Ironically, Shklar is the source of this “negative politics” of the “liberalism of fear.” See Judith N. Shklar, “The Liberalism of Fear,” in Liberalism and the Moral Life, ed. Nancy Rosenblum (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 21–38; and Michael Walzer, “On Negative Politics,” in Liberalism without Illusions: Essays on Liberal Theory and the Political Vision of Judith N. Shklar, ed. Bernard Yak (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 17–24. 38. Omer Bartov, Murder in Our Midst: The Holocaust, Industrial Killing and the Holocaust (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996); Bartov, Mirrors of De476

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struction; Bartov, “Social Outsiders in War and Genocide: A Comparative Perspective,” in Social Outsiders in Nazi Germany, ed. Robert Gellately and Nathan Stoltzfus (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 294–318. 39. Talmon, The Unique and the Universal, 9; Talmon, “European History as the Seedbed of the Holocaust,” Jewish Quarterly 21, nos. 1–2 (1973): 3–22. 40. Talmon, “Uniqueness and the Universality of Jewish History,” 88. 41. Bartov, “Genocide and the Holocaust,” 19. 42. Saul Friedländer, “The Historical Significance of the Holocaust,” Jerusalem Quarterly 1 (Fall 1976): 36–59. Reprinted in Yehuda Bauer and Nathan Rotenstreich, eds., The Holocaust as Historical Experience (London: Holmes and Meier, 1981), 1–23. The next few paragraphs are drawn from A. Dirk Moses, “Redemptive Anti-Semitism and the Imperialist Imaginary,” in Years of Persecution, Years of Extermination: Saul Friedländer and the Future of Holocaust Studies, ed. Paul Betts and Christian Wiese (London: Continuum, 2010), 233–254. 43. Friedländer, “Historical Significance of the Holocaust,” 2–4, 15. 44. Bartov, “The Holocaust as Genocide”: Michman, “The Jewish Dimension of the Holocaust in Dire Straits?” 30. 45. Bartov, “The Holocaust as Genocide.” 46. Jürgen Zimmerer, “Colonialism and the Holocaust: Towards an Archaeology of Genocide,” in Genocide and Settler Society: Frontier Violence and Stolen Indigenous Children in Australian History, ed. A. Dirk Moses (New York: Berghahn Books, 2004), 49–76; Zimmerer, “The Birth of the Ostland Out of the Spirit of Colonialism: a Postcolonial Perspective on the Nazi Policy of Conquest and Extermination,” Patterns of Prejudice 39, no. 2 (2005): 197–219. Rejection: Birthe Kundrus, “Colonialism—Imperialism—National Socialism? Opportunities and Limits of a New Paradigm,” March 29–30, 2007; http://www.his-online.de/cms.asp?IDN =343&H=‘1246’&Sprache=en. 47. Bartov, “Genocide and the Holocaust”; Bartov, “The Holocaust as Genocide.” 48. Jürgen Zimmerer, From Windhoek to Auschwitz: On the Relationship Between Colonialism and the Holocaust (Houndmills: Routledge, 2015); Mark Mazower, Hitler’s Empire: Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe (New York: Penguin, 2008); Shelley Baranowski, Nazi Empire: German Colonialism and Imperialism from Bismarck to Hitler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Wendy Lower, Nazi Empire-Building and the Holocaust in Ukraine (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005);  A. Dirk Moses, ed., Empire Colony Genocide: Conquest, Occupation and Subaltern Resistance in World History (New York: Berghahn Books, 2008). 49. Jane Burbank and Fred Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 370, 380, 398–454; Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton, “Empires and the Reach of the Global,” in A World Connecting 1870–1945, ed. Emily S. Rosenberg (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 299; James Sheehan, “The Problem of Sovereignty in European History,” American Historical Review 111, no. 1 (2006): 12. 50. Bartov, “Genocide and the Holocaust,” published as late as 2014, expresses his former views. 477

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51. Michman, “The Jewish Dimension of the Holocaust in Dire Straits?” 52. Omer Bartov, “The Holocaust as Genocide: Experiential Uniqueness and Integrated History,” Chap. 16 in this volume. 53. Bartov, “Genocide and the Holocaust,” 15. 54. Carroll P. Kakel III, The American West and the Nazi East: A Comparative and Interpretive Perspective (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Kakel, The Holocaust as Colonial Genocide (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). 55. A. Dirk Moses, “The Holocaust and Colonialism,” in The Oxford Handbook of Holocaust Studies, ed. Peter Hayes and John Roth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 68–80. The following paragraphs draw on this chapter. 56. A. Dirk Moses, “Empire, Colony, Genocide: Keywords and the Philosophy of History,” in Moses, Empire, Colony, Genocide, 3–54; Moses, “Redemptive AntiSemitism and the Imperialist Imaginary.” 57. Jürgen Kocka, “Comparison and Beyond,” History and Theory 42 (2003): 6. 58. Mary Neuberger: The Orient Within: Muslim Minorities and the Negotiation of Nationhood in Modern Bulgaria (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004); Emily Greble, Sarajevo, 1941–1945: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Hitler’s Europe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011); Greble, “When Croatia Needed Serbs: Nationalism and Genocide in Sarajevo, 1941–1942,” Slavic Review 68, no. 1 (2009); Vladimir Solonari, “Patterns of Violence: Local Population and the Mass Murder of Jews in Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina, July–August 1941,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 8, no. 4 (2007): 749– 787; Solonari, “ ‘Model Province’: Explaining the Holocaust of Bessarabian and Bukovinian Jewry,” Nationalities Papers 34, no. 4 (2006): 471–500; Solonari, Purifying the Nation: Population Exchange and Ethnic Cleansing in Nazi-Allied Romania (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009); Alexander Korb, “Understanding Ustaša Violence,” Journal of Genocide Research 12, no. 1 (2010), 1–18; Korb, Im Schatten des Weltkrieges: Massengewalt der Ustaša gegen Serben, Juden und Roma in Kroatien, 1941–1945 (Hamburg: Humburger Edition, 2013); Raz Segal, “Beyond Holocaust Studies: Rethinking the Holocaust in Hungary,” Journal of Genocide Research 16, no. 1 (2014): 1–23. Thanks to Raz Segal for conversations about this general point. 59. By contrast, see the exemplary Geoff Eley, Nazism as Fascism: Violence, Ideology, and the Ground of Consent in Germany, 1930–1945 (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2013), chaps. 5 and 6. 60. Roberta Pergher and Mark Roseman, “The Holocaust: An Imperial Genocide?” Dapim: Studies on the Holocaust 27  no. 1 (2013): 42–49. See the special issue, a “Scholarly Forum on the Holocaust and Genocide,” in which this essay appears. Neither Michman nor Bartov cite it. 61. Gerlach, Extremely Violent Societies, 237. 62. All these quotations are taken from Michman, “The Jewish Dimension of the Holocaust in Dire Straits?” 22–23, 29–30. 63. Dan Diner, “The Irreconcilability of an Event: Integrating the Holocaust into the Narrative of the Century,” in Remembering the Holocaust in Germany, 1945–2000, ed. Dan Michman (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2002), 95–107. 478

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64. Paul Berman, Liberalism and Terror (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003); Matthias Künzel, Jihad and Jew-Hatred: Islamism, Nazism, and the Roots of 9/11 (New York: Telos Press, 2007); Jeffrey Herf, ed., Anti-Semitism and Anti-Zionism in Historical Perspective (London: Routledge, 2007); Alan H. Rosenfeld, ed., Resurgent Antisemitism: Global Perspectives (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013). 65. Paul Landau, “Hamas and Islamic Millenarianism: What the West Doesn’t Recognize,” January 8, 2008; http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/articlePrint.aspx ?ID=1481. 66. Benny Morris, “This Holocaust Will Be Different,” Jerusalem Post, January 18, 2007. 67. See, above all, Omer Bartov, “September 11 in the Rearview Mirror: Contemporary Politics and the Perceptions of the Past,” in Power and the Past: Collective Memory and International Relations, ed. Eric Langenbacher and Yossi Shain (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2010), 147–160; Bartov, “Holocaust as Leitmotif of the Twentieth Century,” 14. 68. Omer Bartov, “Alter Befürchtungen, alte Hoffnungen,” in Hat Israel noch eine Chance? Palästina in der neuen Weltordnung, ed. Hermann L. Gremliza (Hamburg: Konkret, 2001), 156–158. Bartov blames the collapse of the Oslo process on Arafat’s and the Palestinian leadership’s failure to compromise with Barak, even resorting to Abba Eban’s lazy cliché about their supposed ability never to miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. 69. Omer Bartov, “Nazi State Terror and Contemporary Global Terrorism: Continuities and Differences,” in Jüdische Geschichte als Allgemeine Geschichte, ed. Raphael Gross and Yfaat Weiss (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2006), 305– 324; Berman, Liberalism and Terror; Robert Wistrich, A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad (New York: Random House, 2010); Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, The Devil That Never Dies: The Rise and Threat of Global Antisemitism (New York: Little, Brown, 2013). In 2006, British chief rabbi, Sir Jonathan Sacks, made similar arguments when he referred to a “tsunami of antisemitism” around the world. See Audry Gillan, “Rabbi Fears ‘Tsunami’ of Hatred,” Guardian, January 2, 2006. In Omer Bartov, “He Meant What He Said: Did Hitlerism Die with Hitler?” New Republic, February 2, 2001, Bartov disavows making the new Hitler and second Holocaust argument, but ends up advancing the same points as the “hysterics,” as he calls them (28). His is a distinction without difference. He published a revised version as “The New Anti-Semitism: Genealogy and Implications,” in Old Demons, New Debates: Anti-Semitism in the West, ed. David I. Kertzer (Teaneck, NJ: Holmes and Meier, 2005), 9–26. 70. Omer Bartov, “Extreme Violence and the Scholarly Community,” International Social Science Journal 54, no. 174 (2002): 509–518. 71. Compare Omer Bartov, The “Jew” in Cinema: From The Golem to Don’t Touch My Holocaust (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), preface. 72. Bartov, “He Meant What He Said,” 29. Bartov’s use of soft-core antiSemitism is reminiscent of Deborah Lipstadt’s distinction between soft-core and hard-core Holocaust denial: Jonny Paul, “Holocaust Scholar Warns of New Forms of ‘Soft-Core’ Denial,” Jerusalem Post, February 2, 2007. 479

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73. Bartov, “New Anti-Semitism,” 9. 74. Bartov, “Holocaust as Leitmotif of the Twentieth Century,” 15. 75. Ibid.,” 18. The “seething rage” quotation is in Bartov, “September 11 in the Rearview Mirror,” 150. He makes a number of problematic assertions about the nature of the global crisis that warrant discussion, but space limitations preclude my treatment of them here. 76. Bartov, “He Meant What He Said,” 26. 77. Matthew F. Jacobs, Imagining the Middle East: The Building of an American Foreign Policy, 1918–1967 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011); Michael Oren, Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East, 1776 to the Present (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007); Zachary Lochman, Contending Visions of the Middle East, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 218; Matthew Connelly, “Taking Off the Cold War Lens: Visions of NorthSouth Conflict during the Algerian War for Independence,” American Historical Review 105, no. 3 (2000): 739–769. 78. Fabian Klose, “The Colonial Testing Ground: The International Committee of the Red Cross and the Violent End of Empire,” Humanity 2, no. 1 (2011): 107– 126; Matthew Connelly, “Population Control in India: Prologue to the Emergency Period,” Population and Development Review 32, no. 4 (2006): 629–667. 79. Bartov, “He Meant What He Said,” 29. 80. Ibid., 26. 81. Bartov, “Nazi State Terror and Contemporary Global Terrorism,” 322. 82. Bartov, “New Anti-Semitism,” 26. 83. Bartov, Murder in Our Midst. 84. Bartov, “Nazi State Terror and Contemporary Global Terrorism,” 322. 85. Elie Wiesel, “Preface to the New Translation,” in Night, trans. Marion Wiesel (New York: 1971/2006), xv; Mark Memmott, “Elie Wiesel: If the Holocaust Is Forgotten, ‘Dead Will Be Killed a Second Time,’ ” National Public Radio, May 5, 2011; http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2011/05/05/136027459/elie-wiesel-if -the-holocaust-is-forgotten-dead-will-be-killed-a-second-time. Jean Baudrillard added that “forgetting the extermination is part of the extermination itself”: Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 49. 86. Bartov, “Genocide and the Holocaust,” 20; Bartov, “Locating the Holocaust,” 128. 87. Alexandra Garbarini, “Reflections on the Holocaust and Jewish History,” Jewish Quarterly Review 102, no. 1 (2012): 91. See the analysis in Donald Bloxham, “Holocaust Studies and Genocide Studies: Past, Present and Future,” in Genocide Matters: Ongoing Issues and Emerging Perspectives, ed. Joyce Apsel and Ernesto Verdeja (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2013), 66–67. 88. Bartov, “Jew” in Cinema, 124. 89. Carolyn  J. Dean, “Minimalism and Victim Testimony,” History and Theory, 49, no. 4 (2010): 86; Dean, The Fragility of Empathy after the Holocaust (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004); and Dean, Aversion and Erasure: The Fate of the Victim after the Holocaust (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010). 480

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90. Garbarini, “Reflections on the Holocaust and Jewish History,” 89. 91. Dan Michman, “Is There an ‘Israeli School’ of Holocaust Research?” in Holocaust: Historiography in Context, ed. David Bankier and Dan Michman (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem; New York: Berghahn Books, 2008), 54–55, 60. 92. Anton Weiss-Wendt, ed., The Nazi Genocide of the Roma (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2013); Anna Holian, Between National Socialism and Soviet Communism: Displaced Persons in Postwar Germany (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011); Simone Gigliotti, The Train Journey: Transit, Captivity, and Witnessing in the Holocaust (New York: Berghahn Books, 2009). 93. Donald Bloxham and Tony Kushner, The Holocaust: Critical Historical Approaches (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2005); Bloxham, “Jewish Witnesses in War Crimes Trials of the Postwar Era,” in Holocaust Historiography in Context, ed. David Bankier and Dan Michman (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2008), 539–544; Donald Bloxham and Ben Flanagan, Remembering Belsen: Eye-Witnesses Record the Liberation (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2005). One of Bloxham’s major arguments in Genocide on Trial: War Crimes Trials in the Formation of Holocaust History and Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) concerned the absence of victim voices at key points in the postwar trials. See also Dan Stone, “Christianstadt: Slave Labour and the Holocaust in the ITS Collections,” Yearbook of the International Tracing Service 4 (2015): 78–91; and Stone, The Sorrows of Liberation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015). 94. See http://www.berghahnbooks.com/series.php?pg=war_geno. 95. Lori Allen, “Unstateable Palestine: The Role of Emotions in Proving Political Worthiness through International Investigative Commissions,” Working Paper Series, no. 16, June 2013, Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs, American University of Beirut. 96. A. Dirk Moses, “Genocide and Holocaust Consciousness in Australia,” History Compass 1 (2003): 28, 1–11. 97. Charles S. Maier, “A Surfeit of Memory? Reflections on History, Melancholy, and Denial,” History and Memory 5, no. 2 (1993): 136–152. 98. Charles S. Maier, “Recounting, Retrieving, Rereading: Approaches to the History of Genocide,” Journal of Genocide Research 16, no. 1 (2014): 101–111. 99. Ibid., 110. 100. Arthur Kleinman, Veena Das, and Margaret M. Lock, eds., Social Suffering (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2009). 101. Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). 102. Juliana Ochs, “The Politics of Victimhood and Its Internal Exegetes: Terror Victims in Israel,” History and Anthropology 17, no. 4 (2006): 355–368. 103. Hadas Yaron, “The Short Story Contains Them All: Victims and Perpetrators, Past and Present, in Post-Holocaust and Post-Colonial Israel,” History and Anthropology 17, no. 4 (2006): 394. 104. Amos Goldberg, “The Victim’s Voice and Melodramatic Aesthetics in History,” History and Theory 48, no. 3 (2009): 220–237. 481

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105. Ran Zwigenberg, Hiroshima: The Origins of Global Memory Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). Symptomatic: Alvin H. Rosenfeld, The End of the Holocaust (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013). 106. Bartov, Mirrors of Destruction, 73. 107. Bartov, “Genocide and the Holocaust,” 19. 108. Compare his review of Tim Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books, 2010), in the Slavic Review 70, no. 2 (2011): 424–428. 109. See Bloxham’s discussion of the general issue in “Holocaust Studies and Genocide Studies,” 66. 110. Irwin Cotler, Paper presented at the New York Symposium, Raoul Wallenberg Legacy of Leadership Project, hosted by the Cardozo Holocaust, Genocide and Human Rights Program, September  18, 2014. The paper was a version of “Never Again: Six Enduring Lessons of the Holocaust”; http://www.huffingtonpost .ca/irwin-cotler/holocaust-enduring-lessons_b_3030564.html. The same links are made by Samuels, “Applying the Lessons of the Holocaust,” 260–261, 268–269. 111. See http://www.cardozo.yu.edu/programs-centers/program-holocaust -genocide-and-human-rights-studies/faculty. Thane Rosenbaum, “Hamas’s Civilian Death Strategy,” Wall Street Journal, July 21, 2014. 112. See http://combatgenocide.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Statement-of -Principles-signed.pdf. 113. Yossi Sarid, “Elie Wiesel Hides Ethnic Cleansing behind a Prayer Shawl,” Ha’aretz, October 17, 2014. The quotation is taken from Shmuley Boteach, “Elie Wiesel and Kagame of Rwanda Discuss Genocide and Syria,” Jewish Press, September  30, 2014; http://www.jewishpress.com/indepth/columns/america-rabbi -shmuley-boteach/elie-wiesel-and-kagame-of-rwanda-discuss-genocide-syria/2013 /09/30/. For criticisms of these sorts of views, see Avraham Burg, The Holocaust Is Over; We Must Rise from Its Ashes (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); and Idith Zertal, Israel’s Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 114. Michman, “The Jewish Dimension of the Holocaust in Dire Straits?” 20 (emphasis in original). 115. Ari Shavit, Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel (New York: Spiegel and Grau, 2013), 394; “Shavit’s My Promised Land Examines Israel’s Complexities,” National Public Radio, December  26, 2013; http://www.wbur.org/npr /257255745 /shavits -my -promised -land -examines -israels -complexities ?ft =3 &f =257255745; Gary Rosenblatt, “Shavit: ‘We’ve Lost Our Narrative,’ ” Jewish Chronicle, December 4, 2014. 116. Amos Goldberg, “The ‘Jewish Narrative’ in the Yad Vashem Global Holocaust Museum,” Journal of Genocide Research 14, no. 2 (2012): 187–213; Daniel Blatman, “Holocaust Scholarship: Towards a Post-Uniqueness Era,” Journal of Genocide Research 17, no. 1 (2015): 21–43. 117. Roger Chickering, Karl Lamprecht: A German Academic Life, 1856–1915 (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1993). 118. Bertrand Russell, “The Bomb and Civilization,” Forward 39 (August 18, 1945); E. P. Thompson, Exterminism and Cold War (London: Verso, 1982), 1–34. 482

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119. Zwigenberg, Hiroshima, 9. 120. Omer Bartov, “Defining Enemies, Making Victims: Germans, Jews, and the Holocaust,” American Historical Review 103, no. 3 (1998): 771–816. Analyses that include Palestinians are Yael Zerubavel, Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); and A. Dirk Moses, “The Contradictory Legacies of German Jewry,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 54 (2009): 36–43. 121. Bartov, “The New Anti-Semitism,” 15. 122. Hoffman, After Such Knowledge, 197–199. 123. Ibid. 124. A. Dirk Moses, “The Holocaust and World History: Raphael Lemkin and Comparative Methodology,” in The Holocaust and Historical Methodology, ed. Dan Stone (New York: Berghahn Books, 2012), 272–289. 125. Bloxham, “Holocaust Studies and Genocide Studies”;  A. Dirk Moses, “Does the Holocaust Reveal or Conceal Other Genocides? The Canadian Museum for Human Rights and Grievable Suffering,” in Hidden Genocides: Power, Knowledge, and Memory, ed. Douglas S. Irvin, Alexander L. Hinton, and Tom LaPointe (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2013), 21–51; Dan Stone, Histories of the Holocaust (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), chap. 5.

18. The Witness as “World” Traveler 1. Saul Friedländer, ed., Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution” (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). 2. See my discussion of this moment in Michael Rothberg, Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000). 3. Friedländer, Probing the Limits, 4. An incomplete list of these diverse controversies includes: the Goldhagen debate, the Wehrmacht exhibition, Life Is Beautiful, Neighbors, The Kindly Ones, and Inglourious Basterds—the list could go on. This period also sees the continuation and intensification of controversial Holocaust references in the context of the ongoing Israeli/Palestinian conflict. On this context, which cannot be treated in the space available here, see Michael Rothberg, “From Gaza to Warsaw: Mapping Multidirectional Memory,” Criticism 53, no. 4 (2011): 523–548. 4. For a rich example of work in comparative genocide studies, with a focus on colonial and postcolonial contexts, see A. Dirk Moses, ed., Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern Resistance in World History (New York: Berghahn, 2009). The comparatively inclined Journal of Genocide Research was founded in 1999. 5. Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books, 2010). 6. Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider, “Memory Unbound: The Holocaust and the Formation of Cosmopolitan Memory,” European Journal of Social Theory 5, no. 1 (2002): 87–106, esp. 88. 483

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7. Ibid., 93, 102. 8. For an assessment of the Arendtian legacy, see Richard H. King and Dan Stone, ed., Hannah Arendt and the Uses of History: Imperialism, Nation, Race, and Genocide (New York: Berghahn, 2008). See also Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), pt. 1. 9. To get a sense of the new work on—and debates around—the relationship between colonialism and the Holocaust, see, for example, Isabel Hull, Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006); Volker Langbehn and Mohammad Salama, ed., German Colonialism: Race, the Holocaust, and Postwar Germany (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011); Moses, Empire, Colony, Genocide; Dan Stone, Histories of the Holocaust (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), esp.  203–244; Jürgen Zimmerer, Von Windhuk nach Auschwitz? Beiträge zum Verhältnis vom Kolonialismus und Holocaust (Berlin: Lit, 2011). See also the forum featuring Zimmerer, Birthe Kundrus, and others in “The German Colonial Imagination,” German History 26, no. 2 (2008): 251–271. For the entangled aftermath, see Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory; Michael Rothberg, Debarati Sanyal, and Max Silverman, eds., Noeuds de Mémoire: Multidirectional Memory in Postwar French and Francophone Culture, special issue of Yale French Studies 118/119 (2010): 52–71; Debarati Sanyal, Memory and Complicity: Migrations of Holocaust Remembrance (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015); and Max Silverman, Palimpsestic Memory: The Holocaust and Colonialism in French and Francophone Fiction and Film (New York: Berghahn, 2013). 10. Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 85–86. The chapter from which I am quoting is called “Why Anticolonialism Wasn’t a Human Rights Movement.” Moyn’s convincing argument that the human rights movement only becomes significant in the post-1968 period lends support to my argument for alternative internationalisms in the pre-1968 period. 11. My point is not to dismiss the politics of human rights as such, but to point to the limits of its dominant articulations, which I believe accord with the normative vision Levy and Sznaider find in post-1990s Holocaust memory culture. In the vast critical literature on human rights, a succinct critique that aligns with my point here is Wendy Brown, “ ‘The Most We Can Hope for . . .’ : Human Rights and the Politics of Fatalism,” South Atlantic Quarterly 103, no. 2/3 (2004): 451–463. Also relevant in this context is the nuanced critique of the consensual, human-rights based Holocaust memory culture in postapartheid South Africa in Shirli Gilbert, “Anne Frank in South Africa: Remembering the Holocaust, during and after Apartheid,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 26, no. 3 (2012): 366–393. For productive reflections on the dialectic of rights and memory that have inspired my thinking on this complex issue, see Andreas Huyssen, “International Human Rights and the Politics of Memory: Limits and Challenges,” Transcultural Negotiations of Holocaust Memory, special issue of Criticism 53, no. 4 (2011): 607–624. 12. Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider, Human Rights and Memory (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010), 15. 484

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13. In following text, I refer to Marceline Loridan-Ivens according to the name(s) she used at the time she took part in different cinematic and literary projects. When speaking generally about her, I refer to her current preference for Loridan-Ivens. 14. For the significance of 1961, see Annette Wieviorka, The Era of the Witness, trans. Jared Stark (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006); and Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory, pts. 3 and 4. 15. María Lugones, “Playfulness, ‘World’-Travelling, and Loving Perception,” Hypatia 2, no. 2 (1987): 3–19; 18. 16. Ibid., 16; Lugones’s italics. 17. Anne Cubilie and Carl Good, “Introduction: The Future of Testimony,” Discourse 25, no. 1/2 (2003): 4–18; esp. 5. 18. For a similar assessment focused on Holocaust studies, see Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer, “The Witness in the Archive: Holocaust Studies/Memory Studies,” Memory Studies 2, no. 2 (2009): 151–170. 19. Lawrence Langer even famously—or infamously—claims that “oral testimony is distinguished by the absence of literary mediation.” See Lawrence Langer, Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991), 57. 20. Astrid Erll and Ann Rigney, “Introduction: Cultural Memory and Its Dynamics,” in Mediation, Remediation, and the Dynamics of Cultural Memory, ed. Astrid Erll and Ann Rigney (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2009), 1–11; esp. 2 (emphasis in the original). 21. Astrid Erll, “Remembering across Time, Space, and Cultures: Premediation, Remediation, and the ‘Indian Mutiny,’ ” in Mediation, Remediation, and the Dynamics of Cultural Memory, 109–138. Erll draws on Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999); and Ann Rigney, “Plenitude, Scarcity and the Circulation of Cultural Memory,” Journal of European Studies 35, no. 1 (2005): 11–28. See also Erll, “Travelling Memory,” Parallax 17, no. 4 (2011): 4–18. 22. As a public articulation of memory, acts of testimony function analogously. See Gillian Whitlock, “Remediating Guerilla Girl: Rape Warfare and the Limits of Humanitarian Storytelling,” Biography 33, no. 3 (Summer 2010): 471– 497. Whitlock does not refer directly to Bolter and Grusin, but rather to Wai Chee Dimock, “Introduction: Genres as Fields of Knowledge,” PMLA 122, no. 5 (October 2007): 1377–1388. 23. Fiona Ross, “On Having a Voice and Being Heard: Some After-Effects of Testifying before the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission,” Anthropological Theory 3, no. 3 (2003): 325–341, esp. 336. 24. Ross, “On Having a Voice,” 337. 25. Noah Shenker also diagnoses this limit of studies of Holocaust testimony and seeks to develop a new methodology attuned to mediation. See Noah Shenker, “Embodied Memory: The Institutional Mediation of Survivor Testimony in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum,” in Documentary Testimonies: Global Archives of Suffering, ed. Bhaskar Sarkar and Janet Walker (New York: Routledge, 2009), 35–58. 485

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26. Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin, directors, Chronique d’un été (Paris: Argos, 1961). 27. For a discussion of this editing process, as well as some of the footage treating these political themes, see Florence Dauman’s documentary Un été + 50 (Paris: Argos, 2011). For an analysis of the way politics was deliberately edited out of the film, see Sam DiIorio, “Total Cinema: Chronique d’un été and the End of Bazinian Film Theory,” Screen 48, no. 1 (2007): 25–43. 28. For a close reading of this scene of testimony, see my discussion in Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory, chap. 6. 29. Writing forty years later, Loridan-Ivens describes the deportation in the following terms: “How could I have known, growing up as a little girl in a modern, happy family in Southern France, that history is so merciless. That my hard-working father, who had flown from anti-Semitism in Poland to France in 1920, would return on the same railway. We had both been arrested by the Gestapo in 1943 and transported to Poland, to the concentration camp Auschwitz. Of the fifty members of our family only a few would return. I arrived in France on the same cattle car, without him.” See Marceline Loridan-Ivens, “The Wind of Tides,” in Cinema without Borders: The Films of Joris Ivens (Nijmegen: European Foundation Joris Ivens, 2002), 6. Loridan-Ivens’s most complete account of her deportation has recently been published in the memoir But You Did Not Come Back, trans. Sandra Smith (New York: Atlantic Monthly, 2016). 30. See the May 7, 1961, interview with Marceline Loridan for the television program Reflets de Cannes, now included in the 2103 Criterion edition of the Chronicle of a Summer DVD. 31. For the historical resonances of Night and Fog—including its links to decolonization—see Griselda Pollock and Max Silverman, eds., Concentrationary Cinema: Aesthetics as Resistance in Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog (New York: Berghahn, 2012). 32. Marguerite Duras, “Les deux ghettos,” France-Observateur, November 9, 1961, 8–10. See also Henri Kréa, “Le racism est collectif, la solidarité individuelle,” France-Observateur, October 26, 1961, 14–15. 33. William Gardner Smith, The Stone Face (New York: Farrar, Straus, 1963). 34. This quotation is taken from the discussion of Comment Yukong déplaça les montagnes on “Le masque et la plume” (radio show, April 10, 1977), available on the website of INA; http://www.ina.fr/video/AFE09000133/les-echos-du-cinema -numero-23.fr.html. See also the press excerpts included in Jean-Pierre Sergent, “The Chinese Dream of Joris Ivens,” Studies in Documentary Film 3, no. 1 (2009): 61–68. 35. Joris Ivens and Marceline Loridan, Le 17e parallèle: La guerre du peuple (Paris: Argos, 1968). 36. In Loridan’s words, the film was an attempt to capture “people’s true lived experience” (le vécu veritable des gens). See Serge Daney, Thérèse Giraud, and Serge Le Péron, “Entretien avec Joris Ivens and Marceline Loridan,” Cahiers du Cinéma 266/267 (May 1976): 6–22; esp. 7. 37. The voices of the villagers are sometimes clearly individualized and sometimes presented as a kind of chorus; the latter is the case near the beginning of the 486

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film, when the filmmakers have edited together fragments of various individual stories of flight from the south to the north over the 17th parallel. One of the most striking testimonies comes toward the end of the film from a gun-toting nineyear-old boy who declares that he is afraid of tigers but not Americans! 38. The Cahiers du Cinéma interview cited above gives a good sense of how Ivens and Loridan worked and portrays a fairly equitable collaboration. 39. See Loridan’s comments on the relatively recent invention of the Coutant camera and the Nagra recorder in Daney, Giraud, and Le Péron, “Entretien avec Joris Ivens and Marceline Loridan,” 14. Note that Rouch and Morin’s film and Ivens and Loridan’s film also shared the same producer: Argos Films. 40. Sergent, “Chinese Dream,” 63. My implicit argument here is that the multidirectional links between Chronicle of a Summer and The Seventeenth Parallel are not primarily a matter of content (the histories at stake are, in fact, radically different from each other), but rather of genre (testimony, direct cinema), rhetoric (“never forget!”), and material form (technology and cinematic technique). 41. The sounds of bombing and jets are not only used synchronously and it is not always possible to tell whether the sound is synchronous with the image— certainly, much editing has taken place. While the synchronous sound is powerful in evoking Vihn Linh as a place, the nonsynchronous use of the same sounds becomes a leitmotif that structures the film as a whole. Indeed, nonsynchronous sounds of bombs and planes accompany the title sequence, a series of still battle shots that form the backdrop for the credits. 42. Marceline Loridan and Joris Ivens, 17e parallèle: La guerre du people (deux mois sous la terre) (Paris: Les éditeurs Français Réunis, 1968), 51. 43. Ibid., 54. My translation. 44. Ibid. This scene is not included in the film, although there is much footage of the underground schools, and children play a significant role (including giving testimony). The recordings Loridan describes in this scene are, however, similar to ones found in the final cut. 45. See for instance Ivens’s comments in his preface to the book version of 17e Parallèle (9). The filmmakers have also sometimes made contestable decisions about what footage to include—including scenes of corpses and of the capture and humiliation of an American soldier. 46. Steven Erlanger, “Jewish Deportee on Persecution, Past and Present,” New York Times, January 2, 2016; http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/02/books/a-french -deportee-life-at-auschwitz-and-history-repeating.html. 47. See also Pierre Haski, “Marceline Loridan a filmé la Chine de Mao: ‘Je fus dupée par mon époque,’ ” Rue89, June 15, 2014; http://rue89.nouvelobs.com/2014 /06/15/marceline-loridan-a-filme-chine-mao-jai-ete-dupee-epoque-252686. 48. Loridan-Ivens, “Wind of Tides,” 5. 49. See also Loridan-Ivens’s remarks about the eternal nature of anti-Semitism on the occasion of the seventieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, in Pierre Haski, “Auschwitz 70 ans après: donner tort à Marceline Loridan,” Rue89, January 27, 2015; http://rue89.nouvelobs.com/2015/01/27/auschwitz-70-ans-apres -donner-tort-a-marceline-loridan-257335. 487

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50. Another obvious example of Holocaust internationalism is the non-Jewish Auschwitz survivor Charlotte Delbo, who linked her experiences nonreductively to events in Algeria, Greece, and Argentina, and also condemned Soviet terror. On Delbo, see Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory, chap. 7. 51. For the importance of 1968 and, in particular, the Vietnam War in the globalization of Holocaust memory, see also Berthold Molden, “Vietnam, the New Left and the Holocaust: How the Cold War Changed Discourse on Genocide,” in Memory in a Global Age, ed. Aleida Assmann and Sebastian Conrad (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 79–96. 52. See Cathy Caruth, “Trauma and Experience: Introduction,” in Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 10. 53. Marceline Loridan-Ivens, Ma vie balagan, written in collaboration with Elisabeth D. Inandiak (Paris: Robert Laffont, 2008), 173. My translation. The fact that the memoir has been written in collaboration with a professional writer (and friend of Loridan-Ivens) only confirms the importance of forms of mediation in the production of testimony—one of the central arguments of this chapter. 54. Ibid. The suitcase as lieu de mémoire is, of course, not limited to LoridanIvens. Such suitcases play a significant role in Holocaust commemoration. They are, for instance, displayed at various camps and museums and used in pedagogical projects such as What We Carry, which combines videotaped survivor testimony and the presentation of authentic artifacts carried in suitcases. See the project website; www .whatwecarry.org. Another innovative deployment of the suitcase as a figure of multidirectional memory can be found in Turkish writer Menekşe Toprak’s short story “Velizdeki Mektup” (The Letter in the Suitcase), which recounts the “inheritance” of Germany’s National Socialist history by a Turkish-German immigrant girl. See Menekşe Toprak, Velizdeki Mektup (Istanbul: YKY, 2007). The story has been translated into German by Koray Yılmaz-Günay, as “Der Brief im Koffer,” Freitext 19 (2012). Yasemin Yildiz and I discuss this story in our coauthored book project in progress, “Citizens of Memory: Migrant Archives of Holocaust Remembrance.” 55. Ibid. 56. Ibid. 57. See Hervé Hamon and Patrick Rotman, Les Porteurs de valises: La résistance française à la guerre d’Algérie (Paris: Albin Michel, 1979). 58. Sergent’s comments can be found in Dauman, Un été.

19. Fiction and Solicitude This chapter was written first as a response to a paper by Samuel Gerson entitled “ ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ after the Holocaust: A Psychoanalytic Kaddish for Jean Amery, Paul Celan, and Primo Levi,” presented at the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis in January 2012. 1. Saul Friedländer, Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution” (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). 488

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2. Hayden White, “Figural Realism in Witness Literature,” Parallax 10, no. 1 (2004): 113–124. For a related essay that covers some of this same ground, see my “Primo Levi for the Present,” in Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 181–204. 3. See Ulrich Baer, Remnants of Song: Trauma and the Experience of Modernity in Charles Baudelaire and Paul Celan (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000). 4. Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, History (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). 5. Shoshana Felman, The Juridical Unconscious (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002). 6. Carole Angier, The Double Bind: Primo Levi, a Biography (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2002); Ian Thomson, Primo Levi, A Life (New York: Picador, 2004). 7. Primo Levi, “Rappoport’s Testament” in Moments of Reprieve, trans. Ruth Feldman (New York: Penguin Books, 1995), 1–2. 8. Hayden White, “Historical Emplotment and the Problem of Truth,” in Friedländer, Probing the Limits of Representation, 37–53. 9. Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Random House, 1989), 78. Further citations are documented parenthetically in the text. 10. See Sigmund Freud, “Criminality from a Sense of Guilt,” Collected Papers (London: Hogarth, 1953), 4:341–344. 11. This is doubtless related to Hayden White’s claim that the middle voice has a privileged position in Holocaust historiography. 12. Charlotte Delbo, Auschwitz and After, trans. Rosette Lamonte (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), xiii. Further citations are documented parenthetically in the text.

20. Catastrophes 1. Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 3, 9. 2. Ibid., 3. A crucial contribution to the debate on the exceptionality of the Shoah is Alan Rosenbaum, Is the Holocaust Unique? Perspectives on Comparative Genocide, 3rd ed. (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2009). 3. Jacques Derrida, “Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides: A Dialogue with Jacques Derrida,” in Giovanna Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 92. 4. Adopted from Derrida, “Autoimmunity,” 88. 5. See Richard G. Hovannisian, introduction to Remembrance and Denial: The Case of the Armenian Genocide, ed. R. Hovannisian (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1999), 21; and Roger W. Smith, Eric Markusen, and Robert J. Lifton, “Professional Ethics and the Denial of the Armenian Genocide,” ibid., 271ff. The 489

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latter essay reproduces the original draft by Lowry, the ambassador’s letter, and provides a detailed analysis of the letter and the institutional context of genocide denial by the Turkish government. 6. Antoon De Baets, Censorship of Historical Thought: A World Guide, 1945–2000 (Westport CT: Greenwood, 2002), 472. 7. Richard G. Hovannisian, “Denial of the Armenian Genocide in Comparison with Holocaust Denial,” in Remembrance and Denial, 202. 8. On October 11, 2007, regarding a proposed congressional resolution to recognize the Armenian genocide, the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, said that the reason to bring the measure to a vote was the present occurrence of genocide: “While that may have been a long time ago, genocide is taking place now in Darfur, it did within recent memory in Rwanda, so as long as there is genocide there is need to speak out against it”; http://web.archive.org/web/2007 1012155707/http://voanews.com/english/2007-10-11-voa71.cfm?renderforprint=1 &textonly=1&&CFID=202741092&CFTOKEN=27406039. However, shortly thereafter, Pelosi was forced to backtrack from her pledge to bring the measure to a vote: “Support for the symbolic resolution dropped as the Bush administration and others warned that angering Turkey would hamper efforts in Iraq. The resolution has 215 co-sponsors, three short of the majority needed to pass in the House of Representatives, and down from the 236 co-sponsors it had earlier this year.” Nick Timiraos, “How Turkey Could Undermine Iraq,” Wall Street Journal, October 20, 2007; http:// online.wsj.com/article/SB119284681093765809.html. 9. California Courier, vol. 48, no. 28, February 16, 2012. 10. Benedict Kiernan, Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 12. “On September 2, 1998, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (a court established by the United Nations) issued the world’s first conviction for the defined crime of genocide after trial before an international tribunal. A man named Jean-Paul Akayesu was judged guilty of genocide and crimes against humanity for acts he engaged in and oversaw while mayor of the Rwandan town of Taba.” “Rwanda: The First Conviction for Genocide,” Holocaust Encyclopedia; http://www .ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007157. 11. Marc Nichanian, Writers of Disaster: Armenian Literature in the Twentieth Century (London: Gomidas Institute, 2002), 13. 12. “La France reconnaît publiquement le génocide arménien de 1915. La présente loi sera exécutée comme loi de l’État—Loi du 29 janvier 2001 (article unique).” http://www.genocide-museum.am/eng/France_Law.php. For an earlier commentary, see Marc Nichanian, “The Truth of the Facts about the New Revisionism,” in Remembrance and Denial, 258. 13. Sévane Garibian, “Génocide arménien: de l’impunité,” Le Monde, March 5, 2012; http://www.lemonde.fr/idees/article/2012/03/05/genocide-armenien-de-l -impunite_1651787_3232.html. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid. 16. Nichanian, “Truth of the Facts,” 258. While Nichanian analyzes a failure of historiography that, disturbingly, requires the intervention of the law, Carlo Ginz490

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burg, in the context of a murder trial, analyzes a “miscarriage of justice” that requires the intervention of the historian: Carlo Ginzburg, The Judge and the Historian, trans. Antony Shuggar (London: Verso Books 1999). On some comparative aspects of the Jewish and Armenian genocides, see also Robert Melson, “The Armenian Genocide as Precursor and Prototype of Twentieth-Century Genocide,” and Vahakn Dadrian, “The Comparative Aspects of the Armenian and Jewish Cases of Genocide: A Sociohistorical Perspective,” both in Rosenbaum, Is the Holocaust Unique?, 125–174. 17. See http://www.preventgenocide.org/law/convention/reservations/. 18. Derrida, “Autoimmunity,” 92. 19. DeNeen L. Brown, “Canadian Government Apologizes for Abuse of Indigenous People,” Washington Post, June 12, 2008; http://articles.washingtonpost.com /2008 -06 -12 /world /36891546 _1 _indian -residential -schools -aboriginal -peoples -apology. 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid. 22. Ward Churchill, Kill the Indian, Save the Man: The Genocidal Impact of American Indian Residential Schools (San Francisco: City Lights, 2008). 23. Raphael Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation— Analysis of Government—Proposals for Redress (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1944), 79. 24. Robert Longley, “Did You Know the US Apologized to Native Americans?”; http://usgovinfo .about .com /b /2012 /12 /27 /did -you -know -the -us -apologized -to -native-americans.htm. 25. Rob Capriccioso, “A Sorry Saga: Obama Signs Native American Apology Resolution; Fails to Draw Attention to It,” Indian Country Today, January 13, 2010; http://www.indianlaw.org/node/529. 26. Department of Defense Appropriations Act, 2010, H. R. 3326, Section 8113, Apology to Native Peoples of the United States; http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg /BILLS-111hr3326enr/pdf/BILLS-111hr3326enr.pdf, 45. 27. Capriccioso, “Sorry Saga.” 28. See http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/BILLS-111hr3326enr/pdf/BILLS-111hr 3326enr.pdf, 45f. 29. This is based on the formulation of Mark Charles, quoted by Robert Longley. On December 19, 2012, Charles “hosted a public reading of the Apology to Native Peoples of the United States in front of the Capitol in Washington, D.C.” Longley, “Did You Know the US Apologized to Native Americans?” 30. Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory, 1ff. 31. Edward Linenthal, quoted in ibid., 9. 32. Wulf Kansteiner, “Finding Meaning in Memory: A Methodological Critique of Collective Memory Studies,” History and Theory 41, no. 2 (May 2002): 189. 33. Ibid., 190. 34. See Richard Falk and David Krieger, The Path To Zero: Dialogues on Nuclear Dangers (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2012), 125–127. Alan Rosenbaum’s volume includes a chapter by Kinue Tokudome on “The Holocaust and Japanese Atrocities” carried out in China between 1942 and  1945. Tokudome writes that “the 491

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number of victims of the Japanese human experiments were twelve times as many as those who were killed by the Nazi doctors in a similar way” (211). Rosenbaum’s volume does not include a chapter on the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 35. See David Stannard, “The Politics of Genocide Scholarship,” in Rosenbaum, Is the Holocaust Unique? 300. Also quoted in Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory, 10. 36. Wulf Kansteiner, “The Rise and Fall of Metaphor: German Historians and the Uniqueness of the Holocaust,” in Rosenbaum, Is the Holocaust Unique? 281. 37. Smith, Markusen, and Lifton, “Professional Ethics,” 280–284. 38. Hovannisian, “Denial of the Armenian Genocide,” 202. 39. Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution, 1933–1939 (New York: HarperCollins 1997); Friedländer, The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945 (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), xxv–xxvi. 40. Saul Friedländer, “History, Memory, and the Historian,” in Disturbing Remains: Memory, History, and Crisis in the Twentieth Century, ed. Michael Rothberg and Charles Salas (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2001), 280. 41. Hayden White, “Historical Truth, Estrangement, and Disbelief,” Chap. 1 in this volume. 42. See, for example, Susan Derwin’s most recent book, Rage Is the Subtext: Readings in Holocaust Literature and Film (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2012). 43. Marc Nichanian, The Historiographic Perversion, trans. and afterword by Gil Anidjar (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 79. 44. Ibid., 82. 45. Ibid., 144. 46. Ibid., 83. Nichanian is here inspired by Jean-François Lyotard’s terminology. See also Marc Nichanian, “Testimony,” in Hovannisian, Denial of the Armenian Genocide, 43. 47. Nichanian, Historiographic Perversion, 55. 48. Jean-François Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 13. 49. Nichanian, “Truth of the Facts,” 257 and 252ff. 50. Ibid., 253. 51. Ibid., 255ff. The quote within Nichanian’s text is from Aram Andonian, 268n21. Regarding the word “catastrophe,” Nichanian remarks that “the proper name of the event in Armenian is Aghed. Like Shoah in Hebrew, it simply designates the Catastrophe, the unique one, and this forever,” 269n22. 52. Ibid., 260–264. 53. Eric Hobsbawm, interview in Le Monde, February 1994; quoted in Nichanian, “Truth of the Facts,” 260. 54. Nichanian, “Truth of the Facts,” 263. 55. David Stannard, American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 12. 56. For a large number of sources, see, for example, Stannard, American Holocaust. 492

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57. Lyotard, Differend, 8. The following quotes, 9–13. 58. Ibid., 9–13. 59. Saul Friedländer, “History, Memory, and the Historian,” 280. 60. Susan Slyomovics, “The Rape of Qula, a Destroyed Palestinian Village,” in Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of Memory, ed. A. Sa’di and L. Abu-Lughod (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 27. 61. Ann Rigney, “Scales of Postmemory: Six of Six Million,” Chap.  5  in this volume. 62. Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory, 11. 63. Wulf Kansteiner and Todd Presner, introduction to this volume. 64. Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory, 311. 65. Ronit Lentin, Co-memory and Melancholia: Israelis Memorialising the Palestinian Nakba (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), 8. 66. Ibid., 1, 16. 67. Ahmad H. Sa’di, “Afterword: Reflections on Representation, History, and Moral Accountability,” in Sa’di and Abu-Lughod, Nakba, 308. 68. Benny Morris, “Mikhake la-barbarim” [Waiting for the Barbarians], Ha’aretz, January 6, 2004, 41–43, quoted in Sa’di and Abu-Lughod, Nakba, 308ff. 69. Quoted ibid., 309. Rothberg also quotes and comments on Morris’s assertions in Multidirectional Memory, 311ff. 70. Sa’di, “Afterword,” 308. 71. In 1944, 66  percent of Palestinian population was agrarian with low literacy. Lentin, Co-memory, 138; Nur Masalha, “Appropriating History: Looting of Palestinian Records, Archives and Library Collections, 1948–2011,” in The Palestine Nakba: Decolonising History, Narrating the Subaltern, Reclaiming Memory (London: Zed Books, 2012), 135–147. 72. Nur Masalha quoted in Lentin, Co-memory, 138. 73. Quoted in Lila Abu-Lughod and Ahmad H. Sa’di, introduction to Sa’di and Abu-Lughod, Nakba, 4. 74. Ibid. 75. Ronit Lentin, “The Contested Memory of Dispossession: Commemorizing the Palestinian Nakba in Israel,” in Thinking Palestine, ed. Ronit Lentin (London: Zed Books, 2008), 212. The quote within the quote is by Sari Hanafi. See also Lentin, Co-memory, 20ff. 76. Ronit Lentin, “Introduction: Thinking Palestine,” in Lentin, Thinking Palestine, 9. 77. Ibid. Lentin refers here to Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oxford: Oneworld, 2006), 229. 78. Nur Masalha, The Palestine Nakba: Decolonising History, Narrating the Subaltern, Reclaiming Memory (London: Zed Books, 2012), 121. 79. Ibid. 80. Ronit Lentin quoting Ilan Pappé’s formulation: Co-memory, 80. 81. David Theo Goldberg, “Racial Palestinianization,” in Lentin, Thinking Palestine, 37. 82. Ibid., 39. 493

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83. Natur quoted in Ronit Lentin, “The Contested Memory of Dispossession,” in Lentin, Thinking Palestine, 215. 84. bell hooks quoted in Lentin, Co-memory, 141. 85. Lentin, Co-memory, 139–140. 86. Lentin, “Contested Memory of Dispossession,” 209. 87. Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory, 313. 88. See Jacques Derrida, “Avowing—The Impossible: “Returns,” Repentance, and Reconciliation. A Lesson,” trans. Gil Anidjar, in Living Together. Jacques Derrida’s Communities of Violence and Peace, ed. Elisabeth Weber (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 23ff: “It is, indeed, always a matter of a necessity, and therefore of a law: One cannot not ‘live together’ even if one does not know how or with whom, with God, with gods, men, animals, with one’s own, with one’s close ones, neighbors, family, or friends, with one’s fellow citizens or countrymen, but also with the most distant strangers, with one’s enemies, with oneself, with one’s contemporaries, with those who are no longer so or will never be so, so many names that I draw from daily language and of which I do not yet presume that we know what they designate. But we sense that the regimes of this law, of the ‘must [il faut]’ and therefore of the ‘well [bien]’ of ‘one must well live together,’ can be different. We know (the example will not surprise you, but I could substitute it with so many others) that Israelis and Palestinians, Israelis and Arabs of the Middle East, already must, they must well ‘live together’ whether they are or not for ‘peace now,’ whether they are or not orthodox, as one says strangely; and the same goes for the Israelis and for all the Jews of the Diaspora (this name which arbitrarily places them in one ensemble, whether they want it or not, be it under the category of dispersion), whether they are believers or not, favoring or not what one calls the ‘peace process,’ agreeing or not with those who, here or there, concur in good conscience or cynically to sabotage the said process; well then, all of these, they must well ‘live together.’ ”

Epilogue This interview was conducted in October 2013. 1. The original conference, “Nazism and the ‘Final Solution’: Probing the Limits of Representation,” was held at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) on April 26–29, 1990. 2. The scene occurred in January 1989, at a UCLA conference entitled “History, Event and Discourse.” Carlo Ginzburg gave a paper and Hayden White reacted from the floor, leading to a heated exchange between the two. A revised version of the paper was later published as “The Inquisitor as Anthropologist,” in Ginzburg, Clues, Myths and the Historical Method (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 141–148. 3. Ginzburg based his attack primarily on Hayden White’s 1982 essay, “The Politics of Historical Interpretation: Discipline and De-Sublimation,” Critical Inquiry 9, no. 1 (1982): 113–137. Friedländer is referring to Hayden White’s “more 494

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nuanced” essay: “Historical Emplotment and the Problem of Truth,” in Saul Friedländer, ed. Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution” (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 37–53. 4. Jacques Derrida delivered his lecture on Walter Benjamin and violence on April 26, 1990, as part of the “Probing the Limits of Representation” conference. The essay was not published in the conference volume because it was already committed to publication as Derrida, “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority,’ ” in Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, ed. Drucilla Cornell, Michel Rosenfeld, and David Gray Carlson (New York: Routledge, 1992), 3–67. 5. Jean-François Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998). 6. See Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 7. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 8. Raul Hilberg, Sources of Holocaust Research (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2001). 9. See the introduction to Saul Friedländer, The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945 (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), xiii–xxvi. 10. Hayden White, “The Modernist Event,” in Figural Realism: Studies in the Mimesis Effect (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 66–86. 11. See Hayden White, “Historical Truth, Estrangement, and Disbelief,” Chap. 1 in this volume, as well as White, “Historical Discourse and Literary Theory: On Saul Friedländer’s Years of Extermination,” in Den Holocaust erzählen: Historiographie zwischen wissenschaftlicher Empirie und narrativer Kreativität, ed. Nobert Frei and Wulf Kansteiner (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2013), 51–78. 12. Martin Broszat, “A Plea for the Historicization of National Socialism,” in Reworking the Past: Hitler, the Holocaust, and the Historians’ Debate, ed. Peter Baldwin (Boston: Beacon, 1990), 77–87; Martin Broszat and Saul Friedländer, “A Controversy about the Historicization of National Socialism,” New German Critique 44 (1988): 85–126. 13. See Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution, 1933–1939 (New York: HarperCollins, 1997), 6. The reference is to Dominick LaCapra, Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994). 14. Robert Paxton, Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940–1944 (New York: Knopf, 1972). 15. Yehuda Elkana, “The Need to Forget,” Ha’aretz, March 2, 1988.

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ACKNOWL EDGMENTS

The editors would like to recognize the support of the 1939 Society and the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies for making possible the 2012 conference “History Unlimited: Probing the Ethics of Holocaust Culture,” and for supporting the publication of this volume. In particular, we thank Vivian Holenbeck, Mary Pinkerson, Chelsea White, and David Wu. We also acknowledge the support of the University of California Humanities Research Institute and its director, David Theo Goldberg, as well as the UCLA Department of History and its former chair, David Myers. In addition, the editors would like to thank the peer reviewers and the editors at Harvard University Press, particularly Kathleen McDermott, for their helpful suggestions and guidance. Last but not least, our heartfelt gratitude goes out to Saul Friedländer and Hayden White for their generous engagement with shaping the vision of this volume and for the many splendid opportunities to listen to, learn from, and debate with them. We dedicate this volume to Saul and Hayden.

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ILLUSTRATION CREDITS

Figure 3.1 Figure 3.2 Figure 3.3 Figure 8.1 Figure 8.2

Graphic by Wulf Kansteiner Graphic by Wulf Kansteiner Graphic by Wulf Kansteiner Screenshot, http://www.joodsmonument.nl/ (July 5, 2014) Compiled by Yoh Kawano, David Shepard, and Todd Presner from data at Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation. Figure 8.3 Compiled by Yoh Kawano, David Shepard, and Todd Presner from data at Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation. Figure 8.4 Compiled by Yoh Kawano, David Shepard, and Todd Presner from data at Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation. Figure 8.5 Compiled by Yoh Kawano, David Shepard, and Todd Presner from data at Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation. Figure 8.6 Screenshot, Daniel Geslewitz, interview. Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation, 2015. Figure 8.7 Screenshot (portion), data pertaining to Daniel Geslewitz, interview. Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation, 2015. Figure 8.8 Samuel Gustman, “Method and Apparatus for Cataloguing Multimedia Data,” U.S. Patent 5,832,495 190 (Nov. 3, 1998). Figure 2B. Figure 8.9 Generated by Zoe Borovsky and Todd Presner using Gephi opensource software for network visualization and analysis. CDDL 1.0 and GNU General Public License (GPL) v3. https://gephi.org. Figure 8.10 Generated by Zoe Borovsky and Todd Presner using Gephi opensource software for network visualization and analysis. CDDL 1.0 and GNU General Public License (GPL) v3. gephi.org. Figure 9.1 Screenshot, Sima Wagner, interview. Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation, 2013. Figure 9.2 Screenshot. IWitness, USC Shoah Foundation. 497

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Figure 9.3 Screenshot. IWitness, USC Shoah Foundation. Figure 10.1 Map by Alberto Giordano, with Tim Cole. From Alberto Giordano and Tim Cole, “Bringing the Ghetto to the Jew: Spatialities of Ghettoization in Budapest” in Geographies of the Holocaust, ed. Anne Kelly Knowles, Tim Cole, and Alberto Giordano (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014). Used by permission of the authors. Figure 10.2 Map by Benjamin Perry Blackshear, using the camps database developed by Alexander Yule and Anne Kelly Knowles, with Paul B. Jaskot; territorial boundaries developed by Michael De Groot. From Anne Kelly Knowles and Paul B. Jaskot, with Benjamin Perry Blackshear, Michael De Groot, and Alexander Yule, “Mapping the SS Concentration Camps,” in Geographies of the Holocaust, ed. Anne Kelly Knowles, Tim Cole, and Alberto Giordano (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014). Used by permission of the authors. Figure 10.3 Erik B. Steiner for Knowles et al. From Anne Kelly Knowles and Paul B. Jaskot, with Benjamin Perry Blackshear, Michael De Groot, and Alexander Yule, “Mapping the SS Concentration Camps,” in Geographies of the Holocaust, ed. Anne Kelly Knowles, Tim Cole, and Alberto Giordano (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014). Used by permission of the authors. Figure 10.4 Photo by Waitman Wade Beorn, with additional imagery by Erik B. Steiner. From Waitman Wade Beorn, with Anne Kelly Knowles, “Killing on the Ground and in the Mind,” in Geographies of the Holocaust, ed. Anne Kelly Knowles, Tim Cole, and Alberto Giordano (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014). Used by permission of the authors. Figure 10.5 Multimedia image created by Erik B. Steiner. From Simone Gigliotti, Marc J. Masurovsky, and Erik B. Steiner, “From the Camp to the Road: Representing the Evacuations from Auschwitz, January 1945,” in Geographies of the Holocaust, ed. Anne Kelly Knowles, Tim Cole, and Alberto Giordano (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014). Used by permission of the authors. Figure 14.1 Photograph by Gavriel Rosenfeld Figure 14.2 Photograph by Gavriel Rosenfeld Figure 14.3 Photograph by Gavriel Rosenfeld

498

CONTRIBUTORS

O M E R B A R TOV is John P. Birkelund Distinguished Professor of European History and professor of German studies at Brown University. His many books include The Eastern Front, 1941–1945; Hitler’s Army; Murder in Our Midst; Mirrors of Destruction; Germany’s War and the Holocaust; and The “Jew” in Cinema. His most recent work, Erased, investigates interethnic relations in the borderlands of Eastern Europe. Bartov is currently completing a major monograph, The Voice of Your Brother’s Blood: Buczacz, Biography of a Town. C H R I S TO P H E R  R . B R OW N I N G is Frank Porter Graham Professor of History at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. His books include Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101; Collected Memories: Holocaust History and Postwar Testimony; The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939–March  1942; and Remembering Survival: Inside a Nazi Slave Labor Camp.

is Maxine Elliot Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Program of Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of numerous books, including Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity; Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”; The Psychic Life of Power: Theories of Subjection; Antigone’s Claim: Kinship between Life and Death; Precarious Life: Powers of Violence and Mourning; and Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? Her most recent books include Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism; Dispossessions: The Performative in the Political (coauthored with Athena Athanasiou); and Senses of the Subject.

JUDITH BUTLER

is professor of social history and director of the Brigstow Institute at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom. He is the author of Images of the Holocaust/Selling the Holocaust; Holocaust City; Traces of the Holocaust; and

TIM COLE

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Holocaust Landscapes. With Anne Knowles and Alberto Giordano, he is a coeditor of and contributor to Geographies of the Holocaust. His current book project— About Britain—follows the routes of a series of 1951 guidebooks to uncover the postwar environmental, landscape, and social history of Britain. P E T E R E I S E N M A N is founder and design principal of Eisenman Architects in New York City. He is also Charles Gwathmey Professor of Architecture at Yale. Among his recent books are Written into the Void: Selected Writings, 1990–2004 and Ten Canonical Buildings, 1950–2000. Eisenman Architects designed the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin. In 2010, Eisenman received the international Wolf Prize in Architecture awarded by the Wolf Foundation in Israel. He was awarded the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement by the International Architecture Biennale in Venice in 2004, and in 2001 he received the Medal of Honor from the New York Chapter of the American Institute of Architects, as well as the Smithsonian Institution’s 2001 Cooper-Hewitt National Design Award in Architecture.

is associate professor of Italian studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of The Historic Imaginary: Politics of History in Fascist Italy and coeditor of The Politics of Memory in Postwar Europe. His research has been published in Representations, History and Theory, Storiografia, and the Journal of Modern European History, and he coedited a special issue of Storia e Storiografia dedicated to the fortieth anniversary of Hayden White’s Metahistory. He is also a cofounder of the digital journals California Italian Studies and Zapruder World: An International Journal on the History of Social Conflict. C L AU D I O F O G U

S AU L F R I E D L Ä N D E R is professor emeritus of history at Tel Aviv University and University of California, Los Angeles, where he held the “1939 Club” Chair in Holocaust History, the first chair in Holocaust studies at a public university in the United States. Among Friedländer’s many books on Nazism and the Holocaust are Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution, 1933–1939 and The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945. The Years of Extermination was awarded both the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction and the Peace Prize of the German Book-Trade Association, the most prestigious award of its kind in Germany. A L B E R TO G I O R DA N O is professor and chair in the Department of Geography at Texas State University. With Anne Knowles and Tim Cole, he is a coeditor and contributor to Geographies of the Holocaust and also the author of Il Controllo di Qualità nei Sistemi Informativi Territoriali (Quality Control in Geographic Information Systems). He has served in the editorial office of the National Atlas of Italy, collaborated on volume 6 of the History of Cartography project, and served on the editorial board of Rand McNally’s Goode’s World Atlas.

is the director of A Film Unfinished, her first feature-length documentary. The film integrates and interrogates found footage produced by the

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Nazis in 1942 in the Warsaw Ghetto, shortly before they liquidated it and sent most of the Jews to Treblinka. She is currently finishing work on her second film, The Visual Crash, a critical documentary that examines the visual material shot on the Mavi Marmara, the ship of protesters that sailed from Turkey to Gaza in May 2010 and was attacked by Israeli commandos. is a professor of the history of art and architecture at DePaul University and was the Andrew W. Mellon Professor at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (2014–2016). He is the author of The Nazi Perpetrator: Twelve German Cities Confront the Nazi Past and The Architecture of Oppression: The SS, Forced Labor, and the Nazi Monumental Building Economy. He is also a contributor to Geographies of the Holocaust, among other work on art, politics, and the Holocaust in modern Germany. Jaskot served as president of the College Art Association Board of Directors from 2008 to 2010.

PAU L  B . J A S KOT

W U L F K A N S T E I N E R is professor of history at Aarhus University, Denmark. A cultural and intellectual historian of twentieth-century Europe, Kansteiner has published in the fields of media history, memory studies, historical theory, and Holocaust studies. He is the author of In Pursuit of German Memory: History, Television, and Politics after Auschwitz and coeditor of The Politics of Memory in Postwar Europe and Historical Representation and Historical Truth. He is also coeditor of the journal Memory Studies. A N N E K N OW L E S is professor of history at University of Maine. She is a pioneer in developing historical Geographic Information Systems (GIS) as an interdisciplinary method to infuse historical research and teaching with geographical awareness. She edited two of the first books on historical GIS: Past Time, Past Place: GIS for History; and Placing History: How Maps, Spatial Data, and GIS Are Changing Historical Scholarship. She is the author of Mastering Iron: The Struggle to Modernize an American Industry, 1800–1868. Along with Tim Cole and Alberto Giordano, she is principal investigator of the first interdisciplinary project to explore the potential for using GIS and other geospatial methods to study the Holocaust. Knowles is lead editor of Geographies of the Holocaust.

is associate professor of history and Allen Apter Chair of Holocaust Studies and Ethical Values at Lehigh University. His first book, The Philosophy of Life and Death: Ludwig Klages and the Rise of a Nazi Biopolitics, focused on the circle around the Lebensphilosopher and anti-Semitic thinker Ludwig Klages. He is also coeditor of The Politics of Nihilism: From the Nineteenth Century to Contemporary Israel, with Roy Ben-Shai, and Catastrophes, with Andreas Killen.

N I T Z A N L E B OV I C

is an author and critic. His reviews, translations, and essays on literary and cultural subjects appear frequently in numerous national publications, most frequently in the New Yorker, New York Review of Books, and New York Times. His books include the memoir The Elusive Embrace; two collections of

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essays; a translation, with commentary, of the complete works of C. P. Cavafy; and a scholarly study of Greek tragedy. The Lost, his 2006 account of a search for information about relatives killed in the Holocaust, won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Jewish Book Award in the United States and the Prix Médicis in France, among many other honors, and has been published in more than fifteen languages. He teaches at Bard College. A . D I R K M O S E S is professor of modern history at the University of Sydney. Educated in Australia, Scotland, and the United States, he is the author of German Intellectuals and the Nazi Past and many articles and seven anthologies on genocide and colonialism, including Colonial Counterinsurgency and Mass Violence: The Dutch Empire in Indonesia and The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies. He is senior editor of the Journal of Genocide Research. M A R C N I C H A N I A N is a philosopher and literary critic who has taught in the United States, France, Italy, Turkey, and Armenia. He is the author of a history of the Armenian language and a multivolume history of Armenian literature. His books include Mourning Philology: Art and Religion at the Margins of the Ottoman Empire; The Historiographic Perversion; and Writers of Disaster: Armenian Literature in the Twentieth Century.

is professor of Germanic languages and comparative literature at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is Sady and Ludwig Kahn Director of the UCLA Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies and also chair of the Digital Humanities Program. He is the author or coauthor of Mobile Modernity: Germans, Jews, Trains; Muscular Judaism: The Jewish Body and the Politics of Regeneration; Digital_Humanities (with Anne Burdick, Johanna Drucker, Peter Lunenfeld, and Jeffrey Schnapp); and HyperCities: Thick Mapping in the Digital Humanities (with David Shepard and Yoh Kawano).

TO D D P R E S N E R

is professor of comparative literature at Utrecht University, the Netherlands, and a member of the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences. She has published widely in the field of cultural memory, modern memory cultures, and the literary dimensions of history writing. Her books include The Rhetoric of Historical Representation; Imperfect Histories; The Afterlives of Walter Scott; Mediation, Remediation and the Dynamics of Cultural Memory (coedited with A. Erll); and most recently, Transnational Memory: Circulation, Articulation, Scales (coedited with C. De Cesari).

ANN RIGNEY

is professor of history at Fairfield University, with a specialization in the history and memory of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. He is the author of several books, including Building after Auschwitz: Jewish Architecture and the Memory of the Holocaust, a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award. He is also the author of The World Hitler Never Made: Alternate History and the Memory of Nazism; and Munich and Memory: Architecture, Monuments, and the Legacy of the Third Reich.

G AV R I E L  D . R O S E N F E L D

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is the 1939 Society Samuel Goetz Chair in Holocaust Studies and professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Los Angeles. Previously, he taught at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, where he founded the Initiative in Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies. He is the author of Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization and Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation. He is also coeditor of The Holocaust: Theoretical Readings.

M I C H A E L R OT H B E R G

is executive director of the USC (University of Southern California) Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education. He founded the UK Holocaust Centre in Nottinghamshire, England, and cofounded the Aegis Trust for the prevention of crimes against humanity and genocide. In the United Kingdom, Smith was the inaugural chairman of the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust. He was also the project director responsible for the creation of the Kigali Memorial Centre in Rwanda and provided consultation for the Cape Town Holocaust Centre, where he serves as a trustee. He is the author of Making Memory: Creating Britain’s First Holocaust Centre; Forgotten Places: The Holocaust and the Remnants of Destruction; and The Holocaust and the Christian World.

STEPH EN  D. S M ITH

E L I S A B E T H W E B E R teaches German and comparative literature at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is the author of the prize-winning Verfolgung und Trauma: Zu Emmanuel Levinas’ Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence and the editor of Jüdisches Denken in Frankreich (published in English as Questioning Judaism), as well as the editor and German translator of several works by Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas, and Félix Guattari. Her recent publications include Speaking about Torture, coedited with Julie Carlson, and the edited collection Living Together: Jacques Derrida’s Communities of Violence and Peace. H AY D E N W H I T E is professor emeritus of the history of consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Since the publication of his groundbreaking Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe, White’s work has been crucial to disciplines where narrative is of primary concern, including history, literary studies, anthropology, philosophy, art history, and film and media studies. His books include The Fiction of Narrative and Figural Realism: Studies in the Mimesis Effect.

503

INDEX

Note: Figures are indexed in italic. Absolute survivor, 159–164, 165–166 Abu-Lughod, Lila, 406 Adam, Uwe Dietrich, 428n13 Adler, H. G., 53, 73, 76, 419, 442n20 Adoptive witnesses, 48, 114, 125, 126, 128 Adorno, Theodor, 14–15, 284–285, 290, 467n2 Aeneid (Virgil), 138 Aestheticization, 54, 179–180 Aesthetics, and ethics in Holocaust representation, 284–285, 291–292 Affiliative memory, 131 Agamben, Giorgio, 141, 155, 307–308 Agency, 377–378 Aghet, 390–391, 492n51 Akayesu, Jean-Paul, 490n10 Algerian War of Independence, 363, 365–366 Algérie, année zéro (Algeria, Year Zero), 366 Allen, Lori, 349 Analogical maps, 227–228 Anecdotes, 61–62, 63–64, 68–69, 76–78, 442n18 Ankersmit, Frank, 445n8 Antelme, Robert, 387

Anticolonialism, 358 Antiocularcentrism, 236, 244–245 Anti-Semitism, 37–38; Eisenman on, 297; Walser and, 305; as origins of Holocaust, 324; and uniqueness of Holocaust, 329–330, 336; Holocaust as warning about consequences of, 340–345; Islamofascism and new, 345–347; and writing of The Years of Extermination, 416–417 Arab-Israeli conflict, 345–347, 352 Arbitrary arrest, 145 Architecture, 286–287. See also Deconstructivism Archival memory, 308 Archive: debate over, 158–159, 167–173; Derrida on, 167, 454n24; and Holocaust video testimony, 182; film and collection and organization of information in, 260; filmic, as subject of A Film Unfinished, 262; and self-fulfilling prophecy, 269–272; and traumatic events experienced as continuous past, 277–278; built for future, 282; Friedländer on, 414–415. See also Nazi archives Archive Fever (Derrida), 158, 159 504

INDEX

Arendt, Hannah, 6, 144–147, 269, 357, 462–463n1 Argumentation: in work of professional historians, 81–83; gap between narration and, 85–87, 89 Armenian genocide, 390–391, 393, 394, 398, 402, 490n8 Arrest, arbitrary, 145 Artistic parapraxis, 57 Atomic weapons, 353, 397 Atrocity aesthetic, 260–261 Attridge, Derek, 117–118 Audiovisual testimony, 182–184; Rugasaguhunga’s refusal to do, 203–204; created as digital files, 205; bit-level preservation of, 205–206, 217; and limits of metadata, 208–209; and supranarrative, 209–210; ranking, 210–211, 459n5; and ethics of access, 214–215. See also Digitization; Visual History Archive Auschwitz: Lyotard on, 45, 431n45; in Visual History Archive testimonies, 211; evacuations from, 238; shift away from, in Holocaust studies, 253–254; and emblematic name, 402 Austerlitz (Sebald), 20, 246 Avelar, Idelber, 148–151 Avisar, Ilan, 271 Babi Yar massacre, 109 Backshadowing, 263, 466n17 Bal, Mieke, 445n10 Barthes, Roland, 17 Bartov, Omer, 334–336, 340–343, 345–347, 351, 479nn68,69 Baudrillard, Jean, 480n85 Bauer, Yehuda, 338, 431n40, 476n29 Bauman, Zygmunt, 32, 179 Beloved (Morrison), 439n6 Bender, Thomas, 255–256 Ben Gurion, David, 261 Benjamin, Walter, 63, 181, 432n59 Benoscher, Leah, 206 Berlin Holocaust Memorial, 180 Bernstein, Michael André, 263, 466n17 Bit-level preservation, 205–206, 217, 459n6

Black, Edwin, 179 Blanchot, Maurice, 157, 160, 161–162, 165–166 Blobel, Paul, 109 Bloch, Marc, 239 Bloxham, Donald, 38, 335, 343, 348 Boder, David, 182, 193, 456n10, 458n38 Bolechow, murder of Jews in, 123–124, 126 Bolechow Jewish Heritage Society (BJSH), 127, 131 Bolter, Jay, 169 Borges, Jorge Luis, 218 Broszat, Martin, 424, 473n30 Brothels, number of, 29 Brown, DeNeen, 395 Brownback, Sam, 396 Browning, Christopher: Ordinary Men, 11, 86–87; The Origins of the Final Solution, 79–81, 83, 87–89, 96–97; White’s influence on, 84; agreement and disagreement between Matthäus and, 89–91; reply to Wulf Kansteiner, 104–112 Bruchstücke: Aus einer Kindheit [Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood], 1939–1948 (Wilkomirski), 20–21 Buber, Martin, 183 Bubis, Ignatz, 305 Budapest, map of street use in, 228, 229 Burke, Kenneth, 66 Butler, Judith, 19 Canada, reparations for indigenous people of, 395 Capriccioso, Rob, 396 Cardozo Holocaust, Genocide and Human Rights Program, 351–352 Caruth, Cathy, 23, 373 Catastrophe, versus genocide, 141 Categories, Knowles on problem with, 249 Causality, 419–420 Celan, Paul, 23, 373, 382, 433n84 Césaire, Aimé, 36, 327 Chalk, Frank, 337 Charlesworth, Andrew, 241 Chatman, Seymour, 81–82, 445n10

505

INDEX

Chronicle of a Summer (Chronique d’un été), 363–365, 369, 487n40 Cinematic language, 257, 258–261, 266 Civilization, Western arrogation of, 339 Civil rights of entire population, destruction of, 144–145 Close reading: advantages of, of nonliterary texts, 70–71; leading to skewed overinterpretation, 76; of contemporary history from narratological point of view, 79–80; of historical prose, 82; and diachronic and synchronic standards of noncontradiction, 99–100 Cognitive dissonance, 250 Cole, Tim: on visualizations of GoH, 241; on factual and fictional visualization, 243–244; on propositional visual forms added to history of Holocaust, 246; on collaboration, 249, 250; on caretakers of Holocaust representation, 250–251; on scale, 252; on scale and modernist representation, 253–254; on ontological status of space in GoH, 255–256. See also Geographies of the Holocaust project Collective memory, 397–398 Collingwood, R. G., 438n4 Colonial epistemic, 339 Colonial genocide studies, 34–40, 313–314, 325–330, 342–343 Colonialism, 324–328, 357. See also Imperialism Comment Yukong déplaça les montagnes (How Yukong Moved the Mountains), 367, 369 Comparative studies, 34–40, 309–317, 325–331, 351–354, 355–360, 365–370, 404–409 Comparison, ethics of, 125–126, 129–130 Competition of victimhood, 321 Concentration camps: number of, 29; spatial-temporal distribution of, 228–230; GIS visualization of, 231–233; understanding psychic damage done by, 374; “grey zone” in, 377–378; surviving in, 383–385

Confino, Alon, 237, 475n21 Constellation, in The Years of Extermination, 68–70 Continuous past, traumatic events experienced as, 277–278 Control, through vision, 245 Cosmopolitanism, 356–357 Cotler, Irwin, 351–352 Crisis of figurability, 264 Crisis of narrativity, 239 Crisis of testimony, 143–144 Croce, Benedetto, 18 Cubilie, Anne, 360 Cultural expression, Adorno on, following Holocaust, 284–285, 290 Cultural memory, and mediation and circulation of testimony, 361–363 Cutting, in film and literature, 419 Czerniaków, Adam, 58, 64, 70 Databases: compilation of, 29–34; ethical questions regarding, 169, 179–180; and challenges of representation, 180–182; content and limitations of, 192–193; purpose of, 193–194; relational, 193–194; and toggling between singular and global, 197–198; and distant reading, 198–199; Levinasian, 199–201; development of GoH, 224. See also Digital Monument to the Jewish Community in the Netherlands; Geographies of the Holocaust project; Visual History Archive Data integrity, 170, 205–206, 217 Dates, in The Lost, 121–124 Davis, Uri, 404–405 Dean, Carolyn, 348, 349 Death marches, 238 Death of witness, 141–144; martyrdom and history, 144–148; torture, 148–151; metareality, 151–154; refutation, 155–156; sense of history, 156–157; Holocaustic crisis of historiography, 157–159; absolute survivor, 159–164; last man, 164–166 Death Sentence (Blanchot), 157 506

INDEX

Declaration of the Stockholm International Forum on the Holocaust, 338 Decolonization, 363, 365–366 Deconstructivism, 287–292, 304 Deep memory, 381–382 Defiguration, 189–190 Delbo, Charlotte, 381–385, 386, 387, 488n50 Denarrativization, 57 Denegation, 148, 155 Denial: and disavowal, 68; and death of witness, 148; survival as, 151; as final phase of genocide, 398. See also Negationism Deportation, 38, 486n29 Derrida, Jacques: and historiographic perversion, 16–17, 45–46; on testimony, 23; reading of Blanchot narratives, 157; and Holocaustic crisis of historiography, 157–159; on The Last Man, 164–166; on archive, 167, 454n24; on temporality of archive, 270; call to repress archive, 276; on differences in genocide studies, 390, 394; on singularity versus exceptionality, 403–404; Friedländer on, 413–414; on living together, 494n87 Derwin, Susan, 399 Destruction of the European Jews, The (Hilberg), 6–7 “Les deux ghettos” (The Two Ghettos), 366 De Waal, Edmund, 116–117 Diachronic standards of noncontradiction, 99–102 Diary of Anne Frank, The, 261 Differend, 45, 400, 403 Differend, The (Lyotard), 45, 153–155, 438n3 Digital education, encouraging use of VHA through, 211–213 Digital mapping, 227–228 Digital Monument to the Jewish Community in the Netherlands: visualizations in, 175; general categories in, 176–178; ethical questions regarding, 179; question answered by, 180; new version, 455n1 Digitization, 29–34; and limits of representation, 179; new era of, 204–205; and

bit-level preservation, 205–206, 217, 459n6; and limits of metadata, 208–209; and problem of ranking, 210–211, 459n5; and ethics of access, 214–215; and trust in technology, 216–217. See also Audiovisual testimony; Geographies of the Holocaust project; Visual History Archive Diner, Dan, 336 Direct sound, 368 Disavowal, 68 Disbelief, in The Years of Extermination, 67–68, 77–78 Dispositif, 28, 172, 272, 275, 276 Distant listening, 198–199, 458n45 Distant reading, 32, 198 Domestication of Holocaust, 421–422 Dorgan, Byron, 396 Dos Passos, John, 419 Downcast Eyes (Jay), 244 Drowned and the Saved, The (Levi), 376–377, 381 Drucker, Johanna, 30, 189, 242 Duras, Marguerite, 366 Durkheim, David Émile, 388 Duty, Mendelsohn on, 129–130 Eichmann trial, 277–278, 364, 428n6 Eine Reise (Adler), 442n20 Eisenman, Peter: and rise of deconstructivism, 287–289; Jewish identity of, 295–296; on architecture and Diaspora, 468n14; on abstraction, 469n43. See also Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (Eisenman) Ekphrasis, 64–66, 71, 442n23 Elkana, Yehuda, 425 Elsaesser, Thomas, 274–275 Emblematic name, 402 Emotion, representation of, in database queries, 193 Empathic unsettlement, 125 Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933–1945, 31–32 Epigraph(s): in The Years of Extermination, 59–63, 69–70, 75–76; in The Years of Persecution, 441n16

507

INDEX

Epistemological relativism, 445n8 “Era of the witness”: rethinking, 363–371; beginning of, 428n6 Erasure, 340–345, 348 Erll, Astrid, 361–362 Ernest, Stefan, 75–76, 440–441nn11–13 Estrangement, 55, 66, 77–78, 268, 443n27 Eternal Jew, The, 281 Ethical bond, 387–388 Ethics: and aesthetics in Holocaust representation, 24–28, 179, 284–285, 291–292; and testimony, 182–184; and preservation of testimonies, 204–206, 216–217; and metadata, 208–210; fiction and ethical framework for Holocaust historiography, 385–388 Ethics of access, 214–215 Ethics of comparison, 125–126, 129–130 Ethics of the algorithm, 170, 180, 197, 199, 202; and scale, 180–182, 193–196; and Levinas, 184, 199–202; and database, 193–197, 199–201; and democratization of knowledge and witnessing, 198–199; and problem of ranking, 210–211, 459n5; and ethics of access, 214 European history, and exclusion of Holocaust from, 320 Evans, Richard J., 439–440n8 Event, versus fact, 149–150, 165 Everything Is Illuminated (Foer), 117 Exceptionality paradigm. See Holocaust exceptionalism; Uniqueness “Excess” of inexpressible, 54–55 Exodus, 261, 273 Experience: mapping, 234–235; return to, 235–236 Experiential uniqueness, 320, 323–324 Extermination, 307, 341 Extermination camps, number of, 29 External memory, 381–382 Eyewitness generation, recession of, 423–424 Ezrahi, Sidra Dekoven, 273 Fact(s): versus event, 149–150, 165; inscribing crime as, 163–164; fetishism of, 399; realism of, 399; as reality, 403

Factuality of fact, 143, 413 Factual visualizations, 242–244 Falk, Richard, 397 Falling, 375–376 Family: and postmemory, 114–115; nature and dynamics of, in The Lost, 121–122; and affiliative memory, 131. See also Lost, The (Mendelsohn) Farocki, Harun, 279 Felman, Shoshana, 22–23, 141–142, 155, 453–454n17 Fetishism of the facts, 399 Fiction: and expressivity of traumatic historical events, 20; and ethical framework for Holocaust historiography, 385–388 Fictionalization, 54, 63 Fictional visualizations, 242–244 Figurability, crisis of, 264 Figural realism, 20 Film Unfinished, A, 260, 262–263, 266–268, 270–272, 273–276, 279–281 Fineman, Joel, 442n18 Flanzbaum, Hilene, 250–251 Flat, The, 273, 274 Flaubert, Gustave, 17 Flinker, Moshe, 69–70 Foer, Jonathan Safran, 117 Fogu, Claudio, 30, 32, 33 “Force of Law” (Derrida), 157–158 Forgács, Péter, 28, 258, 262, 279. See also Maelstrom: A Family Chronicle, The Forgetfulness, 381, 384–385 Fortunoff Archive, 182 France: criminalizes denial of genocides, 392–393; deportation of Jews from, 486n29 Frank, Joseph, 223, 225, 251 Franklin, Ruth, 451–452n26 Freeze-framing, 258–259; and cinematic language, 260; and retroactive meaning, 261–265; and suspense and acceleration of time, 265–269; archive and selffulfilling prophecy, 269–272; reflection through, 276 Freud, Sigmund, 454n24 508

INDEX

Friedländer, Saul: on obsession with Nazism in filmic and literary imagination, 7–8; publishes victim-centered synthesis of Holocaust history, 11–12; on Holocaust exceptionalism, 13–14; on postmodernism, 15; and macro- and microlevel accounts of Holocaust, 31; on colonialism paradigm for interpretation of Holocaust history, 36–37; and debates regarding representation, 43; on factual information taken as data, 124; globally oriented inquiry of, into history of Holocaust, 198; frisson described by, 229; on “new discourse” on Nazism, 233; Jaskot on, 243; and cinematic language of representation, 257; on Final Solution as event at limits, 257; and understanding Holocaust, 258; on dichotomization of world, 265; on infallibility, 270; “The Historical Significance of the Holocaust,” 341; methodology of, 398–399; interview with, 411–425; on description and interpretation of events, 438n4; on Holocaust, 439n7; on use of ekphrasis, 442n23; consults Lanzmann, 464n4; and challenge of using conventional language to describe Holocaust, 465n7. See also Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Extermination, 1939–1945 (Friedländer); Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution, 1933– 1939 (Friedländer); Probing the Limits of Representation (Friedländer) Frisson, 229–230 Garbarini, Alexandra, 347 Garibian, Sévane, 393–394 Gaza War, 352 Genealogy, heightened interest in, 116 General Plan East, 326 Generation War, 27 Genocidal will, 399–400, 402 Genocide Convention of 1948, 319, 392, 394 Genocide(s): critiques of representations of, 3; as factual event, 16; potential for, in Soviet Union, 80; in The Origins of the

Final Solution, 105–106; key incidents of, 108–110; registering scale of, 123; versus Catastrophe, 141; and erasure of factuality of fact, 143; in Rwanda, 203–204, 330, 490n10; as beyond rational comprehension, 291; Holocaust as, 319–331; Armenian, 390–391, 393, 394, 398, 402, 490n8; prosecution of perpetrators of, 392, 402; criminalization of denial of, 392–393; shadow of Holocaust on study of, 404–409; as challenge to diversity, 462–463n1 Gentile, Giovanni, 17, 18 Geographic Information Systems (GIS), 219, 222, 224, 226, 228, 235, 436n109 Geographies of the Holocaust project, 29, 32, 33, 219; topics of, 219–220; and spatial turn and modernist event, 221–226; and replacing representation with visualizations, 226–231; visualizations and return to experience, 231–239; and relationship between spatial and linguistic turns in humanities, 240–242; and factual and fictional visualizations, 242–244; moments of trouble for authors of, 244–246; and propositional visual forms added to history of Holocaust, 246–247; empiricist claim and pictures as chapter headings in, 247–251; and modernist modes of representation, 251–254; ontological status of space in, 254–256. See also Digitization Gephi, 194 Gerlach, Christian, 344 Germans, guilt of, 296–299 Gertz, Nurit, 275 Geslewitz, Daniel, 185, 186–187 Das Ghetto, 281–282 “Ghetto, The” documentary, 271 Ghettos and ghettoization: number of, 29; in The Origins of the Final Solution, 106–107; in Visual History Archive testimonies, 212 Ghosts of Home: The Afterlife of Czernowitz in Jewish Memory (Hirsch and Spitzer), 116–117

509

INDEX

Ginzburg, Carlo, 15–16, 17, 152–154, 158, 411, 412, 465n7 Giordano, Alberto: on spatial turn, 241–242; on factual and fictional visualization, 243; on moments of trouble regarding GoH, 246; on GoH chapter headings, 248–249, 250; on scale, 252; on ontological status of space in GoH, 256. See also Geographies of the Holocaust project Globalization of Holocaust studies, 356 Goddard, Jean-Luc, 279 Goebbels, Joseph, 281–282 Goldberg, Amos, 350 Goldberg, David Theo, 407 Goldfinger, Arnon, 273, 274 Goldhagen, Daniel, 11, 87, 430n30, 447n30 Good, Carl, 360 Goodman, Percival, 468n6 “Grey zone,” 377–378, 379–380 Gross, Jan, 31 Grossman, David, 118 Grusin, Richard, 169 Guilt: of Germans, 296–299; and Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, 307; Levi on, 376–380 Gustman, Samuel, 188, 190 Haas, Arie Leopold, 194 Haggadah, 211 Halbwach, Maurice, 361 Haraway, Donna, 227, 228 Hare with Amber Eyes, The (de Waal), 116–117 Harper, Stephen, 395 Hartman, Geoffrey, 24, 183–184, 451n25 Harvey, Chester, 242 Herero genocide, 325–326, 330 Hermoni, Gal, 275 Hersonski, Yael, 28, 258. See also Film Unfinished, A Heydrich, Reinhard, 80, 91–92, 94, 447n25 High modernism, 417–418 Hilberg, Raul, 13, 401, 414, 422 Himmler, Heinrich, 91–92, 93, 94, 108–109, 111–112

Hiroshima, 353, 397 Hiroshima mon amour, 365 Hirsch, Marianne, 114, 116–117, 122, 433n71 Historical method, 320 “Historical modernism,” 72–78 Historical realism, 72–78 Historical relativism, 356 Historical writing: nature of, 81; narration and argumentation in, 82–83 Hitler, Adolf, 91, 94, 95–97, 98, 110, 111–112 Hitler’s Empire (Mazower), 342 Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (Goldhagen), 430n30 Hobsbawm, Eric, 401–402 Hoffer, P. C., 446n13 Hoffman, Eva, 334–335, 354 Höhere SS und Polizeiführer (HSSPF), 108–109 Hollerith punch card and card-sorting technologies, 179 Holocaust: context of, 320, 322; as modernity’s event of world historical significance, 335–340; renewed attention to, 356; domestication of, 421–422 Holocaust and genocide studies: anxieties in, 332–335, 351–354; centrality and size, 335–340; subsumption and erasure, 340–345; second Holocaust, 345–347; status of victim, 347–351 Holocaust culture: postwar historiography and emergence of public, 5–14; relationship between Israeli politics and, 273–276 Holocaust exceptionalism, 13–14, 15, 309–317; and comparative studies, 34–36; dangers of, 389; institutional context of, 390–392; in international law context, 392–398; theory of, 398–404; and shadow of Holocaust on study of other genocides, 404–409; Friedländer on, 424–425; Weber on, 433n86. See also Uniqueness Holocaust internationalism, 359–360, 488n50 510

INDEX

Holocaust miniseries, 7, 8, 26 Holocaust remembrance, 25–26 Holocaust representations, critiques of, 3–4 Holocaust revisionism, 15–16 Holocaust violence, representation of, 138–140 Homosexuals, 295 hooks, bell, 407 Höppner, Rolf-Heinz, 109–110 Hovannisian, Richard, 391, 398 Humanism, 287–288 Human Race, The (Antelme), 387 Human rights, 356–357, 484n11 Hungary, deportation of Jews from, 38 Hutcheon, Linda, 442n20 Hyperbolic narration, 118–120, 131–134 Hypericon, 233 Hypermediacy, 170 IBM’s Hollerith punch card and cardsorting technologies, 179 “Ich-Du” relationship, 183 Immemorable memory, 307–308 Imperialism, 324, 340–345. See also Colonialism Index: of Visual History Archive, 190–192; normativity indexes, 457–458n34 Indigenous people of North America, 395–397, 402 Infallibility, principle of, 269 Inglourious Basterds, 27, 239 Inheritance relationships, in Visual History Archive index, 190–191 Inouye, Shin, 396 Integration, as complementary to uniqueness, 319–320 Intentionalism/intentionalist narrative vision, 8–9, 10, 96, 416–417, 448n37 Intermedial networking, 361 International law, exceptionality paradigm in context of, 392–398 International Taskforce on International Co-operation on Holocaust Education, Remembrance, and Research (ITF), 338 Irving, David, 110 Islamism, 345

Islamofascism, 345–347 Israel, 36, 320, 323, 352, 405–406, 424–425 Israeli documentaries, 273–276 Ivens, Joris, 366–370 IWitness, 212–213, 214 Jäckel, Eberhard, 13, 469n32 Jackob-Marks, Christine, 180 Jäger, Ester, 124–125 Jakobson, Roman, 71 Jaskot, Paul: on visualizations of GoH, 240–241; on factual and fictional visualization, 242–243; on moments of trouble regarding GoH, 244–245; on propositional visual forms added to history of Holocaust, 247; on GoH chapter headings, 249; on scale, 252; on debate regarding modernist representation and events, 254; on GoH as human and spatial, 255 Jay, Martin, 236, 237, 244–245 Jerusalem School of Holocaust Historiography, 348 La Jetée, 261 Jewish leadership, liquidation of, 447n25 Jewish National Fund (JNF), 406–407 Johnson, Philip, 304 Journey, The (Adler), 53, 73, 76, 419 Les jours de notre mort (Rousset), 146 Judenkartei, 270 Judgment, in The Lost, 134–136 Juridical person in man, fall of, 144–145 Kaes, Anton, 258 Kahn, Louis I., 468n6 Kakel, Pete, 343 Kansteiner, Wulf: Browning’s reply to, 104–112; interview with Daniel Mendelsohn, 129–140; on Years of Extermination, 238; on collective memory, 397; interview with Saul Friedländer, 411–425 Kaplan, Chaim, 64 Katz, Steven, 431n40 Ka-tzetnik, Yehiel Dinur, 277–278 Kennedy, John F., 418 511

INDEX

Kerner, Aaron, 268–269 Kiernan, Ben, 392 Kimmerling, Baruch, 407 Kittler, Friedrich, 188 Klemperer, Victor, 58, 61–62, 63–64 Knowles, Anne: on spatial turn, 222–223; on GIS mapping, 224; on visualizations of GoH, 241; on factual and fictional visualization, 242; on moments of trouble regarding GoH, 245–246; on propositional visual forms added to history of Holocaust, 247; on GoH chapter headings, 248, 249; on scale and modernist representation, 253; on ontological status of space in GoH, 255 Koch, Gertrud, 263 Kohl, Helmut, 305 Kracauer, Siegfried, 31, 259, 263–264, 265 Krieger, David, 397 Krupki killing site, 233–234 Kuper, Leo, 342 LaCapra, Dominick, 125, 265 Landau, Paul, 345 Lang, Berel, 192 Langer, Lawrence, 450n12, 485n19 Lanzmann, Claude, 22, 141–142, 262, 271, 279, 464n4, 465n15 Laqueur, Thomas, 398 Last man, 164–166 Last Man, The (Blanchot), 164–166 Latour, Bruno, 227–228 Laub, Dori, 24, 182, 183 Lebovic, Nitzan, 281 Lemkin, Raphael, 39, 319, 354, 357 Lentin, Ronit, 404–405, 406, 407 Levi, Primo: on true witnesses versus survivors, 22; on retrospective construction of witness, 147; paradox of, 155; on memories evoked too often, 264; death of, 375–376, 380–381, 385, 388; on guilt, 376–380; on groups in concentration camps, 377–378; comparative reading of Delbo and, 386; vision of solidarity of, 388 Levinas, Emmanuel, 183–184, 199–201 Levy, Daniel, 356–357, 359

Lewis, Bernard, 401 Liberalism of fear, 340 Life Is Beautiful, 27 Lifton, Robert Jay, 390–391 Linenthal, Edward, 397 Linguistic turn: in historical studies, 79; relationship between spatial turn and, 240–242; competing historiographies of, 244–245 Literary writing: in The Years of Extermination epigraph, 60–61; confusing, with fictional writing, 63; distinguished from literature, 441–442n17 Liu, Alan, 188 “Living On” (Derrida), 157 Logos, 440n9 Lohse, Hinrich, 110 Loi Gayssot (1990, France), 393 Longerich, Peter, 85–86 Longley, Robert, 396 Loridan-Ivens, Marceline, 359–360, 361, 363–365, 366–372, 486n29 Lost, The (Mendelsohn): accolades for, 115; as third-generation postmemory, 115; as family story, 115–117; and notion of singularity, 117–118, 129; hyperbolic narration in, 118–120, 131–134; numbers as precision instrument and literary device in, 121–125, 451n24; comparisons to narratives of other large-scale destruction, 125–126, 129–130; reception of, 127–128; and affiliative memory, 131; judgment in, 134–136; photographs, illustrations, and captions in, 136–138; Franklin on, 451–452n26; as contrast to minimalism of earlier works, 451n17 Lowry, Heath, 390–391 Lugones, María, 360, 372 Lukács, Georg, 17 Lyotard, Jean-François: on differend, 45, 400, 403; and metareality, 152–154; on reality, 155; and refutation of witness’s death, 155; on emblematic name, 402; Friedländer on, 413–414; on Auschwitz, 431n45; earthquake metaphor of, 438n3 512

INDEX

Macrohistory, 29–34 Madness of the Day, The (Blanchot), 157, 161–162 Maelstrom: A Family Chronicle, The, 260, 261, 262–263, 266, 270–272 Maier, Charles S., 349–350 Manovich, Lev, 197 Maps/mapping of experience, 227–230, 234–235, 237 Marker, Chris, 261 Marrus, Michael, 391 Martyrdom, and death of witness, 144–148 Marxism-Leninism, 5 Masalha, Nur, 405, 406–407 Matthäus, Jürgen, 87, 89–91, 107–108, 110 Maus: A Survivor’s Tale (Spiegelman), 20, 221, 222, 251 Ma vie balagan (Loridan-Ivens), 371, 488n53 Mavi Marmara, 275 Max Reinhardt House (Berlin), 289 Mayer, Arno, 68 Mazower, Mark, 327–328, 342 Meaning: through images, 63; mourning and, 145 Medial networks, 361, 362 Media specificity, 33–34 Mediation, 359–365 Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (Eisenman): absence in, 25; success of, 283, 301; message of, 283–284, 292–295; understanding, 286; deconstructivism and, 289–292; ethical and aesthetic ambivalences of, 292–299; response to, 299–301; assessing significance of, 299–303; backstory to, 304–306; concept of, 306, 470n62; engaging with, 306–307; memory embodied in, 307–308; and Holocaust exceptionalism, 310–311 Memory: multidirectional, 48, 129–130, 274, 362, 390, 404, 408; adopting, 114; affiliative, 131; embodied in Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, 307–308; modern genocides as “hot,” 332; use of Holocaust, 352; and mediation and circulation of testimony, 361–363; and

Loridan-Ivens works, 363–371; storytelling and, 381; deep, 381–382; external, 381–382; writing and, 381–385; collective, 397–398 Memory competition, 316, 397, 404 Memory culture: emergency of “cosmopolitan,” 356–357; exploration of heterogeneous, 358 Mendelsohn, Daniel, 113, 114–115, 127, 129–140. See also Lost, The (Mendelsohn) Metadata, 30, 189, 208–210 Metareality, 151–154 “Method and Apparatus for Cataloguing Multimedia Data, A” patent, 188–189, 190 Michelet, Jules, 17, 113 Michman, Dan, 341, 344, 352–353, 476n29 “Middle voice,” 76–77, 225 Modernism, 18–19, 239, 287–288, 298 Modernist events, 19, 43, 221–226, 251–254, 417 “Modernist” historical works, 72–78 Moffie, David, 58, 64–67, 71 Moments of Reprieve (Levi), 375–376, 379 Mommsen, Hans, 9 Monuments: reception of, 299; visibility of, 302–303 Monument to the Ghetto Heroes in Warsaw (Rapoport), 289–290 “Moral person” in man, destruction of, 145 Moretti, Franco, 32, 198, 458n45 Morin, Edgar, 363 Morris, Benny, 345, 405, 408 Morrison, Toni, 439n6 Moses, Dirk, 39, 358 Mourning, meaning and, 145 Moyn, Samuel, 358, 484n10 Multidirectional memory, 48, 129–130, 274, 362, 390, 404, 408 Munich, monuments and memorials in, 302–303 Murder, versus extermination, 307 Murderous anti-Semitism, 341 Museum of Modern Art (New York City), 287, 304 Musil, Robert, 302 513

INDEX

My Promised Land (Shavit), 352 Mythos, 440n9 Nagasaki, 397 “Al Nakba,” 404–408 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 122, 401, 402 Narration: versus narrative, 56; and argumentation in historical writing, 82–83; gap between argumentation and, 85–87, 89; nonlinear, 98–103; hyperbolic, 118–120, 131–134; shifts in, in Years of Persecution, 443n27 Narrative realism, 20–21 Narrative(s): historical work cast as, 56; The Years of Extermination as, 56–58; of The Origins of the Final Solution, 80, 87–89, 105–106, 107–110; Chatman on, 81–82; created through Visual History Archive, 197; of audiovisual testimony, 205; navigational, of GoH, 224–225; debate on, in Holocaust historiography, 373–375; expressing historical truths through, 373–375; function of Levi’s, 379 Narrativity, crisis of, 239 Narrativization, 69, 149–151 National Socialist perpetrator research, 11–12 Native American Apology Resolution, 396 Native Americans, 395–397, 402 Natur, Salman, 407 Naumann, Michael, 305 Nazi archives: interrogating, 168; and self-fulfilling prophecy, 269–272 Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Extermination, 1939–1945 (Friedländer): general look of, 55; as narrative, 56–58; literary devices in, 58–59, 63, 70–71, 75, 77–78; epigraphs in, 59–63, 69–70, 75–76, 440n10, 440–441n11, 441nn12– 13; relations between parts of, 61; anecdotes in, 61–62, 63–64, 68–70, 76–78; ekphrasis in, 64–66, 71, 442n23; analysis of Moffie photograph in, 66–67; disbelief in, 67–68; constellation in, 68–70; Friedländer versus White’s readings of, 72–78; gaps between

narrative perspectives and analytical objectives in, 84–85; and narrative linearity, 98, 102; comparing GoH to, 237–238; voices in, 414–415, 420–421; influences on, 415–416; intentionalism and anti-Semitism in, 416–417 Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution, 1933–1939 (Friedländer): “excess” of inexpressible in, 55; conceptual coherence in, 416; epigraph in, 441n16; shifts in narration of, 443n27 Nazi perpetrator research, 11–12 Nazism: obsession with, in filmic and literary imagination, 7–8; implemented through space, 223; representation of, 233; and colonialism, 324–328; and targeting of Jews for genocide, 329–330 Negationism, 148, 221, 392–394, 398, 399, 400–401. See also Denial Negative exceptionality, 14 New Anti-Semitism, 345–347 Nichanian, Marc: on genocide as factual event, 16; on survivor versus witness, 22; on reality of fact, 394; on genocidal will, 399; on machinery of genocide and denial, 400–401; Derrida and, 413; on Armenian genocide, 492n51 Nichols, Bill, 267, 268 Noncontradiction, diachronic and synchronic standards of, 99–102 Nora, Pierre, 361 Normativity indexes derived from Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive data, 457–458n34 Novick, Peter, 34–35 Nuclear weapons, 353, 397 Nuit et Brouillard (Night and Fog), 260–261, 356 Nuremberg trial, 392 Oakeshott, Michael, 54 Obama, Barack, 396 Ontology, 184, 199–200 Ophir, Adi, 273 Ordinary Men (Browning), 86–87, 102, 104, 108 514

INDEX

Origins of the Final Solution, The (Browning): close reading and semantic operations in, 79–81; and gap between narration and argumentation, 83, 87–89; agreement and disagreement between Browning and Matthäus, 89–91; narration of minority report, 91–94; narration of majority report, 94–95; narration of chapters 7 and 8, 95–97, 107, 111; statements of fact versus interpretation in, 97–98; and narrative linearity, 98–103; Browning’s reply to Kansteiner regarding, 104–112; diversity of narrative perspectives in, 447–448n31; conceived as multi-volume project, 448n33 Oshagan, Hagop, 160 Otherwise than Being (Levinas), 184 Palestinian refugees, 404–408 Panopticon, model of, 244–245 Pappé, Ilan, 406 Parapraxis, artistic, 57 Past, practical, 54 Pathos, through images, 63 Patterns, in Geographics of the Holocaust, 223–224 Paxton, Robert, 424 Pecora, Vincent, 357 Peereboom family, 266 Pelosi, Nancy, 490n8 Pergher, Roberta, 344 Periphery, Holocaust studies conceptualized in terms of, 106–107 Perpetrator research, 11–12 Perpetual victimhood, 277–278 La petite prairie aux bouleux (The Birch-Tree Meadow), 367, 370 Politik der Vernichtung (Longerich), 85–86 Postmemory, 20, 113–115, 433n71. See also Lost, The (Mendelsohn) Postmodernism, 15, 286–288, 412–413, 417–418 Poststructuralism, 3, 5, 49, 79 Postwar historiography, and emergence of public Holocaust culture, 5–14

Practical past, 54 Premediation, 361–362, 365 Preservation Technologies, 189, 457n25 Presner, Todd: on the ethics of the algorithm, 32, 205; interview with Saul Friedländer, 411–425 Principle of infallibility, 269 Prisoner of war camps, number of, 29 Private Photo and Film Archives Foundation, 271 Probing the Limits of Representation (Friedländer), 1–2, 5; absence of Derrida’s name in, 157–158; context of, 355–356; absence of cosmopolitan perspective focusing on human rights in, 357; absence of colonial contexts in, 357–358; and conceptual distance between 1992 and today, 358, 422–423 Probing the Limits of Representation conference: outcome of debates engendered by, 21–28, 45–46; context of, 355–356; motivation for, 411; Friedländer’s expectations regarding, 412; as response to postmodernism, 412–413; influence of, 415–416 Psychic suffering, 386 Public memory, production of, 168 Punch card and card-sorting technologies, 179 Punishment, 376–377, 378, 379 Pure witness, 162, 163 Pushing, 375–376 Racial imperialism, in The Origins of the Final Solution, 105–106 Radicalism, 257, 259 Ranke, Leopold von, 432n59 Ranking, 210–211, 459n5 Rapoport, Nathan, 289–290 “Rappoport’s Testament” (Levi), 376 Rasch, Otto, 109 Realism of the fact, 399 “Realist” historiography, 72 Realist representation, 17–21 “Reality effect, the” (Barthes), 17 “Récit?” (Blanchot), 157

515

INDEX

Reenactment, 267, 268, 280–281 Regional officers: in The Origins of the Final Solution minority report, 92–93; in The Origins of the Final Solution majority report, 95 Reich, Walter, 333–334, 336 Relational database, 193–194 Relationality, philosophy of, 200 Relic, survivor of Holocaust as, 160 Remediation, 169–170, 361–362, 366 Remembering Survival (Browning), 108 Representation: debates regarding, 43, 235–236; databases and problems of, 180–182; computational mode of, 197–198; White’s departure from figurative conception of, 221; modernist modes of, 221–222, 251–254; GoH and replacing, with visualizations, 226–231; of Nazism, 233; visualizations as alternatives to, 240–242; modes of, 243; dominant aesthetic of Holocaust, 245; caretakers of Holocaust, 250–251; cinematic language of, 257, 258–261; contemporary documentaries’ techniques of, 258 Residential schools, 395–396 Resnais, Alain, 260–261, 262, 279, 365 Retroactive duration, 263 Revisionism, narrative fiction and, 374–375 Richter, Gerhard, 247 Ricoeur, Paul, 73 Rigney, Ann, 129, 131, 361–362, 404 Ringelblum, Emmanuel, 267, 268 Roma, 295, 327 “Rope of history, the,” 234–235, 237, 242, 243 Roseman, Mark, 344 Rosen, Alan, 456n10 Rosenbaum, Ron, 111 Rosenbaum, Thane, 352 Rosenfeld, Gavriel, 336 Ross, Fiona, 362–363 Rothberg, Michael, 125, 274, 389–390, 397, 404, 408–409 Rouch, Jean, 363, 365 Rousset, David, 146 Rozett, Robert, 335

Rugasaguhunga, Yvette Nyombayire, 203–204, 216–217 Rüsen, Jörn, 446n13 Rwandan genocide, 203–204, 216–217, 330, 336, 337, 356, 457n32, 490n10 Sacks, Sir Jonathan, 479n69 Sa’di, Ahmad H., 405, 406 Said, Edward, 334 “Said, the” (Levinas), 200 Samuels, Shimon, 336 Sanbar, Elias, 405 Scale, 220, 251–254 Scaling, 225–226, 227 Schindler’s List, 26–27, 183, 239, 356 Schleunes, Karl, 428n13 Schneelicht, Ester, 124–125 Schröder, Gerhard, 300, 305 Schulz, Erwin, 109 Sebald, W. G., 20, 33, 246, 436n118 Second Intifada, 345 Self-fulfilling prophecy, 269–272 September 11 terrorist attacks, 345 Sergent, Jean-Pierre, 366, 368, 371 The Seventeenth Parallel (Le 17e parallèle: La guerre du peuple), 367–369, 370, 486–487n37, 487n40,41, 487n45 Seyss-Inquart, Arthur, 266 Shannon, Claude, 188, 456n22 Shavit, Ari, 352 Shenker, Noah, 457n32, 458n46, 485n25 Shklar, Judith, 339–340 Shoah, 22, 141–142, 271, 279–280 Shoah Foundation, 27, 30, 206, 217. See also Visual History Archive Sierakowiak, David, 64 Singularity, 117–118, 129, 403–404 Sinti, 295, 327 Slave labor camps, number of, 29 Slavery, 338–339 Smith, William Gardner, 366 Snyder, Timothy, 31, 335, 339, 351, 356 Solidarity, 383–385, 386–388 Spatial turn: and modernist event, 222–226; and return to experience, 235; relationship between linguistic turn and, 240–242 516

INDEX

Spiegel, Paul, 300 Spiegelman, Art, 20, 221, 222, 251 Spitzer, Leo, 116–117 Stafford, Barbara, 241 Stalin, Josef, 126 Stannard, David, 397–398, 402 State of Israel, 405–406, 424–425 States, and processing of trauma, 277 Stereotypes, 264 Stone, Dan, 347 Stone Face, The (Smith), 366 “Storyteller, The” (Benjamin), 181 Storytelling, memory and, 381 Structuralism/structuralist narrative vision, 9–10, 17, 96 Sublimity, 265 Subsumption, 340–345 Suicide, 375–377, 388 Suitcase: in Loridan-Ivens films, 371–372; in Holocaust commemoration, 488n54 Supranarrative, 209–210 Survival: as denial, 151; literary language as essential to, 374; through solidarity, 383–385 Survivor(s), 22–23; as witness, 143; and refutation of witness’s death, 156; phenomenology of, 156–157, 163; absolute, 159–164, 165–166; as distinct from witness, 162–163; ethics of survival and face of, 184; Holocaust exceptionalism and recognition of, 311; guilt of, 376–380 Survivor’s State of Mind, A (Rugasaguhunga), 203–204 Survivor testimony, 22–23 “Survivre” (Derrida), 157 Synchronic standards of noncontradiction, 99–102 Sznaider, Natan, 356–357, 359 Tal, Uriel, 336 Talmon, Jacob L., 332–333, 340, 341 Tarantino, Quentin, 429n20 Tekhnê, 28, 261, 263, 275 Temporality: and ontological status of space in GoH, 255–256; historical event’s relationship to, 258; and freeze-framing,

258–259; and cinematic language, 260; suspense and acceleration of time, 265–269; archive and self-fulfilling prophecy, 269–272 Testimony, 22–24; in Ordinary Men and Remembering Survival, 108; and depiction of violence in The Lost, 140; crisis of, 143–144; mourning and, 145; and refuting denegation, 155; general categories in Visual History Archive and Digital Monument to the Jewish Community in the Netherlands, 176–178; Holocaust video, 182–184; ethical, 183–184; keywords for Visual History Archive, 191–192; network relations based on, 194–195; of Hersonski’s grandmother, 278–279; mediation in relation to, 359–360; circulation of, 360–363; mediation and circulation of, 360–363; and Loridan-Ivens works, 363–371; and narrative forms in Holocaust historiography, 373–374. See also Death of witness Text types, 81–82, 445n10 Thematization, 58 Theoretical breakthroughs, 390, 392, 403 Theory of Film (Kracauer), 259 Third Reich in Power, The (Evans), 439–440n8 Tokudome, Kinue, 491–492n34 Torture, 145, 148–151 Total domination, 144, 145, 146–147 Totalitarianism, temporality as expressive force in, 269–270 Totality and Infinity (Levinas), 184 Toynbee, Arnold, 341 Transcendental illusion, and death of witness, 147 Transference, 424 Transit camps, number of, 29 Trauma theory, 23–25 Traumatic events, experienced as continuous past, 277–278 Truth: in The Years of Extermination epigraph, 59–60; torture and, 148; history and, 160; expressed through narrative, 373

517

INDEX

Turkey, and Armenian genocide, 390–391, 393, 394, 398, 402, 490n8 Ukraine: murder of Jews in, 108–109; victims of Stalin in, 126; genocide concept for famine-genocide of 1932–1933, 338 Uniqueness: as complementary to integration, 319–320; and study of genocides, 323–324; and universalism, 324–325; and Jews as target for genocide, 329–330; anxiety regarding Holocaust, 334, 335–336; and victim perspective, 350–351; beliefs about, 353. See also Holocaust exceptionalism Universalism, 324–325 Verisimilitude, 17 Victimhood: competition of, 321; studying, 350 Victim perspective, 347–351 Video testimony, 182–184. See also Audiovisual testimony Vilnius Ghetto, 206–207 Virgil, 138 Visual Crash, The, 275 Visual History Archive, 168–169; and Schindler’s List, 27; visualizations in, 175–176, 194; general categories in, 176–178; mentions of top-level category “discrimination” by minute in 200 testimonies, 177; mentions of top-level category “places” by minute in 200 testimonies, 177; mentions of top-level category “captivity” by minute in 200 testimonies, 178; mentions of top-level category “still and moving images” by minute in 200 testimonies, 178; ethical questions regarding, 179–180; question answered by, 180–181; size of, 182; information architecture of, 184–192; index of, 190–192; purpose of, 193–194; querying, 195–197; creation of narratives through, 197; and toggling between singular and global, 197–198; and distant reading, 198–199; reimagining, in modernist register, 199–201; redigitiza-

tion of, 204–205; search for Sheyna Wajner in, 206–208; content tagging in, 209; and supranarrative, 209–210; and problem of ranking, 210–211; encouraging use of, 211–213; and ethics of access, 214–215; subjects in, 215–216; and trust in technology, 216–217; testimonies in, 455n5; thesaurus and database structure of, 457n32. See also Audiovisual testimony; Digitization Visual History Archive Online, 214–215 Visualizations: in Digital Monument to the Jewish Community in the Netherlands, 175; of Visual History Archive, 175–178, 194; as alternatives to representation, 226–231, 240–242; and return to experience, 231–239; factual and fictional, 242–244; repeated, 245; addition of propositional visual forms to history of Holocaust, 246–247; and chapter headings of GoH, 247–251 Vlock, Laurel, 182 Wagner, Leon, 206–208 Wagner, Rubin, 206, 207 Wagner (Wajner), Sheyna, 206–208 Wagner, Sima, 206, 207, 208, 209 Wallenberg, Raoul, 351 Walser, Martin, 305 Warsaw Ghetto, 70, 168, 279, 280–281 Warthegau, 109–110 Weber, Elisabeth, 433n86 Western civilization: Holocaust exceptionalism as challenge to, 39; Holocaust shocking and emblematic event for, 313; Holocaust as crucial event for, 335–340 Wexner Center for Visual Arts (Columbus, Ohio), 289 White, Hayden, 15–21; negative exceptionalism in work of, 14; and debates regarding representation, 43; Friedländer’s response to, regarding “historical modernism,” 72–78; influence of, 84; and metareality and death of witness, 151–154; on relationship between 518

INDEX

linguistic turn and representation of Final Solution, 220–221; on modernist representation, 251, 253; on fetishism of facts, 399; theses of, about history, 411; and expectations for Probing the Limits of Representation conference, 412; on modernist events, 417; contradictions in philosophy of history of, 445n8; on writings on Holocaust events, 451n19 Wiesel, Elie, 7, 115, 347 Wieviorka, Annette, 22, 183, 428n6 Wigley, Mark, 304 Wilkomirski, Binjamin, 20–21 Wirst, Willy, 266–267 Witness(es), 22–23; adoptive, 48, 114, 125, 126, 128; and depiction of violence in The Lost, 140; subject as, 156–157; as distinct from survivor, 162–163; pure, 163; last, 423–424. See also Death of witness; “Era of the witness” Witness generation, recession of, 423–424

Witnessing: distance listening and democratization of, 198–199; guilt and, 380; and external memory, 382 Wood, Dennis, 246 “World”-travelling, 360 World War I, 324, 423–424 Writing, memory and, 381–385 Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial museum, 182, 278–279 Yahil, Leni, 430n33 Yale Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, 182 Yaron, Hadas, 350 Young, James, 303 Zelizer, Barbie, 260 Zertal, Idith, 273 Zimmerer, Jürgen, 325–326, 341, 358 Zionism, 273–274, 340–341, 352 Zündel, Ernst, 110 Zwigenberg, Ran, 350

519