Did It Happen or Not?Bringing Traumatic Events into the Historical Discourse

Daniel BolgM

What are the potential consequences for us as readers and as historians when ahistorian who adheres to a sense of responsible patriotism in confronting the past,endeavoring to improve the nation's understanding of itself, confronts events thatthe body politic of his society had hitherto rejected from its consciousness? Whathappens when his work focuses on events previously excluded from the narrativedefining national identity because acceptance of these events would destroy theself-image that the community had built up for itself? In other words, what impactwill his work have if he is writing about things that happened, although theyshould not have? And finally, what effect does it have on historical discourse ifthe historian takes on the task of processing his community's traumas, or at leastforcing the community to process them?

Let us take an example from cinema. A fost sau /1,-afost? (Did it happen or not?)is the title of a 2006 film by Corneliu Porumboiu. The action - as we discoverfrom the credits - takes place in a crumbling television studio in Vaslui (Moldavia).The studio is hosting a live talk show to mark the sixteenth anniversary of thestart of the revolution in Bucharest. The theme of the program is whether there arevolution in Vaslui, and the host and two eyewitnesses try to answer this question.Each character symbolizes a different way of representing the past.

The host, Iderescu, trots out a string of commonplaces and declares at thevery start of the program that digging in the past is justified insofar as it helpsthe community process its traumas. This is precisely what he hopes to achieve byanswering the question of whether or not the revolution happened in Vaslui. He hasa terrible suspicion - nonetheless justified by the events preceding the broadcast- that the people ofVaslui are not the brave and freedom-loving community theyclaim to be (they boast that they defied the dictator, and he intends to confronthis audience with it). As he says, it is important to clarify the past »for the sakeof the truth, and for all our sakes.« It quickly emerges during the course of thediscussion that the way to test the reality behind the Vasluians' identity is to findout whether the local demonstrations started before (even one minute before) the

moment ofCeausescu's abdication at 12:08 on the 22nd of December, 1989.1 If theybegan afterwards, then the entire Vasluian revolutionary narrative falls to pieces.

Of the studio guests, the first to speak is the local high-school history teacher,the alcoholic Manescu, who does just what historians tend to do: at no pointdoes he bother to prove that the event he believes to have taken place actuallydid. Rather, he goes about - within his own limitations - providing the contextin time and space of the event that he takes for granted. The language he usesis figurative, constructing and embellishing the heroic narrative, even placing(needless to say) his own person at the center of the revolutionary events in Vaslui.He endows the events that took place with meaning - he creates history. But thehost constantly interrupts him in the exposition of his version of events, becausehe is only interested in finding out whether or not the events happened - whetherManescu went out to protest on the main square before 12:08. The teacher claimsit was before, but the people who phone in all disagree. Manescu starts off bytrying to reason with them. He is clever, but he quickly realizes that he has no wayof proving his assertion, just as the people phoning in cannot prove theirs. Thecommunication between the teacher and the host finally breaks down - they areincapable of establishing what really happened.

The other guest, Mr. Piscoci, by contrast, has no problem at all establishingwhat really happened that day: he quarreled with his wife. To make it up to her.he stole her some flowers because he could not buy any at the market. Then hewatched Tom and Jerry. The old man presents the past in a way that can only work ir;theory, and not in practice: he recounts it as it happened, at most stringing even::together into a chronicle. For Piscoci, everything he says is obviously meaningfu.,but this has absolutely nothing to do with the Vasluians or the traumatic eventsthat might challenge their sense of identity. The old man drones on and on willthe other participants drift off and there are no callers - the program descendsinto torpor. In other words, the mimetic experiment fails, because bare factsnot reveal any meaning.

The history teacher does not know what happened, but assigns meaningwhat allegedly happened - as all historians do. Piscoci knows what happened,but doesn't attribute meaning to the events - he merely lays the facts before usas they are. This is what most historians who approach the subject with realistpreconceptions think they are doing, i.e., this is the unrealistic self-image of ti::~realist historians. The host, however, is only willing to read the past througi;the lens of its impact on the community's present. This is how historians thinsof themselves when they appeal to the social duty with which their profess: _endows them, and which therefore makes them indispensable.

In the fictional narrative of the film, these three different roles of the historiszare neatly divided, and the dialogue between them, - or rather their inability =maintain a dialogue, proves inappropriate for the task of processing trauma. ==

478 Daniel Bolgar

1 I Referred to in the film's English title - 12:08 EASTOFBUCHAREST.

Did It Happen or Not? 479

reality, however, and especially when looking at things that happened in the 20th

century, the historian frequently wants to play all three roles at the same time. Dothese roles, then, inhibit one another in the real world, as they do in the movies?

THE LIMITS OF REPRESENTING TRAUMA

Fortunately, we are not entirely alone in asking this question. There is a long-established discourse that concerns the relationship between traumatic events(first and foremost the Holocaust) and their historical representation.' Today, theHolocaust is the preferred testing ground for new developments in the theory ofhistory. I will not go into detail here why Hayden White's narrativist philosophy ofhistory became pre-eminent in this debate.' but merely record White's conclusion:that the traumatic events of the twentieth century (which he calls modernistevents) cannot be plotted with the traditional literary techniques ofhistoriography.The twentieth-century experience demands twentieth-century literary devicesthat can focus attention on the limits of representation. The very nature of thesemodernist events is such that there are limits to their representability. They arethings that would have been inconceivable before. Put another way, they defythe notion that history is a coherent, uninterrupted process. White at one point(referring to Barthes) recommends intransitive writing to historians," while atanother he concludes that any modernist or post-modernist writing techniquewill do." What was the impact of White's comments on historians, we may wellask? The first historical work to satisfy his criteria appeared after »only« a decadeor two. That, at least, is how Wulf Kansteiner greeted Saul Friedland~ ~Years of Extermination. 6 Kansteiner maintains that the book's unusual structure,the renunciation of the omniscient narrator's role of historian serves preciselyto present the Holocaust throughout as something beyond belief, somethinguntamed.'

But let us note that the people sitting in the studio in Vaslui were not quite howWhite imagined the historian dealing with traumatic events. He conceptualizedthe historian as someone capable of transmitting a sense of the traumatic natureof the event (capable of presenting the impossibility of representing the trauma),while historians like Jderescu endeavor to erase the trauma. For White, trauma isa factor outside the historical narrative: in his discourse, things take place withtrauma outside the narrative, while for historians like Jderescu, they take place

2 I See the summary from Gyani: A 20. szazad, pp. 6-13.3 I Braun: Holocaust; Friedlander: Probing; Kisantal: Tulel ; Kisantal: Tornegmeszarlasrol.4 I White: Historical Emplotment.5 I White: The Modernist.6 I Friedlander: The Years.7 I Kansteiner: Success.

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through the process of constructing the narrative. One merely seeks to represen:the traumatic event, while the other aims to free the nation of the trauma. White'shistorian aims merely to reveal it, while Jderescu wants also to put an end to it.Trauma, then, penetrates the plot of historical narrative aimed at processing thetrauma and, I would argue, confuses everything.

In an essay published in the New York Review of Books, Robert Darnton createsa separate stream for Jderescuian historiography, which he celebrates under thename of »incident analysis.s" He takes as the most important example of thisschool of historical writing the subject of my study, [an Gross' Neighbours: theDestruction of the Jewish Community in jedwaone" Darnton's point of departure isthat there is a significant demand from readers for studies of historical traumas,which more and more historians aim to satisfy by working in two registers at thesame time. On the one hand, they present the traumatic (and generally bloody]event in convincing detail, while on the other hand (and most importantly) theypay just as much attention to the interpretations of the incident in society, usuallywithin the discourses that determine the nature of national identity and the placeallocated for it in the national memory. The practitioners of incident analysistherefore do not simply recount the history of a traumatic event without anyregard for what was unusual about it, but try to incorporate the traumatic eventas traumatic (something that threatens the identity of a community and thereforeneeds to be processed) into their texts. That is, they are not in the least afraid O!

correcting, with their own work, the national self-consciousness. Darnton believesthis »incident history« approach to be free of difficulties and calls it a significantmethodological innovation. He-als0~icts great professional and popularsuccess for works that make use of it. ~

Before we look at a text to see if Darnton's confidence is justified, I wouldlike to point out a few peculiarities of »incident history,« arising from logicalextensions of Darnton's definition. My first comment concerns that register - orrather, narrative - in which the event, no longer traumatic, is put into its place inthe national consciousness. In this discourse, the task of erasing the trauma inthe narrative of the Jderescuian work is placed upon the very work itself It has toundertake this task itself: the things that happen do not in themselves becomehistorical events. It is the historian who makes them such by bringing them topublic attention. Nothing unusual there so far - there is no shortage of this kind ofdiscourse in academia. Looking over a few of my own articles, they all started thus:»dear colleagues, until now you have thought this and this about this subject, buafter you have read this paper, you will think that and that,« and afterwards therewill be a new narrative that will summarize what we have learned. If I may sayso, one narrative is writing the history of reception (Wirkungsgeschichte) of the

8 I Darnton: It Happened.9 I Gross: Nelghbors

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other and if I am not wrong, this is the basis of all both scholarly and unscholarlyrevisionist texts.

The problem is that in incident analysis, there can be no narrative other thanthe one processing the trauma. It is a precondition of processing the traumathat the traumatic event should be understood only within the narrative of itsprocessing, that it become a historical event within this context only - by meansof its presentation to the public - and not in its own spatial and temporal context.Otherwise, it would not be true that trauma is something that was previouslyunimaginable. What we have so far labeled traumatic would turn out to belongto the proper course of history. Darnton's model therefore includes a logicalerror. There cannot be two registers: if one account already exists, then the other,definitely can not. Either we weave a story of the past around an event that tookplace in the past, or we tell the future story of coping with the trauma, but these twoalternatives negate one another. The incident analysis project therefore containsan innate contradiction, creating a tension between the conventional way of tellinga story and the endeavor to process historical trauma.

NEIGHBORS

How to dissolve this innate tension? Is it even possible? What can one say about atraumatic event when absolutely forbidden to narrate it? These are the questions Iwish to explore in Jan T. Gross' Neighbours. Of course, looking at the text itself isonly one way of measuring its influence. Looking at its reception would be anotherobvious s~ting point, to see how this contradiction becomes problematic, if itbecomes prO;lematiC at all, in the reception the work receives. To be precise: myown interpreta 'on of others' readings of Neighbours would certainly be at least asrepresentational '\ my own reading of the book. However, the work in questionhad such a widespread and profound social and academic impact in Poland andalso abroad" that I won't even attempt here to refer to other interpretations. I willtherefore take the task of evaluating how effective the text is in processing traumapurely as a question of narration and not history.

I would characterize the event that caught Gross' attention in the following way:in Jedwabne, a dusty Polish cross-roads that according to the Molotov-Ribbentroppact belonged to the Soviets, two-thirds of the village is murdered on the 10th ofJuly, 1941, not long after the Wehrmacht attacks the Soviet Union and occupies theregion of Bialystock. The traumatic aspect of this event is that the two-thirds of thepopulation of the village - who were Jews - were murdered not by the Germans,but by the remaining third of the village, i.e., their Polish neighbors. In 1949,the Polish »Stasi« office in Lomza initiated proceedings against one Ramotowskiand others, twenty-two men from Jedwabne in all, for aiding the Germans (!) in

10 I See Polonsky/Mlchllc: The Neighbors Respond; Aleksiun: Polish Historians.

murdering the Jews. The transcripts of this trial, along with post-war statementsfrom a few survivors, comprise the sources for Gross' research.

How can we understand an event that seemed unimaginable, an unexpectedtwist in the tale? I have no answer to that, but I can identify the things withoutwhich it is impossible to talk of understanding the meaning, or any meaning atall. In Hungary in the 1980s and 90S, there was a popular television soap opera,also called Neighbours, which was set around the problematic everyday world of asingle block of a public housing development. Let us assume that what happenedin Jedwabne were to happen in this television series, i.e., that after severalcenturies of peaceful co-existence, without a single one of the viewers expectingit, one half of the residents of the council block murders the other. Let us say thaone of the dead is the doctor in the series, Dr Magenheim, who died after anotherprotagonist of the show (written deliberately by the authors to represent a moreplebeian character), the doctor's next- door neighbor Feri Vagasi, set fire to the flatwith the doctor inside. For a moment (perhaps not even a moment that will everreally happen, but that is a logical corollary of the event), what had seemed to be acoherent narrative, a story that held together, will seem like nothing more than thepast, confused and lacking meaning. But this confusion won't last long, since weare in the fortunate position of having seen the preceding episodes and being ableto watch the future ones - thus we can create after the events an interpretation 0:the past in which everything already points to the murders. What had previouslybeen banal will now be imbued with importance and meaning. We will start tonotice Magenheim's German-sounding name, we will recall that he is a doctor toboot and will immediately apply universal stereotypes about the social inequalitybetween Jews and non-Jews. Magenheim will become for us all at once a [ewiscintellectual, though his ethnicity and religion had never before been an issue..All this will lead us to question, whether Vagasi does not actually spell his namewith two >s<and a >y<(Le. Vagassy). the way that Hungarian nobles generally .- and the Hungarian gentry were stereotypically anti- Semitic. In the series, tilecharacters concluded each episode by summarizing what they had learned duringthe broadcast, mostly voicing their political and existential concerns. If Vagassyspent the end of the episode preceding the murders complaining about the priceof petrol and matches, this becomes now more than the mere everyday disconten:of the average citizen, and some cynical foreshadowing of the brutality to corn"We continue to do the same in the episodes after the murders, only in those wewill see references to the past. In other words, in order to understand an otherwiseunexpected twist in the plot, for example, the massacre of the 10th July, we need "-span of time - we need to know what happened before and after, in order to be abieto build up our associations.

Do we find anything like this in the book? Of Iedwabne's past and ~topography, we only get a cursory overview. We also get a description of the idyliiclife of the Jedwabne Jews from a book of undated memoirs, as well as two or threecontradictory reminiscences of the relations between the Jews and Poles from

482 Daniel Bolgar

Did It Happen or Not? 483

same. This relatively sparse material, however, is about the members of a Jewishcommunity in Jedwabne who we do not again encounter later in the book, sincethey were put to death on the 10th of July, 1941. The book is not primarily abouttheir sufferings, but about the trauma experienced by the perpetrators of theirmurder. We get no information at all about the Polish residents of Jedwabne until1939, and the few residents we do learn about (for example, how they collaboratedwith the Soviets), were not the same ones who murdered their Jewish neighbors.The situation is the same with the account of the impact of the massacre. Thetext therefore does not give us a span of time and does not allow us to developassociations - the massacre is not made part of a narrative. Gross himself admitsthat no-one will be able to understand, on the basis of his book, why the Polishresidents of Jedwabne killed their Jewish neighbors." It is as if the television seriesstarted with Feri Vagassy - a character we are totally ignorant of -leaning downwith a match and a flame leaping up; this would signal at once the beginning andthe end of the »series.«

I am, of course, exaggerating somewhat. The massacre we were just treatingas a single event was of course not some elemental happening, but somethingwith its own internal span of time, a successive series of many events." Thebook's effect, then, on the reader may better be compared to watching the episodewith the massacre first, and then finding out that no more episodes will ever bebroadcast. We have no space to find out how the villagers ofJedwabne went froma cacophony of violence to rounding up the village's Jews, calmly escorting theminto a barn, and then covering it with petrol and setting fire to it. Suffice it to saythat Gross himself unfolds some meaning - albeit trivial- from the flow of events(for example, pointing out the factor of avarice" and the tradition of pogroms inthe way the killings were carried out), although far more exciting interpretationsleap to mind. The villagers of Jedwabne did not merely murder their Jewishneighbors, then go back home calmly to bed; rather, they held an entire series of»tribal dances« before they »consumed« their victims (all of which cries out for

\ an anthropologist). This served two purposes. Firstly, the villagers symbolicallytransferred the responsibility for the murders onto the Jews by presenting the Jewsas Soviet collaborators and the murders purely as retribution for this. Secondly,they tried to rob the Jews of their individual identity, by making the Jews a part ofrites that presented them not as individuals but as an amorphous mass, and whichdeprived them not only of their individual, but of their collective dignity as well.The same people who that very morning had appeared in the guise of neighbors

11 I Gross: Neighbors, p. 12.12 I On the vagueness of the concept of an event, and the unjustified assumption of itselemental nature, see Mink: Narrative Form.13 I Gyani: Helyunk, describes and critiques the school that interprets the Holocaust as»robbery«,

(which is to say people of the most varied kind) were by lunchtime no more thanjust Jews, which was merely one step from their being no more at all by sundown.

The day of the pogrom can be interpreted from the point of view of modernity.Although Gross is absolutely right that the massacre in [edwabne was very old-fashioned compared to, say, Auschwitz, very important changes took placeduring the course of the day: although at the beginning the people murderedout of obvious anger, by the time they herded the Jews into the barn, they werebehaving rationally, at least in the sense that they made the decision about howmost effectively to kill the Jews in the coldest and most calculating possible way.The pogrom rapidly grew more and more organized due to the improvementsin the methods they used to murder. At the same time, the victims themselvesbecame more and more clear about what their »role« was. At first, they tried to fleehowever they could, but on their way to the barn it seems that they too had becomeloyal servants of the system set up to exterminate them. This would fit well intothe discourse by which Zygmunt Bauman aims to show that the Holocaust isindeed deeply rooted in modernity." It is clear that taking into account the internaltemporality of the murders helps us understand only the »how« of the event andnot the »why.« We can give some elements of the events meaning (for example thesetting alight of the barn) but we receive no explanation for why the murders tookplace at all.

Our initial thought has been confirmed - the work really does lack the registerin which the historian undertaking incident analysis discusses the traumaticevent while placing it into its context in space and time. The trauma remainstrauma - something that doesn't fit into history. The text is narrative-based, butthe subject of the narrative is not the events themselves but rather what we earliersaid it should be, the processing of the trauma. The story can be reconstructedthus: »dear Poles, until now, you though that the Holocaust is to be understoodexclusively in terms of Germans and Jews. Poles had nothing to do with it, or at thevery most only that they, too, suffered under the Nazis. But this book will tell youthat the Poles took an active part in murdering the Jews, and from now on you willhave to take this into account when thinking about yourselves ...«.15Since the text

14 I Bauman: Modernity, pp. 83-150.15 I The way a historian processes trauma does not only raise questions of narration, b :also problems of representation. One can see that in Gross' work, those statements (0

elements of identity) that he wishes to bring into question have, without exception, the Pol-ish nation as their subject, but he wants to use a local (not a national) event to do it. Wha:could the bringing to light of the Jedwabne massacre add to the history and memory of thenation; how could such a »mlnor detall« enlighten general themes? I do not for a mome :believe that the author should fill the pages of his book demonstrating the statistically re -resentative nature of the Jedwabne incident; it is not my intention to attack Gross by sayingthat we lea rn nothing from his book about the behavior of the vast majority of Poles towar sthe Jews, and that the people of Jedwabne are by no means a random sample of the e -

Did It Happen or Not? 485

contains no other narrative, we have to assume that the work intended to changePolish self-perception is in fact the account we mentioned just now. The narrativeis not, therefore, concerned with the Wirkungsgeschichte of another narrative, butwith its own (or so it would appear): it is concerned with its own reception. Is thissomething that a narrative can be about? Why not? But then it becomes clear tothe reader that the text is not telling about something that happened, but aboutsomething that can happen. That is to say, the text abandons the effect of realityin favor of its own fictionality. If I am not mistaken, this is what literary theoristscall metafiction. At the same time, the position of the narrator is also unusual,since he becomes a participant in the very story he is writing. This does not occurin the same old-fashioned way as say, Caesar in the De Bello Gallico; the narratorof Neighbours becomes a participant in the story he is telling by recounting theprocess of writing Neighbours. In the course of the narration, the narrator is morethan the simple architect of the story, although it is not true to say that thingsmerely happen to him. If my thinking is correct, then »writing« occurs in theintransitive here." Metafiction and intransitive writing - here we are faced withtwo of the methods recommended by Hayden White for representing traumaticevents, or to be more precise, the limits of the representation of such events.

Are we really being fair in interpreting the unusual nature of this narrative (inthe context of White's recommendations) as the narrator's loss of confidence, asthe abandonment of the realist (self-)image of historical writing? Does Gross' workdeserve to be placed alongside Friedlander's? Hardly. For the [derescuian historiantrying to analyze the incident, calling into question of the factual accuracy of theaccount is unacceptable if only because of their commitment to try and processthe trauma. For the narrator of Neighbours, the narrative devoted to dealing withthe trauma is not fictive, but hypothetical, i.e. a supposition whose veracity is tobe proven. Since in the Jderescuian narrative, the narrator is not discussing themeaning of an event but rather the delayed discovery of its existence, the truth ofthe account can be proven by the fact of the event having happened. If you canshow that the Polish villagers did indeed murder their neighbors, or if it turns outthat there was not a single soul on the main square in Vaslui in before 12:08, thenthe Polish reader of the book, or the program viewer in Vaslui will be forced to

tire populace. Instead, I think the question is whether the murderers in Jedwabne on thatfateful day did what they did as Poles, or whether they felt they were acting as some othergroup, such as anti-Communists, Christians or even as the people of Jedwabne. Becauseonly ifthe answer is that the killers were identifying primarily as Poles on that particular daydoes every Pole have to confront Neighbours. Gross does not - at any rate explicitly - dealwith this problem. The work lacks a discursive approach to the massacre, and does notshow how the victims and the perpetrators talked one about the other, something that cancall into question the success of the whole enterprise.16 I Barthes: To Write.

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admit that their community is not the same as they thought it was before readingthe book or watching the broadcast.

This is how old man Piscoci and his promised handle on reality becomesimportant, thanks to [derescu and the teacher in Manescu's dialogue. This is howboth in Gross and the other incident-analytical texts, the question of »did it happenor not« acquires essential prominence (and let me briefly refer to the surprisingextent to which works about the 1956 revolution in Hungary or latterly those on themass-killings carried out by the Hungarian army during the Second World Warare generally focused on facts"). This is in contrast to the alternative question of»what is the meaning of what we believe to have happened?« In ordinary practice,the historian does his best to avoid the former question. This statement may comeas a shock to those who have read historical texts, since they seem constantly to beconcerned with whether or not something happened. The question of whether ornot there was an Industrial Revolution is not, however, the same kind of questionas whether or not the steam engine was invented in 1769. The latter is reallyconcerned with the whether the invention itself took place, while the former is no:really concerned with the occurrence of the Industrial Revolution, but with themeaning of the invention of the steam engine. The historian thinks about whz;meaning can be ascribed to the storming of the Bastille, while the [derescuiannarrator is concerned with pondering - what if there was no-one at the Bastille z:all on the 14th ofJuly?

What is the catch in these »did it happen or not« dilemmas? It is that it :.simpossible to find valid solutions to them since the past is past and inaccessibleto us. Let us look at a few examples of what absurd assertions come out of Cross'questioning of his sources about the same things again and again and ':different responses they keep providing (while lacking any rational criterion ":;-which to judge their veracity). The Jewish accounts of the massacre are reliab.eGross tells us, because »[ewish witnesses to the Jedwabne massacre wouldhave falsified their accounts out of ill will vis-a-vis their Polish neighbors.e" V;-,::-not? In another instance, Gross writes about one of the principal perpetrators -the mass-killings that »it is quite likely that Sobuta was faking mental illness.e"Why was it quite likely? And so on. The end of the book can be read almost as ;::.parody of incident analysis, because under the title a New Approach to Sources, -=read that historians must exchange their a priori critical stance in the case of . --period with a more accepting attitude. According to Gross, the way to determizzwhat happened is to accept every account as true until we can prove that wha; =says is incorrect. But do we really accept as the truth the statement of the Po:::':::::residents of Jedwabne during the trial that it was the Germans who murdered .=...cJews and not them? Not at all, since - as we are told - this rule applies only to:3::

17 I KrauszjVarga: A magyar megszallo.18 I Gross: Neighbors, p. 26.19 I Ibid., p. 223.

Did It Happen or Not? 487

accounts given by the Jewish survivors. The most maddening stroke is nonethelesswhen Gross denies the validity of the confessions (and by extension the testimony)of the accused based on the very word of the accused themselves, according towhich they were beaten during their interrogation. The consideration of whetherthe event occurred or not is therefore a crucial experiment in the proving of thehypothetical narrative whose results are not observable in practice. Therefore it isnot enough that the Jderescuian historian is not able finally to prove the factualityof his narrative concerned with the processing of trauma, but his demonstratedincompetence in the course of trying to uncover what really happened in the pastserves even to bring into question whether the traumatic event they originallywished to bring to the community's attention happened or not, in other words thereality of the suffering.

This then is roughly my conception of the anatomy, or better yet, the pathologyof the incident analytical, Jderescuian approach to history (which is trying toprocess trauma) and indeed all historical discourse that is trying to encourageus to confront the past. My original question was whether a traumatic event canbe processed within the framework of a historical discussion. My answer is thatany such experiment is bound to fail and in the process will destroy its tools -the historical narrative itself. But incident analysis carries a wider danger beyondself-destruction in placing its ultimate focus on the question of -did it happen ornot-? For this on the one hand brings the writing of history into an unsustainableposition from an epistemological standpoint, when the Jderescuian historian triesto become what the historian only purports to be. The historian merely assumesthat what he's writing is what actually happened, while the historian undertakingincident analysis actually tries to determine whether this assumption is true ornot, without ever managing to show convincingly that it is. The greatest attempt atrealism so far, the most »Piscocian« approach to history, gives the most subjective,relativist results - and anything more paralyzing is hard to imagine. On theother hand, because of the centrality of the »did it happen or not« question, themethodology of the historian undertaking incident analysis becomes comparableto that of precisely the people who are trying to minimize the trauma and thesuffering - or in other words, morally dubious. The difference between them ismerely that while every Holocaust denier exploits the fact that one can never sayfor certain exactly what happened, the historian trying to process the historicaltrauma becomes a victim of this fact.

LITERATURE

12:08 EASTOF BUCHAREST(RO 2006, R: Corneliu Porumboiu)Aleksiun, Natalia: »Polish Historians Respond to Jedwabne«, in: R. Cherry/A.

Orla-Bukowska (eds.), Rethinking Poles and Jews. Troubled Past, BrighterFuture, Lanham 2007, pp. 169-188.

488 Daniel Bolgar

Barthes, Roland: »ToWrite. An Intransitive Verb?«, in: id., The Rustle ofLanguage,Berkeley/Los Angeles 1989, pp. 11-21.

Bauman, Zygmunt: Modernity and the Holocaust, Cambridge 1989.Braun, R6bert: Holocaust, elbeszeles, tortenelern [Holocaust, narrative, historyJ,

Budapest 1995.Darnton, Robert: »It Happened One Night«, in: New York Review of Books

11(2004), pp. 60-64-Friedlander. Saul (ed.): Probing the Limits of Representation. Nazism and the

»Final Solution«, Cambridge/Massachusetts/London 1992.- The Years of Extermination. Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945, New York

2007.Gross, [an T: Neighbors. The Destruction of the Jewish Community in [edwabne,

Poland, Princeton 2001.Cyani, Caber: »Helyunk a holokauszt tortenetirasaban [Our place in Holocaust

historiography]«, in: Kommentar 3 (2008), pp. 15-18.- »A 20. szazad mint ernlekezeti -esemeny-« [The 20. century like memory

-incident-], in: Forras 41 (2009), pp. 3-15.Kansteiner, Wulf: »Success, Truth, and Modernism in Holocaust Historiography.

Reading Saul Friedlander Thirty-Five Years After the Publication ofMetahistory«, in: History and Theory 2 (2009), pp. 25-53.

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