Holocaust Memories, Historians' Memoirs: First-Person Narrative and the Memory of the Holocaust

Historians and Holocaust Memoirs

It has become more common for professional historians to write about their own lives during the last few decades, but no other group of contemporary historians has shown such a propensity to write personal memoirs as those from Jewish origins whose lives were directly affected by the Holocaust, whether or not it has been their principal subject of study. ¹ The fact that historians from this particular group have been so prone to writing about their own lives indicates that the general issues raised by the confrontation of history and autobiography are especially intense with respect to the Holocaust. These historians' published recollections have become a significant part of the literature of first-person recollections from the Holocaust era. In some respects, however, the stories they tell are at odds both with the dominant tendencies in the larger body of survivor literature and with major assumptions about modern Jewish history. These memoirs thus raise important questions about the representations of the Holocaust and about the construction of twentieth-century Jewish identity.

Fundamentally, the problem that autobiography poses for historians is that it challenges history's claim to be the science of the human past, the only set of procedures by which a valid representation of events can be generated. Among the bases for history's claims are the fact that it is a collective enterprise and thus overcomes the subjectivity of individual memory, and that it operates on the basis of traces or evidence that are available to public scrutiny. History takes as its subject, not individual human beings with their arbitrary life spans, but larger collectivities, and it inserts their narratives in a larger temporal framework that, in principle, incorporates all human experience.

As the philosopher Paul Ricoeur has shown in Time and Narrative, his monumental analysis of the relations between different forms of narrative, history can usually coexist peacefully enough with fiction, even historical fiction, because fictional narratives do not claim to be "true" in the same way that history does. ² Autobiography, however, which Ricoeur discusses only in passing, claims, like history, to be a true account of things that actually happened in the past, even though the bases of its claim to truth are very different. Autobiographies are individual stories, not collective enterprises, and they are based at least in part on evidence that is not available to examination by anyone except their author—namely, personal memory. Historians traditionally asserted their discipline's superiority over autobiography by classifying these texts as sources, and not very respectable sources at that. Manuals for history students tell them to regard memoirs and autobiographies as the "least convincing of all personal records" ³ and teach them how to deconstruct the distortions and biases they are likely to find in them. Nevertheless, history has not completely separated itself from autobiography. Even if they are doubtful historical sources, autobiographies are still sources, in a way that works of fiction are not, although historians have reserved for themselves the prerogative of deciding to what extent each first-person narrative can be trusted.

Because historians do, however grudgingly, acknowledge that autobiographies contain some truth about the past, the changed evaluation of autobiography in contemporary literary theory has important implications for the historical discipline. Whereas historians had traditionally rejected autobiographies because they had too much fiction in them, literary critics long considered them uninteresting because they were too bound to literal truth and did not offer enough scope for the imagination. The new interest in the genre of autobiography since 1970, associated with the work of critics such as James Olney, Philippe Lejeune and Paul John Eakin, has reversed this situation. By stressing the connections between autobiography and fiction, and de-emphasizing the issue of autobiography's truthfulness, these critics have firmly incorporated first-person narrative into the domain of literature. ⁴ Walter Laqueur, one of the historians...