The Past and Future of Holocaust Studies
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Understanding the Holocaust: The Past and Future of Holocaust Studies GREGORY WEEKS Omer Bartov, Germany’s War and the Holocaust: Disputed Histories (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2003), 248 pp., (pb), ISBN 0801486815. Doris L. Bergen, War and Genocide: A Concise History of the Holocaust (Lanham, MD, and Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), 280 pp., $17.95 (pb), ISBN 0847696316. Inga Clendinnen, Reading the Holocaust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 238 pp., $15 (pb), ISBN 0521012694. Deborah´ Dwork, ed., Voices & Views. A History of the Holocaust (New York: Jewish Foundation for the Righteous, 2002), 687 pp., $44.95 (pb), ISBN 0970060211. Cornelia Hecht, Deutsche Juden und Antisemitismus in der Weimarer Republik (Bonn: Dietz 2003), 432 pp., €32.00 (hb), ISBN 3801241378. Dan Stone, Constructing the Holocaust: A Study in Historiography (London and Portland, OR: Vallentine Mitchell Publishers, 2003), 308 pp., $49.50 (hb), ISBN 0853034907. Sue Vice, Representing the Holocaust (London and Portland, OR: Vallentine Mitchell Publishers), 280 pp., £17.50 (pb), £42.50 (hb), ISBN 0853034966. The extensive literature available about the Holocaust grows daily, and it seems to be nearly limitless in scope. The books that will be discussed in the following review are merely a microcosm of this literature, but unfortunately, they, like much of the other literature on the Holocaust, differ greatly in quality and focus. In a sense, this is an essay about the general themes and overarching concepts of Holocaust research as exemplified by the seven books reviewed here. As a result of the sheer volume of literature on the Holocaust, its antecedents, and the crimes it entailed, it is nearly impossible to claim that one knows all of the literature. One may know all the books in a specific segment of Holocaust research, but with approximately 300 new books on the Holocaust and nearly fifty Webster University, Berchtoldgasse 1,A-1220 Vienna, Austria. [email protected]. Contemporary European History, 15, 1 (2006), pp. 117–129 C 2006 Cambridge University Press doi:10.1017/S0960777306003134 Printed in the United Kingdom Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.202.8, on 01 Oct 2021 at 06:52:04, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0960777306003134 118 Contemporary European History on the Third Reich appearing in English each year,1 one would be hard-pressed to have read it all. The books published in other languages offer an even greater number. The history of the Holocaust and the crimes of Hitler’s Germany is far from complete. New facets are continually being discovered and old facets re-evaluated. New documents, oral history sources and opinions continue to flood the market. As the Second World War generation ages and dies, there may be other surprises, at least from the Allied side, as archives are opened, but this is likely to add little to the documentation that is already available in German archives and in foreign archives about Germany during this period. The opening of non-German archives will give us a more balanced and nuanced picture of the course of the war and what Germany’s enemies actually knew about the crimes being committed as it progressed. A number of books such as Richard Breitman’s Official Secrets and Walter Laquer’s The Terrible Secret have already dealt with the issue of Allied secrecy and the Holocaust, but we can expect to see more written on this topic as confidential and top-secret documents are slowly declassified in the coming years. British military historian John Keegan has described the Allied need for secrecy in order to win the Second World War and the importance of classification to keep the code-breaking operations at Bletchley Park under wraps, a topic that Breitman discusses in detail in Official Secrets.2 The majority of the books published on the Holocaust, however, are not based on revealing new documents and are less new research than a re-evaluation of older claims and ideas. All except one of the books reviewed here fall into this category. The only truly original research is to be found in Cornelia Hecht’s Deutsche Juden und Antisemitismus in der Weimarer Republik, which, although in many ways flawed in its methodology, tackles the important subject of how Jews themselves viewed antisemitism in the pre-Nazi years. In saying this, it should be noted that Inga Clendinnen’s Reading the Holocaust is new only because of her line of argument, that the Holocaust as a human-created event can be understood. Even with nearly sixty years of Holocaust research and writing behind us, the debate over the Holocaust and how it should be presented and understood continues. Evaluating the works discussed has been challenging since the theses and 1 Bowker’s Books in Print Professional lists 293 books for the subject heading ‘Holocaust’ for 2004, 300 for 2003 and 313 for 2002.For2004, it lists forty-nine books under the subject ‘National Socialism’ and for 1998 and 1999, fifty and forty-two respectively. The author would like to thank Ronald Coleman of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum Library in Washington, DC, for his assistance in confirming these figures with a search of OCLC WorldCat. The number of books catalogued in any given year differs slightly from the figures cited above, since books published earlier are often catalogued in the following year. 2 Richard Breitman, Official Secrets: What the Nazis Planned, What the British and Americans Knew (New Yo r k : H i l l & Wa n g , 1998); John Keegan, ‘What the Allies Knew’, New York Times, 25 Nov. 1996; Richard Breitman, Norman J.W. Goda, Timothy Naftali and Robert Wolfe. U.S. Intelligence and the Nazis (Washington, DC: National Archives Trust Fund Board, 2004, and Cambridge University Press, 2005, with a new conclusion); and Walter Laquer, The Terrible Secret. An Investigation into the Suppression of Information about Hitler’s ‘Final Solution’ (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1980). Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.202.8, on 01 Oct 2021 at 06:52:04, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0960777306003134 Understanding the Holocaust: The Past and Future of Holocaust Studies 119 subjects of analysis are diverse. There are, however, commonalities for discussion and comparison, points of contact between the works under review. The question of understanding the mass murder of millions is critical to all the works reviewed here, and yet there still seems to be no consensus on the question of whether the Holocaust is comprehensible or not. The sheer magnitude of the crimes in question leaves any scholar of this series of events to ponder their significance for future generations and the meaning of all of these lost lives. In these works the debate about the meaning of the Holocaust appears to be more important than the debate about how the Holocaust should be defined. What should we take away as a lesson from the Holocaust? The phrase ‘never again’, seen on monuments throughout Germany and eastern Europe, seems to be too little. There must be more, and the authors of these works struggle with the difficulties of trying to comprehend an event that is viewed by some as unique in human history. The uniqueness of the Holocaust has been a constant point of contention in its historiography, and its significance does not seem to have waned in the recent literature. Old debates are discussed while at the same time new arguments enter the mix, thus complicating the issues at hand even more. In various ways each book reviewed here grapples with old issues and new arguments to ‘invent’ a consensus that gives meaning to the deaths of millions in one of the most horrible human tragedies of all time. What exactly is the Holocaust and what does it mean for us? On this point, the books take very different stances. There is something unnerving about any attempt to comprehend the Holocaust. Perhaps it is possible to believe that one has come to an individual understanding of the Holocaust as Inga Clendinnen claims, but this reviewer would argue that this is an utter impossibility. The comprehension required to contemplate such events would test the limits of our humanity. Clendinnen’s Reading the Holocaust is interesting because it takes the point of view of the ‘casual’ reader of Holocaust literature and seeks to assist ‘perplexed outsiders’ (p. 5) in understanding how the Holocaust could occur and reviewing the literature available on this subject. Clendinnen states in her introduction that her purpose is ‘to challenge that bafflement, and the demoralisation which attends it’. She wants ‘to dispel the “Gorgon-effect” – the sickening of imagination and curiosity and the draining of the will which afflicts so many of us when we try to look squarely at the persons and processes implicated in the Holocaust’. She states succinctly, I want to arrive at a clearer understanding of at least some of those persons and processes to be confident that the whole is potentially understandable. This is not a matter of arriving at some ‘Aha! now I comprehend everything!’ theory or moment. The understanding I seek comes from framing sufficiently precise questions to be able to see exactly what is before us, whether persons or processes. It is both cumulative, and never complete. (p. 4) Unfortunately, it is exactly this precise framing of questions that is not found in Clendinnen’s work. Although she has worked on anthropological studies of how societies function, this particular work seems to be quite superficial, since it is a treatise based on her reading of Holocaust literature rather than a history based on Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core.