The Victim’s Voice and Melodramatic Aesthetics in History

History and Theory 48 (October 2009), 220-237 © Wesleyan University 2009 ISSN: 0018-2656

Forum:on Saul Friedländer’S The Years of exTerminaTion

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The VIcTIm’S VOIce aNd melOdramaTIc aeSTheTIcS IN hISTOry1

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Saul Friedländer’s recent Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Extermination offers a brilliant new literary mode for historical representation of extreme events such as the holo-caust. he has produced an authoritative historical narrative of the holocaust, within which he integrates the victims’ authentic voices, as recorded (mostly) in their contemporary writings. This article offers a comparative assessment of Friedländer’s achievement with regard to the integration of Jewish sources into the historical account. It begins with a con-textualization of Friedländer’s book within a framework that compares the ways in which Jewish sources are addressed by different historiographical approaches. In the second part it seeks to contextualize analytically and critically Friedländer’s concept of “disbelief”—a concept by which he defines the role of the “victims’ voices” in his narrative. I claim that in our current “era of the witness,” set within a culture addicted to the “excessive,” the voices of the victims and the witnesses appear to have lost their radical political and ethical force. They seem no longer to bear the excess of history, and can thus hardly claim to be the guardians of disbelief. excess and disbelief have thus become the most commonplace cultural topos. In our current culture, I contend, the excessive voices of the victims have, to some extent, exchanged their epistemological, ontological, and ethical revolutionary function for an aesthetic one. They operate according to the pleasure principle in order to bring us, the consumers of holocaust images, the most expected image of the “unimagi-nable,” which therefore generates a melancholic pleasure and involves the narrative in melodramatic aesthetics. The article concludes by briefly suggesting some guidelines for an alternative approach to the study of contemporary Jewish holocaust sources.

Keywords: holocaust historiography, witness, Saul Friedländer, melodrama, Jewish histo-riography, cultural history, victim’s voice

Saul Friedländer’s two volumes of Nazi Germany and the Jews offer a brilliant, new literary mode for the historical representation of extreme events such as the holocaust.2 He has managed to produce what may be defined as an authorita-tive and integrative historical narrative of the holocaust that has elicited admi-ration across historical camps and orientations—from Jeffery herf, dan diner,

�. I wish to thank Alon Confino, Dominick LaCapra, Dan Stone, Doris Bergen, Michael Steinberg, Peter Novick, and Federico Finchelstein for reading a draft of this essay and for their illuminating remarks.

2. Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, vol. I: The Years of Persecution: 1933–1939 (New york: harpercollins, 1997); Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, vol. II: The Years of Extermination (New york: harpercollins, 2007).

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and richard evans to Ulrich herbert, hans mommsen, Karl Schleunes, and the Israeli writer and literary critic ada Pagis, as well as many others.3 The book has also won some of the most prestigious literary awards, such as the Pulitzer Prize, the Frankfurt book Fair Prize, and the leipzig book Fair Prize. It has been generally agreed that his historical approach and insights as well as his literary modes have set a new baseline for all future holocaust historical narratives, and that Friedländer has written the ultimate scholarly holocaust textbook. “he has written a masterpiece that will endure,” wrote richard evans. “a masterpiece of historical writing which has the accurate and penetrating intensity of a work of art,” wrote Klaus-dietmar henke.4

Without detracting from Friedländer’s great achievements in this magnum opus, I seek to historicize and contextualize it, applying the critical and analytical tools of the historian to this text, the better to assess its meaning. In the first section of this article I contextualize Friedländer’s book within a framework that compares the ways in which Jewish sources are addressed by different historiographical approaches. In the second part I seek to contextualize analytically and critically Friedländer’s concept of “disbelief”—a concept by which he defines the role of the “victims’ voices” in his narrative. The review concludes by briefly suggesting some guidelines for an alternative approach to the study of contemporary Jewish holocaust sources.

I. hISTOrIOGraPhIcal cOmParISON

as most commentators have asserted, one of Friedländer’s major innovations and achievements is his integration of the victims’ voices and experiences, for the most part as recorded during the events in diaries, letters, and other written genres, into the overall historical account. Thus, the authoritative voice of the historian-narrator Saul Friedländer, who sets the historical record straight in a powerful explanatory exposition, is continually pierced by the victims’ voices.

moreover, the historical narrative is framed by the fate of the victims/witnesses. It begins with the story of David Moffie, who was awarded his degree in medicine in Nazi amsterdam on September 18, 1942 (and was sent to auschwitz shortly thereafter), and ends with the fates of all those Jewish writers whose voices are heard throughout the narrative.5 These witnesses are thus honored as the major protagonists of this book, their fate not only integrated into the narrative but also framing it altogether.

3. Jeffrey herf, “The Whole horror,” New Republic (October 9, 2007); dan diner, “Jahre der Vernichtung,” Die Welt (September 30, 2006); richard evans, “Whose Orders?,” New York Times (June 24, 2007); Ulrich herbert, “die Stimmen der Opfer,” Süddeutsche Zeitung (September 29, 2006); hans mommsen, “Fassunglosigkeit, die sich mitteilt,” Frankfurter Rundschau (October 4, 2006); Karl Schleunes, “The years of extermination: book review,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 22 (2008), 340-342; ada Pagis, “The dead Will Not Stop living,” Haaretz (december 12, 2007) [hebrew].

4. evans, “Whose Orders?”; Klaus-dietmar henke, “die Stimmen der Opfer,” Frankfurter Allge-meine Zeitung (October 4, 2006).

�. On the framing of historical narratives of the final solution, see Amos Goldberg, “One from Four: On What Jaeckel, hilberg, and Goldhagen have in common and What is Unique about christopher browning,” Yalkut Moreshet 3 (2005), 55-86.

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Friedländer lists several reasons for using this literary device. These voices, he says, “are like lightning flashes that illuminate parts of the landscape: they confirm intuitions; they warn us against the ease of vague generalizations. Sometimes they just repeat the known with an unmatched forcefulness.”6 In addition, Friedländer offers another reason for inserting these voices into the narrative, which, follow-ing Alon Confino,7 I believe to be the most daring and interesting of all: “an individual voice suddenly arising in the course of an ordinary historical narrative of events . . . can pierce the (most involuntary) smugness of scholarly detach-ment and ‘objectivity’,” writes Friedländer. “The goal of historical knowledge,” he continues, “is to domesticate disbelief, to explain it away. In this book I wish to offer a thorough historical study of the extermination of the Jews of europe without eliminating or domesticating that initial sense of disbelief.”8

but while this gap of “disbelief” remains open, another gap—that which di-vides German and european history of the Nazi genocide and the Jewish history of the Shoah—is closed. “The history of the Jews has remained a self-contained world, mostly the domain of Jewish historians,”9 Friedländer himself reminds us. True, Jewish sources indeed play a major role in the book, but they always appear as “voices.” contrary to the integration of the perpetrators’ personal accounts into the narrative, the integration of the victims’ diaries and accounts lacks almost any synthetic, analytic, or conceptual framework. They are simply there, somehow piercing or punctuating the narrative. They therefore re-present the bare experi-ence of the victim within the historical account. Thus, while the perpetrators have a narrative and a history, the victims have only experiences and voices.10 They are individuals.

The innovative nature of this literary stratagem of including the victims’ voices becomes apparent upon comparison with other trends in holocaust historiogra-phy. most German and anglo-Saxon historians of the Final Solution tend to ig-nore the victim’s perspective altogether and rarely relate to Jewish sources, which in any case they can hardly read. These historians perceive their historiographical task as explanatory; they seek to explain how and why the events occurred, and in this respect the Jews had very little, if any, influence.

It is not that these historians are totally unaware of the Jewish perspective and sources or ignore them altogether. These “voices” are in fact frequently inserted into the narrative so as to reinforce or illustrate graphically a major claim made by the historian. moreover, some historians of the Final Solution have indeed dedicated works to the “victims’ perspective.” raul hilberg’s second book, for example, explores specific issues concerning the three major protagonists of the event—the perpetrators, the victims, and the bystanders.11 christopher browning has devoted an entire book to the value of testimonies, in which he discusses at

6. Friedländer, The Years of Extermination, xxv.�. Alon Confino, “Narrative Form and Historical Sensation,” History and Theory 48 (October

2009), 199-219 (this issue).8. Friedländer, The Years of Extermination, xxvi.9. Ibid., xxiii.10. Ibid., xxv, xxvi, 4, 64.11. raul hilberg, Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders (Newyork: harpercollins Publishers, 2007).


length the Jewish perspective as well.12 he has also edited and written an intro-duction to a collection of correspondence among members of a Jewish family in Poland during the war.13 Götz aly has written a biographical account of the eleven-year-old marion Samuel, a Jewish girl deported from berlin to auschwitz in 1943.14 but these and similar products represent only the minor works of these historians, and are by no means included in the major and canonical works of the field. Some are referred to as interesting methodological contemplations whereas others appear to be perceived as a kind of homage or tribute to the memory and humaneness of the victims.15 None are systematic reconstructions of the Jewish experience(s) during the holocaust. a very interesting exception is christopher browning’s forthcoming study of the Starachowice slave labor camp, which is based almost entirely on 292 survivors’ post-holocaust oral testimonies by which he manages to reconstruct the history of the camp.16 Nevertheless, Friedländer’s book still stands out as an innovative integration.

but Friedländer’s work also differs from Jewish and Israeli historiography of the holocaust. This historiography, whose roots go back to Jewish historians in europe (mostly Poland), the United States, and Israel during the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s,17 established itself as a systematized historical field during the �9�0s and 1980s through historians such as yehuda bauer, yisrael Gutman, and leni yahil. Very different from Friedländer, and contrary to German and english-language holocaust historiography, the Israeli school of holocaust research focuses for the most part on systematically reconstructing the internal life of the Jews under Nazi domination between the years 1933 and 1945. It follows the guidelines already set out by Philip Friedman, one of the first Jewish Holocaust historians (originally from Poland) in 1957: “What we need is a history of the Jewish people during the period of the Nazi rule in which the central role is to be played by The Jewish People, not only as the victim of a tragedy, but also as the bearer of a communal existence with all the manifold and numerous aspects involved. In short: our ap-proach must be definitely ‘Judeo-centric’ as opposed to ‘Nazi-centric,’ which it has been so far.”18

12. christopher browning, Collected Memories: Holocaust History and Postwar Testimony (madi-son: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003).

13. Every Day Lasts a Year: A Jewish Family’s Correspondence from Poland, ed. christopher browning (cambridge, UK: cambridge University Press, 2007).

14. Götz aly, Into the Tunnel: The Brief Life of Marion Samuel 1931–1943 (New york: metropolitan books, 2007).

15. The same marginality is shared by many local histories written since the early 1990s, mostly in Germany and austria.

16. christopher browning, Remembering Survival: Inside a Nazi Slave Labor Camp (New york and london: W. W. Norton and company, forthcoming 2010).

17. among the early historians, one can name Isaiah Trunk, Phillip Friedman, Gerald reitlinger, lucy dawidowicz, Joseph Kermish, Nachman blumental, and others. On the early phases of Jewish historiography of the holocasut, see dan michman, Holocaust Historiography: A Jewish Perspective (london and Portland, Or: Vallentine mitchell, 2003); boaz cohen, “The birth Pangs of holocaust research in Israel,” Yad Vashem Studies 33 (2005), 203-243. For the most updated discussion of this school see dan michman, “Is There an ‘Israeli School’ in holocaust research?,” Zion 74 [hebrew] (2009), 219-244.

18. Philip Friedman, “Problems of research on the european Jewish catastrophe,” in The Ca-tastrophe of European Jewry, ed. yisrael Gutman and livia rothkirchen (Jerusalem: yad Vashem, 1976), 643.

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This historiographical school seeks to redeem the Jews from their status as mere objects of annihilation by constructing them as historical agents in their own right—at both the collective and individual levels. In Israel, this history was written within the Zionist national history paradigm of “the Jerusalem school of Jewish studies,”19 which views Jews not as a religious, cultural, or even eth-nic group but as a national grouping, and which assumes, according to yitzhak beer—one of its founding fathers—that this history is “the organic outcome of internal forces.”20

Indeed, contrary to the holocaust historiography written in Germany, the Unit-ed States, and other countries, which focuses primarily on the perpetrators and bystanders, this historiography marks out the Jews as its major historical subject. Its main focus is institutional, and the most frequent issues it addresses are Jewish ghettos, communities, and internal Jewish life and institutions under Nazi domi-nation; Jewish leadership; Jewish ideological and youth movements; welfare and cultural activities within the Jewish communities; major Jewish figures; revolts and partisan warfare; rescue attempts; reactions of Jews and Jewish communities beyond Nazi domination to the persecution and execution of the Jews; anti-Semi-tism and relations between the Jewish population and the various non-Jewish eu-ropean ethnic and national groups during the holocaust; the ways in which states and institutions within and beyond europe reacted to the fate of the Jews during the 1930s and 1940s; and so forth. Israeli historiography also addresses various is-sues concerning the aftermath of the holocaust and holocaust memory. all these topics are handled within the conceptual framework set by, or at least in reference to, concepts such as “Jewish reaction,” “Jewish resistance,” and “amidah” (which may be translated as “spiritual resistance”).21

yehuda bauer, whose 2001 Rethinking the Holocaust constitutes the most recent conceptualization of the Israeli school in holocaust research, stresses in his introduction that: “The core of my interpretation appears . . . where I deal with Jewish reactions during the holocaust.” On other issues, he admits, he has little new to say. and while the major metaphor for the Jewish point of view in Friedländer’s account is “voices,” and his book focuses on experiences, bauer uses the conceptual vocabulary of resistance, reaction, and two specifically Jew-

19. I therefore relate here mostly to scholars who work in Jewish history departments in Israeli academia and in yad Vashem, who view Jews as a national group and therefore write their history from this vantage point; see michman, Holocaust Historiography, 374.

20. editorial article, “megamatenu” [hebrew], Zion 1 (1936), 1-5. On this historiographical school, see david myers, Re-Inventing the Jewish Past: European Jewish Intellectuals and the Zionist Return to History (New york: Oxford University Press), 1995.

21. It is worth mentioning that there is a group of scholars, comprising mostly Jews who work in american universities, engaged in research on Jewish culture and literature during and after the holocaust. alan mintz, Popular Culture and the Shaping of Holocaust Memory in America (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001), 36-84. Whereas Friedländer perceives the Jews as individuals and is interested in depicting their voices and raw experiences, and whereas the Israeli school focuses on “resistance” and “reaction,” this group relates to the Jews as a cultural entity and focuses on cultural and political continuity in Jewish life from before the war. For an outstanding and brilliant historical account of the Warsaw Ghetto clandestine archive and its head and initiator emanuel ringelblum, see Samuel Kassow, Who Will Write Our History?: Emanuel Ringelblum, the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Oyneg Shabes Archive (bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007).


ish terms, “amidah” and “Sanctification of Life,” and is most interested in institu-tional and collective frameworks.

Amidah, admits bauer, “is almost impossible to translate . . . It means literally standing up against but that does not capture the deeper sense of the word.”22 It includes, according to bauer, armed and unarmed resistance but also smuggling food; cultural, educational, and religious activities; and all other actions taken to enable individual and group survival. The second term that bauer employs, “Sanctification of Life,” was allegedly coined by rabbi Nissenbeum, one of the rabbis in the Warsaw ghetto, in order to invest actions of survival with religious or transcendental meaning.

The choice of these two specific Jewish terms is indicative of the tendency of this school to view the Jews as a collective historical subject with its immanent internal language and concepts. This terminology of resistance, reaction, and ami-dah, moreover, constructs the Jewish collective as a full and autonomous histori-cal subject, even during the course of the most traumatic events. These “thermo-dynamical” “counter” metaphors of resistance suggest that two physical entities are clashing with each other. The Germans apply pressure while the Jews react, resist, or stand up to them.23 a good example of this approach is provided by yis-rael Gutman, another pillar of this historiographical school, who writes in regard to Polish Jewry under Nazi domination: “Terrible decrees are being visited upon Polish Jewry. These decrees were intended to humiliate the Jew . . . to reduce him to subhuman status. . . . It turns out that these humiliating decrees did not have such a severe effect on the public nor the individual . . . the more the forced hu-miliation grew outwardly, so did Jewish pride grow inwardly.”24

This emphasis on terms such as “struggle,” “resistance,” “reaction,” “amidah,” and similar vocabulary developed, to a large extent, as a reaction to allegations emanating from diverse sources, according to which the Jews did not resist their murderers but had gone “like sheep to slaughter.”25 The early and very influential holocaust historians, Philip Friedman, raul hilberg, and henri michel,26 claimed that the Jews did not resist because of their tradition of survival in exile, which precluded armed struggle against their enemies. Very similar claims were often made by survivors, mostly ghetto fighters and partisans or Zionist ideologists. against this background the emerging Israeli historiography made every effort to prove the opposite: that the Jews had undertaken, as far as circumstances had allowed, civil, cultural, communal, and religious resistance in almost all spheres of life, and had, whenever possible, also resorted to armed resistance.27 The term

22. yehuda bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust (New haven: yale University Press, 2001), 120.23. See amos Goldberg, “If This Is a man: The Image of man in autobiographical and historical

Writing during and after the holocaust,” Yad Vashem Studies 33 (2005), 381-429.24. Israel Gutman, Struggle in Darkness [hebrew] (Tel-aviv: Sifriyat Poalim, 1985), 81.25. It must be stressed that, contrary to the by now common knowledge that this slogan was

offensively directed toward the victims and survivors by the ghetto fighters during the war and by the Zionists after the war, this phrase can be found in almost every diary as an expression of hopelessness and sometimes of shame.

26. Israel Gutman, “Reflection on Jewish Resistance under the Nazi German Occupation,” Studies in Contemporary Jewry 18 (2002), 109-125.

27. Ibid.

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“resistance” was thus stretched to its almost paradoxical limits, with almost every act of living considered as an act of resistance.28

although this school of historiography has recently admitted—as bauer does in his book—that such history, lacking, as he says, “Jewish traitors, desperate leader-ship, masses of disoriented people, etc., doesn’t adhere to reality,” it nevertheless focuses on the “positive” aspects of Jewish existence under Nazi power. It portrays the historical Jewish agent—both collective and individual—as active and reac-tive, whose inner self is mentally, culturally, and spiritually continuous, strong and even unbreakable; a historical agent who always “stands up against. . . .”

This is, of course, an extreme illustration of a far more complex and diverse tendency. many of the monographs written in Israel by Gutman, bauer, and their students dedicated to reconstructing Jewish life under Nazi domination also de-pict the aspects of discontinuity, powerlessness, corruption, and despair.29 how-ever, these scholars focus on institutional and communal aspects, and their debt to the conceptual world of resistance and/or reaction inevitably constitutes the Jews as full, continuous, active, and proud historical agents. Other, dissonant aspects are somehow relegated to the margins. Thus, for example, only one major study has addressed the problematic issue of the Jewish police in the ghettos: a doctoral thesis written by aharon Weiss in 1973, which was never published in book form in hebrew or in any other language.30

This historiography has thus failed to depict precisely what is so central in Friedländer’s book—the victims’ collective and individual experiences and their fragmented and destabilized “inner” world. The horror, shame, powerlessness, sense of devastation, cognitive transformation, disintegration of solidarity, struc-tural disintegration of their habitus, the everyday struggle for survival—all these and more are missing. This absence is all the more conspicuous given the writings of the Jews themselves at that time. These texts embody and often reflexively discuss such phenomena at length, at times with impressive analytical sharpness. They report the dramatic and catastrophic influences of external reality on fun-damental cultural concepts in the world of the victims. It thus becomes apparent that major and essential aspects of the experience of the victim are lacking in the writings of these historians, which have been, in a sense, sanitized.31

Friedländer, who is not committed to the assumptions and framework of this historiographical school but nevertheless seeks to integrate the Jewish perspective into his narrative, avoids some of these “apologetic” pitfalls. From the integration of so many minor Jewish voices and experiences, readers gain an impression of

28. Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, ed. Israel Gutman (Jerusalem and New york: yad Vashem and macmillan, 1990), 1265-1272.

29. See, for example, the following outstanding monographs: Sara bender, The Jews of Bialystok during World War II and the Holocaust (hanover, Nh: University Press of New england, 2008); daniel blatman, For Our Freedom and Yours: The Jewish Labour Bund in Poland 1939–1949 (london: Vallentine mitchell Publishers, 2003); michal Unger, Lodz: The Last Ghetto in Poland [hebrew] (Jerusalem: yad Vashem, 2005); and michal Unger, Reassessment of the Image of Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski (Jerusalem: yad Vashem, 2004).

30. aharon Weiss, The Jewish Police in the General-Gouvernement and in Upper Silesia during the Period of the Holocaust [hebrew], Ph.d. dissertation, hebrew University, 1973.

31. a contemporary writer who was very conscious of this bias and who perished was yosef Zelkovitsh, In Those Terrible Days: Writings from the Lodz Ghetto (Jerusalem: yad Vashem, 2002).


the fragility, destabilization, suffering, fright, and powerlessness that characterize the traumatized victims, just as they are impressed by the sharpness and sophisti-cation of the victims’ writings and their overwhelming sense of dignity.

as a matter of fact, Friedländer dissociates himself from the Israeli and Jewish historiographical school at the very beginning of the book. contrary to the as-sumption of the unity of Jewish history embedded in the Israeli holocaust histo-riographical school,32 Friedländer writes, “no obvious common denominator fitted the maze of parties, associations, groups and some nine million individuals, who nonetheless consider themselves Jews (or were considered as such).”33 This is one of the reasons why the Jews in Friedländer’s volume, as I have already mentioned, have no history but only voices. The Jews in this book are basically individuals.

II. dISbelIeF

as mentioned above, Friedländer’s primary aim in merging Jewish sources that express the victim’s voice into the narrative is not to reconstruct Jewish life, but, as Alon Confino illuminates most forcefully,34 to preserve in the narrative the sense of disbelief. I would argue that Friedländer’s concept of disbelief is closely connected to the much broader concept of “excess.” Ontologically, the victims’ voices are the embodiment of the “excessive” aspects of the events that negate rational, explanatory, historical narrative. epistemologically, they retain the initial shocking response of disbelief due to their excessive nature throughout the narra-tive, which fails to exhaust them or reduce them to “meaning.” I would therefore suggest that Friedländer’s insistence on disbelief should be related, at least par-tially, to what Dominick LaCapra calls Friedländer’s “partial affinity to post-mod-ernism,”35 which is overwhelmingly preoccupied with the issue of excess.

Indeed, Friedländer himself employs this term, “excess,” which characterizes, according to him, the historical event of the holocaust: “The Shoah carries an excess, and this excess cannot be defined except by some sort of general state-ment about something ‘which must be able to be put into phrases [but] cannot yet be.”36 at times, and in a variety of contexts, he talks about other related terms, such as the Nazi Rausch, which is radically uncanny and therefore exceeds the historian’s powers of explanation.37 This excess, with its various manifestations, lies at the core of Friedländer’s historiographical view of the holocaust, and as dan Stone rightly emphasizes, is also very central to his ongoing discussion re-

32. See, for example, Otto dov Kulka, “The ‘reichsvereinigung’ of the Jews in Germany 1938/9–1943,” in Patterns of Jewish Leadership in Nazi Europe 1933–1945, ed. yisrael Gutman and cynthia J. haft (Jerusalem: yad Vashem, 1979), 45-58.

33. Friedländer, The Years of Extermination, 5.34. Confino, “Narrative Form and Historical Sensation.”35. dominick lacapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (baltimore: Johns hopkins University

Press, 2000), 95-138.36. Saul Friedländer, “Introduction,” in Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the

“Final Solution,” ed. Saul Friedländer (cambridge, ma: harvard University Press, 1992), 19-20.37. See, for example, Saul Friedländer, “The Final Solution: On the Unease in historical

Interpretation,” in Lessons and Legacies, ed. Peter hayes (evanston, Il: Northwestern University Press, 1991), 23-35. For a sharp critique of this historiographical stance, see Inga clendinnen, Reading the Holocaust (cambridge, UK: cambridge University Press, 1999), 83-88.

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garding the adequate literary mode for a historical account of the Shoah. Stone quotes Friedländer’s renowned 1994 discussion on this topic, in which he adopts a postmodern literary mode:

The voice of the commentator must be clearly heard. The commentary should disrupt the facile linear progression of the narration, introduce alternative interpretations, question the partial conclusion, withstand the need for closure. because of the necessity of some form of narrative sequence in the writing of history, such commentary may introduce splintered or constantly recurring refractions of a traumatic past by using any number of different vantage points.38

however, as Stone keenly detects with regard to the 1997 Nazi Germany and the Jews, vol. I: “In terms of the task which Friedländer apparently set for himself in the early 1990s, the book is surprisingly conventional . . . in terms of breaking the linear narrative, interjecting the voice of the historian, and resisting teleology, Friedländer’s book does not quite fulfill his own requirements.”39 So, instead of a destabilizing narrative that might involve the reader in what lacapra calls “em-pathic unsettlement,”40 Friedländer’s first volume was a conventional, reassuring one. I shall return to this issue shortly, but let us first revisit Friedländer’s concept of “disbelief.”

The insistence on maintaining disbelief and excess in the narrative by means of the victims’ voices obviously also has an ethical dimension that was forcefully articulated, in a different but not irrelevant context, by Shoshana Felman. In her famous essay on the eichmann trial, Felman defends (against arendt’s harsh criti-cism) Gideon hausner’s decision to conduct the trial primarily on the basis of the victims’ testimonies rather than on formal documentation:

History by definition silences the victim, the reality of degradation and of suffering—the very facts of victimhood and of abuse—are intrinsically inaccessible to history. . . . but the eichmann trial, I would argue, strives precisely to expand the space available for moral deliberation through law. The trial shows how the unprecedented nature of the injury in-flicted on the victims cannot be simply stated in a language that is already at hand . . . the trial struggles to create a new space, a language that is not yet in existence. This new legal language and this new space in which Western rationality as such shifts its horizon and extends its limits are created here perhaps for the first time in history precisely by the victims’ first-hand narrative.41

One may argue that Friedländer, precisely like hausner (in Felman’s view), ex-pands the norms of the universalist objective approach in historiography so as to expand the rules of the discipline and to allow the excessive voice of the victim to be heard without eliminating its excessive nature and without totally domesticat-ing it.

38. Quoted in dan Stone, Constructing the Holocaust (london: Vallentine mitchell, 2003), 162. This passage originally appeared in Saul Friedländer, “Trauma, memory, and Transference” in Holocaust Remembrance, ed. Geoffrey hartman (cambridge, ma: blackwell, 1995), 261.

39. Stone, Constructing the Holocaust, 164.40. lacapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma, chapter 2.41. Shoshana Felman, “Theaters of Justice: arendt in Jerusalem, the eichmann Trial, and the

Redefinition of Legal Meaning in the Wake of the Holocaust,” Critical Inquiry 27, no. 2 (Winter 2001), 201-238. For a critical analysis of Felman’s involvement in the issue of excess, see lacapra, History and Memory after Auschwitz (Ithaca, Ny: cornell University Press, 1998), 95-138.


But is this indeed so? Does Friedländer really achieve in the field of historiog-raphy what Hausner achieved in the field of law during the Eichmann trial?

I have my doubts about this. Forty-seven years separate these two events. For-ty-seven years in which the cultural status of the witnesses and their story has changed dramatically. What may have been considered a daring, groundbreaking leap in the �960s is not necessarily so in the first decade of the third millennium.

Indeed, we are now living in the “era of the witness,” as the French historian annette Wieviorka has so accurately named it42—an era in which every historical or newsworthy event is mediated to the public by the victims and the eyewitness. We can sense this everywhere—in the popularity of the Oprah Winfrey Show, in the ways by which terror attacks are reported in the media, in documentaries, and in holocaust museums all over the world. “The individual and the individual alone became the public embodiment of history,”43 concludes Wieviorka. Owing to this development, the voices of the victims and the witnesses appear to have lost their radical political and ethical force. They seem no longer to bear the ex-cess of history, and can thus hardly claim to be the guardians of disbelief. In other words, in a culture addicted to the “excessive,” these voices provide the most expected excess and create the most believable and conventional disbelief. excess and disbelief have become the most commonplace cultural topoi. I contend, there-fore, that to a certain extent, in our current culture the excessive voices of the vic-tims have exchanged their epistemological, ontological, and ethical revolutionary function for an aesthetic one. They operate according to the pleasure principle in order to bring us, consumers of holocaust images, the most expected image of the “unimaginable,” which therefore generates a melancholic pleasure.

my premise here is that there are no essential elements within the “victims’ voices” that in themselves cause disbelief, and that whether they do so is always dependent on cultural factors. So, while in the 1960s the victims’ voices managed to produce what the formalists demanded of literature—alienation and de-automa-tization44—thereby returning horrorness to the horrors (to paraphrase Shklovsky’s expectation of poetry “to return the stone its stoneness”)—in the current culture these voices produce precisely the opposite, namely, pleasurable identification with human suffering according to familiar and expected protocols. This aesthet-ics seems to have a strong affiliation to the melodramatic, which, according to Peter brooks, is precisely about excess.45 I therefore contend that Friedländer’s book tends, in a sense, to melodramatic aesthetics.

Friedländer’s book is melodramatic in an additional sense. In order to explain this assertion allow me to quote at length from Confino’s assessment of this book: “The scope [of the book] is a sort of a total history (in a historiographical age that repudiates it) that ‘penetrates all the nooks and crannies of european space.’46 The narrative is held together by . . . the centrality of ideology as its driving force and

42. annette Wieviorka, The Era of the Witness (Ithaca, Ny: cornell University Press, 2006).43. Ibid., 97.44. Victor Shklovsky, “art as Technique,” in Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader, ed. david

lodge (london: longmans, 1988), 16-30.45. Peter brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination (New haven: yale University Press, 1976).46. Friedländer, The Years of Extermination, xix.

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unifying theme.” In this the narrative structure is causal and the cause itself is quite general; to the question, Why did it happen?, Friedländer’s book provides a very definitive answer: because of what he calls the “redemptive anti-Semitism” that dominated Nazi ideology. But as Confino rightly asserts,

There is a built-in tension between the success of this interpretation in convincing the reader and Friedländer’s wish to maintain a sense of disbelief. The more convincing is the answer to the question “What caused it,” the greater the domestication of disbelief.

The same is true for the interpretive framework of the holocaust as an integrated history. The result is convincing. but, again, a compelling rendition of this interpretive framework would work toward domesticating disbelief, regardless of the author’s intentions declared in the Introduction.47

This precise formulation of the innate tension embedded in Friedländer’s proj-ect strongly resonates with the criticism articulated by dan Stone with regard to Friedländer’s first volume on Nazi Germany and the Jews from which I quoted earlier. both note the disparity between Friedländer’s intentions and the actual, lit-eral outcome. On the one hand he acknowledges the issue of excess, which yields a carnival-like style of historical writing that tends to destabilize the authority of the linear, causal, and harmonic narrative. but what he actually does so virtuously is precisely the opposite. he reinforces authority, causal explanation, and mono-vocal narrative. Unlike the bakhtinian polyphony to which Friedländer seems to allude and in which the narrator’s voice does not dominate all other voices in the narrative but enters into a dialogical exchange with them,48 here we are actually given a well organized and harmonious narrative where the authoritative voice puts everything in its place. Instead of polyphony we actually get harmony mas-terfully orchestrated by the all-seeing historian-narrator.49

This historical narrative is thus an instance of what may be seen as melodra-matic aesthetics, since the melodramatic, according to many of its critics, is a kind of performance that signifies great horror and crisis, but at the same time immedi-ately reestablishes the moral order and its authority. Good is good and bad is bad; black is black and white is white. With the demand for unqualified identification from the viewer that stimulates an effect that heilman terms monopathy,50 the moral order is immediately reestablished. This is why, according to Peter brooks, melodrama flourished after the French Revolution when the moral order was shat-tered, when it transpired that nothing but a neck connected the king’s head to his body, and the transcendental perception of the king that guaranteed the ethical and political order was consequently smashed. Melodrama flourishes in such times since it acknowledges the disaster but at the same time immediately reassures one

4�. Confino, Narrative Form and Historical Sensation, 203.48. mikhail bakhtin, The Dialogical Imagination: Four Essays (austin: University of Texas Press,

1982).49. In this sense Friedländer’s harmonious aesthetics resembles hilberg’s book The Destruction of

the European Jews. See Hilberg’s own reflections on the harmonious, well orchestrated structure of the book in his memoir, raul hilberg, The Politics of Memory: The Journal of a Holocaust Historian (chicago: Ivan r. dee, 1996). For the most pertinent critique of hilberg, on this and on other issues, see Federico Finchelstein, “The holocaust canon: rereading raul hilberg,” New German Critique 96, Memory and the Holocaust (Fall, 2005), 3-48.

50. robert heilman, Tragedy and Melodrama: Versions of Experience (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1968).


that everything is in order.51 authority and morality are thus reestablished. This is what often gives rise to the feeling that melodramatic emotions are somehow shallow and insincere.52

This is precisely what Friedländer does in his book. While on the one hand the crisis and the magnitude of the event are acknowledged, thereby introducing an excessive element into the narrative, at no point in it does one feel that the excessive disbelief is capable of destabilizing the self-confidence of the narrator, who knows exactly not only how, but also why. authority and order are restored at once. It would appear that the unanimous praise showered upon this histori-ography by the critics serves to prove this point. The disbelief that this narrative provokes is exceedingly pleasurable; it is easily digested since it actually restores order without troubling or subverting any of our basic assumptions, including the by now commonplace moral imperative that we must listen to the “victims’ voic-es,” with which the readers automatically identify. For in our culture the victims are no longer the “others” who contain a grain of the unabsorbed real,53 to use a lacanian term, but rather are major cultural protagonists who absorb almost au-tomatically, and at times very easily, what, paraphrasing lacapra, may be termed “unearned” identification.54

This kind of melodramatic aesthetics, which is based on stark identification and dichotomy, is very different from the aesthetics of the tragic, for example. according to Oliver Taplin, (Greek) tragedy likewise arouses in its audience a kind of emotional identification, but in this instance “we feel disturbed person-ally for other people who have no direct connection with us and indeed belong to another world from ours.” Furthermore, “the emotions of the tragic experience are complex and they are of course ever-shifting. . . .” This quality of complexity in tragic emotions, continues Taplin, induces the audience to reflect critically on the complexities of the moral order of life since, alongside its emotional effect, it also involves critical, distanced observations. “The quality of the tragedy de-pends both on its power to arouse our emotions and on the setting of those emo-tions in a sequence of moral and intellectual complications which is set out and examined.” When this does not happen it is “merely a bad tragedy, sensational, melodramatic” (all italics in the original).55 an excellent, recent example of such

��. In this sense, the logic of the melodrama resembles the logic of the fetish as Slavoj Žižek defines it: “the symptom is the exception which disturbs the surface of the false appearance, the point at which the repressed Other Scene erupts, while fetish is the embodiment of the lie which enables us to sustain the unbearable truth. let us take the case of the death of a beloved person: in the case of a symptom, I ‘repress’ this death, I try not to think about it, but the repressed trauma returns in the symptom; in the case of a fetish, on the contrary, I ‘rationally’ fully accept this death and yet I cling to the fetish, to some feature that embodies for me the disavowal of this death.” Slavoj Žižek, On Belief (London and New York: Routledge, 200�), �3-�4. See also Slavoj Žižek, Looking Awry (cambridge, ma and london: mIT Press, 1995), 27, 34-39.

52. brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination.53. It is also worthwhile mentioning, following Goldhagen’s critique, that there are almost no non-

Jewish victims in this narrative, who as “others” remain outside of it. See daniel Goldhagen, “The War years,” Washington Post (may 13, 2007).

54. dominck lacapra talks about “unearned spiritual uplifting” and “unearned judiciousness” in the representation of trauma; see Writing History, Writing Trauma, chap. 1.

55. Oliver Taplin, “emotions and meaning in Greek Tragedy” in Oxford Readings in Greek Tragedy, ed. erich Segal (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 10-11. I thank dr. amiel Vardi for this reference and for his illuminating remarks on this issue, which we discussed in a workshop at bet Umar near hebron.

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a controversial tragic representation is Jonathan littell’s book The Kindly Ones,56 named after one of the best known Greek tragedies that deals precisely with the issue of revenge and justice. The public controversy that it aroused, together with the very complex identifications that it suggests, links it to the aesthetics of the tragic rather than to that of the melodramatic.

doubts have indeed been raised as to whether the tragic is an adequate mode by which to represent the events of the holocaust. This debate had already begun during the course of the events themselves. Fela Szeps, for example, writing in her Gruenberg forced labor camp diary, rejected the use of the word “tragedy” to describe the camp reality. “No,” she says, “our experiences don’t yet have an appropriate term for them. . . . We still have to find a new term, which will be blood-freezing like this reality.”57 a later and far harsher critique is that of Slavoj Žižek: “Tragedy allows its heroes to retain their self dignity. . . . To perceive the holocaust in terms of a tragedy misses the real scale of the horror and reduces it to the sizes of the normal. It is a kind of denial of the enormity of the catastrophe.”58 Like Sidra Ezrahi and others, Žižek resolves this problem of the tragic by favoring some kind of comic element.59 To my mind, however, this problem with the tragic and with historical representation in general resolves itself, in Friedländer’s nar-rative, through an inclination toward melodramatic aesthetics. This tendency to move from the tragic to the melodramatic is related to broader cultural changes.

One may say that immediately after the war, holocaust discourse tended toward the tragic, but toward a very vulgar type of the tragic. This was the tragic narrative that focused on the “resisters”—the ghetto fighters and the partisans who accepted their tragic fate after heroically and desperately fighting in vain against it, while the other Jews went to their deaths “like sheep to slaughter.” This kind of tragic national myth, which imitated the dominant mode of other european national re-sistance narratives regarding the Second World War, indeed “allowed its heroes to retain their self-dignity,” as Žižek puts it. But gradually this tragic narrative was replaced by a much more democratic and melodramatic narrative that allowed the far larger number of voices of ordinary victims to be heard.

Since then the history of holocaust representation has been consistently marked by the melodramatic—the anne Frank play; yehiel dinur (Ka-zetnik) collapsing on the witness podium at the eichmann trial; the 1978 mini-series Holocaust, which, according to many observers, was the trigger for the americanization of

56. Jonathan littell, The Kindly Ones (New york: harper, 2009). by comparing Friedländer’s and littell’s texts one gains insight into the way in which the historical narrative became more literary, victim-oriented, and “melodramatic,” while the fictional text tends toward historical realism. The latter is perpetrator-oriented and “tragic,” as if history and literature had switched sides and roles.

57. Fela Szeps, A Blaze from Within (hebrew, translated from Polish) (Jerusalem: yad Vashem, 2002), 78.

58. Interview with Ha’aretz, September 20, 2006.59. Sidra deKoven ezrahi, “after Such knowledge, What laughter?” Yale Journal of Criticism

14, no. 1 (2001); idem, “acts of Impersonation: barbaric Spaces as Theater,” in Mirroring Evil: Nazi Imagery/Recent Art, ed. Norman l. Kleeblatt (New brunswick, NJ: rutgers University Press, 2001), ��-38; Slavoj Žižek, “Laugh Yourself to Death: The New Wave of Holocaust Comedies!” http://www.lacan.com/zizekholocaust.htm (accessed may 21, 2009). The deliberation as to the appropriate genres for historical representation of holocaust events was expressed most forcefully in hayden White, “historical emplotment and the Problem of Truth,” in Friedländer, ed., Probing the Limits of Representation, 37-53.


the holocaust; Schindler’s List, which was also accused of being melodramatic; and elie Wiesel’s performance on the Oprah Winfrey Show. all these are clear melodramatic instances that not only shaped popular awareness of the Shoah but also marked some of the major turning points in its history. contrary to Jeffrey alexander,60 I thus claim that in the beginning was the tragic, which then gradu-ally made way for the melodramatic to take center stage.61

The decline of the heroic narrative and its essential protagonist the ghetto fight-er/partisan, and their replacement by the melodramatic narrative with its protago-nist the witness, reflects a broader cultural context. It is intimately connected to what eva Illouz calls the rise of homo sentimentalis in a culture that has adopted a fundamentally therapeutic narrative of the self. She regards this as one of the most prevailing features of current Western culture.62 In two of her recent books, Cold Intimacies: Emotions and Late Capitalism, and Oprah Winfrey and the Glamour of Misery,63 she portrays this cultural age as centered on the suffering of the indi-vidual, which becomes its major feature in constructing the self. Oprah Winfrey’s show is so successful because it presents individual narratives of suffering and self-improvement while portraying even herself, at the height of her successful career, as a fragile, post-traumatic woman. Such an image of the self is so popu-lar and fundamental in our era because “the individual has become embedded in the culture saturated with the notion of rights. both individuals and groups have increasingly made claims to ‘recognition,’ that is, demanded that one’s suffering be acknowledged and remedied by institutions.”64 Or, as robert hughes puts it: “Our culture is an increasingly confessional culture, one in which the democracy of pain reigns supreme.”65

In such a culture, I contend, the voice of the victim is anything but the bearer of disbelief. It is instead emblematic of our melodramatic age. It is in this context that one can understand the popularity of the victim in recent holocaust representa-tions: the flood of survivors’ memoirs published by the dozen each year; the popu-larity and centrality of video archives; the newly erected museums such as the new yad Vashem museum, the berlin memorial, and the recently inaugurated bergen-belsen site, which all draw very heavily on the victim’s voice and testimony.

as critical as one may be toward this tendency to melodramatize holocaust discourse, one should nevertheless acknowledge its positive aspects: the dissemi-nation and democratization of narratives about it; the emergence of a long-over-due empathy that the victims have gained as a result of it; and raising awareness of previously ignored psychological and psychoanalytical aspects of the holo-

60. Jeffrey c. alexander, “On the Social construction of moral Universals: The ‘holocaust’ from mass murder to Trauma drama,” European Journal of Social Theory 5, no. 1 (2002), 5-86.

61. One of the writers who most clearly performs this turn—from tragic existentialism to a melancholic, postmodern melodrama, is Imre Kertész. compare, for example, his Fateless (evanston, Il: Northwestern University Press, 1992) to Kaddish for an Unborn Child, transl. Tim Wilkinson (New york: Vintage International, 2004).

62. eva Illouz, Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism (cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2007).

63. eva Illouz, Oprah Winfrey and the Glamour of Misery (New york: columbia University Press, 2003).

64. Illouz, Cold Intimacies, 56.65. Quoted in ibid., 57.

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caust—to name but a few. From the 1990s onward many critics have in fact as-sessed the melodramatic genre itself far more favorably, and this should always be borne in mind.66

I do, however, wish to point out one problematic feature of the melodramat-ic mode. according to charles maier, two narratives compete in explaining the twentieth century—the holocaust narrative, and the anti- and then post-colonial narrative.67 broadly speaking, one may say that during the 1950s and early 1960s these two narratives served as political narratives and were closely bound up with each other. This is clearly apparent in the work of Franz Fanon, hanna arendt, alain renais, Jean Paul Sartre, charlot delbo, and many others.68 These two ac-counts, however, have parted company, and while the post-colonial narrative has sustained its criticism of Western societies and their liberal democracies for their ongoing structural involvement in acts of domination, racism, extreme violence, and criminality, the holocaust has become a reassuring narrative. It was the “bad guys”—the Nazis—who messed it all up, and as long as we stick to our democrat-ic values and strengthen our civic society while moderating radical ideological trends, we can protect ourselves from slipping into criminality, thereby reinforc-ing our identity as the “good guys,” the upholders of democracy and freedom. This is indeed a melodramatic picture.

When speaking about anne Frank, adorno recalls a German woman who re-acted by saying that at least this girl should have been saved, implying that the others could have perished. This is the most dangerous outcome of melodrama.69 according to the Israeli literary critic yitzhak laor, who has produced a thorough study of english melodrama, this genre focuses on the misery of a single indi-vidual or family, which, “more than it extracts tears, remains silent about a greater suffering that prevails all around. It is constituted from a kind of identification that does not demand any real moral action.”70 In a way, the holocaust lends itself to this kind of identification. It is so easy to identify with the Jewish victim when the Jews—collectively and many times individually—are no longer the victims of history but rather powerful historical agents, and to silence any empathy to-ward currently suffering victims—an empathy that demands moral and political strength and a far more courageous and complex engagement.71

66. See, for example, Melodrama: Stage, Picture, Screen, ed. Jacky braton et al. (london: british Film Institute, 1994); Melodrama: The Cultural Emergence of a Genre, ed. michael hays et al. (New york: St. martin’s Press, 1996).

67. See charles S. maier, “consigning the Twentieth century to history: alternative Narratives for the modern era,” American Historical Review 165, no. 3 (June 2000), 807-831.

68. michael rothberg, “multidirectional memory and the Universalization of the holocaust memory,” in Remembering the Holocaust: A Debate (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), chap. 4; idem, “between auschwitz and algeria: multidirectional memory and the counterpublic Witness,” Critical Inquiry 33, no. 1 (autumn 2006), 158-184.

69. Theodor W. adorno, “Was bedeutet: aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit,” in Eingriffe (Frankfurt am main: Suhrkamp, 1968), 143-144.

70. yitzhak laor, Description of the Development of a Genre for Mass Consumption: The English Melodrama during the Early 19th Century [hebrew], ma thesis, Tel-aviv University, 1983. See also his beautiful short essay in Ha’aretz (September 15, 2008), http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1020716.html (accessed June 9, 2009).

��. I follow here Peter Novick and others, who fail to find a true commitment to the values of human rights and freedom in holocaust consciousness. See Peter Novick, The Holocaust in


III. aN alTerNaTIVe aPPrOach TO The JeWISh SOUrceS

I have so far reviewed three (actually four72) historiographical approaches to the integration of the victim’s point of view into the history of the holocaust. The first is that of historians of the “Final Solution” such as Hilberg, Browning, Mom-msen, ali, herbert, heim, and others, who for the most part ignore the Jewish experience. The second is Israeli and Jewish historiography, which has registered important achievements in reconstructing Jewish life during the holocaust but which, in avoiding the “excessive,” ignores the radical destabilization of the Jew-ish experience of that time. The third is Friedländer’s approach, which brilliantly integrates the victims’ (mostly individual) voices into the historical narrative in order to preserve the excess of disbelief, but which, as I have demonstrated, also runs into some major problems deriving from its melodramatic tendencies.

as an alternative to these three, I wish to suggest a fourth approach, one that applies the methodology of cultural history73 to the historiography of the Jews in the holocaust.74 an excerpt from the lodz ghetto diary of Oskar rosenfeld from december 1, 1943, will serve to clarify my suggestion. This diary entry discusses an initiative in which rosenfeld played a part, to compose an encyclopedia of the lodz ghetto. The diary explicitly refers to a future cultural history of the ghetto and points to a most significant change that took place during this time: “The change of social, intellectual and economic functions brought with it a change in the most commonplace conceptions. concepts that until then were understood unambiguously everywhere among europeans underwent a complete transforma-tion.”75 This entry makes three claims, all of which point to the way a cultural history of the Jews in the holocaust should be undertaken.

First, rosenfeld speaks of “transformations”; to my mind this idea is crucial. rather than bauer’s concepts of reaction, resistance, and amidah, and Friedlän-der’s voices, experiences, and disbelief, I wish, following rosenfeld, to propose

American Life (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, �999), 239-262. In Jewish and Israeli political contexts one may even make the opposite case. See, for example, Sidra deKoven ezrahi, “To Write Poetry after auschwitz you Need the barbarians” (tentative title) to appear in: After Testimony, ed. Jakob lothe, Jim Phelan, and Susan Suleiman (columbus: Ohio State University Press, forthcoming 2009); and also Idith Zertal, Israel’s Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood (cambridge, UK: cambridge University Press, 2005). For a very problematic (to say the least) book that nevertheless contains more than a grain of truth, see Norman Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflection on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering (london and New york: Verso, 2001).

72. See note 21 above.73. On the relevance of cultural history to holocaust historical research, see dan Stone, “holocaust

historiography and cultural history,” Dapim 23 (2009) (the english section), 52-68; and the debate forum following it in which dominick lacapra, dan michman, carolyn dean, Wendy lower, and Federico Finchelstein take part (69-93). See also Alon Confino, “Fantasies about the Jews: Cultural Reflections on the Holocaust,” History and Memory 17 (2005), 296-322.

74. This broad concept of cultural history draws on roger chartier, Cultural History: Between Practices and Representations (Ithaca, Ny: cornell University Press, 1988).

75. Oskar rosenfeld, In the Beginning Was the Ghetto (evanston, Il: Northwestern University Press, 2002), 229.

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this as a key concept.76 I believe that cultural historical research of the Jews in the holocaust should focus on the fundamental transformations that Jews in the ghettos (and elsewhere)—as a society and as individuals—underwent during the holocaust.

The second claim embedded in rosenfeld’s text is that the transformation of which it speaks takes place at a deep level of fundamental concepts, which form the infrastructure of any given culture. These concepts, which, according to rosenfeld, are taken for granted by modern europeans, constitute the context within which one can identify and analyze the cultural transformation of the ghet-to population. In current terminology we may refer to the “deep categories” of culture that form its “world image,” as the middle ages cultural historian aaron J. Gurjewitsch articulates it,77 or to Foucault’s “episteme,” or to bourdieu’s “habi-tus.” all three terms, though very different from one another, nevertheless share a common feature: they all signify some deep structure that enables culture in the first place. This is, in my opinion, the direction in which study of the cultural his-tory of the Jews should proceed.

The third of rosenfeld’s claims has to do with his emphasis upon language. he asserts that the conceptual and cultural transformation that the ghetto inhabit-ants underwent is embodied in the language of the ghetto. Thus, for example, the vocabulary of basic human needs such as nutrition expanded dramatically, while “[i]ntellectual needs [were] pressed together in a narrow frame. They require only a few words, concepts or word association. . . . a collection of these linguistic and word treasures forms part of the cultural history of the ghetto,” asserts rosenfeld. “[T]he language is a more reliable witness and source of truth than other, material artifacts.”78

I share with rosenfeld the belief that a major emphasis of historical analysis of the holocaust and the Jews should be placed on language, which is, accord-ing to him, much more forceful in revealing the human condition than any other factual evidence or description. I believe that I do not overly diverge from rosen-feld’s meaning if I extend his notion of language to other symbolic practices, a term of which cultural historians, following clifford Geertz, are very fond. more precisely, I would expand this notion to include the practices and procedures by which the Jews produced, or at times failed to produce, meaning.79 Thus, in order to understand the condition of the Jews under the Nazi regime we should turn to fields developed in history’s neighboring disciplines: literature, linguistics, and anthropology—the science of symbolic practices.

Put succinctly, the historical analysis of the holocaust and the Jews should focus on texts, broadly conceived, and they should be studied as cultural expres-sions of the conditions of those who experienced the holocaust. The texts should

�6. In a sense I am following here Hannah Arendt, who was the first, to my knowledge, to use this concept after the war in this context, though within the somehow problematic framework of totalitarianism. See hannah arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism [1951] (New york: harcourt brace & company, 1979), 437-479, in particular 438-439, 458-459.

77. aaron J. Gurjewitsch, Das Weltbild des mittelalterlichen Menschen (munich: c. h. beck Verlag, 1996).

78. rosenfeld, In the Beginning Was the Ghetto, 230-231.79. david chaney, The Cultural Turn (london: routledge, 1994).


be rigorously scrutinized, not only in order to confer a sense of disbelief but also to conceptualize and gain a better understanding of what this disbelief is made of. Such a conceptualization would not circumvent, as Israeli historiography has, the radical, excessive aspects of the victims’ experiences; on the contrary, it would confront them directly. but on the other hand, it would not reduce the victims’ perspective to mere individual “raw” voices, as Friedländer does. In addition, this conceptualization would also enable or even invite a comparative study of victims’ experiences in various radical events of suffering and evil other than the holocaust.80 I believe that such comparative study is the real ethical and political imperative of our time, but this is an issue that exceeds the scope of this paper.

Hebrew University of Jerusalem

80. See, for example, the most morally compelling introductory essay, “a Victory,” by Jean-Paul Sartre, in henri alleg, The Question (New york: G. braziller, 1958). The book is a testimony by an FLN fighter who was severely tortured by the French in Algeria. Sartre makes a very interesting connection between this story and the Nazi occupation in France. I thank dr. manuela consonni for this reference.

The Victim’s Voice and Melodramatic Aesthetics in History

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