Tales of Affect, ‘Thick’ and ‘Thin’: On Distantiation in Holocaust Historiography

Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History, Vol.20, No.1–2, Summer/Autumn 2014, pp.179–218PUBLISHED BY VALLENTINE MITCHELL, LONDON

Tales of Affect, ‘Thick’ and‘Thin’: On Distantiation inHolocaust Historiography

KARYN BALL

The problem of emotional and spatiotemporal distantiation in Holocausthistoriography is approached through an elaboration on ‘affect’ broadly definedas differing intensities of intra- and intersubjective reactivity to an ideational orexternal source. Within this schema, ‘thick’ or ‘visceral’ affect designates acharged identification with past violences as though they were still activelypresent, in contrast to ‘thin’ or ‘rarefied’ affect, which refers to an apparentabsence of this charge. This distinction is theorised with reference to SigmundFreud’s ‘Introductory Lecture’ from 1916–17 on ‘Anxiety’ and his ‘NewIntroductory Lecture’ from 1932–36 on ‘Anxiety and Instinctual Life’. Readingbetween these lectures highlights the intimate relationship between anxiety andaffect in Freudian psychoanalysis. By extension, the distinction between ‘thin’and ‘thick’ affect is determined by the relative presence or absence of life-preservative stress, which endows an affect with its intensity. The key claim isthat while anxiety alone suffices to give an affect its intensity, traumatic episodestrigger a heightened sense of vulnerability and potentially leave behind a toxicconfluence of humiliation, shame, paranoia, and ressentiment. Flagrant betrayalsof a naively presumed survival consensus plant the social-psychological seeds of‘visceral’ affect, which magnetises contemporary slights that fuel cycles ofretaliatory brutality among subsequent generations during periods of instability.Conversely, ‘thin’ or ‘rarefied’ affect (affect under erasure) refers to variablymotivated distantiating reactions: on the one hand, in situations punctuated bywidespread atrocities, the perpetrator’s disavowal of the crimes he or sheordered or committed transpires as a defensive tendency to deflect criticaljudgements of his or her own actions and belittle or blame the victim; on theother hand, in ordinary circumstances, absorption in day-to-day survival mightimpel bystanders at various removes to disregard suffering, even in theirimmediate midst. In both cases, thin affect manifests itself as an apparent

Electronic Offprint

Copyright © 2014 Vallentine Mitchell

Karyn Ball is a professor of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta. She haspublished articles on the Holocaust, memory politics, trauma and affect studies, criticaltheory, psychoanalysis and literature. Other publications include the edited collectionTraumatizing Theory: The Cultural Politics of Affect in and beyond Psychoanalysis (2007)and Disciplining the Holocaust (2008).

evacuation of compassionate identification with those in dire circumstances; itsignals an economy in which people who might otherwise feel guilty or ashamed,manage, through a variety of psychic mechanisms, to disassociate, forget or evenjustify persecution or profound inequity. Illustrations of thick affect in bystandertestimony draw upon John-Paul Himka’s review of Daniel Mendelsohn’s TheLost and Jan Gross’s Neighbors, two discussions that showcase instances ofshocking brutality in atrocities committed against Ukrainian and Polish Jews,respectively. To elucidate thin affect, the analysis returns to Martin Broszat’s1988 exchange of letters with the Jewish historian Saul Friedländer, where theGerman Second-World-War-generation historian repeatedly demeaned an‘adamant’, ‘mythical’, ‘accusatory’, ‘insistent’, and ‘contrary’ Jewish memory for‘coarsening’ historical understanding. Consulting Nicolas Berg’s Der Holocaustund die westdeutschen Historiker sheds light on Broszat’s background with theInstitute for Contemporary History, which was involved in suppressing theJewish survivor Joseph Wulf ’s evidence against Dr Wilhelm Hagen. The essayconcludes with a reflection on the biopolitical implications of a ‘dialectics’between thick and thin affect, which suggests that a contemporary-historiographic construction of ‘normalcy’ as an appearance or perception ofcontinuity privileges the standpoint of a subject who disavows his or herimplication in the violence and crises that sentence others to destruction.

Since its still recent emergence as an institutionalised field of inquiry,Holocaust studies has developed a disciplinary division as historiansclinging to a ‘stick-to-the-facts’ ethos sideline the problem of how toread the potentially powerful emotional valences of testimony. Whileresearchers gaining access to newly available archives continue thetask of shoring up ‘the Holocaust’ as a historical referent in the faceof denial, those of us influenced by the legacies of psychoanalysis anddeconstruction, alongside Jean-François Lyotard’s and HaydenWhite’s respective contributions to the critique of referentiality, feelfreer to take up risky metahistorical explorations of theinexpungeable perspectivalism that fractures signification. Thislinguistically turned willingness to reflect upon the indeterminaciesof interpretation has, over the past quarter century, generated adisciplinary divide as Holocaust historians invested in what theyperceive as ‘hard’ epistemologies dismiss the purportedly ‘soft’theoretical considerations associated with trauma studies, whichencourages the analysis of emotion, imagination, fantasy andfiguration in interpretative writing. Historians who view theirmethods of comparatively assessing and arranging sources as aprocess of sifting for historical bedrock rely heavily on logic and

180 HOLOCAUST STUDIES: A JOURNAL OF CULTURE AND HISTORY

Electronic Offprint


careful documentation to weed out the contradictions orimprecisions that sometimes vex the testimony provided by first-handand second-hand witnesses. Moreover, when their aim is to debunkthe insistent nationalist canards that rationalise past violence againstminorities, historians tend to shy away from messy paradigms thattrouble common-sense understandings of ‘irrational myth’ versus‘evidence’, or that indicate a fog-covered, brush-strewn path thatwinds from the light of what took place into the murky recesses ofwhy. In contrast, contributors to trauma studies tend not to discountthe intersections between history and memory, since we assume thatthe aftereffects of massive violence imbue the moral-rhetoricalcontent of the forms that render the past responsive to presentquestions.1

As I argued in Disciplining the Holocaust, it is paradoxical thathistorians who endeavor to describe and explain extreme situationsthat leave massive bereavement and a heightened sense ofvulnerability in their wake typically emulate an emotionallyrestrained style. It is paradoxical because the authority of anhistorical account depends, in part, on a historian’s success inpersuading readers that he or she has ‘mastered’ the horror thatmight have stirred his or her interest in researching the perpetrationof genocide in the first place.2 I also contended that a historian’sperformance of affective mastery is as important as his or herrecourse to logic in order to assess contingency and causality. Thesimulation of detachment occasionally decorated with compassionategestures toward the victims constitutes a regulative ideal thathistorians internalise in order to safeguard their membership in thecommunity of experts – in other words, to reproduce the conditionsfor their professional survival. What is at stake, then, in a historian’sperformance of emotional distanciation is the institutionalisation of afunctionally differentiated affective economy that short circuits self-conscious reflections about the emotional impact of traumatic eventsand the limits of compassionate identification with victims and otherhistorical agents.

The presupposition I want to open up here relates to the status ofaffective compartmentalisation as a measure of professional authorityand as a behavioral protocol of socioeconomic survival – not merelythe necessity of controlling our emotions to prove our ‘scientific’

ON DISTANTIATION IN HOLOCAUST HISTORIOGRAPHY 181Electronic Offprint


neutrality, but as academics who, like anyone who works, mustsustain a semblance of calm stability as a condition of continuedemployment. The emotional discipline scholars perform in order toshore up our authority does not end with an even-handed tone, sinceself-control is also a pivotal condition of ‘getting along’ in apurportedly ‘civil’ society. The irony for Shoah scholars is that wewrite about events that expose the provisionality of this commitmentto ‘civility’ and an ethics of mutual survival as such. For if massmurder shows us the dire consequences that ensue when peopleabandon a ‘live and let live’ consensus, the ability to act as if we are‘civil’ depends upon an unsettling capacity for disassociating fromcruelty as it takes place, even and perhaps especially when we arecomplicit with it.

To unravel this as if, the task that preoccupies me here involvesconceptualising the emotional infrastructure of critical distantiationthat becomes discernible as historians take up the thorny issue ofbystander complicity in mass murder. My aim is to enunciate theformalisation of different affective registers in Holocausthistoriography as reverberations of, as well as retreats from, thebrutality it depicts. After I outline a framework for distinguishingthese registers, subsequent sections will illustrate how historiansenact differing intensities of emotion that belie the ideal ofprofessional restraint.

‘Thick’ and ‘Thin’ Affects

To narrow the scope of this inquiry, I would like to carve out two‘intensities’ from a potentially infinite array of anxiety-limnedemotions, including shame, paranoia, rage, ressentiment, and pitythat surround the perpetration of violence. Under Gilles Deleuze’sand Brian Massumi’s influence, recent contributors to affect studiesalso sometimes employ a desubjectifying framework in defining affectas fluctuating intensities of sensation and their virtual extensions.3

When I use the term, I am referring to differing degrees of intra- andintersubjective reactivity to and investment in ideational or externalsources.

In his critique of trauma as ‘one of modern culture’s masterconcepts’, Natan Sznaider argues that it is not merely coincidental


Electronic Offprint


that wars generated traumas as well as an attendant discourse oftrauma as a means of reckoning with them.4 Sigmund Freud’sobservations about First World War veterans in Beyond the PleasurePrinciple (1920) remain relevant theoretical resources in thisconnection to the extent that they anticipate the diagnosis that theAmerican Psychiatric Association in 1980 labelled PTSD, or post-traumatic stress disorder.5 While social scientific researchers mightdismiss Freud’s delineation of anxiety as ‘a vicissitude of the libidoand the system of the unconscious’, my recourse to hismetapsychological heuristic sets aside his prioritisation of sexualtraumas as the origin of neurosis while retaining an emphasis on therole of anxiety in cycles of violence.6 A range of variable logics andsymptoms inflect the belated affective economy of trauma, but thestress left over from events that imperiled psychic and physicalsurvival comprises its volatile core.

It is worth pointing out that Freud’s interest in anxiety was notlimited to his accounts of hysteria, neurosis and trauma. In the1916–17 ‘Introductory Lecture’, his delineation of the Angstaffekt(anxiety-affect) as an amalgamation of ‘particular motor innervationsor discharges’ along with ‘certain feelings’ suggests an intimaterelationship between affect in general and anxiety in particular.Affect delimited with and as anxiety not only reflects ‘perceptions ofthe motor actions that have occurred’, but also registers as anintensity, measured by the degree to which it overtaxes ourprocessing capacities (unpleasure) or relieves tension (pleasure).7 Inhis ‘New Introductory Lecture XXXII’ on ‘Anxiety and InstinctualLife’ from 1932–36, Freud contends that when an idea is repressedand, perhaps, ‘distorted to the point of being unrecognizable’, what hecalls the ‘quota of affect’ is ‘regularly transformed into anxiety – andthis is so whatever the nature of the affect may be, whether it isaggressiveness or love’.8 Anxiety is, for Freud, ‘the universally currentcoinage for which any affective impulse is or can be exchanged if theideational content attached to it is subjected to repression’.9

Ultimately, then, it is the relative presence or absence of life-preservative stress that endows an affect with its intensity.

In his Introductory Lectures from 1916–17, Freud contrasts thephenomenon of ‘realistic anxiety’, as ‘a manifestation of the ego’sself-preservative drives’ with neurosis and phobias.10 Freud believes



that this kind of stress can be discharged in some cases throughprotective action in response to finite threats; however, anundercurrent of vital stress (what Freud in Beyond the PleasurePrinciple will figure as the ‘substance’ of psychic life) waxes andwanes, but never disappears.11 In conceiving anxiety as a kind offundamental affectivity, Freud in 1920 appears to associate it with thetension that distinguishes ‘life’ itself. This definition seems to shift inFreud’s ‘New Introductory Lecture’ on ‘Anxiety and Instinctual Life’,where he reiterates his prior conception of anxiety as a symptom ofhysterical or neurotic repression. The broader understanding hasmore explanatory value for my purposes, however, since it delineatesanxiety as a measure of shifting levels of self-preservativeboundedness, and visceral reactivity as such.12

Freud’s commitment to metapsychology stipulates that memoryoperates figuratively to deflect or displace a stimulus that incitesanxiety by distorting its content. In addition, a single event mightbecome ‘overdetermined’ to the extent that it operates as a kind ofideational magnet through which various related and unrelatedtension-saturated issues are rolled into one. To describe a painfulevent as ‘the precipitate of a reminiscence’, as Freud does, is toemphasise how a memory’s vicissitudes over time generate differingdegrees of anxiety, or not.13 If preparedness for anxiety permits it tobe expediently transformed ‘without disturbance into action’,according to Freud, event-instigated anxiety that cannot be defusedactivates defensive mechanisms that encroach upon the energyavailable for emotional receptivity and management.14

To the extent that shame often haunts surviving victims andperpetrators, albeit in very different ways, actions or memories thattrigger this affect also incite anxiety, which might sharpen themotivation to come to terms with or to avoid the excruciating self-incrimination that shame expresses. As Eve Kosofsky Sedwick andAdam Frank suggest, ‘shame is characterized by its failure ever torenounce its object cathexis’,15 an attribute that also distinguishes self-preservative stress; thus, while anxiety alone suffices to give an affectits intensity, episodes that trigger a heightened sense of vulnerabilitypotentially leave behind a toxic confluence of humiliation, shame,paranoia and ressentiment. This is to say that flagrant betrayals of apresumed survival consensus plant the social-psychological seed of


Electronic Offprint


visceral affect, which magnetises contemporary slights that fuel cyclesof retaliatory brutality among subsequent generations during periodsof instability.16

Privileged members of relatively stable societies might believe,albeit naively, in the consensual force of a rule of law that will orshould actualise itself in situations where one of ‘us’ facesunprovoked violence. Though the hope is that some version of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s social contract will prevail over Thomas Hobbes’dystopic vision of chaos in the absence of strong government, inmany parts of the globe, the nasty and the brutish triumphs all toofrequently in collusion with the state. A humiliating sense of betrayalabides when the state or even a neighbourhood authorises, organisesor looks the other way from mob violence against a minority orindividual, or when the network of relations we call civil society orcommunity fails to protect one-time members from persecution,abjection or irreparable harm. This betrayal guts the fiction of asocial-contractual promise that a spirit of common decency willmobilise ‘us’ to defend the endangered.

Adopting a sociological approach, Sznaider endorses JeffreyAlexander’s emphasis on trauma as ‘a socially mediated attribution’,which ‘[steers] the language of trauma away from its essentialist andpathological connotations towards one that is constitutive forcollective and thus moral identifications’. While highlighting KaiErikson’s proposition that catastrophe creates community, Sznaiderultimately favours Alexander’s definition of ‘cultural trauma’, whichtakes place ‘when members of a collectivity feel they have beensubjected to a horrendous event that leaves indelible marks upontheir group consciousness, marking their memories forever andchanging their future identity in fundamental and irrevocable ways’.17

As Gabriele Schwab reminds us, disaster-forged communities mightalso become melancholically attached to injury ‘as proof of identity’and the basis for politics, a visceral formation that ‘binds affectiveenergies and draws them away from the world’.18

After viscerality, thin or rarefied affect (affect under erasure) refersto differently motivated distantiating reactions: on the one hand, insituations punctuated by widespread atrocities, the perpetrator’sdisavowal of the crimes he or she ordered or committed transpires asa defensive tendency to dissemble responsibility – to negate critical



judgments of his or her own actions and belittle or blame the victim;on the other hand, in ordinary circumstances, absorption in day-to-day survival might impel bystanders at various removes to disregardsuffering, even in their immediate midst. In both cases, thin affectmanifests itself as an apparent evacuation of compassionateidentification with those in dire circumstances; it distinguishes aneconomy in which people who might otherwise feel guilty orashamed manage, through a variety of psychic mechanisms, to feelvery little – to disassociate, forget, or even justify persecution orprofound inequity.

Rather than a dearth of feeling, the operations of the defensemechanism that Freud labelled disavowal [Verleugnung] to designatea refusal to recognise a traumatic reality might negate or invertshame, for example, along with an attendant anxiety that needs to berepressed in its turn.19 The psychoanalytic concept of disavowalindicates that identifying detachment as an antonym of visceralitydoes not fully explain the range of partially conscious or unconsciousmotivations for thin affect as the registration of a self-interested ordefensive failure of empathy for an endangered or vulnerablecontemporary (as opposed to actual historical or geographicaldistance).

Holocaust historians and trauma scholars have opened up a rangeof inquiries that focus on the differing motivations for non-Jewishpopulations to intervene, stand by, or participate in the atrocitiesagainst the Jews.20 A bystander’s failure to step in if someone isattacked might be driven by self-preservation, as well as ambivalenceabout or hostility toward the victims – the not-so-secret belief thatthe Jews ‘had it coming’, for example. Of course, a still moreunsettling scenario also transpired: virulently antisemitic war-generation Germans openly celebrated their Judenfrei towns (whilelooting the property of their deported neighbours), but their gleebecame officially unacceptable in the post-war ‘denazification’period. Once suppressed, visceral antisemitism, or other extremeprejudices might translate into a thinly-affective absence ofcompassion as the inverted corollary of thick affect.21 In suchinstances, what Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich called the‘inability to mourn’ fomented identity trouble as grief about Hitler’sdefeat was split off, or ‘encrypted’ to borrow Schwab’s phrasing, so


Electronic Offprint


as not to interfere with present investments and habits, including thepost-war generations’ abiding love for parents and grandparents whocarried out or were deeply complicit with the Third Reich’smurderous racial policies.22

In redefining the condition of living-with ethnonationally as arescindable ‘right’ to continue to live at all, the Third Reich’sideologues deployed the Volksgemeinschaft fiction to override theprejuridical givenness of cohabitation in Hannah Arendt’s sense: as apremise that ‘we are already in the hands of the other before we makeany decision about with whom we choose to live’.23 Judith Butleramplifies the biopolitical magnitude of this violation when she invokesthe term precarity in order to designate a ‘politically inducedcondition of maximized vulnerability for populations exposed toarbitrary state violence who often have no other option than to appealto the very state from which they need protection’.24 Butler’sdefinition of precarity distinguishes a situation in which a dominantgroup’s callousness about the fate of ‘other populations’ assumes thestatus of a civilising norm: the failure to intercede on behalf ofpersecuted others entrenches their desperation while paving over thefrictions that roughen smooth sociability among the silent andcomplicit. Widespread disavowal allows bystanders to circumvent self-condemnation, thus constituting the affective and epistemologicalhorizon of social cognisance and acceptance among themselves. Thisis the biopolitical underbelly of smooth sociability: some populationscomplacently thrive at the expense of others who die or barely subsist.

Research about Hitler’s Germany has elucidated how thecontinuity of habits and conventions does not rule out civilianawareness of systemic violence. ‘To have experienced the Third Reichfrom the inside ... entailed complicated rules of comportment’, asGeoff Eley writes: ‘In one’s ordinary transactions, even the mostmundane and trivial of daily decisions could be construed either as anethical compromise with the regime and its values, or as a modest butexistentially significant subversion.’ Hence, ‘even the most privatizedand principled refusals of the regime’s legitimacy were contaminatedby its racialized languages and practices of public identification,just as the performance of conformity might also be subtly edgedwith dissent’.25

Beyond the perpetrator-victim dyad, distended affect paves the



anomic domain of day-to-day practices that eek out the all-consuming demands of biological and socioeconomic survival:holding down a job; feeding, clothing and sheltering oneself anddependent others; trying to stay healthy or surmount physical andmental weakness in order to continue to work; and fulfillingobligations so as to fend off ostracism or punishment. The capacityfor mindfulness and intervention diminishes as the time ofproduction expands to subsume the whole of ‘life’, including the timewe allocate for functions that sustain the labouring body. Thin affectmakes it possible to alternate between work, physical and emotionalsustenance, rest and even pleasure while the wretched scramble,languish or live in fear one house, city or national border away. Inshort, thin affect is the heart-hardening currency of a functionallydifferentiated economy that compartmentalises concern for others asthe condition of getting by; thus, even when our governments do notperpetrate atrocities in our name, genocide and other forms ofcommunity-annihilating violence briefly capture the media’sattention and then slip out from beneath us when they loosen theirgrip on the front pages, or as ‘we-the-spectators’ imbed ourselves insocioeconomic preoccupations.

From the standpoint of everyday survival, internal hardeningmight seem to function simultaneously as a need and a luxury: thedemands of staying afloat leave ordinary people with scarce resourcesto help themselves (let alone act on the compassion they might feelfor those beyond the family); the largely preconscious distantiationthat permits us to concentrate on work, to manage day-to-dayminutiae or take care of those for whom we feel anxiouslyresponsible while contingently disregarding acquaintances, friends,neighbours or even relatives who are injured or ill may not feeldispensable; however, the ability to satisfy everyday needs is a luxuryfrom the perspective of those who are embroiled in a crisis, or thosefor whom the basic conditions of survival are foreclosed by a statethat preempts the struggle for survival, already so vexed for so many,by denying citizenship or withdrawing protection, or failing to reinin a blame-the-other mob mentality. One byproduct of thisasymmetry is that the everyday ‘need’ to concentrate on preservingcontinuities leaves others in dire situations to fend for themselves, ordie trying. The survivors and bereaved potentially feel betrayed by


Electronic Offprint


those who did not provide desperately needed aid or looked away;the former’s thickly affective ressentiment and mortified sense ofgrievance might consequently precipitate as the toxic waste of thelatter’s thinly affective preoccupation.

To understand the dynamics of thick and thin affect dialecticallyis to recognise that one individual’s or group’s thin affect mightmarginalise and thereby exacerbate another’s precarity. If thebystanders’ failure to help and protect is narrated by a victim ofviolence as indifference or endorsement, then the latter’s sense ofvulnerability and ressentiment might ‘thicken’ in an upheaval’saftermath. A reading of testimony about pogroms perpetrated inUkraine and Poland suggests that the murderous rage which incitedmass brutality was fuelled by paranoia-exaggerated backgroundstories featuring Jews colluding with the Soviet oppressors. In theselargely apocryphal narratives, Jews did not merely collaborate inthwarting a particular ethnonationalist group’s interests, but activelysubordinated them to the point of dispossession and death. Lifepreservative anxiety is, in this scenario, inextricably bound up withan acute sense of the vulnerability experienced in actual past episodesof poor treatment, blatant inequity, or violence; however, thisawareness approaches paranoia when it is distorted into an obsessiveresentment toward other less threatening groups – and, perhaps, theJews most consistently – regardless of whether or not there aredemonstrable grounds for such hostility.26

Tales of Thick Affect: John-Paul Himka’s ‘Ukraine’ and Jan Gross’s‘Poland’

Looking more closely at historically minded treatments of testimonyabout antisemitic violence will shed light on valences of thick affectin writing about mass murder. To begin to chart the variegated terrainof thick affect in Holocaust studies, I want to turn to my colleagueJohn Paul-Himka’s review of Daniel Mendelsohn’s The Lost: TheSearch for Six Million published in 2006.27 In the course ofinvestigating the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists andUkrainian Insurgent Army’s involvement in the massacres of Polishand Jewish civilians,28 Himka has pored over deeply disturbingtestimonial accounts and footage while compiling evidence that



counteracts nationalist myths which occlude, deny or rationalise theUkrainian role in the massacre of Jews. He has discovered that theaccounts of Jewish witnesses contradict war-time Ukrainians’testimony about their alleged lack of animosity toward Jews in theirmidst who were being rounded up, humiliated, beaten and murdered– often tortuously – by Ukrainian police and civilians.29 In addition,Himka has closely examined footage from the 1941 pogrom in Lvivfollowing the excavation of Ukrainians executed by the NKVD.30

Footage of this pogrom reveals a whole-scale breakdown of solidarityas Ukrainians, including children, spurred on by the Judeo-communist stereotype that erroneously equates ‘the Jews’ with theNKVD, viciously attacked Jewish neighbours.

In ‘How to Think about Difficult Things: Daniel Mendelsohn’sThe Lost’, Himka acknowledges the emotional impact ofMendelsohn’s book, which charts a journey to Ukraine in thecompany of his photographer brother to trace the fates of relativeswho died in Bolechow during the Shoah. Mendelsohn also pursues asecondary aim: to probe the accuracy of a ‘truism’ imparted by hisgrandfather who emigrated in 1920 – that the Ukrainians were morebrutal than the Poles and even the Germans.31 Because of hisUkrainian heritage, Himka is, by his own admission, riveted: here isan account that explicitly poses the question of collective guilt –whether or not the Ukrainian people as a whole can be cast as ‘rabidantisemites’ who murdered Jews with relish. He acknowledges apersonal agenda: part of him wants to believe the hopeful note inMendelsohn’s observation that, in extreme circumstances, while‘some people simply choose to do evil’, there are, nonetheless, othersthat ‘choose to do good, even when ... they know that their choiceswill require dreadful sacrifices’.32 Yet Himka’s doubts remain; despitehis longing to find evidence that counters demonising depictions ofUkrainians, he is reluctant to dissolve all forms of collectiveresponsibility.

What is striking about his review of Mendelsohn’s The Lost isHimka’s willingness to convey conflicting valences of thick affect:compassion for the victims, revulsion at the crimes perpetratedagainst them, and a desire to recover a germ of hope that redeems hisabiding attachment to his Ukrainian ancestry; however, the prospectof discovering this hope seems to fade as Himka turns to a


Electronic Offprint


particularly gruesome fragment of testimony from MatyldaGelernter’s deposition, quoted by Mendelsohn:

The Germans and Ukrainians preyed especially on the children.They took the children by their legs and bashed their heads onthe edge of the sidewalks, whilst they laughed and tried to killthem with one blow. Others threw children from the height ofthe first floor, so a child fell on the brick pavement until it wasjust pulp. The Gestapo men bragged that they killed 600children and the Ukrainian Matowiecki (from Rozdoły nearZydaczowy) proudly guessed that he had killed 96 Jews himself,mostly children ...

A terrible episode happened with Mrs Grynberg. TheUkrainians and Germans, who had broken into her house,found her giving birth. The weeping and entreaties ofbystanders didn’t help and she was taken from her home in anightshirt and dragged into the square in front of the town hall.There, when the birth pangs started, she was dragged onto adumpster in the yard of the town hall with a crowd ofUkrainians present, who cracked jokes and jeered and watchedthe pain of childbirth as she gave birth to a child. The child wasimmediately torn from her arms along with its umbilical cordand thrown – It was trampled by the crowd and she was stoodon her feet as blood poured out of her with bleeding bitshanging and she stood that way for a few hours by the wall ofthe town hall, afterwards she went with all the others to thetrain station where they loaded her into a carriage in a train toBełzec.33

Himka follows this quotation with a question: ‘How does oneaccount for such a blood orgy? And what does one think of creaturescapable of such behavior?’ This question is the heartbeat of anabiding fascination with the Shoah, with a spectrum of extremity thatabolishes the conditions of mutual survival – the very premise of a‘civil’ society (that we let one another live). Episodes marked byunreserved malice and brutality forestall any attempt to see thevictims through the perpetrators’ eyes. In addition, Himka’s readingof Mendelsohn self-consciously enunciates a reaction scholars andstudents potentially share when we study scenes of carnage. It is as if



our imagination automatically fixates on the most luridlytransgressive actions, which hint at the perpetrators’ sadisticenjoyment, an obscene pleasure insinuated here by Himka’s recourseto the sexualising ‘blood orgy’ metaphor.34

This insinuation provokes further questions. What were theUkrainian bystanders thinking as they saw Jewish children smashedon the pavement? Were they too shocked to react, or did they assumethat there was little chance of prevailing against the Gestapo? Andwhat about those who dragged a woman in labour onto a dumpsterand trampled her newborn infant? How many of Mrs Grynberg’sgentile acquaintances beseeched the perpetrators to desist or soughtto stop them? Did her neighbours’ antisemitism incline them tobelieve the worst – that mother and newborn ultimately deservedtheir fate, or were these Christians savouring an opportunity toplunder her household, which begs the question of how manyformerly Jewish possessions ended up in Ukrainian homes (or, forthat matter, in German, Polish, Latvian, Lithuanian and Romanianhouseholds), the lucrative ‘inheritance’ of genocide. Do theplunderers’ descendants hold on to these possessions as cherishedfamily heirlooms to be passed down from generation to generationwithout so much as an embarrassed wink?

The signs of Himka’s ‘thick’ reaction to the narration of ghastlyevents invite comparison with Jan T. Gross’s still more emotionallycharged Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community inJedwabne, Poland (2000). In this account, written for a generalaudience, Gross seeks to rectify the absence of murdered Jews inPolish historiography of the Second World War period, which alsooccults ordinary Poles’ participation in violence perpetrated againstJewish neighbours when these comprised as much as one third ofPoland’s urban population. The case of Jedwabne, a small village inPodlasie, is particularly instructive in Gross’s view, since, in thesummer of 1941, half of the town’s population was involved inannihilating its other half. Bystanders are indicted as well in Gross’sorchestration of testimonies that telescope various atrocitiesalongside a seemingly global failure to intervene on behalf of Jewishneighbours whose lives were at stake.35

While Gross’s conclusions would hardly surprise Shoah scholars,as Natalia Aleksiun observes, mainstream Polish historiography ‘has


Electronic Offprint


tended to stress the activities of those who assisted the Jews, withonly a token nod to such “marginal” phenomena as the activities ofthe so-called extortionists’.36 In brashly demonstrating his principalclaim that, ‘Poles were in fact both victims of the Germans andvictimizers vis-a-vis the Jews’, Gross’s ‘much acclaimed’ bookemerged in a vacuum; it consequently sparked defensiveness andcontroversy in Poland after its publication in 2000.37 The passionatereactions to Neighbors are less surprising, however, when the grittyforce of Gross’s strategically selected testimony is considered:

‘I saw with my own eyes how those murderers [the ‘localbandits’ Borowski (or Borowiuk) and Mietek Wacek] killedChajcia Wasersztajn, Jakub Kac, seventy-three years old, andEliasz Krawiecki.

Jakub Kac they stoned to death with bricks. Krawiecki theyknifed and then plucked his eyes and cut off his tongue. Hesuffered terribly for twelve hours before he gave up his soul.’38

In its gruesome effect, this selection from Szmul Wasersztaijn’stestimony resonates on a formal and affective level with the portionof Gelernter’s testimony that Mendelsohn and then Himka citedbefore me. The horror that these incidents spawn presumably brooksno reasoned contradiction, even from a defensive Polish audience.Nevertheless, such testimony does not, apparently, ‘speak for itself ’,since Wasersztaijn’s ceremonial ‘I saw with my own eyes’ reiterates aconventional mode of self-authorising the act of bearing witness. It isworth noticing that Gross’s treatment of Wasersztaijn’s accountignores such conventional elements in emphasising the testimony’semblematic status, inciting readers to multiply the brutality it depictsacross space and time: these incidents figure among countless othervicious acts by the Poles who rounded up the elderly and debilitated,or pitch-forked children into a barn where the Jedwabne Jews wereburned en masse. With testimony of this tenor, Gross need not addmuch, if anything, to attain the desired effect, yet he does not treadlightly when the opportunity arises to hone in on the sensory detailsof the pogrom:

So it was not only the sight of the massacre of the Jews that wasunbearable. Also, the screams of tormented people were



numbing, as was the smell of their burning bodies. Theslaughter of Jedwabne Jews lasted an entire day, and it wasconfined to a space no bigger than a sports stadium. Sleszynski’sbarn, where the majority of the pogrom victims were burned inthe afternoon, was but a stone’s throw from the square in thecenter of town. The Jewish cemetery, where many of the victimswere knifed, clubbed, and stoned to death, is just across theroad. And so everybody who was in town on this day and inpossession of a sense of sight, smell, or hearing eitherparticipated in or witnessed the tormented deaths of the Jews ofJedwabne.39

Postioned dramatically as the conclusion of a chapter, this paragraphillustrating Gross’s visceral poetics becomes most potent where itstimulates several senses at once in a tightly confined narrative space‘no bigger than a sports stadium’. He heightens this effect bymapping the intimate contours of a slaughter which cannot beattributed to the Nazis who, in this case, stood by and took picturesof the burning barn a ‘stone’s throw’ from the town’s centre and thekillings in the cemetery ‘just across the road’. Plucked out eyes andthe stench of burning flesh electrify a grotesque sensorium thatscourges the defensively-charged negation that preceded it in Polishhistoriography by thickening his readers’ disgust.

In general, the Einsatzgruppen (German police detachments) ‘didnot compel the local populations to participate directly in the murderof Jews’.40 As Gross declares, ‘the 1,600 Jedwabne Jews were killedneither by the NKVD, nor by the Nazis, nor by the Stalinist secretpolice. Instead, as we now know beyond reasonable doubt, and asJedwabne citizens knew all along, it was their neighbors who killedthem.’41 What the Jedwabne Jews saw, then, ‘to their horror’, asGross stresses, ‘were familiar faces. Not anonymous men in uniform,cogs in a war machine, agents carrying out orders, but their ownneighbors, who chose to kill and were engaged in a bloody pogrom– willing executioners.’42

Gross’s reference to ‘willing executioners’ patently echoes the titleof Daniel Goldhagen’s 1997 book, lambasted by Holocaust historiansfor its belligerently manichean depiction of ‘ordinary Germans’ goingbeyond the call of duty to inflict anguish on Jewish victims.43 The


Electronic Offprint


picture of collective guilt that Gross paints is likewise damning: hisincorporation of testimony that sensorialises the viciousness ofcertain atrocities seems actively to court our outrage at theperpetrators while holding bystanders accountable for notintervening. Like Goldhagen, then, Gross’s goal is not limited tocomposing a more accurate historical record; he also lacerates war-time Poles as a whole for their widespread complicity in suchmassacres as well as post-war Polish historians for ignoring them.

According to Gross, Polish historiography has blamed antisemiticbrutality on ‘the “scum” in every society’.44 While the Jedwabneassault strikes us as extreme, it was not an isolated incident,according to Gross, whose goal is to demonstrate that ‘ordinary’Poles participated along with local and imported criminal elements inthis massacre.45 To the extent that he addresses first and foremost aPolish audience in denial, one might presume that Gross’s gut-wrenching depiction of the crowded stage of tormented death shouldeasily dispense with ready-made evasions; certainly, it sharpenedanger on all sides. Those who sympathised with and perhapsmourned the Jewish victims were nevertheless taken aback by Gross’slack of restraint.46 Gross’s account was also hotly denounced by thePolish Catholic Right, whose members promulgate the romantic-messianic vision of Poland’s history of lost causes and excuseantisemitic violence as a defence against Judeo-communism or as justrevenge for the kidnapping of Christian babies to supply blood forPassover rituals.47

Adam Czarnota identifies Gross’s aim as nothing less than the‘recasting of collective consciousness’ through ‘the inclusion of theHolocaust within Polish memory’.48 Before the publication ofNeighbors, neither Jan Blonski’s ‘The Poor Poles Look at theGhetto’,49 nor the ‘painfully moving novels of Henryl Grynberg’, oreven the documentary film, Place of Birth, directed by PawelLozinksi, succeeded in ‘[calling] forth broad public debate that alsoinvolved moral or political authorties’. Apparently, this ‘was theachievement of Gross’s book alone’, which opened up the formerlyuntouched subject of collaboration, and thereby ‘poked a stick in ananthill’.50

With differing degrees of passion, both Himka (via Mendelsohn)and Gross deploy bystander testimony to express indignation about



Ukrainian and Polish nationalist histories that relegate antisemiticcrimes against Jews to the dustbin of history in the interests ofpromoting images of heroic resistance and martyrdom. To theircredit, both historians have made significant headway in debunkingnationalist narratives that blame the Holocaust on ‘Judeo-Communism’, or occlude the atrocities perpetrated by Ukrainiansand Poles against Jews altogether. One question that their workexplicitly raises is how to adjudicate stubborn silences in a historicalrecord built around the narcissistic caveats of a collective memorythat fiercely clings to its own self-bestowed honours as articles offaith. How does a historian promote a cognitively responsiblerepresentation of a violent past without presupposing the distinctionsbetween truth and falsehood, evidence and myth, as well as‘unreliable’ memory and ‘rational’ history?

Michael Rothberg’s ambivalence about Pierre Nora’s reductiveopposition between history and memory is pertinent in thisconnection. According to Rothberg, this distinction falls prey to thefallacy of pathologising memory as inherently ‘irrational’ whileanointing historians with ‘authoritative healing powers’ as well as theauthority to adjudicate between divisive claims.51 More recently,Carolyn Dean has foregrounded the deployment of this distinction inthe backlash against the alleged ‘excesses’ of Jewish victim memory,and, Jewish Holocaust memory in particular, which is resented fortaking up ‘too much’ space in the public realm at the expense ofattention to current injustices.52 Dean argues that historians whoinsist on the opposition between rational history and affectivelysaturated memory potentially impose their protocols for adjudicatingevidence on survivors themselves, implying that the ‘exemplaryvictim’ is the one who, having already ‘mastered the symptoms oftheir suffering’, has apparently ‘moved on from their losses’, therebyperforming ‘an experience of victimhood that is no longer one’.53

This aversion toward Shoah victims has a history in German-authored contributions to historiographical debates about the ThirdReich. Those who have been working in the field of HolocaustStudies for a quarter of a century or more will no doubt rememberMartin Broszat’s notorious subordination of a ‘mythologising’Jewish-victim memory to a ‘scientific’ history in his exchange withSaul Friedländer following the 1986 German Historians’ Debate.54 A


Electronic Offprint


year before the 1986 Historikerstreit, Broszat published a ‘Plea for aHistoricization of the Nazi Period’ (1985), where he challenged thecomplete moral distancing [Pauschaldistanzierung] and tabooing ofthis past with its accompanying ‘morality of consternation’ [Moralitätder Betroffenheit].55 In the ‘Plea’, Broszat called for a ‘proper’historicization, which requires longitudinal analyses of thesocioeconomic practices and everyday conditions common to theWeimar period, the Third Reich, and to the Federal Republic. Toremain critically effective, Broszat argued, Nazi periodhistoriography should not exclude aspects tangential to thedictatorship but must open history’s scientific purview to the study ofstructures that did not necessarily support the regime’s inhumaneaims. Historical explanation might be cleansed, then, of its mythicobsessions and thus ‘normalised’.

Over the past 25 years, different generations of historians havefamiliarised themselves with Broszat’s exchange of letters with theJewish historian, Saul Friedländer, whose parents perished in thecamps. This familiarity will make their exchange useful as a casestudy through which to reconsider historiographical issues throughthe lens of thin affect. As many readers will no doubt recall, Broszatunabashedly demeans Jewish victim memory, which is not sosurprising, perhaps, since Broszat himself declares that he was‘definitely affected, but hardly burdened’ by Germany’s NationalSocialist past. Yet it also seems as if Broszat was ‘hardly burdened’ bya sense of humility that might have prompted a war generationGerman historian to be more sensitive about how his remarks wouldbe received by a broader audience still outraged by the scale andrelentlessness of the Nazi atrocities in and beyond the death camps.

Despite Broszat’s allegedly ‘impeccable anti-Nazi credentials’,56

Friedländer heard echoes of revisionist Ernst Nolte in Broszat’s ‘Plea’against an overly insistent focus on the period that is ‘concernedmore with bringing about a distancing exorcism of the demons thanarriving at a historical explanation’.57 More recently, in DerHolocaust und die westdeutschen Historiker (2003), Nicolas Berg hasreassessed the implications of Broszat’s ‘pathos of sobriety’ [Pathosder Nüchternheit].58 Berg’s copious research documents the hypocrisyof Broszat’s dichotomy between ‘history’ and ‘memory’ in hisexchange with Friedländer.59 Drawing on Berg’s research, the next



section will reframe Broszat’s binary as a compulsive repetition of thewar-time German civilian disavowal of Jewish suffering thatstructured everyday life under the Third Reich.

A Tale of ‘Thin’ Affect: Martin Broszat’s Critical Verstehen

The fulcrum of Broszat’s recourse to the opposition betweendisciplinary history and mythologising memory is his criticalconception of historical understanding [Verstehen] as the foundationof scientific rigour. Broszat’s ‘critical’ understanding might be viewedas a corrective to Wilhelm Dilthey’s definition of Verstehen as ‘therediscovery of the I in the Thou’ whereby ‘the mind rediscovers itselfat ever higher levels of connectedness’. Dilthey problematicallyemphasises ‘this sameness of the mind in the I and the Thou and inevery subject of a community, in every system of culture and, finally,in the totality of mind and universal history, [which] makes theworking together of the different processes in the human studiespossible. In these’, Dilthey concludes, ‘the knowing subject is onewith its object, which is the same at all stages of its objectification’.60

In maintaining a tension between two forms of ‘historical insight’,Broszat stresses, his Verstehen is not the nineteenth-century Germanhistoricist concept ‘with its Romantic-idealist basis and the one-sidedpattern of identification bound up with this notion’.61 Broszat’sdelimitation of historical insight [Einsicht] involves ‘a distancingexplanation and an objectification to be achieved analytically’alongside a ‘comprehending, subjective appropriation andempathetic reliving [Nachvollzug] of past achievements, sensations,concerns and mistakes’.62 Broszat charges this twofold historicalinsight with the ‘task of preventing historical consciousness fromdegenerating once more into a deification and idealization of brutefacts of power’. It must maintain critical distance without takingrefuge in a wholescale moral distancing [Pauschaldistanzierung]. Atthe same time, historical insight must avoid an ‘amoral Verstehenpredicated on “mere understanding”’.63 It should, instead, reflect thetension between comprehending and condemning.

Broszat acknowledges that a Pauschaldistanzierung of the Nazipast in the post-war period was initially important for the re-establishment of social and moral norms; nevertheless, it also had the


Electronic Offprint


adverse effect of compensating for, as well as masking, the inadequateinvestigation and subsequent punishment of ‘concrete’ individualinvolvement, guilt, and responsibility.64 Since then, subsequentgenerations have altered German perceptions of the period, most ofthose who were directly involved have passed away, and formerdistinctions among degrees of involvement have blurred. Because anongoing evaluation of the past is unavoidable and has already beentaking place for some time, Broszat advocates for conscientioushistoricization defined as a ‘rational comprehension of this period’.He thereby anoints historians the professional adjudicators of‘rational’ historical consciousness and members of the expert-elect assuch.65

Broszat encourages historians to reflect on the pragmatic limits ofmaintaining the traumatic meaning of the Holocaust for Germans ofall ages and all times while warning German historians asrepresentatives of the former ‘perpetrator nation’ not to ignore thevictims’ sensibility. Rational historicization need not lead toinsensitivity, as Broszat cautions, yet it remains to be seen whethercritical Verstehen as he conceives it can avoid callousness when hedenigrates ‘Jewish memory’ as a mode of ‘myth’ in a notoriouscomment that is worth quoting at length:

Among the special features of the scholarly-scientificinvestigation of this [National-Socialist] past, is the knowledgethat this period remains bound up with many and diversemonuments of mournful and accusatory memory, imbued withthe painful sentiments of many individuals, in particular of Jews,who remain adamant in their insistence on a mythical form ofthis remembrance ... Respect for the victims of Nazi crimesdemands that this mythical memory be granted a place.Moreover, there is no prerogative here of one side or the other.Whether the juxtaposition of scientific insight and mythicalmemory represents a fruitful tension also depends, to be sure,on whether the former is able to provide productive images andinsights, or whether it is based only on a coarsening – with thepassage of time – of the data of history: on a process involvingthe forgetting of details still familiar to contemporaries and ofthe imponderable elements of genuine historical events. Among



the problems faced by a younger generation of Germanhistorians more focused on rational understanding is certainlyalso the fact that they must deal with just such a contrary formof memory among those who were persecuted and harmed by theNazi regime, and among their descendants – a form of memorywhich functions to coarsen historical recollection.66 [Myemphases]

Broszat begins by respectfully affirming the ‘place’ of Jewishremembrance in historical consciousness, but quickly slips into ahierarchy that privileges ‘rational’ and, implicitly, non-Jewishscholarship, over a Jewish ‘mythical memory’. His repetitivereferences to an ‘adamant’, ‘mythical’, ‘accusatory’, ‘insistent’, and‘contrary’ Jewish memory symptomatically belie his claim that thereis ‘no prerogative here of one side or the other’, since he obviouslyblames ‘those who were persecuted and harmed by the Nazi regime’and their descendants for ‘coarsening’ historical recollection.67 It is asif Broszat resents survivors and the bereaved for dwelling on the painof victimisation.

As stated earlier, Broszat attributes a twofold role to criticalinsight as a balanced interaction between distancing andunderstanding. Broszat’s Einsicht, so conceived, involves both a‘subjective appropriation’ and an ‘empathetic reliving’ [Nachvollzug]of past actions.68 It is paradoxical, then, that Broszat disparagesJewish victim-identified perspectives for lacking this balance when heplaces them under the rubric of ‘mythical memory’ defined as a ‘formof remembrance located outside the framework of (German andJewish) historical science’.69 He does not stop there, for at the sametime that he denies the rationality of victim memory, he also seems toadvocate for diluted compassion. The Shoah has been the object oftoo much empathetic understanding, he asserts, and not enoughdistancing. The petrifying grip of an ‘especially intensive’ Jewish-victim affect must be loosened for the sake of critical balance.70 Thispolemic tautologically figures ‘balanced perception’ as theprecondition of critical distance as well as its aim, which begs thequestion of who, in Broszat’s view, is capable of critical insight and,conversely, whose actions qualify for subjective appropriation andempathetic reliving. Friedländer poses the problem in this way: ‘why,


Electronic Offprint


in [Broszat’s] opinion, would historians belonging to the group of theperpetrators be able to distance themselves from their past, whereasthose belonging to the group of the victims, would not?’71

In his response to Friedländer, Broszat attests to his belief that hehas adopted the proper degree of distance in his focus on everydaylife, but his background suggests that this distance is self-serving.Though it was not extraordinary for a member of his generation tobelong to the Nazi Youth, Broszat also hoped to join the NSDAP.According to his own account, coming of age in a fiercely antisemiticclimate left its imprint on the young Broszat, who would have beenapproximately 19 when the war ended. To the extent that the Naziworld-view had saturated the national imaginary and encroached onthe ‘potential for youthful dreams’, Broszat concedes that it was ‘nolonger possible to dream other, better dreams’.72 Yet the profoundimplications of this formation do not trouble his scientificcommitment to ‘normalise’ a period he not only wrote about but alsoparticipated in. Indeed, he has seemingly misrecognised his deflectionof a potentially shameful sense of self-implication as an Archimedeanstandpoint from which to adjudicate ‘normal’ historiography.

It turns out that this misrecognition indicates a long-standingpattern of behaviour, as Nicolas Berg discovers when he follows upon Friedländer’s suspicions about the moral integrity of Broszat’sContemporary History agenda. Berg has uncovered a prior episodein which Broszat downplayed collaboration at the expense of asurvivor’s testimony in his treatment of the historian Joseph Wulf inthe 1960s.73

Along with his affiliates Hans Buchheim and Thilo Vogelsang atthe Institut für Zeitgeschichte (IfZ), Broszat dismissed Wulf ’s sourcespertaining to the case of Dr Wilhelm Hagen, former president of theFederal Health Department in Bonn and director of the WarsawHealth Department under the Third Reich.74 In brief, Wulf citedHagen’s December 1942 letter addressed to Hitler that begs thedictator to preserve the Arian Poles from the fate of the Jews, or asHagen clarifies, ‘das heißt, sie zu töten’ [in other words, to killthem].75 Wulf noted that Dr Hagen’s conscience was not apparentlytroubled by the Hippocratic Oath when it came to the monstrousconditions that prevailed in the Jewish ghetto (which he neverreported after the war). Hagen had, instead, threatened Jewish



doctors with death if they did not contain the typhus danger.According to Wulf, ‘these doctors were then murdered together withtheir patients’,76 which makes Hagen a ‘helper’s helper’ rather thanan ineffectual resister, not a member of the ‘other Germany’ as heand his defenders, including Broszat, proclaimed.

Rather than apologising, Broszat rejected Wulf ’s evidence throughan ‘elaborate’ methodology, as Berg describes it; he also conveyed hisregret to Hagen about the distortion in Wulf ’s book, which distresses[the IfZ affiliates] ‘ganz besonders’ [especially]: ‘I must assure youthat we ourselves are dismayed [entsetzt] about the misconception[Mißbegriff] in Wulf ’s book’.77 As Berg reports, Broszat went on toreassure Hagen that manifold documents demonstrated beyonddoubt the doctor’s dogged resistance against the SS and police-ordered health policies in Warsaw. Speaking on behalf of theInstitute, Broszat even pressed Wulf to make amends to Hagen. As aresult of Hagen’s suit, Wulf ’s publisher felt compelled to remove theoffending pages from the author’s book. The ‘caesura’ that Bergdiscerns in German-authored Holocaust historiography is, thus, quiteliteral in this instance: ‘As of today’, Berg notes, ‘there is an empty,white double-sided page where a mere footnote provides theapocryphal explanation to the effect that chapter 14 was “for this andsubsequent printings” omitted on the basis of a decision by the Bonndistrict court.’78

Addressing Broszat toward the close of their exchange, Wulfcountered the IfZ’s accusations about his questionabledocumentation and citation methods; he also challenged Broszat’sself-assurance about Hagen’s putative resistance, particularly in atime (the 1960s) when such ‘heroes’ were daily multiplying in WestGermany.79 In his last, unanswered letter to Broszat, Wulf castigatedGerman historians for minimising the complicity of pastors, theWehrmacht, and the civil authorities in the General Governmentwho, even ‘in the best cases’, had watched or looked away[‘“zugesehen” oder “weggesehen”’].80

Broszat’s own ‘looking away’ crops up in his denigration of Jewishmemory in letters to Friedländer that compulsively repeat his priordefamation of Wulf, who, as a former ghetto inmate and Auschwitzprisoner, questioned his own ability to be objective in markedcontrast with Hagen’s smugly complacent defenders at the IfZ.81


Electronic Offprint


What his unapologetic letters to Wulf demonstrate, in effect, is thesymptomatic valence of Broszat’s opposition between history andmemory, which he hypocritically wields against survivors with acudgel’s force. For if Broszat deems some Jewish witnesses morecredible than others, he does not identify an example of ‘rational’memory. From a German historian, especially one of his generation,his derisive comments about Jewish memory speak volumes about hisaversion toward victim perspectives; they unveil his thinly affectiveVerstehen as a thickly affective defence against genuine introspectionand cognitive responsibility.

The IfZ’s success in censoring Wulf whose parents, likeFriedländer’s, had been murdered, confirms the latter’s concernsabout Broszat’s methodological focus on everyday micro-practicesthat fostered ‘normal’ patterns of activity among Third ReichGerman civilians , a focus which attenuates their complicity withsystemic violence; moreover, scholarship that includes Broszat’srefutes his claim that the Jews’ fate ‘constituted a little-noticed matterof secondary importance for the majority of Germans during thewar’.82 Though not fully recognised at the time, the destruction of theJews, as Friedländer emphasises, ‘loomed as a hidden but perceivedfact in many German minds during the war itself ’.83 Friedländer citesBroszat’s article “Zur Struktur der NS-Massenbewegung” [‘On theStructure of the NS Mass Movement’] from 1983, where the Germanhistorian acknowledges that, ‘there was certainly a social basis ofresponse’ to the hatred of the Jews publicly expressed by the Nazileadership on repeated occasions.84 Yet even if Germans ‘lived undera regime that makes the line between indifference and beingterrorised into consensus hard to draw in bold strokes’, as Deanpoints out,85 the awkward question remains as to how a historian ofBroszat’s generation could belittle victim memory as ‘overlyintensive’ after witnessing the self-protective silences, not to mentionthe brazenly antisemitic jouissance that aided and abetted Nazipolicies.86

Dean’s review of bystander research supports Friedländer’srejection of ‘somewhat apologetic notions about Germans notwanting to know what they knew in favor of a basic andstraightforward recognition’ of the ‘structural blindness’ particular tomajorities who are privileged to pretend ignorance about a minority’s



plight.87 In this connection, she paraphrases Friedländer’s contentionthat the wartime civilian tolerance of Nazi brutality was the‘chillingly normal’ condition of an existence limned with terror andpunctuated by the spectacles of persecution, public beatings anddeportations.88 ‘While diverse groups of Germans did not know allthe details’, Dean contends, ‘they knew generally what washappening to Jews as well as to other persecuted groups and may bestbe described as having tacitly consented to Nazi policies’.89 Deanhighlights testimony authored by German Jews that attests to the‘uncanny banality with which extraordinary cruelty [was] manifested’by non-Jewish friends and acquaintances.90 Under thesecircumstances, civilian indifference was not necessarily ‘a calculatedretreat into one’s own self-interest’, according to Dean, ‘but a moreactive form of uncaring; it wasn’t a matter of not-knowing, but thedifficult-to-comprehend fact that the population actually did know’,and nevertheless supported ‘a regime whose criminality they werewell aware of ’.91

In 2003, Christopher Browning observed that: ‘Not knowing, notunderstanding even when you do know, because you have a closeddoor inside you, and you only can realize what you merely know ifyou open it. That is the enormous drama of our age. Everyone isblind to those being tortured.’92 In his exchanges with Wulf andFriedländer respectively, Broszat not only failed to open his own‘closed door’, as Browning might call it, but actively promulgatedemotional comparmentalisation as a disciplinary standard of rigourthat ‘corrects’ the influence of a ‘mythologizing’ victim memory byostracising it, thereby modelling enfeebled compassion as the contentof his historical form.93

In his Horkheimer lectures at the University of Frankfurt, AvishaiMargalit delineates an ethos that offsets Broszat’s enactment of thinaffect. In ‘The Morality of Memory’, as Czarnota paraphrases it,Margalit distinguishes a moral community ‘characterized by theprinciple of concern with the fate of one’s neighbor’ from an ethicalcommunity that encourages ‘tolerance of a neighbor’. According toCzarnota, Gross’s Neighbors ‘showed that not only was the Polishmoral community very limited, and others (Jews) were excludedfrom it, but they were not even included in what Margalit terms theethical community’.94 To the extent that national self-understanding


Electronic Offprint


involved a melancholic sense of solidarity with the innocent Polishdead, ‘the inclusion of Polish Jews in the community of historicalexperience’, led, as Czarnota contends, to ‘an expanded moralcommunity’.95

As I argue above, to the extent that mass violence and persecutiondefile cohabitation as the fundamental condition of communal tiesand mutual survival, groups who have historically suffered this kindof betrayal may also endure more belated self-preservative anxiety, orthe post-traumatic reactivity I have been placing under the rubric ofvisceral affect. Both Himka’s Mendelsohn and Gross subtend ahistoriography that exceptionalises moral outrage in the face of suchbetrayals by concretising the viciousness with which Ukrainians andPoles murdered Jewish neighbours. Their citations of testimonyabout massacres in Ukraine and Poland expose the flaws of the thinlyaffective functionalist approach that pushed Goldhagen to remind us,so gratingly, of the obvious: that antisemitism was a powerfulmotivation for sadism against the Jews. Beyond the context of post-Soviet memory politics, Mendelsohn’s and Gross’s visceral narrationsexpand our repertoire of grim episodes in which historical actorsappear to relish an opportunity to kill with or without explicitorders. Such adrenalised imagery haunts a restrained exposition ofhow ‘ordinary men’ can be cognitively acclimated to shootingcivilians at point blank range, as Browning so famously recounted it.96

Reading the dialectics of thick and thin affect biopolitically suggeststhat a historiographic construction of ‘normalcy’ as an appearance orperception of continuity privileges the standpoint of a subject whodisavows his or her implication in the violence and crises thatsentence others to destruction.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Noah Benninga, Gerda Roelvink, Katrin Stoll, andMagdaelena Zolkos for providing invaluable feedback on previousdrafts of this essay.



NOTES

1. As Carolyn Dean observes, ‘literary theorists understand that traumatic memory inparticular compromises history conceived as a straightforward narrative account of theunfolding of events, which the force of trauma by definition defers, represses, rendersopaque or all-too-vivid but difficult to recount’ (Dean, Aversion and Erasure, 147).

2. For a more detailed examination of the minimalist style in Holocaust historiography,see the first chapter of Disciplining the Holocaust, where I contrast Christopher R.Browning’s and Daniel Goldhagen’s respective descriptions of the mass burning ofJews in Bialystok. A second chapter on the Berlin Memorial to the Murdered Jews ofEurope focuses on minimalism as an architectural ‘aesthetics of restraint’. See alsoDean’s Aversion and Erasure, 101–42.

3. Though inaugural contributors to the contemporary ‘affective turn’ such as TeresaBrennan were well-versed in psychoanalytic theory, now that Jacques Lacan’s onceformidable influence has waned while Gilles Deleuze’s has skyrocketed, newergenerations of affect theorists tend to bypass the ‘declassé’ psychoanalytic lineage oftrauma and its roots in Freud’s early conceptions of hysteria. Drawing upon Deleuze’sSpinoza-, Bergson- and Hume-mediated conceptions of affect, the post-psychoanalyticorientation in affect studies stresses the ‘virtuality’ of a pre-ideological, desubjectified,open-system dynamicism (‘becoming’ over and against ‘being’) versus the bio-metaphysical determinisms and Oedipal triangulations of psychoanalysis (see Massumi,Parables for the Virtual). In consonance with Massumi, Melissa Gregg and GregorySeigworth, for example, delineate affect as ‘an impingement or extrusion of amomentary or sometimes more sustained state of relation as well as the passage (andthe duration of the passage) of forces or intensities. That is, affect is found in thoseintensities that pass body to body (human, nonhuman, part-body, and otherwise), inthose resonances that circulate about, between, and sometimes stick to bodies andworlds, and in their very passages or variations between these intensities andresonances themselves’ (Gregg and Seigworth, The Affect Theory Reader, 1, quoted byAtkinson and Richardson, ‘At the Nexus’, 1). I do not find anything objectionableabout this definition, since it acknowledges the psychophysical dimensions of affect;however, as I argue in this essay, a psychoanalytic conception of trauma posits anxietyas a keystone affect that both intensifies other affects while operating as a differentiallyintense affect in its own right. Silvan Tomkins’ work also deserves mention as anotherprominent theoretical resource in affect studies. For an incisive assessment of the‘affective turn’, see Leys, ‘The Turn to Affect: A Critique’.

4. Sznaider, ‘Suffering as a Universal Frame for Understanding Memory Politics’, 239.Natan Sznaider objects to the universalisation of suffering as a ‘theoretical formulationof collective memory’ that positions mass atrocities as the fulcrum of Europeanidentity. From Sznaider’s perspective, it is significant that the ‘discovery’ of trauma bythe French scientists Jean-Martin Charcot and Pierre Janet coincided with the mid-nineteenth-century roots of the 1864 Geneva Convention, whose framers ‘probablymeant to define the rules of war in such a circumscribed manner so as to start a legalprocess that would make war illegal’. Sznaider rejects the view that ‘all traumata arecreated equal’, a proposition that levels the difference between ‘an unhappy childhood’and ‘experience in a concentration camp’. He also contends that the diagnosis oftrauma ‘takes for granted that we are held hostage to earlier trauma, a presupposition’,as he says, ‘that applies not only to personal therapy but also the contemporary cultureof therapeutic politics’ (239).

5. Cited in ibid., 240.6. Freud, ‘Lecture XXV: Anxiety’, 411. I do not have space here to reprise my account

of how Freud’s theses about hysteria, narcissism, the drives, and sadomasochism might


Electronic Offprint


offer lessons for historians. For a more complex discussion of these theses, see Chapter4 of Ball, Disciplining the Holocaust.

7. Freud, ‘Lecture XXV: Anxiety’, 395. A man of his time, Freud’s descriptions of thepsychophysical apparatus are saturated with Helmholtzian human motor motifs thatpostulate a need to conserve energy and stave off entropy. In keeping with thisthermodynamic configuration, diffuse or unbound affect ‘seeks’ a venue that can serveas a means of ‘binding’ or focalising it – what Freud refers to as Besetzung (cathexis)to designate a charged investment in an ideational or external object. To the extent thatbuilding and maintaining ‘border controls’ also requires psychophysical energy, anaffect for Freud does not expand or intensify without economic consequences, sincethe pressure it triggers might need to be offset through psychic labor. For a fullerexposition on Freud’s economic theory of affect, please see Chapter 4 of Ball,Disciplining the Holocaust.

8. Freud, ‘Lecture XXXII: Anxiety and Instinctual Life’, 83.9. Freud, ‘Lecture XXV: Anxiety’, 403–4.

10. Ibid., 411 (translation modified); Freud, ‘Vorlesung XXV: Die Angst’, 426.11. For my analysis of this configuration, see Ball, ‘The Substance of Psychic Life’.12. See Freud, ‘Lecture XXXII: Anxiety and Instinctual Life’, 83.13. Freud, ‘Lecture XXV: Anxiety’, 396. A commonplace circulated in the name of Freudian

psychoanalysis is that certain kinds of neurotic anxiety precipitated by childhood traumasmay be linked to an inferiority complex, a thesis that Freud attributes to Alfred Adler.The thesis, as Freud paraphrases it, is that if ‘inferiority can be prolonged from childhoodinto adult life’, then it constitutes ‘the final basis of neuroses’ (ibid., 406). Freud is criticalof this thesis because it undermines the centrality of the libido in his theory of neuroticanxiety. Tompkins once characterised Freud’s id as a ‘paper tiger since sexuality, as he bestknew, was the most finicky of drives, easily rendered impotent by shame or anxiety orboredom or rage’. See Kosofsky, Sedgwick and Frank, ‘Shame in the Cybernetic Fold’, 8,citing Tompkins, ‘The Quest for Primary Motives’, 309.

14. Freud, ‘Lecture XXV: Anxiety’, 39515. Kosofsky Sedgwick and Frank, ‘Shame in the Cybernetic Fold’, 23.16. Such ‘Ideologically charged projections’, as Gabriele Schwab argues, may ‘freeze’ and

thereby ‘produce located emotions’ that are less pervious to evidence that qualifiesthem, or to spatiotemporal flux that might attenuate their charge, sealing the hatedbody ‘into crushing objecthood’ (Schwab, Haunting Legacies, 112–13, citing Ahmed,The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 57). For an elaboration on ‘viscerality’ as a mode of‘reasoning’ in the face of imploded solidarity, see Ball, ‘Precarious Civility’, 104–28.

17. Sznaider, ‘Suffering as a Universal Frame for Understanding Memory Politics’, 241,citing Alexander, ‘Toward a Theory of Cultural Trauma’, 1.

18. Schwab, Haunting Legacies, 114, citing Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 58;Brown, States of Injury, and Berlant, ‘The Face of America and the State ofEmergency’, 309–10.

19. Freudian disavowal or denial (Verleugnung) designates a refusal to recognise atraumatic reality. In their entry on disavowal, J. Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis remarkthat Freud defines this term so as to characterise the little boy’s defense against histraumatic discovery that the woman lacks a penis. See Laplanche and Pontalis,‘Disavowal (Denial)’, 118–21. Slavoj Žižek’s various illustrations of the logic ofdisavowal to explain the operation of ideology allow for more varied applications. InŽižek’s terms, the subjects of disavowal know very well what they do, but deny thatthey know it (the unknown known). For his theses on the paranoid logic thatundergirds resentment toward Jews and others as ‘thieves of enjoyment’, see Žižek,‘Eastern Europe’s Republics of Gilead’. See also, Žižek, Looking Awry.

20. Sznaider criticises the reification of the Holocaust as a negative foundational moment



that dislodges it from space and time, thereby blurring the distinction betweenhistorical and structural trauma, the personal and the collective, the real and theimagined (Sznaider, ‘Suffering as a Universal Frame for Understanding MemoryPolitics’, 242–3). While Sznaider argues that the Holocaust’s reified iconic status as a‘universal trauma’ has allowed victimhood to symbolise ‘grace and moralrighteousness’ rather than shame, it has also transformed assumptions about thebystanders of mass violence. From a historical standpoint, to the extent that ThirdReich German civilians managed to salvage their sense of a normal life by suppressingconcern for their persecuted, deported, looted and murdered Jewish neighbours, theirdisregard helped to install the infrastructure of the Final Solution; however, from theuniversal trauma perspective that troubles Sznaider, the bystanders’ capacity fordisassociation resonates as a warning for us all. It is for this very reason that Deancriticises the didacticism in some bystander studies that replace the victim-perpetratordyad ‘with a fantasmic “we” of common humanity figured variously as powerless,numbed, or passively complicit witnesses to suffering they did not themselves directlycause’. The ‘retrospective identification with ... “normal” people who watchedindifferently or helplessly and therefore numbly or guiltily, is apologetic’, in Dean’sassessment, because it ‘unwittingly repeats the self-protective numbness into whichsome have argued onlookers must have retreated’ and ‘once again “forgets” the victimsexcept as those “we” could not help or against whose pain we would naturally protectourselves.’ The recourse to this self-sanctifying ‘we’ symbolically occludes the victims’experiences while deferring the chance to save the solidarity that was missed ‘to afuture when lessons will have been learned’. Solidarity is thus affirmed ‘retrospectivelyin a lesson about the consequences of human frailty: this is what happened, this is whatwas not done to prevent it, and this is what “we”, frail humanity, must make sure doesnot happen in the future’ (Dean, Fragility of Empathy, 104 and 80). The naïve fantasyof futural solidiarity prompts Dean to question ‘how much the predominantconstruction of bystander indifference derives from a longing that “we” would havedone or will do something differently when the time comes, accompanied by anequally powerful fear that we will not’ (ibid., 105).

21. In the aftermath of Germany’s defeat, Theodor W. Adorno reproved war-generationGermans for their defensive rationalisations deflecting responsibility for the ThirdReich’s atrocities. See Adorno’s 1959 essay, ‘The Meaning of Working Through thePast’, 89–103. In conversation, Noah Benninga has speculated that the Germans’betrayal of the survival consensus redoubled their resentment against surviving Jews asVolkschaedlinge twice over, who corrupted the racial purity of das Volksgemeinschaftbefore the war and exposed its lethal hypocrisy afterward.

22. Schwab, Haunting Legacies, 114, citing the Mitscherlichs, The Inability to Mourn. Fora canonical theorisation of ‘encrypting’, see Abraham and Torok, The Shell and theKernel. For an ethnographic treatment of selective memory among the descendants ofthe war generations, see Welzer et al., ‘Opa war kein Nazi’.

23. Butler, Parting Ways, 129.24. Butler, Frames of War, 26. See also Butler, Precarious Life. Butler is drawing upon

Giorgio Agamben’s ‘state of exception’ theses on sovereignty. A ‘state of exception’transpires, according to Agamben, when ‘the system interiorizes what exceeds itthrough an interdiction and in this way “designates itself as interior to itself ”’. Hence,‘the situation created in the exception has the peculiar characteristic that it cannot bedefined either as a situation of fact or as a situation of right, but instead institutes aparadoxical threshold of indistinction between the two’. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 18,citing Blanchot, L’entretien infini; Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, 292. Drawinglessons from Hannah Arendt’s configuration of totalitarianism to revise MichelFoucault’s conception of biopower, Agamben’s ‘state of exception’ topos ultimately


Electronic Offprint


formalises the implications of Carl Schmitt’s ‘state of emergency’ protocol as aunilateral expansion of state sovereignty that purports to justify the arbitraryexpropriation of citizenship from ‘enemies of state’.

25. Eley, ‘Ordinary Germans, Nazism, and Judeocide’, 11.26. A metapsychological emphasis on psychic figuration shores up the well-trodden

scapegoat thesis emphasising the xenophobic, racial or ethnoreligious focalisation ofinsecurities in search of a cause – the purported source of actual and perceived slights.

27. Himka, ‘How to Think about Difficult Things’. See also Mendelsohn, The Lost.28. See Himka, ‘The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and the Ukrainian Insurgent

Army’, 83–101.29. See Himka, Ukrainians, Jews, and the Holocaust.30. See Himka, ‘The Lviv Pogrom of 1941’, 209–43; Himka, ‘Ethnicity and the Reporting

of Mass Murder’, 379–98.31. John-Paul Himka cites Mendelsohn paraphrasing his grandfather: ‘The Germans were

bad, my grandfather used to tell me, describing – from what authority, from whatsources, from what hearsay I do not and cannot know – what happened to Bolechow’sJews during World War II. The Poles were worse. But the Ukrainians were worst of all.A month before I went to Ukraine ... I stood in the stifling lobby of the Ukrainianconsulate on East Forty-ninth Street in New York, waiting for a visa, and as I stoodthere I would look around at the people standing next to me, who were all talkinganimatedly and often exasperatedly in Ukrainian to each other, yelling at the solitaryofficer behind the bulletproof glass, and the line the Ukrainians were the worst wouldgo through my head, over and over, acquiring its own kind of rhythm’ (Mendelsohn,The Lost, 100, cited by Himka, ‘How to Think about Difficult Things’).

32. Himka, ‘How to Think about Difficult Things’, citing Mendelsohn, The Lost, 493.33. Ibid., 227–8.34. Of course, taking pleasure in the pain of others is not limited to black-booted sadists who

have landed in movies more frequently than international courts. Although compassionfor victims and indignation at perpetrators will ratchet up a reader’s outrage, thefocalisation that Himka stages and that I voyeuristically redouble by reproducing hisMendelsohn citation brings me to the crux of an ethical paradox: my fascination withtrangression is inseparable from fantasy – the inner visualisations that supply the grist fora compassionate identification with victims and outraged condemnations of perpetrators.I consider the implications of the continuum between the empathetic imagination andfantasy in Chapter 5 of Ball, Disciplining the Holocaust entitled ‘UnspeakableDifferences, Obscene Pleasures: On the Holocaust as an Object of Desire’, 193–218.

35. In Gross’s words, ‘There were things people could have done at the time and refrainedfrom doing; and there were things they did not have to do but nevertheless did’ (Gross,Neighbors, xix).

36. Aleksiun, ‘Polish Historiography of the Holocaust’, 407.37. Ibid., 406 and 407. ‘[W]ith the exception of the period immediately after the Second

World War’, Aleksiun writes, ‘twentieth-century Polish historiography of theHolocaust scarcely seems to exist as a category’ (ibid., 409).

38. Gross, Neighbors, 2–3.39. Ibid., 55.40. Ibid., 87.41. Ibid., 114.42. Ibid., 78.43. Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners.44. Gross, Neighbors, 138–9, cited by Aleksiun, ‘Polish Historiography of the Holocaust’,

407, note 6.45. Ibid., 143–4, cited by Aleksiun, ‘Polish Historiography of the Holocaust’, 408.



46. While I hesitate to label this style ‘minimalist’, as Dean characterises its ‘chronicle’form, she is right to stress how Gross’s ‘hyper-empiricism’ launches ‘a shattering, brutalassault on any attempt to deny what happened rather than a cool-headed, sober, andconstrained account of things’. See Dean, Aversion and Erasure, 125, citing Hole,‘Working through Jan Gross’s Neighbors’, 453–9, and Hagen, ‘A “Potent, DevilishMixture” of Motives’, 466–75.

47. See Adam Czarnota’s discussion of the ‘romantic-messianic’ vision of Polishness in‘The Polish Community of Amnesia’, 317. According to Czarnota, Polish-national self-understanding cherishes a ‘romantic-messianic’ vision, which conjures ‘a Polandtormented by its neighbors, by the Prussian boot and the Russian Knout’. In this vision,Poles in search of freedom and independence fought for ‘your and our’ freedom, inother words, for all the oppressed nations’ and their respective lost causes. Themessianic valence of this vision thus ‘manifested itself in the image of a Polandsuffering like Christ for others, so that others might lead better lives’. As Czarnotaemphasises, before the debate provoked by Gross, ‘the “Jewish question” had no placein such a national self-image’ (317). On the resiliency of the blood libel in Polishideology, see Gross, Fear.

48. Czarnota, ‘The Polish Community of Amnesia’, 316.49. Aleksiun, ‘Polish Historiography of the Holocaust’, 409, citing Blonski, ‘The Poor

Poles Look at the Ghetto’, 1–33. Aleksiun reports that the Blonski text originallyappeared in the Krakow-based Catholic weekly, Tygodnik Powszechny on 17 January1987. Ibid.

50. Czarnota, ‘The Polish Community of Amnesia’, 313 and 317.51. Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory, 270. Against Pierre Nora’s insistence that

disciplinary history ‘is best situated to help society overcome the intolerable“conflictual incompatibility of memories” in a multicultural public sphere’, MichaelRothberg emphasises how ‘coming to terms with the past always happens incomparative contexts and via the circulation of memories linked to what are onlyapparently separate histories and national or ethnic constituencies’ (ibid., 235 and 272,citing Buob and Franchon, ‘“La France est malade de sa mémoire”’, 6–9).

52. See Dean, Aversion and Erasure.53. Ibid., 142.54. See Broszat and Friedländer, ‘A Controversy about the Historicization of National

Socialism’, 85–126. For an alternative view of the professional historian’s role asarbiter in the divisive realm of memory politics, see Moses, ‘Hayden White, TraumaticNationalism, and the Public Role of History’, 311–32. See also Hayden White’s replyto Moses, and Moses’s response, in turn, to White in the same issue of History andTheory. For a cautionary tale about the politically and ethically dubious side ofprofessional historians’ service as memory adjudicators for the state, see Clifford’schapter entitled, ‘Identity in Mashpee’. This chapter remains highly relevant reading,perhaps particularly for students and practitioners of ‘disciplinary history’.

55. Broszat writes: ‘Das Besondere an unserer Situation ist die Notwendigkeit undSchwierigkeit, den Nationalsozialismus in die deutsche Geschichte einzuordnen.Vierzig Jahre Abstand haben dabei, so scheint es auf den ersten Blick, nicht vielbewirkt.’ Broszat, ‘Plädoyer für eine Historisierung des Nationalsozialismus’, 374.

56. See Markovits, ‘Introduction to the Broszat-Friedländer Exchange’, 81. According toJürgen Habermas, in carefully differentiating between understanding and condemning,Broszat purportedly loosens ‘hypnotic paralysis’ and thereby moves his audiencetoward ‘a healing and objectifying representation’ (Habermas, ‘A Kind of Settlement ofDamages (Apologetic Tendencies)’, 37). For English translations of the collecteddocuments pertaining to the Historikerstreit, including Ernst Nolte’s contributions, seeKnowlton and Cates (trans.), Forever in the Shadow of Hitler?, 18–23. For the articles


Electronic Offprint


in their original German, I have consulted Piper et al. (eds), Historiker-“streit”.57. Broszat and Friedländer, ‘A Controversy about the Historicization of National

Socialism’, 89.58. Atina Grossmann notes that Broszat joined Konrad Adenauer in weighing in against

William L. Shirer’s bestselling The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, presumably becauseit demonised Germans (Grossmann, ‘The “Goldhagen Effect”’, 98).

59. Berg, Der Holocaust und die Wesdeutschen Historiker, 615. While this article was inpress, an English edition of Nicolas Berg’s Der Holocaust und die westdeutschenHistoriker translated by Joel Golb was published in 2014. See Berg, The Holocaust andthe West German Historians. Except where otherwise noted, my references are to theGerman edition of Berg’s book and the translations are my own.

60. Dilthey, Meaning in History, 67–8.61. Broszat and Friedländer, ‘A Controversy about the Historicization of National

Socialism’, 87.62. Ibid.63. Ibid.64. Ibid., 89.65. Ibid., 89 and 90.66. Ibid., 90.67. My emphasis. As many readers of this special issue might remember, Dominick

LaCapra has commented on how this dichotomy between ‘myth’ and ‘history’ alsoinforms Mayer’s Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? LaCapra notes: ‘Mayer explicitlyrelies on an opposition between myth and history that defines and tends to reify thepresumably dichotomous positions of certain Jews and historians. The memory ofapparently unenlightened Jews is relegated to myth and acting-out, in sharp andunmediated contrast to the requirements of history.’ LaCapra, Representing theHolocaust, 83.

68. Ibid., 8769. Ibid., 101.70. Ibid., 102.71. Ibid., 95–6.72. Broszat writes: ‘If I myself had not been a member of the generation of Hitler Youth, if

I had not lived through its very specific experiences, then I probably would not have feltsuch a need after 1945 to confront the Nazi past so critically and, as we sensed backthen, to do this at the same time with “solemn sobriety”. As a member of thatgeneration, one had the good fortune of not yet being drawn (or being drawn onlymarginally) into political responsibility for actions. Yet one was old enough to beaffected emotionally and intellectually to a high degree by the suggestivity – soconfounding to feeling and to one’s sense of morality – which the Nazi regime wascapable of, especially in the sphere of youth education, and this despite the counter-influence stemming from parents, teachers, and acquaintances who were critical of theregime. An important portion of the potential for youthful dreams had been occupied,taken over by the world of Nazism; it was no longer possible to dream other, betterdreams’ (ibid., 112).

73. Eaglestone, The Holocaust and the Postmodern, 181, citing Berg’s Der Holocaust unddie westdeutschen Historiker. According to some commentators, Broszat was notformally admitted to the party. See Berg, Der Holocaust, 615. On Joseph Wulf, seeKempter, Joseph Wulf.

74. See Berg, Der Holocaust, 594–615.75. Ibid., 595.76. Ibid., 596, citing Wulf, Das Dritte Reich und seine Vollstrecker, 335.77. Berg, Der Holocaust, 596, citing Broszat, ‘Probleme zeitgeschichtlicher



Dokumentation’, 300f.78. Berg writes: ‘Bis heute ist hier leere, weiße Doppelseite, auf der lediglich in einer

Fußnote die apokryphe Erläuterung gegeben wird, nach welcher Kapitel 14 aufgrundeines Beschlusses des Landgerichts Bonn “für diese und weitere Ausgaben” entfalle’(Berg, Der Holocaust, 604). In Joel Golb’s 2014 translation of Berg’s book, thissentence reads: ‘Until the present, there is a near-empty white leaf at this spot, the onlytext being a cryptic footnote explaining that on the basis of a decision of the Bonnregional court, chapter 14 is absent from this and further editions.’ See Berg, TheHolocaust and the West German Historians, 221. I am grateful to Katrin Stoll forlocating this sentence in Golb’s translation.

79. Ibid., 612, citing Wulf ’s letter to Broszat dated 19 October 1965.80. Ibid., 613, citing Wulf ’s letter to Broszat dated 19 October 1965.81. Ibid., 597, citing Wulf ’s letter to Broszat dated 14 April 1963: ‘Sie dürfen mir glauben,

ich wollte jahre-lang keine Zeile über das Dritte Reich schreiben, weil ich selbst kaumannahm, daß ein ehemaliger Ghetto-Insasse und Auschwitz-Häftling, der Sohnermordeter Eltern, objectiv sein kann. Ich gebe zu, es hat mich viel Kraft gekostet, dasalles zu überwinden.’ Berg consulted these letters at the Zentralarchiv zur Erforschungder Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland in Heidelberg. Though he acknowledgedunderestimating Hagen’s ‘fatalistic’ disregard with respect to the radical anti-Jewishpolicies, Broszat nevertheless refused to consider the import of Wulf ’s evidence,conceding, on Hagen’s behalf, the discrepancy between intentions and outcomes. Thisconcession does not suffice, in Berg’s eyes, to explain how the mass murder of the Jewscould have taken place. Instead, it exposes Broszat’s ‘blind spot’ – that he is, by nomeans, free of an ‘unspoken longing for exoneration’ [Entlastungssehnsucht] and is inthis and other respects completely committed to a ‘pure German perspective’ (ibid.,614).

82. Broszat and Friedländer, ‘A Controversy about the Historicization of NationalSocialism’, 102.

83. Ibid., 108. In refuting Broszat, Friedländer cites Kershaw’s The ‘Hitler Myth’.84. Broszat, ‘Zur Struktur der NS-Massenbewegung’, 74, cited by Friedländer in Broszat

and Friedländer, ‘A Controversy about the Historicization of National Socialism’, 108.On this point, Friedländer also cites Obenaus, Schreiben, wie es wirklich war!, whichindicates that ‘the general population was much more aware of what was happeningthan we thought up to now’ (107ff).

85. Dean, Fragility of Empathy, 86.86. To shed light on Broszat’s apparent insensitivity, Berg calls attention to the

perpetrators’ influence on historians who consulted the former – sometimes in thecontext of personal or mutually beneficial relationships. Werner Best is one of Berg’smore blatant examples of historians who became insiders and whose relationships withperpetrator contacts imbricated them in a ‘legitimatorisch-defensiven’ discussion aboutthe Nazi Period (Berg, Der Holocaust, 578–80). Broszat’s colleague at the IfZ, HansBuchheim, was in close contact, not only with Best, but also with Richard Koherr, whoserved as the SS Inspector for Statistics as of 1939 (ibid., 580). In Berg’s assessment,Joachim Fest, who wrote biographies of both Speer and Hitler, is a less extreme case,but a no less arrogant purveyor of the post-war historians’ tendency to convey self-serving and apologistic declarations among perpetrator associates as genuine andsufficient historical explanations (ibid., 592–4). In 1973, the famous German literarycritic, Marcel Reich-Ranecki and his wife, both Warsaw Ghetto survivors, were invitedby Fest to a party, where they were ceremoniously introduced to ‘ein dunklerEhrengast’, Albert Speer. Reich-Ranicki reports that Speer praised Fest’s Hitler. EineBiographie with ‘He would have been content with this, he would have liked it’. SeeReich-Ranicki, The Author of Himself, 342. See also Dean’s discussion of Reich-


Electronic Offprint


Ranecki’s memoires, including this episode, Fragility of Empathy, 101–4. Berg goes onto observe that German war-generation historians were often so close to their subjectsthat the latter’s rationalisations may have been taken at face value. The implication isthat a self-serving ‘disassociation’ from systemic crimes against the Jews insinuateditself into the war-generational unconscious of an historical approach thatconsequently eschewed questions about intentionality. Berg hereby implies that thefunctionalist-structuralist trajectory in Nazi period historiography may have literalisedthe action-intention splitting tendencies of bureau-speak in perpetrator testimony.Indeed, it is possible that this paradigm became descriptively persuasive because,between 1933 and 1945, Hitler’s followers already acted as conscious structuralistswhose euphemistic objectification of their crimes prefigured a ‘scientific’ attitude thatformalised rather than challenged the perpetrators’ defensive self-distantiations (Berg,Der Holocaust, 576). Hence, Hans Frank, General Governor of Poland, bracketed hisagency when he proclaimed that, ‘Hitler was alone the causa efficiens of all thathappened’, while Rudolph Höß deflected the consequences of his service as theCommander of Auschwitz in claiming that, ‘[he had] never personally harmed or killeda prisoner’; Albert Speer, Hitler’s minister of transportation and armaments, dismissedthe need for apology [‘Doch ich bin ohne apologie’] (ibid., 575, 583 n.52, 590). Bergalso indicates a repertoire of stock adjectives such as ‘anonymous’, ‘bureaucratic’,‘industrial’, ‘hygienic’, ‘impersonal’ and ‘managerial’, which evacuated indices ofinitiative in historiography mediated by perpetrators while naturalising their‘kleinbürgerliche’ understanding of their own obedience (ibid., 574).

87. Dean, Fragility of Empathy, 92–3, citing Friedländer, ‘The Wehrmacht, GermanSociety, and the Knowledge of the Mass Extermination of the Jews’, 26–7.

88. Dean, Fragility of Empathy, 93, paraphrasing Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews,5 and 117–18.

89. See Dean, Fragility of Empathy, 81. See also Dean’s endnote for this claim, whichcontains a valuable bibliography (174, n. 25). Dean cites Ian Kershaw, who notes that‘there is incontrovertible evidence that knowledge of atrocities and mass shootings ofJews in the east was fairly widespread, mostly in the nature of rumor brought home bysoldiers on leave’. See Kershaw, Popular Opinion and Political Dissent in the ThirdReich, 364, cited by Dean, Fragility of Empathy, 84. David Bankier contends that ‘theGerman population welcomed anti-Semitic measures and did not generally opposeattacks on Jews and yet also did not want to know these things ... or, what was worse,it did not want to know what it actually knew because “knowledge generated guilt”’.Hans Mommsen shares Bankier’s sense ‘that Germans who did not want to know hadways of avoiding knowledge’ (Dean, Fragility of Empathy, 84–5, citing Bankier, TheGermans and the Final Solution, 156, and Mommsen, From Weimar to Auschwitz,225).

90. Dean, Fragility of Empathy, 99.91. Ibid., 90.92. Browning, Collected Memories, 42, cited by Dean, Aversion and Erasure, 146. Dean

criticises Browning for ‘reintroduc[ing] the divide between history and memorythrough the back door’ by ‘insist[ing], finally, on a neo-positivist use of as-empirically-verifiable-as-possible memories’. ‘In so doing’, she writes, ‘he risks creating apresupposition of who is credible and who is not that potentially generates a story asphantasmatic (as characterised by denial, rejection, and repression) as those narrativesobsessed by commemoration and the sanctity of survivors’ (ibid., 147).

93. It might be said that, in his treatment of Wulf as well as his denigration of Jewishmemory in the exchange with Friedländer, Broszat compulsively repeats the obtusecoldness that Theodor W. Adorno once derided in Negative Dialectics as ‘the basicprinciple of bourgeois subjectivity, without which there could have been no Auschwitz’



(Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 363). Seeming to amplify Adorno here, Agamben readsPrimo Levi as reminding us that Auschwitz ‘is the site in which it is not decent toremain decent, in which those who believed themselves to preserve their dignity andself-respect experience shame with respect to those who did not’ (Agamben, Remnantsof Auschwitz, 60).

94. Czarnota, ‘The Polish Community of Amnesia’, 317. Czarnota also cites AvishaiMargalit’s definition of a ‘moral witness’ as one ‘whose goal is to preserve the witnessof suffering for future moral communities’, but who can only fulfil this task if he orshe has ‘directly seen the suffering and terrors, news of which he [sic] then passes on’(318). Czarnota acknowledes that Gross does not fulfil this ‘necessary condition’, butthe historian nevertheless acts as ‘a kind of proxy moral witness’ (318).

95. Ibid., 319. Czarnote writes: ‘The debate triggered by Gross’s book served tounderwrite the Polish “romantic paradigm”, and, by inclusion of “the innocent victimsof history” symbolized by the Jedwabne Jews, allows inclusion of others to the moralcommunity and this “expansion of the circle of our dead” is closer to the essence ofPolish universalistic romanticism’ (ibid).

96. See Browning, Ordinary Men.

REFERENCES

Abraham, Nicolas and Maria Torok, The Shell and the Kernel, ed., trans. and with anIntroduction by Nicholas Rand (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994).

Adorno, Theodor W., Negative Dialectics, trans. E.B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1995).Adorno, Theodor W., ‘The Meaning of Working Through the Past’, in Critical Models:

Interventions and Catchwords, trans. and with a preface by Henry W. Pickford (NewYork: Columbia University Press, 1998): 89–103.

Agamben, Giorgio, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998).

Agamben, Giorgio, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. DanielHeller-Roazen (Cambridge, MA: Zone Books, 1999).

Ahmed, Sarah, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (New York: Routledge, 2014).Aleksiun, Natalia, ‘Polish Historiography of the Holocaust – Between Silence and Public

Debate’, German History 22, no.3 (2004): 406–32.Alexander, Jeffrey, ‘Toward a Theory of Cultural Trauma’, in Cultural Trauma and

Collective Identity, ed. Jeffrey Alexander Ron Eyerman, Bernhard Giesen, Neil J.Smelser and Piotr Sztompka (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004):1–30.

Atkinson, Meera and Michael Richardon, ‘At the Nexus’, in Traumatic Affect, ed. MeeraAtkinson and Michael Richardson (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press,2013): 1–19.

Ball, Karyn, ‘The Substance of Psychic Life’, in The Dreams of Interpretation: A CenturyDown the Royal Road, ed. Catherine Liu, John Mowitt, Thomas Pepper and JakkiSpicer (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2007): 321–35.

Ball, Karyn, Disciplining the Holocaust (New York: State University of New York Press,2008).

Ball, Karyn, ‘Precarious Civility: On the Motif of Catastrophic Betrayal in Kleist’s Fiction’,in Traumatic Affect, ed. Michael Richardson and Meera Atkinson (Newcastle uponTyne: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2013): 104–28.

Bankier, David, The Germans and the Final Solution: Public Opinion under Nazism(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).


Electronic Offprint


Berg, Nicolas, Der Holocaust und die westdeutschen Historiker: Erforschung undErinnerung [The Holocaust and the West German Historian: Exploration andMemory] (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2003).

Berg, Nicolas, The Holocaust and the West German Historians. Historical Interpretationand Autobiographical Memory, trans. Joel Golb (Madison, WI: University of WisconsinPress, 2014).

Berlant, Lauren, ‘The Face of America and the State of Emergency’, in Popular Culture: AReader, ed. Raiford Guins and Omayra Zaragosa Cruz (London: Sage Press, 2005):309–23.

Blanchot, Maurice, L’entretien infini (Paris: Gallimard, 1969).Blanchot, Maurice, The Infinite Conversation (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota

Press, 1993).Blonski, Jan, ‘The Poor Poles Look at the Ghetto’, in ‘My Brother’s Keeper?’: Recent Polish

Debates on the Holocaust, ed. Antony Polonsky (New York and London: Routledge,1990): 1–33.

Broszat, Martin, ‘Probleme zeitgeschichtlicher Dokumentation’ [‘Problems ofContemporary Historical Documentation’] NPL 2 (1957): 298–304.

Broszat, Martin, ‘Zur Struktur der NS-Massenbewegung’ [‘On the Structure of the NSMass Movement’], Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 31 (1983): 52–76.

Broszat, Martin, ‘Plädoyer für eine Historisierung des Nationalsozialismus’ [‘Plea for aHistoricization of National Socialism’], Merkur, 39 (1985): 373–85.

Broszat, Martin and Saul Friedlander, ‘A Controversy about the Historicization of NationalSocialism’, New German Critique 44 (Spring/Summer 1988): 85–126.

Brown, Wendy, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton, NJ:Princeton University Press, 1995).

Browning, Christopher R., Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the FinalSolution in Poland (New York: HarperPerennial 1992).

Browning, Christopher R., Collected Memories: Holocaust History and Postwar Testimony(Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003).

Buob, Jacques and Alain Franchon, ‘“La France est malade de sa mémoire”: Pierre Nora etle métier d’historien’, in ‘Colonies: Un débat français’, Le monde 2 [May–June 2006]:6–9.

Butler, Judith, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (New York: Verso,2004).

Butler, Judith, Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2009).Butler, Judith, Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism (New York: Columbia

University Press, 2012).Clifford, James, ‘Identity in Mashpee’, in The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century

Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988):277–346.

Czarnota, Adam, ‘The Polish Community of Amnesia: The Polish Discussion of JanThomas Gross’s Neighbors: The History of the Destruction of a Jewish Village’, EastCentral Europe/ECE 29, no.1–2 (2002): 311–25.

Dean, Carolyn J., Aversion and Erasure: The Fate of the Victim after the Holocaust (Ithaca,NY: Cornell University Press, 2010).

Dean, Carolyn J., The Fragility of Empathy after the Holocaust (Ithaca, NY and London:Cornell University Press, 2004).

Dilthey, Wilhelm, Meaning in History: W. Dilthey’s Thoughts on History and Society, ed.,H.P. Rickman (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1961).

Eaglestone, Robert, The Holocaust and the Postmodern (Oxford: Oxford University Press,2004).

Eley, Geoff, ‘Ordinary Germans, Nazism, and Judeocide’, in “The Goldhagen Effect”:



History, Memory, Nazism – Facing the German Past, ed. Geoff Eley (Ann Arbor, MI:The University of Michigan Press, 2000): 1–30.

Erikson, Kai, A New Species of Trouble: Explorations in Disaster, Trauma, and Community(New York: Norton, 1994).

Fest, Joachim, Hitler. Eine Biographie [Hitler: A Biography] (Berlin and Frankfurt: UllsteinVerlag, 1973).

Freud, Sigmund, ‘Vorlesung XXV: Die Angst’, Gesammelte Werke Band XI: Vorlesungen zurEinführung in die Psychoanalyse (Frankfurt: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1999):407–26.

Freud, Sigmund, ‘Lecture XXV: Anxiety’, in The Standard Edition of the CompletePsychological Works of Sigmund Freud Volume XVI: Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (Part III: 1916–1917), ed. and trans. James Strachey in collaboration withAnna Freud (London: Vintage, 2001): 392–411.

Freud, Sigmund, ‘Lecture XXXII: Anxiety and Instinctual Life’, The Standard Edition ofthe Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud Volume XXII: New IntroductoryLectures on Psycho-Analysis and Other Works (1932–1936), ed. and trans. JamesStrachey in collaboration with Anna Freud (London: Vintage, 2001): 81–111.

Friedländer, Saul, Nazi Germany and the Jews: Volume I: The Years of Persecution,1933–1939 (New York: HarperCollins, 1997).

Friedländer, Saul, ‘The Wehrmacht, German Society, and the Knowledge of the MassExtermination of the Jews’, in Crimes of War: Guilt and Denial in the TwentiethCentury, ed. Omer Bartov, Atina Grossmann and Mary Nolan (New York: New Press,2002): 17–30.

Goldhagen, Daniel, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust(New York: Vintage, 1997).

Gregg, Melissa and Gregory Seigworth, The Affect Theory Reader (Chapel Hill, NC: DukeUniversity Press, 2007).

Gross, Jan T., Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland(New York: Penguin Books, 2000).

Gross, Jan T., Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland after Auschwitz (New York: Random House,2007).

Grossmann, Atina, ‘The “Goldhagen Effect”: Memory, Repetition, and Responsibility inthe New Germany’, in The “Goldhagen Effect”: History, Memory, Nazism – Facing theGerman Past, ed. Geoff Eley (Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 2000):89–129.

Habermas, Jürgen, ‘A Kind of Settlement of Damages (Apologetic Tendencies)’, trans.Jeremy Leaman, New German Critique 44 (1988): 25–39.

Hagen, William W., ‘A “Potent, Devilish Mixture” of Motives: Explanatory Strategy andAssignment of Meaning in Jan Gross’s Neighbors’, Slavic Review 61 (2002): 466–75.

Himka, John-Paul, Ukrainians, Jews, and the Holocaust: Divergent Memories (Saskatoon,Saskatchewan: Heritage Press, 2009).

Himka, John-Paul, ‘The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and the UkrainianInsurgent Army: Unwelcome Elements of an Identity Project’, Ab Imperio 4 (2010):83–101.

Himka, John-Paul, ‘The Lviv Pogrom of 1941: The Germans, Ukrainian Nationalists, andthe Carnival Crowd’, Canadian Slavonic Papers/Revue canadienne des slavistes LIII,Nos.2–3–4 (June-September-December 2011): 209–43.

Himka, John-Paul, ‘Ethnicity and the Reporting of Mass Murder: Krakivs’ki Visti, theNKVD Murders of 1941, and the Vinnytsia Exhumation’, in Shatterzone of Empires:Coexistence and Violence in the German Habsburg, Russian, and Ottomon Borderlands,ed. Omer Bartov and Eric D. Weitz (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2013):379–98.


Electronic Offprint


Himka, John-Paul, ‘How to Think about Difficult Things: Daniel Mendelsohn’s The Lost’,Harvard Ukrainian Studies (forthcoming).

Hole, Janine, ‘Working through Jan Gross’s Neighbors’, Slavic Review 61 (2002): 453–9.Kempter, Klaus, Joseph Wulf: Ein Historikerschicksal in Deutschland [Joseph Wulf: A

Historian’s Fate in Germany]. Schriften des Simon-Dubnow-Instituts Band 18(Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Rupreht, 2013).

Kershaw, Ian, Popular Opinion and Political Dissent in the Third Reich: Bavaria, 1933–45(New York: Oxford University Press, 1983).

Kershaw, Ian, The ‘Hitler Myth’: Image and Reality in the Third Reich (Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 1987).

Knowlton, James and Truett Cates (trans.), Forever in the Shadow of Hitler? OriginalDocuments of the Historikerstreit, the Controversy Concerning the Singularity of theHolocaust (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1993).

Kosofsky Sedgwick, Eve and Adam Frank, ‘Shame in the Cybernetic Fold: Reading SilvanTompkins’, in Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader, eds. Eve KosofskySedgwick and Adam Frank (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1995):1–28.

LaCapra, Dominick, Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma (Ithaca, NY:Cornell University Press, 1994).

Laplanche, J. and J.-B. Pontalis, ‘Disavowal (Denial)’, The Language of Psychoanalysis,trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1973): 118–21.

Leys, Ruth, ‘The Turn to Affect: A Critique’, Critical Inquiry 37 (Spring 2011): 434–72.Markovits, Andrei S., ‘Introduction to the Broszat-Friedlander Exchange’, New German

Critique 44 (1988): 81–4.Massumi, Brian, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC and

London: Duke University Press, 2002).Mayer, Arno J., Why Did the Heavens Not Darken?: The ‘Final Solution’ in History (New

York: Pantheon, 1988).Mendelsohn, Daniel, The Lost: The Search for Six Million (New York: HarperCollins,

2006/2009).Mitscherlich, Alexander and Margarete, The Inability to Mourn: Principles of Collective

Behavior (New York: Grove Press, 1975 [German original 1967]).Mommsen, Hans, From Weimar to Auschwitz, trans. Philip Connor (Cambridge: Polity

Press, 1991).Moses, A. Dirk, ‘Hayden White, Traumatic Nationalism, and the Public Role of History’,

History and Theory 44 (October 2005): 311–32.Obenaus, H. and S., ‘Schreiben, wie es wirklich war!’ – Aufzeichnungen Karl Dürkefäldens

aus den Jahren 1933–1945 [‘“To write, how it really was!”: Karl Dürkefälden’sChronicles from the Years 1933–1945] (Hannover: Fackelträger, 1985).

Piper, Ernst Reinhard with Ralf-Peter Märtin and Ulrich Wank (eds), Historiker-“streit”.Die Dokumentation der Kontroverse um die Einzigartigkeit der nationalsozialistischenJudenvernichtung [The Historians’ ‘Debate’: The Documentation of the Controversyabout the Singularity of the National Socialist Destruction of the Jews] (Munich: Piper,1987).

Reich-Ranicki, Marcel, The Author of Himself: The Life of Marcel Reich-Ranecki(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001).

Rothberg, Michael, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age ofDecolonization (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009).

Schwab, Gabriele, Haunting Legacies: Violent Histories and Transgenerational Trauma(New York: Columbia University Press, 2010).

Sznaider, Natan, ‘Suffering as a Universal Frame for Understanding Memory Politics’, inClashes in European Memory: The Case of Communist Repression and the Holocaust,



ed. Muriel Blaive, Christian Gerbel and Thomas Lindenberger (Innsbruck:StudienVerlag, 2011): 239–54.

Tompkins, Silvan, ‘The Quest for Primary Motives: Biography and Autobiography of anIdea’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 41, no.2 (1981): 306–29.

Welzer, Harald, Sabine Moller and Karoline Tshuggnall, ‘Opa war kein Nazi’:Nationalsozialismus und Holocaust im Familiengedächtnis [Grandpa Wasn’t a Nazi:National Socialism and the Holocaust in Family Memory] (Frankfurt am Main:Fischertaschenbuch Verlag, 2008).

Wulf, Joseph, Das Dritte Reich und seine Vollstrecker. Die Liquidation von 500 000 Judenim Ghetto Warschau [The Third Reich and its Executioners: The Liquidation of500,000 Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto] (Berlin-Grunewald: Arani, 1961).

Žižek, Slavoj, ‘Eastern Europe’s Republics of Gilead’, New Left Review I/183 (September-October 1990): 50–62.

Žižek, Slavoj, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992).


Electronic Offprint


Tales of Affect, ‘Thick’ and ‘Thin’: On Distantiation in Holocaust Historiography

Documents

Transcript of Tales of Affect, ‘Thick’ and ‘Thin’: On Distantiation in Holocaust Historiography