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A historian, in my estimation, has to do two things, especially when dealing with a subject such as this one [the Holocaust]: one, research and analyze; and two, remember that there is a story to be told, a story that relates to people’s lives. So a real historian is also a person who tells (true) stories. This does not mean that the main task lies outside documents and their interpretation—anyone who has ever head my friend and colleague Raul Hilberg pronounce the word d-o-c-u-m-e-n-t will know what I am talking about—but a historian must also be a teacher, and teachers have to remember that their pupils, and indeed themselves , are just like the people they talk about in their telling of history.1 At first blush, Professor Bauer seems to be evoking something quite familiar to scholars: their responsibilities to their discipline and to their students. But he does something else as well: the sharp distinction he proposes prompts us to consider how our approach to historical work (particularly if we are not historians) might change if we were to place the accent on the teaching. At least, we should begin to talk about the work of the classroom as well as use the classroom as a place to talk about the work. But how are we to talk about the teaching if not as the 231 11 Shoah and the Origins of Teaching david metzger work? On the one hand, the work differentiates what we (students and teachers) do in one classroom and what we might do in another. On the other hand, the teaching/the telling (and, by implication, the learning/ the listening) prompts us to liken our experiences—our participation as agents and instruments in the world—with the experiences of others. The middle ground proposed by Professor Bauer is helpful and succinctly expressed: we tell (true) stories. But how does this remark relate to the experiences of our students? Let’s say that we have asked our students to read Langer’s Holocaust Memories, or something by Primo Levi, or Cynthia Ozick’s “The Shawl.” Then the class takes the train to the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. One of our students uses a credit card in the museum shop, and he or she remembers the numbers tattooed on a survivor’s arm; the student thanks G-d that he or she has a name to go with his or her (credit card) number. What has the visit, the student’s reading, the class accomplished? Has this student learned something? Here’s another example. At the beginning of one of our courses, a student tells us that the Holocaust is another example of “man’s inhumanity to man.” Then, at the end of the semester, the student tells us that we must distinguish between Shoah as a trope for disaster, playing a role in a totalizing history of history, and Shoah as a unique, historical occurrence. Is this an example of learning? Have these students begun to tell (true) stories? If so, is this telling of a (true) story the mark of how well these students have listened? It would not be difficult for many of us to say, “Yes, there is learning/listening, here.” But I would argue that we need to take our analysis of the situation one step further. Our obligation to the material may be, in part, satisfied by these expressions of learning/listening, but I am not so certain that our obligations to the students have been equally satisfied. The students have heard; they are telling (true) stories: I felt such and such; I said such and such. But are they obligated to do so? And, without the obligation to tell (true) stories, how “true” are the stories that we have prompted them to share? If the Wilkomirski affair has taught us nothing else, it is that there are (true) stories and there are “true” stories. That is, there are stories that are true because of our obligation to history, and there are stories that are true because of our obligation to a personal history, some pathology . We accept the former and reject the latter. Even those who have studied or written about the value of Wilkomirski’s text have done so by linking his personal history (which is a lie as history) to the (true) 232 metzger [3.15.151.214] Project MUSE (2024-04...

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