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This is the editor's introduction to Dan Stone (ed.), The Holocaust and Historical Methodology (New York: Berghahn Books, 2012)
Abstract: Saul Friedländer's recent Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Extermination offers a brilliant new literary mode for historical representation of extreme events such as the Holocaust. He has produced an authoritative historical narrative of the Holocaust, within which he integrates the victims' authentic voices, as recorded (mostly) in their contemporary writings. This article offers a comparative assessment of Friedländer's achievement with regard to the integration of Jewish sources into the historical account. It begins with a contextualization of Friedländer's book within a framework that compares the ways in which Jewish sources are addressed by different historiographical approaches. In the second part it seeks to contextualize analytically and critically Friedländer's concept of “disbelief”—a concept by which he defines the role of the “victims’ voices” in his narrative. I claim that in our current “era of the witness,” set within a culture addicted to the “excessive,” the voices of the victims and the witnesses appear to have lost their radical political and ethical force. They seem no longer to bear the excess of history, and can thus hardly claim to be the guardians of disbelief. Excess and disbelief have thus become the most commonplace cultural topos. In our current culture, I contend, the excessive voices of the victims have, to some extent, exchanged their epistemological, ontological, and ethical revolutionary function for an aesthetic one. They operate according to the pleasure principle in order to bring us, the consumers of Holocaust images, the most expected image of the “unimaginable,” which therefore generates a melancholic pleasure and involves the narrative in melodramatic aesthetics. The article concludes by briefly suggesting some guidelines for an alternative approach to the study of contemporary Jewish Holocaust sources. Publication Date: 2009 Publication Name: History and Theory
A chapter from: Dan Stone (ed.), The Holocaust and Historical Methodology, (New York: Berghahn publication 2012), pp. 79-100 An analysis of four major trends in Holocaust historiography about the Jews and a suggestion research Jewish life during the Holocaust along cultural history lines
Gdańsk Juornal of Humanities (Jednak Książki. Gdańskie Czasopismo Humanistyczne)
Holocaust Satire on Israeli TV: the Battle against Canonic Memory Agents2016 •
The paper explores potential interfaces between postcolonial studies and Holocaust studies with specific reference to the category of witness. It appears in a collected volume edited by Amos Goldberg and Haim Hazan: _MARKING EVIL Holocaust Memory in the Global Age_ http://www.berghahnbooks.com/title.php?rowtag=GoldbergMarking
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The Limits of Empiricism: The Utility of Theory in Historical Thought and Writing2018 •
In recent years, there has been a revival of emphasis in historical research and writing on the practice of empiricism, together with the rehabilitation of those 'epistemic virtues' of accuracy, impartiality, objectivity, fairness, attentiveness, perseverance and the like that for so long characterised criteria for a professional mode of behaviour that would guarantee the credibility of the historian's account. This has occurred after several decades when, under the influence of the 'linguistic turn' and its turn to the study of narrative constructivism, earlier claims respecting the truth value and objectivity of empirical work had come under attack among those espousing a linguistic approach to history. This article investigates the most recent efforts to integrate empiricism and theory currently being proposed by scholars in the philosophy of history and historiography and the epistemological and historiographical entailments that such an attempt necessarily involves. What is emerging at the moment is an effort to generate a synthetic approach to historiography in which elements of narrativism and empiricism are equally in play and continually modify one another in the production of historiographical representation and meaning. Whether we have yet to arrive at a successful solution to the manner best suited for such a reconciliation of empiricism and constructivism remains an open question to be discussed.
This article examines the depiction of the loss of close family members in selected child Holocaust testimonies of the Central Jewish Historical Commission in Poland (CJHC) in relation to the representation of trauma and the practices of historiography that governed the collection and composition of these early postwar accounts, as well as contextualizing them within contemporary Jewish and Polish traditions of autobiographical writing. The CJHC’s testimonial endeavor was informed by a range of potentially conflicting motivations: documenting Nazi atrocities for future historiographical, Jewish-voiced research into the Holocaust; collecting potential courtroom evidence for legal prosecutions; engaging with the young survivors on a more psychological level; and effectively creating testimonies affirming the individual survivor’s identity as a member of two different Jewish communities: those who had perished and those who lived.
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