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75 4 Oskar Rosenfeld and Historiographic Realism (including Sex, Shit, and Status) BEREL LANG There is nothing startling by now in the claim of a role for style in writing (or reading) history, but most working historians would probably still vote against it, the more so if the claim included Hayden White’s conception of historical discourse as based on emplotments shaped by literary figuration or tropes. Votes, however, are not arguments, and the case that White presented in Metahistory for historiography as a form of writing causally intertwined with the traditional projects of historical explanation and/or a search for the eigentlich has survived the many attacks directed against it. This conclusion holds, I believe, even if one adds to the mix the qualifications White subsequently made (more correctly, that he made explicit, since he had always assumed them) for the relevance of certain non- or extra-stylistic criteria of truth in the process of emplotment itself. White’s later references to such non- or extra-stylistic criteria appear largely in response to the demands made on historical writing in its representations of the Holocaust, most urgently as those representations confront a ground-zero in the non- or extra-stylistic claim of Holocaust-denial: the assertion that there was no Holocaust (since no “Hitler-order” for genocide has been recovered, or since, in any event, the Nazis used no gas chambers, and/or if they did, the gas chambers had some other purpose and, anyway, could not have “accommodated” the numbers of victims claimed). In terms of Holocaust history , Holocaust denial is a marginal phenomenon, but for historical methodology , it poses a radical “either/or”: between the acceptance or rejection of its claim, there is no third way. The implications of recognizing the non- or extrastylistic referentiality in the challenge of Holocaust denial, furthermore, extend to historical discourse more generally, and it should be clear by now that readings of White’s meta-history which infer from it the writing of history as one among other varieties of fiction are mistaken in that interpretation (as well, I should argue, as in their own usual endorsement of that view). Yet there is an issue here that will not go away for any writer or reader of history who hopes to give each of the (now) two facets of historical discourse its conceptual due: on the one side, admission of the literary or discursive character of history as a substantive element in its writing (that is, style as a contributor to making the historian’s subject); on the other hand, recognition that events of history do not wait for the accounts or explanations, let alone for the historians’ confirmation, in order to happen. And although the Holocaust is one among an indefinitely large number of events that provide evidence for the latter claim, it makes the point with unusual force. For obvious reasons. I do not attempt here a stylistic analysis of Holocaust historiography as such, or even of the volume of Oskar Rosenfeld’s writing from the Lodz Ghetto that serves as the primary text for these comments. More restrictively, I shall be considering Rosenfeld’s “ghetto writing” in a framework of Holocaust historiography that reaches, however, beyond that single volume—specifically, as his advocacy and practice of realism bear representationally on the writing of Holocaust history as such. On this conception of realism adduced (I use the term to refer alternately—and I hope distinctly—to both its stylistic and extrastylistic applications), it designates representation that aspires by way of verisimilitude to a referential or intentional object—that is, by asserting a relation between a representation and the Real—the latter understood, indifferently , as the “really” real or (only) the real. Even this relatively limited project is formidable in relation to Rosenfeld’s ghetto writing because of two aspects of his work that are unusual in the domain of historical discourse. One of these is the fact that Rosenfeld was writing about contemporary, not past events—events, furthermore, that were happening to him. He thus set out to do the work of a historian but in the manner of a diarist— in this, differing from the usual character of both historians and diarists. Typically, the diary as a genre emphasizes—it is about—an author’s mind and heart, with the events that set those organs in motion of secondary importance to the diarist’s reactions to them. The most memorable diarists are recalled for...

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