The Holocaust & Historical Methodology ed. by Dan Stone (review)

Jean-Martin Charcot once remarked that “Theory is good, but it doesn’t prevent things from existing” – a view that effectively describes most Holocaust historians’ dogged empiricism and methodological conservatism when faced with producing historical representations of the Nazi Final Solution. The Holocaust & Historical Methodology, the latest volume in the “Making Sense of History” series, examines, with an eye to unsettling, what editor Dan Stone describes as this methodologically “staid” character of Holocaust historiography, which contrasts sharply with the sensationalism of much contemporary Holocaust representation in art, film, fiction, and elsewhere. This book aims, therefore, to indicate “how historians can respond in innovative but responsible ways to the horror of the Holocaust” (pp. 8-9). Stone, who has been indefatigable in probing the limits of Holocaust historiography over the last decade, has collected contributions from 14 Holocaust historians organized around four topics: cultural history, memory, and the Third Reich; testimony and commemoration; Saul Friedländer’s Nazi Germany and the Jews; and the Holocaust in world history. The result is a stimulating and important exploration of how, as Frank Ankersmit described it, we “write ourselves” by writing histories of the Holocaust (pp. 14-15).

In part one, Stone and Alon Confino make separate but complementary arguments for using cultural history – concerned with “symbolic, anthropological modes of thinking” – as the means to better understand how individuals and groups understood themselves in these events (p. 52). Confino’s provocative claim that the “Holocaust is over” supports his appeal for new narratives explaining how the Nazis were able to conceive of “a world without Jews” (p. 24). His own proposal is that the Holocaust be viewed “as a problem of culture: the making of and believing in a moral community of fantasies” that made the murder of millions imaginable(p. 34). Stone, troubled by Peter Burke’s recent critique of cultural history’s future, recommends Confino’s argument, while also acknowledging the theoretical and methodological limits of cultural history in studying the Holocaust, “for how can a method devoted to explicating meaning be applied to account for the opacity of meaning?” (p. 52). Stone’s interest in the contributions of the professions and academic disciplines to Nazi mythmaking is shared by Dirk Rupnow, who, rejecting claims that the Nazis planned to commit “memorycide” against the Jews, shows how they intended “a complex construction and preservation of memory,” to which non-Jewish academics–historians in particular – contributed through Judenforschung (research on Jews) that legitimized anti-Jewish beliefs and policies (p. 75). Amos Goldberg shifts the focus to ghettoized Jewish academics who produced extant texts on social psychology, ethnography, anthropological history, and linguistics – texts cultural historians should use to write what Goldberg calls “a history of helplessness” that neither sanctifies, valorizes, nor obscures the Jewish ghetto experience. But it’s Boaz Neumann’s wide-ranging essay on National Socialism, the Holocaust and ecology that’s perhaps most promising, as it convincingly demonstrates how “ecologism” can function as both a historical characteristic of the Holocaust and a new methodology that reveals Nazism and the Holocaust phenomenologically, “as they manifested themselves” (pp. 118-119).

Samuel Moyn and Zoë Waxman both examine survivor testimony in part two: Moyn from the perspective of a Judeo-Christian religious framework of witnessing, which in the Cold War West (re)assigned to Jews the role of suffering witness in a Christianized understanding of the Holocaust; Waxman with the aim of immanentizing testimony so that it might be usefully, but respectfully, employed by historians struggling to overcome the “mystification” of the Holocaust (p. 154). The peculiarities of writing Holocaust history also occupy Doris Bergen, whose superb essay on how history must remain independent of commemoration, even while anchoring it, should be required reading for all history undergraduates, if only for her critical reading of the so-called “lessons” (e.g. “All that it takes for evil to triumph…”) that studying the Holocaust purportedly teaches.

Friedländer’s attempt to make an “ethical intervention” in Holocaust historiography via Nazi Germany and the Jews...