Germany as a Culture of Remembrance: Promises and Limits of Writing History

PROLOGUE

THE HISTORIAN’S REPRESENTATIONS

All societies have been in different ways attentive to the past, that protean and essential factor of life: we depend on it and seek it, yet at times we cannot bear to face it. Our sense of individual and collective identity requires it, whether we decide to repress, embellish, or just lie to ourselves about it. Historians are also linked to the past, of course, but not quite in the same way as their fellow citizens: for historians have the vocation of representing the past accurately. They create narratives about the past using evidence and methods of verification as the primary material of their craft with the intention of telling true stories. The truth of their stories is never stable, for it is socially and culturally constructed, and their stories can never tell the whole truth about the past. But the foundation of all serious historical work is the intent for truth and fairness in the representation of the past.

And yet, because their stories are always linked to social and personal phenomena that stand outside the realm of scholarship, historians can never reach a cultural Archimedean point from which one can interpret the world from the outside. They are always inside culture; they are a product of the intellectual tradition and historical mentality of their society, while attempting at the same time to explain and criticize it. And they always work with words that are at times ambiguous, even tricky. They create narratives, but their narratives don’t always mean what they think they mean, and they don’t always tell only the stories they think they tell.

In consequence, their final product is a narrative that mixes personal, public, and professional factors. It is not an arbitrary product, however. It has the beauty of narrative art, of storytelling, but it also makes, when it is properly crafted, a legitimate claim to accuracy. I would like to reflect, by way of introducing this collection of essays, on representations of the past made by historians as well as about representations of historians. I often tend to concentrate on Germany, not only because it is my major historical area of research, but also because modern German history, dominated as it is by the Third Reich and the Holocaust, is an extreme historical case, and extremes are sometimes useful for uncovering choices, views, and solutions.

The past exists out there—imagined, invented, actually experienced—for all to use. Historians make sense of it by creating narratives of the past that they shape, in my opinion, in three concentric circles of influence, namely, the personal, the public, and the professional.

The first circle consists of the historian’s personal background, education, and memories. While the importance of this factor for determining a historian’s interests, sensitivities, and approaches is evident, it is the least discussed. The profession is allergic to introducing personal considerations as justification for choices of method. These considerations are left to the preface and acknowledgments of books, or to informal discussions (and at times confessions) among colleagues. To be sure, there are exceptional cases such as autobiographies that sum up the lifelong vocation of a historian. It is probably desirable—even unavoidable—that the personal is kept separate from the strictly professional in historical studies. To link the two demands maturity and wisdom that comes with experience and an elegant style, as well as having something important to say. At the same time, it is unfortunate that the discipline cannot find an appropriate space in which to discuss this topic because, judging from historians’ autobiographies, one can see how strong the link is between personal experience, upbringing, and memories, and professional and theoretical choices. The point is not to be narcissistically self-indulgent, but to take into consideration the historian’s subjectivity in making choices that otherwise appear wholly theoretical, to articulate the conditions and interdependencies that limit and inform the historian’s work.

The topic should be discussed among historians, although limits should be made clear. It is difficult to articulate any causal connections between the historian’s past and the kind of historian he or she becomes. Thus, it is self-evident that Saul Friedländer’s experience—born in 1933 in Prague, losing his parents in the Holocaust, surviving the war in a monastery preparing for the Catholic priesthood, and then discovering his Jewishness and emigrating to Israel—is related to his work on the Holocaust. But it is far from clear, based on Friedländer’s autobiography, why his experience made him into the insightful historian that he became (and not into an angry Goldhagen, for example).

The historian cannot quite make this kind of psychological evaluation.¹ But he or she can make connections when personal experience is linked to professional life. Take the case of Henri Pirenne, the famous Belgian medievalist. Before 1914 Pirenne had been deeply and positively influenced by German scholarship, studied in Leipzig and Berlin, and had cultivated many friends and colleagues during his frequent participation in the German historians’ annual meeting, the Historikertag. In a 1912 ceremony honoring his twenty-fifth anniversary at the University of Ghent, attended by colleagues from all over Europe, he asserted confidently that science had no borders. All this changed in August 1914, when the German army invaded Belgium. Pirenne lost a son at the beginning of the war. The University of Ghent was closed by the occupation authorities. And he was shocked by the October 1914 petition, signed by ninety-three of Germany’s top intellectuals, that supported the nation’s military and political goals and called for expansion of the German civilizing mission in Europe. Active against the occupiers, Pirenne was arrested several times and finally sent to Germany in March 1916, where he remained imprisoned until the end of the war. By then he had rejected much in German historical scholarship, judging even the good methodological tools it offered as badly executed politically and morally. He gave more weight than before to the individual in history, and saw Luther and Bismarck as the fathers of German militarism, chauvinism, and subservience to authority.²

The second circle of influence that shapes the historian’s view is the dominant perceptions of the past in the surrounding culture. The birth of the historical discipline in nineteenth-century Europe, for example, took place just as nationhood was becoming a fundamental creed of political sovereignty and group identity. The historian thus became the grand priest of the nation and the ultimate recounter of its identity, roots, and immemorial existence. The line between careful historical inquiry and forging national identity was blurred. In our own period, two elements of public consciousness of the past seem particularly evident, and both have immediate bearing on German history. The first is the rise of memory as a key notion with which individuals and groups understand, explain, and interpret their identity. The second is the rise of the Holocaust to the status of a fundamental event in modern Judeo-Christian civilization, a foundational past that organizes (together with other representations of the past) the way people understand questions of history, morality, politics, and international relations (as, for example, in the influence of the Holocaust on the legal proceedings of the events in Rwanda and Bosnia).³

Many historians are influenced by the public representations of memory and the Holocaust, whether or not their immediate topic is German history.⁴ Historians are both influenced by this general perception and participate in shaping it. Jacques Le Goff observed once that the medieval period may best be understood by its inability to express itself apart from religious references. Our own period may well be understood by, among other things, its dependence—when expressing itself on a range of moral, historical, legal, and artistic issues—on memory and Holocaust references. How are historians of Germany to negotiate the burdensome closeness of their subject matter? How should they negotiate the concerns of the present with the commitment to describe accurately the world of Germans in the past?

It is widely assumed that the third circle of influence provides the professional tools to make this negotiation successful: to understand the past in spite of the personal and public bias of the historian. This circle includes the rules and modes of operation of the historical discipline as a vocation whose aim is to represent the past accurately. Using the tools of their craft, historians can do their best to reach an insightful, fair, and, as far as possible, truthful representation of the past.

The convergence of personal, public, and professional aspects of historical understanding came into sharp focus for me several years ago when I read Eugen Weber’s My France, a collection of essays.⁵ It was one of those periods in which debate flared up in German historiography about the appropriate way to study the Third Reich and remember the Holocaust. My France, I thought, sensing very clearly the dissonance with modern German history. Weber’s title moves between, on the one hand, the France that he loves and, on the other, the France on which he conducted historical work. Weber did not ignore France’s unpleasant past during the Second World War; he had been a close student of Vichy and French fascism, but these did not prevent him from embracing his France. There is an ease, a panache, and a self-confident lighthearted tone to Weber’s introduction. Part of this, no doubt, owes to his skill as a historian and his sheer talent as a storyteller. But there is, I sensed, more to it than simply style; it is rather that even Vichy could not trample the notion of the presumed French joie de vivre. It reminded me of the persistent representation of Italy as the land of friendly people, romance, and vino, pasta, e piacere di vivere—which is all true enough (as I can attest firsthand) but often brackets out the brutality and murderousness of Italians during the twenty years of fascism.

For a historian of modern Germany, whose topics include the years 1933–45, My Germany would not be an impossible title, but would certainly be problematic. The title my Italy is not likely to elicit the reflexive question as to whether the author included Mussolini and the 1936 gassing of Abyssinians, whereas My Germany is likely to bring forth immediately the issue of how Hitler and Auschwitz are accommodated in the word my. Such a title would require some explanatory words to avoid sounding uncritical, or apologetic, or even just to avoid being misunderstood. And this is true for all historians of Germany regardless of their background, while being particularly acute for those of German and Jewish background, because, as we all know, the German past of the Third Reich, to use an observation on American southern history made famous by William Faulkner and C. Vann Woodward, is not even past yet.⁶

At the same time, we can find in Weber’s book indications of larger trends of public historical consciousness and disciplinary interpretative shifts. My France, published in 1991 and comprising essays written between 1958 and 1988, reflected a generation of scholars who studied fascism and were aware of the Holocaust in professional and personal ways; Weber, who grew up in Bucharest, left Rumania in 1940 and joined the British army in 1943. But this generation neither assigned the Holocaust the centrality it now possesses in the interpretation of modern European history nor lived in a culture that viewed the extermination of the Jews as the moral historical signifier of its age. In the immediate decades after 1945, the Holocaust was mostly perceived (if it was a topic of scholarly interest at all) as a unique, German affair having fundamental, perhaps insurmountable, problems of historical explanation, while the interpretative and public transformation of the past two decades has turned it from a German into a European affair, anchoring the German planning and perpetration of the Holocaust in a nexus of continental traditions, implementation, and participation. These days, a historian of France who aims at presenting a broader view and truthful interpretation of its twentieth century cannot but integrate and emphasize the French history and memory of the Holocaust. The acknowledgment of the centrality of the Holocaust necessarily means that my France acquires some of the meanings of my Germany: the public, scholarly, and historical image of France is now made up also of the Vélodrome d’Hiver, the children of Izieux, and Louis Malle’s Au revoir les enfants in a way it was not twenty years ago.⁷

Two lessons can be drawn from these reflections. First, and more generally, history writing is a dialectic between the personal, public, and professional. The three always exist in different combinations and configurations. There is always a personal inflection, one’s memories and experiences, that commingle in a multitude of complex ways with the social, cultural, and political world around, with questions of justice and war, of life and death, as well as with the available professional choices of method and theory. In this respect, a historian should always ask how and why I think the way I do about the past. Often it is less the answer that is revealing than the journey in search of an answer. Second, and more specifically, German history poses, as is well known, particular problems of historical narration and explanation because of the years 1933–45. Still, the difference between German and other histories is not in kind but in degree and intensity. In many respects Germany is an extreme historical and historiographical case, but not a fundamentally different one, and its particular characteristics have general implications.

How are we to understand this past, which is at the same time so present? Understanding history, François Furet elegantly observed, constitutes a dialectic between the experience of strangeness and the act of familiarization.⁸ The past is out of reach like the river in Heraclitus’s adage, you cannot step twice into the same river. But at the same time, the historian should understand history from the viewpoint of people in the past, cultivating a certain familiarity with their tastes, attitudes, mentalities, values, and beliefs. Historians negotiate this dialectic with various degrees of willingness, resistance, and self-consciousness.

The most common strategy for understanding the past is to demand that the historian exercise detachment from the topic of study, avoiding emotions, personal inclinations, and ideological bias. It sounds appealing but is not necessarily always a good strategy. The work of two celebrated historians is revealing here. The most notable case in recent decades for emotional attachment to the object of study is the opening line of Fernand Braudel’s The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II: I have loved the Mediterranean with passion … This was not Braudel’s only declaration of love: Let me start by saying once and for all, begins The Identity of France, that I love France with the same demanding and complicated passion as did Jules Michelet; without distinguishing between its good points and its bad … but that passion will rarely intrude upon the pages of this book.⁹ Of course his passion intruded. The Identity of France is now recognized as a flawed work because it assumes that rootedness has been the essential feature of the French people until recently. Today, historians of France recognize that immigration has always been a part of the French past and so has the myth of rootedness that Braudel helped to perpetuate.¹⁰ But his attachment also endowed Braudel’s books with an added depth, humanity, and the sincere attempt to familiarize with the past. A counterexample is Eric Hobsbawm’s statement about his national sentiments in Nations and Nationalism: Nationalism requires too much belief in what is patently not so. … [T]he historian [must] leave[s] his or her convictions behind when entering the library or the study. Some nationalist historians have been unable to do so. Fortunately, in setting out to write the present book I have not needed to leave my non-historical convictions behind.¹¹ What is presented as a positive detachment from the topic turns out to be a shortcoming: because Hobsbawm views nationalism as the opposite of historical reason, as a myth not to be believed in, his analysis lacks insights into the reasons why people in the modern world—how much of an exaggeration is it to say all people?—embraced nationhood with such tender emotions and destructive zeal. Hobsbawm made, in essence, no attempt to engage in a process of familiarization.

A delicate balance and complex mix exist, then, between the strangeness of the past and the process of familiarization, between personal sentiments and professional practices. These cannot be reduced to polar opposites. There is no single, correct formula for transforming evidence, via the rules of the historical discipline, into an enlightening interpretation. Detachment is a required element for the historian, but excessive detachment can deaden historical imagination and block access to the subjectivity of historical actors. A sense of personal involvement may add insights that come with intimate knowledge, but excessive involvement obscures critical analysis. The delicate balance exists in a state of tension but without a dissonance by the historian’s possessing enough self-consciousness of his or her composite role as a representer of the past who is shaped by professional, public, and personal factors. Differently put, the issue of understanding the past cannot be solved by calling for detachment over personal involvement. Rather, the crucial aspect is often the questions we formulate and the things we seek to know about the past, and our engagement in a process of familiarization.

Precisely this problem of the strangeness and familiarity of the past has been crucial to German history because of the Third Reich and the Holocaust, which are the problem’s locus classicus in modern historical thinking. For some historians and laypersons, the unbearable closeness of this past meant that no detachment was possible, that this was a past that could not go away, never became strange, and would therefore remain constantly present. When Elie Wiesel asserted, The Holocaust? The ultimate event, the ultimate mystery, never to be comprehended or transmitted. Only those who were there know what it was; the others will never know, he challenged (if unintentionally) the basic procedures of historical understanding that assume that every human past is within reach of being comprehended, that experiencing a given event is not a requirement for understanding it, and that a process of historical familiarization takes place from an external position, that is, from a basic position of being distant from the past.¹²

Historical work on the Third Reich and the Holocaust has exhibited a dual sensitivity about the possibility and limits of historical understanding. On the one hand, historians have admirably and painstakingly reconstructed the period in spite of the enormous stress it put on our imagination and belief in humankind. Holocaust historiography stands out as one of the towering achievements of the historical profession in the modern period. On the other hand, this reconstruction was constantly accompanied by a sense that adequate explanation is either impossible or limited, and that several features of the period (guards leading children and whole families to Treblinka’s gas chambers, for example) do not lend themselves to being captured by normal historical methods.¹³ In consequence, it has been believed, the Holocaust diverged, on some level and some form, from normal history. Saul Friedländer’s work stands for this duality of a whole cohort of historians belonging to the era of contemporaries, whose experience of the Third Reich, either personally or as members of the second or third generation or as influenced by Holocaust remembrance in public culture, impinged on their historical understanding. He argued that "the ‘Final Solution,’ like any other historical phenomenon, had to be interpreted in its historical unfolding and within the relevant historical framework," and out of this understanding he produced his magisterial Nazi Germany and the Jews. But he also claimed in a following sentence and in the same breath but, as we know, this is not the case and, implicitly, for most, this cannot be the case. No one of sound mind would wish to interpret the events from Hitler’s viewpoint.¹⁴

I have reservations about this dual historical understanding, which has been dominant among historians and laypersons alike since 1945 and is now in a process of transformation. It is wrong to assume that the Holocaust is exceptional because the historical discipline cannot fully interpret, explain, and capture it. It burdens history with massive expectations that it cannot possibly fulfill.¹⁵ For, in fact, in its inability to be fully captured, the Holocaust is not unusual. It is not that the Holocaust is unique because the historical discipline cannot capture it, but that the extreme case of the Holocaust lays bare the basic fact that the historical discipline cannot fully capture any past.¹⁶ It is better to argue that the historical discipline can never fully interpret, explain, and capture a past, that all interpretations are incomplete, and that all historical understanding is a work in progress. And that, moreover, the historical discipline itself is crucial but insufficient to understand the past, for some experiences can only be captured by artistic representations such as poetry, sculpture, painting, literature, and film. This is particularly true for extreme historical events—and for the Holocaust, which is the extreme of the extreme—that call into question our cognitive, imaginative, and emotional abilities to comprehend the world. The profundity of human experience in the Holocaust captured by Primo Levi’s Se questo é un uomo (If this is a man, horrendously translated into English as Survival in Auschwitz) is unrivaled.

The historian, to my mind, has a way through the intractable intellectual labyrinth of the dual sensitivity about the possibility and limits of historical understanding. It is difficult to be isolated from or emotionally removed from the Holocaust, the event that is a moral signifier of our age. (That the Holocaust is a, perhaps the, signifier in current Judeo-Christian civilization is attested by the fact that its very existence is negated in lectures, publications, and on the Internet. Why is the existence of, say, the First World War, the Russian Revolution, the Ribbentrop-Molotov agreement, or the Berlin Wall never questioned?) And no one should aspire to be detached from the event, if by detachment we understand neutrality where Nazis and Jews are morally equal. The crux of the issue is that detachment is not in itself a good guide for historical insight. Historians should not seek a detached Archimedean point, for it does not exist; they cannot exist outside of their culture. They have to live and manage the issue of involvement with the Holocaust, and with history. What they can do is rely on their discipline to provide a guide to understand the Holocaust. The simplest historical principle is the following: German history, as res gestae (the things that happened), was made by human beings and it therefore lies, on a fundamental level and in principle, within historical experience and understanding. But its historia rerum gestarum (the narration of the things that happened) is at times represented as beyond historical experience and understanding. This narration should be taken for what it is, namely as a step in our internalization of the Third Reich, in our journey to self-consciousness of an event that calls into question the basic values of Western civilization and the idea of shared humanity. Our problem in telling and understanding what happened does not shed light on the historicity of the years 1933–45, which can be submitted to the basic principles of historical analysis, narration, interpretation, explanation, and understanding.

Once we keep a distinction between res gestae and historia rerum gestarum, questions of historical understanding fall into place.¹⁷ We need not call for the historicization of the Third Reich, as some scholars did several years ago, for we do not need to historicize what is already history. It is wrong to assume that some approaches possess intrinsic moral qualities that make them either better or worse for the study of the Third Reich, as had been suggested with regard to everyday-life history, because it might prompt us to empathize with the Nazis, for historical approaches are more or less useful in illuminating the past, but it is ultimately the intention of the historian that gives them meaning. And it is limiting to ask only why Germany was radically different—and to take this difference as the center of investigation—instead of recognizing also that modern German history fits well within larger trends of European history and that the main question is how these similarities produced excesses.

To understand the things that happened in German history, we must also interpret the events in part from the Nazis’ point of view, and we must capture the recognizably human and moral in the Nazi world as many Germans viewed it by exploring mentalities, motivations, and ethics. Mais est-il vrai que tout comprendre c’est tout pardonner? To my mind this is a non sequitur—one can understand without forgiving and forgive without understanding. Understanding does not mean identifying with what one understands; familiarization does not mean justification. The imperative of historical understanding must remain the act of familiarizing the past, treated without qualifications with the tools of the historian’s craft. Nazism set out to construct a new type of society, based on racial ideas, that posed a historical alternative and challenge to both liberal democracy and communism. It was a destruction of civilization, in the traditional sense of a culture aspiring to moral values and worthy of emulation. But it also constructed an alternative civilization. And to reconstruct Nazism as a civilization seems a task worthy of the historian.

To a post-Auschwitz historical consciousness, the idea of Nazism as a civilization is blasphemy. Let us think about it with the help of an observation of Marc Bloch from The Historian’s Craft, written during World War II: We speak also of civilizations in the plural and merely as realities. From this point, we admit that there may be, if I may venture to say so, civilizations of people who are not civilized.¹⁸ Which civilization of uncivilized people did he have in mind? For a Frenchman, a Jew, a refined thinker of the past, and a humanist, the civilization of the uncivilized, in the darkest war years, could only mean Nazism. But for Bloch there was no necessary dissonance in making this statement, because he did not have the full knowledge and perception of the rupture that was the Holocaust. Nazism, for him, was uncivilized but squarely within the territory of the historian. For us, calling Nazism a civilization seems blasphemy because we perceive Auschwitz as a foundational break that imposes enormous strains on our imagination. Consciousness of the enormity of the Holocaust could not but influence historians, for while historians know that the Holocaust is historical, they have resisted applying to it fully the methods of historical understanding. Present-day historians should bring to the understanding of the Holocaust a recognition of its foundational meaning and the rupture it has caused in modern historical consciousness. But this rupture should be assessed as fully historical based on the act of familiarity for the purpose of understanding. When all is said and done, a single word, ‘understanding,’ is the beacon light of our studies.¹⁹

The principle of understanding joins, to my mind, with yet another historical principle to comprise, together, the essence of historical thinking: the notion of contingency. Let this view be expressed in the following two texts. Alexander Herzen put the issue poetically: If humanity marched straight toward some result, there would be no history, only logic. … If history followed a set libretto it would lose all interest, become unnecessary, boring, ludicrous. … [H]istory is all improvisation, all will, all extempore—there are no frontiers, no itineraries. More specifically about Germany, the Third Reich, and the Holocaust, Victor Klemperer wrote in his diary on September 29, 1939: I am just reading the first few pages of the Tocqueville, which Frau Schaps gave me in 1924. No one, not even the most significant and knowledgeable contemporaries, anticipated the course of [the French] Revolution. Every page of the book surprises me with analogies to the present.²⁰ Whatever happens is not predetermined to happen; it does, as a result of a million events in unanticipated sequence, which the historian needs to reconstruct and explain. It is an inherent paradox of history that while the historian perforce looks at the past backward from his or her temporal location, to understand its meaning he or she must imagine the temporal location of past historical actors and look forward into an unknown future. The historian knows what this future would bring, but for contemporaries the future was still unanticipated with a million possibilities. Capturing people’s angst, hopes, and happiness over unknown possibilities is a necessary step toward understanding past experience.

Historians should think twice before they doubt the ability of history to interpret and understand the Holocaust in the same way, which is not without limitations, history can understand and interpret all past events. Of course, any account of the Holocaust, however convincing, will continue to evoke in us a sense of moral inadequacy, for the victims of the Holocaust died in complete innocence; no historical narrative will ever relieve us from the agony of the Holocaust. But it has the potential of making us wiser. Therefore, if a representer and remembrancer of the past in society doubts the ability of his or her craft to interpret and understand the world the Nazis built, then this is grim news indeed: for while the historian is not the only representer of the past in society, he or she does have a vocational obligation to speak truthfully about the past.

The notion of speaking truthfully about the past raises a certain discomfort in a culture that has come to distrust historical truth in the name of a relativism that claims that all truths are simply a result of power relations in a given society. The mistake of historical relativists was to assume that because the historian is always influenced by the point of view of time and place he or she is incapable of gaining historical understanding. As if historical understanding can be gained only under conditions of a pure state of objectivity. But the fact that the historian cannot be totally free from the point of view of his or her culture does not necessarily foreclose historical understanding or establishing historical facts. Historical knowledge is established through a process of collection and classification of sources and of reconstruction of the context that made them. This process is composed of asking the sources questions that cannot be wholly arbitrary, for they are limited by the empirical data and the specific conditions of the sources’ period. This process of constant negotiation between the sources, which are limited by their time and place, and the historian’s search for knowledge is more or less illuminating based on the ability of the sources to produce possible answers to possible questions. This negotiation is obviously articulated in language, whose meaning shifts, but there is a truth outside of the text precisely because language itself is conditioned by its time and place: historical inquiry can detect its anachronisms, lies, and tendentiousness, much as Lorenzo Valla centuries ago used this strategy to unmask the Donation of Constantine.

To my mind, history is a form of narrative art practiced with tools that permit verification of our knowledge about the past. Differently put, historical writing is an art that uses scientific methods of inquiry. History permits verification because historians are committed to using evidence as the primary material of their craft. With the help of evidence, historians put forward differing interpretations that are weighed against each other. Interpretations differ, but not all interpretations are equal: some clarify the historical world better than others, and some are downright wrong. But in spite of historians’ use of evidence history remains simultaneously a form of art: historians can never achieve the precision, say, of mathematicians who work with numbers, where two plus two makes four under any social, political, and cultural circumstances. And they always work with words that are potentially unstable. Their final product is a story, a narrative that falls squarely in the realm of art, just as the best of history writing is touched by the grace and beauty of art.

Historical relativism confuses evaluation of facts with evaluation of values; the two are related but are not the same. Historians can establish true or false knowledge about the past, while also recognizing that historical understanding is always complex, incomplete, and still under construction. The point of view of the present is unavoidable—our knowledge about the past changes (we know more or we learn that what we had known was wrong), and the significance of it changes—but this does not mean that when it comes to apprehending the historical record, there are no grounds to be found in the historical record itself for preferring one way of constructing its meaning over another.²¹

Let us consider the extermination of the Jews as a historical case that has undergone tremendous interpretative shifts, which however did not fundamentally question the basic truth of what happened. As noted previously, it is a good event to treat as a case study because, as an extreme historical event, it sharpens professional procedures and moral choices. After the war, understanding the foundational historical meaning of the extermination of the Jews, as well as embracing the point of view of the victims, was rare, even for intellectuals who were Jewish or antifascist. Thus, for example, Primo Levi’s Se questo é un uomo was rejected in 1947 by Einaudi in Turin and later by five other publishers before it was taken by a small publishing house in Turin. The Einaudi literary reader who rejected the book, claiming it was not right for Einaudi’s list, was the young and talented novelist Natalia Ginzburg, a member of an exemplary antifascist family and the wife of resistance fighter Leone Ginzburg who was murdered by the Germans in Rome in 1944.²² Raul Hilberg’s monumental The Destruction of European Jews was rejected in 1959 by Princeton University Press because, as the outside reader noted, the manuscript did not constitute a sufficiently important contribution, and readily available books on the subject existed in sufficient detail. That critic was Hannah Arendt.²³ And West German historians, if they considered the extermination at all, saw it as a German not a Jewish tragedy. Martin Broszat, whose distinguished career was dedicated to exploring National Socialism, rejected in the 1950s the work of Joseph Wulf, a German-Polish writer and an Auschwitz survivor, who focused on the extermination of the Jews as inherent in Nazi ideas, motivations, and regime. Broszat rejected this approach as polemical and nonprofessional and, above all, questioned the professional distance of Wulf from the subject matter by implying that a scientific-historical description of the extermination of the Jews could not and should not be left to Jews and survivors.²⁴ Holocaust survivors were not objective and Jewish historians of the Holocaust were emotionally unable to study the topic scientifically.

Now, of course, we have a radically different sensitivity to these issues. Many react to such examples with moral outrage. The extermination has now been transformed into The Holocaust or The Shoah. Holocaust scholarship has been in part the producer and in part the product of this new consciousness. The historian’s work has been influenced by the point of view of present-day public, artistic, and political representations of the Holocaust. The enormous contribution of this scholarship to our historical understanding of the Holocaust—in terms of method, scope, interpretation, and sheer new knowledge—is undeniable. We know today infinitely more about the comprehensive nature of the Nazi racial state, worldview, implementation, terror, and extermination than people did in the 1950s. We know that the extermination originated and was planned by Germans, but was a European project in scale and participation. We know that the main interpretative topic is not whether Nazism was a form of totalitarianism, fascism, or antimodernism (as was commonly debated in the 1950s and 1960s), but how the Nazi utopian racial vision—as part of broader European trends of life and thought—was justified, internalized, and murderously executed. And by focusing on memory, the victims’ point of view has become prominent in the way we narrate the years 1933–45, be they Jews, Gypsies, mentally ill patients, slave laborers, homosexuals and lesbians, or others.

In short, historical knowledge and interpretations of the Holocaust have dramatically changed in the past half century. But these changes do not question the basic facts about what happened in the Holocaust. We now know more about the extermination than ever before, and this knowledge is irrefutable. The historian cannot avoid the culture of the present, but historical understanding is not the prisoner of that culture. Certain knowledge can be acquired in spite of, against, and independently of the point of view of the present. Had the Nazis won the war, let us think with a counterfactual, Hitler’s often-repeated lie—that the Jews had been responsible for the Second World War—would have become common knowledge and official truth. But the historian who seeks to represent the past accurately would still be able to refute this claim about Jewish aggression by examining the sources: there are grounds to be found in the historical record itself for preferring a different interpretation than Hitler’s way of constructing meaning. A historical event is not only made by words, texts, and narratives, but also by the procedure of historical analysis and by the moral conscience of the historian. Ultimately, if historical reconstruction is only texts and narratives, Hitler’s argument may just have the upper hand.

If the historian is not quite a helpless prisoner of his or her culture, he or she still operates under its enormous influence, which tends to conflate history with identity and scholarship with political leanings in ways that prejudge historical stories. Some of the political leanings are justified and humane, and some of the identity building is long overdue, but the ultimate result of these histories is to obscure the past.

The special path interpretation to German history (the Sonderweg approach) dominant in the 1960s and 1970s is a case in point. In this