Autobiography, Experience and the Writing of History

Abstract

I suppose I should begin with a caveat. This volume is about ‘Holocaust Scholarship’, but I am not strictly speaking a Holocaust scholar. My field is much more concentrated on European — especially German and Jewish — cultural and intellectual history. Still, in many explicit but also subtly implicit ways, the Shoah has impinged deeply both on my ‘personal trajectory and professional interpretations’ — just as its ideological exploitation has increasingly become a source of disturbance and, at times, even anger. But this will become clearer only in terms of relating the larger story and context of the link between biography and work.