Abstract
This chapter does not purport to provide an overall history and evaluation of Holocaust historiography nor does it even pretend to comprehensively cover the state of present research. The beginning of this complex task has been competently undertaken by others.1 Rather, I shall attempt to analyse certain key works and place into context some of the major interpretive issues that define the fluid — indeed, rather bewildering — condition of the field.2
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Notes and References
Given the sheer horror and scale of the event, Elie Wiesel’s argument that ‘Auschwitz cannot be explained’ because ‘the Holocaust transcends history’ may, at times, be a tempting and sobering one: ‘The dead are in possession of a secret that we, the living, are neither worthy of nor capable of recovering.’ See his ‘Trivialising the Holocaust: Semi-Fact and Semi-Fiction’, New York Times (April 16, 1978, section 2.) Historians too have been known to argue in this vein. Nora Levin, author of a widely-read history of the Holocaust, writes: ‘The Holocaust refuses to go the way of most history, not only because of the magnitude of the destruction — the murder of six million Jews — but because the events surrounding it are in a very real sense incomprehensible. No one altogether understands how mass murder on such a scale could have happened or could have been allowed to happen. The accumulation of facts does does not yield this understanding; indeed comprehensibility may never be possible.’ Nora Levin, The Holocaust: The Destruction of European Jewry, 1919–1945 (New York, 1973), pp. xi—xii. But surely ‘comprehensibility’ must be understood as a finite and changing rather than a single, final state. As Michael Marrus puts it: ‘Historians are used to tramping over their fields while suspending judgements on the fundamental issues that are ultimately at stake… We simply do the best we can, knowing that our efforts are necessarily imperfect, incomplete and inadequate.’ See his The Holocaust in History, p. 7. See too Dan Magurshak, ‘The “Incomprehensibility” of the Holocaust: Tightening up Some Loose Useage’ in the useful anthology edited by Alan Rosenberg and Gerald E. Meyers, Echoes from the Holocaust: Philosophical Reflections on a Dark Time (Philadelphia, 1988 ).
For summaries and evaluations of this debate, see Juergen Kocka, ‘German History before Hitler: The Debate about the German Sonderweg’, Journal of Contemporary History 23 (1988) pp. 3–16 and my ‘Nazism, Normalcy and the German Sonderweg’, Studies in Contemporary Jewry 4, The Jews and the European Crisis, edited by Jonathan Frankel (New York and Oxford, 1988) pp. 276–92.
The literature on this is vast. For convenient overviews see
Charles S. Maier, The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust, and German National Identity (Cambridge, Mass., 1988 ) And Richard Evans, In Hitler’s Shadow: West German Historians and the Attempt to Escape the Nazi Past (London, 1989). See too my ‘History, Politics, and National Memory: The German Historikerstreit’, Survey of Jewish Affairs (1988), pp. 222–38.
Introduction’, Saul Friedlander (ed.), Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the ‘Final Solution’, (Cambridge, Mass., 1992 ) pp. 4–5. Friedlander is undoubtedly correct in his analysis of the problem raised by post-modernism. However, his evaluation of its more positive potential — as well as the intrinsic opaqueness of Holocaust historiography — is more open to question: ’… the very openness of postmodernism to what cannot yet be formulated in decisive statements, but merely sensed, directly relates to whoever considers that even the most precise historical renditions of the Shoah contain an opaqueness at the core which confronts traditional historical narrative.’ (p. 5).
Mayer, Why did the Heavens not Darken? (New York, 1990) p. xiii.
For a classic illustration of all these themes, see Lucy Dawidowicz The War against the Jews (New York, 1975). In his ‘Reflections on the Historiography of the Holocaust’, Michael Marrus has a long list of writings that adopted this approach. It should be clear that in this paper we are talking about a trend not an iron-clad law. Studies advocating the centrality of anti-Semitism as the moving force continue to appear and will be considered in the course of this essay.
Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York, 1951 ) p. 7.
See George L. Mosse, ‘Die Rechte und die Judenfrage’, in Werner E. Mosse (ed.), Entscheidungsjahr 1932 (Tuebingen, 1964 ) pp. 183–249.
See the divergent interpretations of Peter Pulzer, ‘The Beginning of the End’, Peter Gay, ‘At Home in Germany: The Jews during the Weimar Era’ and Werner E. Mosse, ‘German Jews: Citizens of the Republic’ in Arnold Paucker (ed.), The Jews in Nazi Germany 1933–1943 (Tuebingen, 1986) and Donald L. Niewyk, The Jews in Weimar Germany (Baton Rouge, 1980), Chapter III.
Geoffrey Pridham, Hitler’s Rise to Power: The Nazi Movement in Bavaria 1923–1933 (New York, 1973 ) pp. 237–44;
William Sheridan Allen, The Nazi Seizure of Power: The Experience of a Single German Town 1930–1935 (Chicago, 1965 ),p. 77;
Jeremy Noakes, The Nazi Party in Lower Saxony 1921–1933 (London, 1971) pp. 209–10.
Oded Heilbronner, ‘The Role of Nazi Antisemitism in the Nazi Party’s Activity and Propaganda–A Regional Historiographical Study’, Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook XXXV, (1990) pp. 397–439.
David Bankier, The Germans and the Final Solution: Public Opinion Under Nazism (Oxford, 1992 ) p. 115.
Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (Chicago, 1961 ) pp. 653–62.
Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York, 1963 ).
Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View (New York, 1974 ).
Christopher R. Browning, The German Foreign Office and the Final Solution: A Study of Referat DIII ofAbteilung Deutschland (New York, 1978 ).
Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Batallion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York, 1992 ).
Of course, there is also not unanimity here. ‘Moderate’ functionalists would not go so far as some of their more radical colleagues who have suggested that the Holocaust was the (almost accidental) outcome of lowly-placed functionaries responding to immediate field problems and uncertain signals from above. For a sympathetic view of functionalism and the ‘functionalist-intentionalist’ debate see Tim Mason, ‘Intention and Explanation: A Current Controversy about the Interpretation of National Socialism’, in G. Hirschfeld and L. Kettenacker (ed.) The Fuehrer State: Myth and Reality (Stuttgart, 1981 ).
See the brilliant analysis in Chapter 9, ‘The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man’ of The Origins of Totalitarianism (Cleveland, 1958). The quote appears on p. 277. For a general history, see Michael R. Marrus, The Unwanted: European Refugees in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1985 ).
For the German case, see the chapter on ‘The Brutalization of German Politics’ in George L. Mosse, Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (New York, 1990 ).
Andreas Hillgruber, Zweierlei Untergang, Die Zerschlagung des Deutschen Reiches and das Ende des europaischen Judentums (Berlin, 1986 ), p. 67.
Istvan Deak, ‘Strategies of Hell’, New York Review of Books (October 8, 1992) pp. 8–10.
Mayer, Why did the Heavens Not Darken? (New York, 1990 ) pp. 16–17. This new edition contains the author’s ‘Afterword’.
See Christopher Browning, Fateful Months: Essays on the Emergence of the Final Solution (New York, 1985 ).
See my ‘Caftan and Cravat: The Ostjude as a Cultural Symbol in the Development of German Anti-Semitism’ in S. Drescher, D. Sabean and A. Sharlin (eds.), Political Symbolism in Modern Europe (New Brunswick, 1982 ) and Chapter 3 of my Brothers and Strangers: The East European Jew in German and German—Jewish Consciousness, 1800–1923 (Madison, 1982).
Eugen Weber, ‘Revolution, Counterrevolution? What Revolution?’, Journal of Contemporary History, 9 (1974) p. 33.
Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary modernism: Technology, culture, and politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge, 1984 ).
Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann, The Racial State: Germany 1933–1945 (Cambridge, 1991 ) p. 22.
R.W. Darre, ‘Marriage Laws and the Principles of Breeding’ (1930) in Nazi Ideology before 1933, translated by Barbara Hiller and Leila J.Gupp (Manchester, 1978 ) p. 115.
See the illuminating essay by Robert-Jam Van Pelt, ‘A Site in Search of a Mission’, in Yisrael Gutman and Michael Berenbaum, eds., Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp (Bloomington, 1994), especially p. 103
Gisela Bock, Zwangssterilisation im Nationalsozialismus (Opladen, 1986 ). For the figures see pp. 230ff. Sterilisation, it is true, was not limited to Germany but was also lamentably carried out in the USA. The relevant figures are, however, as Burleigh and Wippermann point out (p. 253), very different. Thirty states in the USA with comparable laws sterilised 11,000 people between 1907 and 1930.
Fora valuable survey of the literature, see Michael Burleigh, ‘Euthanasia in the Third Reich’, Social History of Medicine (1991), 4. See too Ernst Klee, ‘Euthanasie’ im NS-Staat. Die ‘Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens’ (Frankfurt am Main, 1983 );
Goetz Aly, Peter Chroust and Christian Pross, Cleansing the Fatherland: Nazi Medicine and Racial Hygiene, translated by Belinda Cooper (Baltimore and London, 1994 );
Manfred Kluepel, ’Euthanasie’ and Lebensvernichtung am Beispiel der Landesheilanstalten Haina and Merxhausen. Eine Chronik der Ereignisse 1933–1945 (Kassel, 1984 );
Walter Schmuhl, Rassenhygiene, Nationalsozialismus, Euthanasie (Goettingen, 1987 ).
See Benno Mueller-Hill, ‘The Idea of the Final Solution and the role of Experts,’ in David Cesarani (ed.), The Final Solution: Origins and implementation (London and New York, 1994 ) p. 62.
Burleigh and Wippermann correctly reject what have come to be the pejorative terms ‘Gypsy’ and ‘Ziegeuner’ and use the name Sinti and Roma. The prejudice against Gypsies, obviously did not begin with the Nazis. The authors note (Chapter 5) that while they were not explicitly mentioned in Nazi racial laws the commentaries argued that it applied to them as well as Jews. Moreover, their sterilisation took place without any ‘legal’ basis whatever. If they formed part of a continuum there were nevertheless important differences from the Jews–distinctions were made between ‘pure’ and ‘impure’ Gypsies with the former receiving a degree of protection (while being rigorously controlled) and their deportations halted to give priority to Jewish deportations. For an explication of this view, see Yehuda Bauer, ‘Jews, Gypsies, Slays: policies of the Third Reich’, UNESCO Yearbook on Peace and Conflict Studies 1985 (Paris 1987 ) pp. 73–100. But this position has been recently questioned by Henry Friedlander who argues that while Nazi killings in terms of political affiliations (communists, socialists, Soviet POWs), behaviour (criminals, homosexuals) or activities (resistance members) did not amount to genocide–‘the mass murder of human beings because they belong to a biologically defined group’ -such a definition indeed applies equally to Nazi policies toward the handicapped and the Gypsies as it does the Jews. See Friedlander, ‘Euthanasia and the Final Solution’, especially p. 51.
The classic study here is Robert Koehl, RKFDV German Settlement and Population Policy 1939–1945: A History of the Commission for the Strengthening of Germandom (Cambridge, 1957 ).
See the very early work by Max Weinreich, Hitler’s Professors: The Part of Scholarship in Germany’s Crimes against the Jewish People (New York, 1946 ).
More recent work includes Till Bastian, Von der Eugenik zur Euthanasie. Ein Verdraengtes Kapitel aus der Geschichte der deutschen Psychiatrie (Woerishofen, 1981 );
Michael Burleigh, Germany Turns Eastwards: A Study of ‘Ostforschung’ in the Third Reich (Cambridge, 1988 );
Peter Weingart, ‘Eugenik, eine angewandte Wissenschaft im Dritten Reich’, in Peter Lundgreen (ed.), Wissenschaft im Dritten Reich (Frankfurt am Main, 1985 ) pp. 314–49.
Michael. H. Kater, The Nazi Party: A Social Profile of Members 1919–1945 (Cambridge: Mass, 1983 ) p. 73.
The literature on this is now extensive. For some English-language sources see Benno Mueller, Murderous Science: Elimination by Scientific Selection of Jews, Gypsies, and Others, Germany 1933–1945 (Oxford, 1988 );
Robert N. Proctor, Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis (London, 1988 );
Robert Jay Lifton, The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killings and the Psychology of Genocide (London, 1986 ).
On the German background of these influences, see Paul J. Weindling, Health, Race and German Politics between national unification and Nazism, 1870–1945 (Cambridge, 1989 );
Peter Emil Becker, Zur Geschichte der Rassenhygiene in Deutschland: Wege ins Dritte Reich (Stuttgart, 1988 );
Peter Weingart, Juergen Kroll and Kurt Bayertz, Rasse, Blut und Gene. Geschichte der Eugenik und Rassenhygiene in Deutschland (Frankfurt am Main, 1988 ).
Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder c. 1848–1918 (Cambridge, 1989 );
George L. Mosse, Towards the Final Solution: A History of European Racism (New York, 1978 ). Mosse has made a masterly statement on the connection between the doctor’ s role in European society in general and genocide in his review of Lifton, ‘Medicine and Murder’, Studies in Contemporary Jewry VI (1990) pp. 315–20.
For a general survey of the field of eugenics in this context, see Robert A. Nye, ‘The Rise and Fall of the Eugenics Empire: Recent Perspectives on the Impact of Biomedical Thought in Modern Society’, The Historical Journal 36, 3 (1993) pp. 687–700. Nye examines the divergent modes of permeation of eugenic thought within mainstream European and American science and medicine and while his article contains ‘echoes of the murderous racism of the World War II era’ it also stresses ‘aspects of biological and racial thought that did not end in holocaust’ (p. 687).
Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich (New York, 1964 ).
Raul Hilberg, ‘German Motivations for the Destruction of the Jews’, Midstream (June 1965 ) p. 36. I believe that Hilberg later regretted the speculative nature of his comments.
Berel Lang, Act and Idea in the Nazi Genocide (Chicago, 1990 ) pp. 168–9.
See the review by Laurence Thomas, ‘Characterizing and Responding to Genocide: A Review Essay’, Modern Judaism 11 (1991) pp. 371–9. As he argues (p. 276), ‘the very reason why we find what the Nazis did so morally heinous and inexcusable is that humanity admits of a universalist and ahistorical rendering.’
For a superb exposition of the essentially tolerant nature of Kant’ s moral (rather than empirical or historical) concept of humanity, see Leszek Kolakowski, ‘Why do we Need Kant?’ in his Modernity on Endless Trial (Chicago, 1990 ) pp. 44–54.
Emil L. Fackenheim, To Mend the World: Foundations of Post-Holocaust Thought (New York, 1989) pp. 272–3.
Wolfgang Sauer, ‘National Socialism: Totalitarianism or Fascism?’, American Historical Review, 78 (1967) p. 418.
Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Oxford, 1989 ) pp. x, xiii and p. 8.
Hannah Arendt, ‘Approaches to the “German Problem”’, Partisan Review, 12 (no. 1, 1945) p. 97.
In addition to those addressed below, see W. Schneider (ed,) Vernichtungspolitik. Eine Debatte ueber den Zusammenhang von Sozialpolitik und Genozid im nationalsozialistischen Deutschland (Berlin, 1991).
See too the related work of K.H. Roth. Roth edited Redationskollektiv ‘Autonomie’, Erfassung zur Vernichtung. Von der Sozialhygiene zum ‘Gesetz ueberSterbhilfe’ (Berlin, 1984) and, together with G. Aly, Die restlose Erfassung. Volkszaehlen, Identifizieren, Aussondern im Nationalsozialismus (Berlin, 1984 ).
Paul Lawrence Rose, Revolutionary Antisemitism in Germany: From Kant to Wagner (Princeton, 1990 ).
See the critical reviews by Anthony Quinton, ‘Idealists Against the Jews’, The New York Review of Books (November 7, 1991 ) pp. 38–40
James F. Harns, American Historical Review (April 1992 ) pp. 571–2.
See too Christopher Munro Clark, ‘Three Books about Antisemitism’, Historical Journal 34 (1991) p. 993.
For the still-definitive presentation of this, see Eberhard Jaeckel, Hitler’s World View: A Blueprint for Power, translated by Herbert Arnold (Cambridge, 1981 ).
Jacques Derrida, ‘Otobiographies: The Teaching of Nietzsche and the Politics of the Proper Name’ in The Ear of the Other: Otobiography Transference Translation, edited by Christie McDonald, translated by Peggy Kamuf and Avital Ronell (New York, 1985 ) pp. 30–1.
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© 1996 Steven E. Aschheim
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Aschheim, S.E. (1996). Small Forays, Grand Theories and Deep Origins: Current Trends in the Historiography of the Holocaust. In: Culture and Catastrophe. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-24401-0_7
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