Truth's other: Ethics, the history of the holocaust, and historiographical theory after the linguistic turn1

History and Theory

Volumn 39, Issue 1, 2000, Pages 1-20

  Dintenfass, Michael ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN MILWAUKEE   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0038971038     PISSN: 00182656     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/0018-2656.00110     Document Type: Article

References (63)

1. Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob, Telling the Truth about History (New York and London. 1994). 259
2. Richard J. Evans, In Defence of History (London, 1997), 249
3. Gertrude Himmelfarb, "Telling It As You Like It: Postmodernist History and the Flight from Fact," in The Postmodern History Reader, ed. Keith Jenkins (London and New York, 1997), 158-159 (reprinted from the Times Literary Supplement [16 October 1992], 12-15)
4. and Omer Bartov, Murder in Our Midst: The Holocaust, Industrial Killing, and Representation (New York and Oxford, 1996), 131. The terms "linguistic turn," "poststructuralism," "deconstruction," and "postmodernism" have been employed to denote a great variety of theoretical positions and interpretive performances, not all of which can be meaningfully subsumed under the same rubrics. The indiscriminate and often pejorative adoption of these designations is a characteristic feature of the texts that identify history with the accurate reconstruction of the past, but this is not the place to address these misrepresentations
5. Appleby et al., Telling, 4, 4, 5, 7, 7, and 7 (in order of citation). (In subsequent notes, multiple page references are all in order of citation.)
6. Evans, Defence, 249, 231, and 238-239. Evans evidently is of two minds about objectivity. On the one hand, he concedes that the historian's "reconstruction of past reality," while "nevertheless true," "certainly will not be objective." On the other, he remains "optimistic that objective knowledge is both desirable and attainable" (252)
7. Himmelfarb, "Telling It As You Like It," in Postmodern Reader, 158 and 164.
8. Bartov, Murder, 134, 130, 130, and 134.
9. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore and London, 1973) was White's original provocation. He directly engaged the Holocaust only with "The Politics of Historical Interpretation: Discipline and De-Sublimation," Critical Inquiry 9 (1982) (reprinted in Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation [Baltimore and London, 1987], 58-82 and 225-231)
10. and "Historical Emplotment and the Problem of Truth," in Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the "Final Solution," ed. Saul Friedlander (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1992), 37-53 and 340-343
11. The most vigorous, one might say most vehement, criticism of White's discussion of the Holocaust to this point is Carlo Ginzburg, "Just One Witness," in Probing, 82-96 and 350-356
12. more circumspect and penetrating is Martin Jay, "Of Plots, Witnesses, and Judgments," in Probing, 97-107 and 356
13. White subsequently returned to the Holocaust as a historiographical and representational problem in "The Modernist Event," in The Persistence of History: Cinema, Television, and the Modern Event, ed. Vivian Sobchack (New York, 1996) (reprinted in Hayden White, Figural Realism: Studies in the Mimesis Effect [Baltimore and London, 1999], 66-86 and 187-190)
14. For a dated but still suggestive account of the place of the Holocaust in the evolution of White's historiographical thinking, see Wulf Kansteiner, "Hayden White's Critique of the Writing of History," History and Theory 32 (1993), 273-295, especially 290-293
15. Bartov, Murder, 131 and 224-225, notes 71-75
16. Bartov, Murder, 116 and 217, note 6. Although Bartov alerts the reader to "Friedlander's sense of unease with recent modes of representation of and discourse on Nazism" (217, note 6), he does not notice that Friedlander's unease extends to the reconstructivist notion of historiography that Bartov posits as our only salvation against the murder of truth itself. For Friedlander's unease, see section I below
17. Readers who wish to pursue further the discussion among historiographical theorists about the historical rendering of the Holocaust should consult, in addition to the works cited in note 7 above, the contributions of Hans Kellner, Wulf Kansteiner, and Robert Braun to the symposium on "Representing the Holocaust" in History and Theory 33 (May 1994), 127-197 and Berel Lang's response to them in ibid, 34 (February 1995), 84-89.
18. Saul Friedlander, Pius XII and the Third Reich, transl. Charles Fullman (New York, 1966)
19. idem, Prelude to Downfall: Hitler and the United States, 1939-41, transl. Aline B. and Alexander Wirth (New York 1967)
20. idem, Kurt Gerstein: The Ambiguity of Good, transl. Charles Fullman (New York, 1969); idem, Nazi Germany and the Jews, Volume I: The Years of Persecution, 1933-1939 (New York, 1997)
21. idem, When Memory Comes, transl. Helen R. Lane (New York, 1979)
22. idem, ed. Probing the Limits of Representation; idem. Reflections of Nazism: An Essay on Kitsch and Death, transl. Thomas Weyr (New York, 1984)
23. and idem, Memory, History, and the Extermination of the Jews of Europe (Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1993). Friedlander's exchange with Broszat can be found in New German Critique 44 (1988), 85-127
24. and with the essays by each that precipitated it, in Reworking the Past: Hitler, the Holocaust, and the Historians' Debate, ed. Peter Baldwin (Boston, 1990), 77-133
25. For a valuable survey of Friedlander's scholarship and an appreciation of his moral stature within the field of Holocaust studies that nonetheless resists in the name of "bread-and-butter" historians the historiographical convictions Friedlander articulates, see Steven Aschheim, "On Saul Friedlander," History & Memory 9 (Fall 1997), 11-46, especially 34-38
26. Friedlander, Memory, 131, 131, 43, and 103.
27. "Introduction," 3; and Memory, 132, 131, 131, and 131
28. "Introduction," 17; and Memory, 132
29. Dominick LaCapra, Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma (Ithaca and London, 1994)
30. and idem, History and Memory after Auschwitz (Ithaca and London, 1998)
31. History and Memory, 20
32. Representing, 66; History and Memory, 207 and 68
33. Representing, 66 and 47; and History and Memory, 6
34. Representing, 99 and 2
35. Representing, 201; and History and Memory, 115 and 127
36. and History and Memory, 40
37. Representing, 35, 201, and 47
38. History and Memory, 68; Representing, 35
39. LaCapra, History and Memory, 207 and 20
40. idem, Representing, 65
41. and History and Memory, 207.
42. and History and Memory, 67, 68, 40-41, and 68
43. For the original texts of the Historikerstreit see Forever in the Shadow of Hitler? Original Documents of the Historikerstreit, the Controversy Concerning the Singularity of the Holocaust, transl. James Knowlton and Truett Cates (Atlantic Highlands, N. J., 1993)
44. LaCapra, History and Memory, 185, 137, 185, and 20.
45. Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews [1961], rev. ed., 3 vols. (New York and London, 1985)
46. Christopher Browning, "German Memory, Judicial Interrogation, and Historical Reconstruction: Writing Perpetrator History from Postwar Testimony," in Probing, 26
47. Geoffrey H. Hartman, The Longest Shadow: In the Aftermath of the Holocaust (Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1996), 13, note 5
48. Steven Aschheim, Culture and Catastrophe: German and Jewish Confrontations with National Socialism and Other Crises (New York, 1996), 119, 144, note 65, and 203, note 100
49. Friedlander, Memory, 103
50. and Omer Bartov, "An Idiot's Tale: Memories and Histories of the Holocaust," Journal of Modern History 67 (March 1995), 67, and reprinted in Bartov, Murder, 88
51. Hilberg, Destruction (1961 edition), v
52. and idem, The Politics of Memory: The Journey of a Holocaust Historian (Chicago, 1996), 84, 85, and 88
53. Politics, 85; Destruction (1961 edition), v
54. and Politics, 86
55. Raul Hilberg, Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders: The Jewish Catastrophe 1933-1945 (New York, 1992)
56. and Politics, 189
57. Politics, 83 and 86
58. "Roundtable Discussion: Raul Hilberg, Cynthia Ozick, Aharon Appelfeld, Saul Friedlander," in Writing and the Holocaust, ed. Berel Lang (New York and London, 1988), 273
59. Raul Hilberg, "I Was Not There," in Writing and the Holocaust, 23.
60. and Politics, 139-140
61. Politics, 74, 76, 78, 76-77, and 140
62. "I Was Not There," 22; Politics, 83; "I Was Not There," 24
63. Appleby et al., Telling, 5, 4, 4, 5, 7, 7, and 7