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A Master of Narrating the Incomprehensible
With an award-winning volume, historian Saul Friedlander brings to a close his work on Nazi Germany and the genocide of the Jews.
There are times when the only way to deal with life's most incomprehensible events is by narrating them as vividly and accurately as possible. Professor of history Saul Friedlander, who holds the 1939 Club Chair in Holocaust Studies and whose parents were killed during the Nazi Holocaust, is a master of this art.The concluding 2006 volume of his acclaimed historical narrative about the genocide of the Jews, The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945, is likely to be one of the last accounts by a noted historian who survived Hitler's "final solution."
In October, in recognition of his works, Friedlander received the 2007 Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, the top award at the Frankfurt Book Fair. Friedlander talked to writer Ajay Singh about what it was like for him, personally and professionally, to chronicle the Holocaust.
You are noted for keeping the history of the Holocaust alive. Why has this scholarship been so important to you?
Historians very often, without acknowledging it, have some personal reason to deal with a specific topic. Whether the reason is personal, social or political, there is an element of subjectivity. As I was a child in Europe during World War II and went into hiding, it's not so astonishing that years later I decided, after studying political science, to change direction and go back to this topic.
Was history always something you wanted to pursue or did you somehow fall into it?
I didn't fall into history but I was drawn to it because of the domains I wanted to study. It's true I could have approached them via political science, but I really had a need to approach this specific past in a more narrative than purely analytic way.
As a survivor-historian, what is it like to live with the memory of the Holocaust?
It creates a problem in the sense that when I work on the materials, I am sensitive to them more directly than, I guess, people who are totally unrelated to these events. But then again, strangely enough, it's not something that has stopped me from doing this specific research and writing. The most gruesome aspects are not the ones that influence me—it's the unexpected, small details that sometimes bring up emotions that I did not know were even there.
Could you give an example?
While researching the second volume of my book, Nazi Germany and the Jews, which deals with the years of extermination and where I encountered the most difficult material, I came across by pure chance a letter of a young French-Jewish girl announcing to her father that the next day she was being deported from Drancy, which was an assembly camp for Jews near Paris, to the east. She didn't know about Auschwitz but she was going to Auschwitz. In her letter, she tries to cheer her father up and hide from him what she knows. She tries to say everything will be alright—I will soon be back, I'm going with friends, we are many who go together, don't worry... This kind of both naïve and touching letter, very loving toward her father, unsettled me much more than some documents describing the worst atrocities.
In your writings you suggest that history and memory are always intertwined. Given that memory is often imperfect, do you think narrative history is often mythologized by that relationship?
No. This was an argument that was brought by a German historian 20 years ago against Jews trying to write the history of the Holocaust. The historian, Martin Broszat, and I had an exchange in which I had to ask him whether it was less of a burden for a historian who had been a member of the Hitler Youth (after he passed away, it also came out that he had been a member of the Nazi party) than for me. But historians have to have enough self-awareness and professional integrity to control their own subjectivity.
What do you think is likely to happen to the memory of the Holocaust after its last survivors pass away?
In my opinion, these events, for reasons I cannot explain very well—maybe because they were so extreme in terms of human evil—seem to be deeply anchored not only in the German imagination or that of the Jews but in the Western imagination.
These events were part of Western civilization as a whole, beyond Germany. In France a year ago, a novel, Les Bienveillantes ("The Kindly Ones"), about the activities of an SS officer, was published. Its success was absolutely enormous, unexpected, unexplained and unexplainable. Its American author, Jonathan Littell, was hardly known. The killing of the Jews is described in gruesome detail. So you see, this theme, from whatever angle you take it, seems to be coming back.
Why do you think the world knows so much more about the Holocaust than about other mass exterminations of people?
It has to do with a concrete historical reason: The Holocaust happened in the midst of the European continent—in a country, Germany, which documented very thoroughly its own murderous actions and kept very careful records of the agencies involved. So when Germany was defeated and its archives were opened to researchers after World War II, all the material about the events were found. Plus, of course, the survivors, who very often were literate people, could tell or record what they had seen or gone through. A considerable number of diaries were written during the events.
There is a second reason, which I believe, but it is a hypothesis. We have had terrible genocides since World War II—in Cambodia, Rwanda, the Soviet Union under Stalin, and in China. Of China, for example, we know very little because of course the Chinese are not going to let you into their archives. These massacres have shaken the minds of many.
But the systematic, long-drawn and thorough mass murder during the Holocaust, and the whole preparation of the atmosphere of it, meant not leaving one single person of that group (Jews) alive. And not only the thoroughness and the intention of absolute annihilation of living beings but whatever they created.
For example, an institute was established in Germany to cleanse the New Testament of its Jewish elements. And when the Nazis discovered that the man who wrote the libretti for three of four of Mozart's most famous operas was an Italian Jew, they had the texts retranslated in order not to have to use a libretto written by a Jew. They tried to cleanse whole libraries of Jewish books. They asked students writing dissertations to make a distinction between Jewish authors and non-Jewish authors in their bibliographies. It was an obsession that looks to us a total collective craze.
This is what stuck in the (Western) imagination—not only the horror of it but also the kind of absolutely pathological expressions of anti-Jewish obsession.
