Foundational Pasts: The Holocaust as Historical Understanding (review)

“The accumulation of facts in massive studies is accompanied by diminishing interpretative returns.” Based on this verdict on Holocaust history and the “sense of déjà vu” that “many contributions” to the field evoke (41), Alon Confino urges historians to invest more time and energy in reflecting on the ways they do history, i.e., on the conceptual categories they use, consciously or unconsciously, while writing history. In a field that is indeed inclined to exhaust itself by lapsing into documentary narratives or into recycling the same old models of explanation, this request is reasonable—although Confino is not the first to think about the historiography rather than just the history of the Holocaust. A number of leading scholars, such as Ian Kershaw, Yehuda Bauer, Michael Marrus, and Omer Bartov have, of course, already done so. More recently, other scholars, including Dan Stone, Tom Lawson, and Peter Hayes and John Roth, as well as Paul Bartrop and Steven Leonard Jacobs, have produced comprehensive surveys and biographical compendiums on Holocaust historiography.

Confino’s work is not just another survey of the research, however. He is interested in the metahistory of the Holocaust. According to him, much of the extant Holocaust historiography is still burdened by the idea that the Holocaust was a unique event that cannot be represented, described, or explained in the same way as other historical events. Confino’s book takes aim at exactly this kind of mystification of the Holocaust. The Holocaust was surely an extreme event, he says, but one that reveals the opportunities and restrictions of historical interpretation precisely because of its extreme nature.

Foundational Pasts demonstrates how Holocaust historiography navigates through conceptual, categorical, and interpretive problems that shape, and have shaped, other historiographies as well. The comparative paradigm is the French Revolution. Both the French Revolution and the Holocaust have served as “foundational pasts,” as events that have been considered as ruptures—not only of political regimes, societies, or economic orders, but also of all other dimensions of human life, experience, and morality. Since the 1960s or 1970s, the Holocaust has replaced the French Revolution as the one foundational past of the West, as well as other parts of the world.

Foundational Pasts is divided into two sections. The first, “Thinking the Holocaust,” outlines some general thoughts on Holocaust historiography and the 1789–1933 comparison, which leads into an in-depth analysis and favorable critique of the role the voices of victims’ diaries play in Saul Friedlaender’s preeminent Holocaust narrative, Years of Extermination (New York, 2007). In his second section, “Thresholds and Limits of History,” Confino examines how four principle issues of historical writing have shaped, advanced, or obstructed explanations offered by Holocaust scholars. These include issues of periodization, as well as definitions of the Holocaust’s beginnings, ruptures, and endings. Confino also examines historians’ dedication to contexts, which he says has made historians overestimate the military confrontation of World War II as a reason for the Holocaust. Another conceptual problem that Confino addresses is the popularity of the category “contingency,” and, related to this, the search for agency and the choices of historical actors. He rightly warns against confusing different degrees of contingency in different historical situations. The fourth conceptual problem of Holocaust historiography that he addresses results from its fixation on antisemitism as an ideology. Confino suggests using the tools of cultural history instead, in order to explore more complex belief systems (including religion), emotions, obsessions, and social practices as conditions that allowed for the perpetration of the Holocaust.

Not all of Confino’s observations may sound new to historians familiar with the field, but it is nevertheless an inspiring and well written book; any advanced class on Holocaust historiography will profit from it. Of course, this book cannot cover all the issues of Holocaust historiography. One of these is the deep entanglement of Holocaust research, and thus historiography, in memory and identity politics (Jewish, non-Jewish, American, German, Polish...