Microhistories of the Holocaust: between factual and fictional narrative

ABSTRACT

This article explores the complex relationship between fact and fiction in Holocaust narratives, focusing on the often-overlooked realm of microhistory. By applying Gérard Genette’s approach to narrative discourse, it scrutinizes Christopher R. Browning’s Remembering Survival and Omer Bartov’s Anatomy of a Genocide, thereby underscoring the distinction between microhistorical accounts and grand narratives. The core argument posits that microhistories, which emphasize first-person testimonies and bottom-up perspectives, introduce an additional layer of complexity to the line between fiction and nonfiction. Unlike macrohistories that center on broad social, economic, or political processes, microhistorical approaches delve into the lives of ordinary people and incorporate fictional elements to a greater extent. Consequently, the article emphasizes the significance of narrative theory in Holocaust historiography and explores the challenges of narrating the Holocaust through a microhistorical lens, which intensifies the use of fictional elements.

KEYWORDS:

• Holocaust studies
• microhistory
• narrative theory
• Gérard Genette

“It is very easy to recognize fiction, but very hard to explain it”

David Gorman

Introduction

Following World War II, Holocaust historiography primarily focused on elucidating the overarching themes and abstract dimensions of the Holocaust, with a specific emphasis on its legislative and bureaucratic underpinnings. Raul Hilberg’s seminal work, The Destruction of the European Jews, published 1961, epitomized this approach by characterizing the Holocaust as an impersonal and mechanized process, thus creating a significant distance between readers and the lived experiences of historical actors.¹ In recent decades, Holocaust historians have shifted their focus toward exploring smaller units, specific places, or events, as well as delving into the everyday life experiences of historical actors. These efforts, often categorized as microhistory, have the potential to offer a more personalized understanding of the Holocaust, endowing historical actors a greater degree of agency. The shift toward smaller-scale historical analyses, as advocated by the microhistorical genre, has also prompted us to reflect on the narrative devices employed by historians and the delicate interplay of factual and fictional elements in academic historiography. While the field of Holocaust studies has been deeply involved in scholarly debates on the complexities of narrative and representation, the present article expands this scholarly lens by delving into the often-overlooked realm of microhistory.

The article commences by examining how Holocaust historiography has approached narrative theory, with a focus on the debates surrounding Holocaust fiction and the controversies in academic historical writing. Building on this groundwork, the second section delves further into the domain of microhistory, followed by an introduction of Gérard Genette’s approach to narrative discourse. Genette’s model serves as a lens through which the main part of this article will examine two chosen examples of microhistories of the Holocaust: Christopher R. Browning’s Remembering Survival: Inside a Nazi Slave-Labor Camp and Omer Bartov’s Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz. Browning’s and Bartov’s works serve as representative cases enriching our comprehension of the complexities inherent to narrative construction and representation within the realms of historiography and Holocaust studies.

The decision to concentrate on Holocaust historiography, as opposed to other topics examined through microhistory, is rooted in the magnitude of the Holocaust and its profound implications for grappling with the concept of historical “truth.” The genocide of European Jews is not an event as any other because it challenges the boundaries of our conventional conceptual and representational frameworks. It is, as Saul Friedländer put it, an “event at its limits.”² Furthermore, microhistory, characterized by its emphasis on first-person testimonies and bottom-up perspectives, introduces an additional layer of complexity to the already intricate line between fiction and nonfiction. Hence, the underlying foundation of this article argues that microhistories can serve as catalysts for stimulating further conversations about the complexities of narrative and historical representations of the Holocaust.

Holocaust narratives between fact and fiction

The inclusion of narrative techniques in historical writing has long been a central concern within historiography, with its origins stretching back well before the emergence of modern historiography and Holocaust studies. Over time, historians deliberately incorporated elements from classical antiquity, where storytelling played a vital role in the craft of historians, as exemplified by the works of Herodotus and Thucydides.³ The concept of “narrative” also finds its historical origins in classical rhetoric’s “narratio” and can be traced even further back to the proto-Indo-European root “gna,” which conveys the notion of “knowledge.”⁴ Contrasting with these traditions, the development of modern historiography and its institutional practices, particularly from the 1820s onwards, is a tale that underscores the struggle to establish a clear distinction between empirical research and fiction. Leopold von Ranke’s efforts to demonstrate “wie es eigentlich gewesen” (“how things actually were”), along with subsequent scholars like Charles Seignobos and Charles-Victor Langlois and their devise “there is no history without documents,” championed the ideal of objective and empirically grounded history.⁵ However, doubts persisted regarding the possibility of transforming history into a purely empirical and scientific discipline akin to the natural sciences. Already in his Outlines of the principles of history (Grundriss der Historik) from 1868, Johann Gustav Droysen strongly rejected the demand for objectivity in historiography put forth by Ranke. Instead, he reflected upon different modes of historical representation: interrogative, recitative, didactic, and discussive.⁶

The modern understanding of narrative emerged relatively late in the realm of literary theory. It was not until the 1970s that scholars paved the way for a narrative turn that had a considerable impact on various disciplines outside literary studies and linguistics.⁷ Commonly used to discuss emplotments of interconnected events, the term “narrative” transcends specific genres such as journalism, novels, or history writing, and it is inherently unconcerned with the distinction between factual and fictional texts.⁸ This position had already been outlined by Doctorow in his significant 1977 essay titled “False Documents,” in which the author concluded that “there is no fiction or nonfiction as we commonly understand the distinction: there is only narrative.”⁹ To this day, historians suggest that history cannot fully abandon its narrative dimension, as it is an integral part of historiography itself. Historical inquiry has always possessed a dual nature, simultaneously existing within the realm of literary expression and engaging in rigorous examination of historical sources to make historical truth claims. This Janus-faced character has created a multitude of uncertainties and has left historiography in a perpetual state of flux. The tension between the literary aspect of historical accounts and the discipline’s unwavering commitment to an evidence-based examination of historical sources has thus engendered a field that is simultaneously aesthetic and empirical.

The significance of narrative theory is especially pertinent in the context of Holocaust studies, where the matter of “historical truth” deserves particular care. The reason is that fictional Holocaust narratives bear significant moral reservations, with Adorno’s admonition—“To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric”—looming over them like a proverbial Damocles sword.¹⁰ In a similar vein, Lawrence L. Langer considered that “there is something disagreeable, almost dishonorable, in the conversion of the suffering of the victims into works of art.”¹¹ The Holocaust is thus, as Berel Lang has emphasized, “not a conventional or ‘normal’ subject at all [since] the evidence of its moral enormity could not fail to affect the act of writing and the process of its literary representation.”¹²

Various arguments have been put forth concerning the perils linked to fictional depictions of the Holocaust.¹³ These concerns are particularly pronounced when fictional accounts embellish established historical facts, a phenomenon often pejoratively referred to as “faction.” Yet, the intersection of reality and imagination, historical accuracy, and fiction is an aspect we cannot escape. David H. Hirsch and Eli Pfefferkorn, the editors of Sara Nomberg-Przytyk’s Auschwitz: True Tales from a Grotesque Land, emphasized this inevitable dimension, among others, by highlighting Elie Wiesel’s acknowledgment that “sometimes it is only fiction that can make the truth credible.”¹⁴ In an imagined conversation with a Rabbi, Wiesel stated that “Things are not that simple, Rebbe. Some events do take place but are not true; others are, although they never occurred.”¹⁵

Leslie Epstein’s novel the King of the Jews from 1979 can serve as an example for further exploring this tension. Epstein’s spotlight is on the morally ambiguous politics of the Judenrat (Jewish council) within the confines of the Łódź ghetto. The narrative centers around Isaiah Chaim Trumpelman, an extravagant leader who bears a striking resemblance to the actual historical figure, Chaim Rumkowski. Although populated by fictional characters, the narrative is approached as if it carries echoes of historical events, despite its factual inaccuracies.¹⁶ James Young’s groundbreaking study on Holocaust narratives addressed these complexities and probed the ambiguity of characters in Holocaust narratives. Young emphasized that

it may be just as difficult to delineate this border between fact and fiction in the first place; for as long as facts are presented to us in fictionalizing media and fiction is presented as fact, the categories themselves remain all too fuzzily defined. If there is a line between fact and fiction, it may by necessity be a winding border that tends to bind these two categories as much as it separates them, allowing each side to dissolve occasionally into the other.¹⁷

Other writers focusing on the Holocaust similarly maintained the belief that comprehending history necessitates transforming it into imaginative expressions. Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel Maus exemplified the potential of employing aesthetic elements to convey the Holocaust. While the book narrates the story of Spiegelman’s father, drawing from direct interviews with him and often incorporating his own words when representing him, interestingly, Spiegelman’s effort to depart from a realistic depiction virtually accentuates the Holocaust’s overwhelming reality.¹⁸ The artistic accomplishment of Holocaust narratives, including Maus, lies precisely in the tension between aesthetic solutions and the subtle resistance against allowing literary forms to dominate. The incorporation of documentary techniques, such as the use of photographs in Maus and the inclusion of detailed witnesses from the death camps, indicates an internal reluctance to renounce elements of realism and facticity.¹⁹

In addition to discourses in literary studies, historiography has grappled with its own set of controversies regarding the same subject matter. These debates can be traced back to Hayden White’s seminal work, Metahistory, published in 1973, in which he introduced the narrative turn to historiography, leaving an indelible mark on the discipline.²⁰ White was not only interested in the aesthetic choices historians make when reconstructing the past. Crucial to his theory was also the idea that the past has no intrinsic meaning. As historians grapple with unprocessed historical records, their task is to weave together the fragments and form cohesive narratives, thus emplotting the scattered pieces to render them intelligible. White never claimed that there is “nothing outside the text” or that historians’ constructed narratives are purely arbitrary. Rather, he was unconcerned with the facticity of past events prior to their textualization. White’s body of work has wielded significant influence in dismantling the foundations of a simplistic historical positivism and directed our focus toward the elaborate process by which historians shape plots and narratives of events. Marie-Laure Ryan highlighted the profound impact of White’s work, as it effectively awakened “narrative theory out of the complacency with which it has long approached non-fiction. If rhetorical devices produce meaning in fiction, so do they in non-fiction.”²¹

I do not intend to reiterate the intricate theoretical implications put forth by White, as his intellectual legacy has been extensively examined by other scholars.²² What holds paramount importance for our purpose, however, is the impact of his work on Holocaust historiography. In 1989, a conference titled History, Event, and Discourse ignited a spirited exchange between Hayden White and Carlo Ginzburg, who, despite his expertise as a microhistorian, leaned toward a more traditional approach when grappling with questions of historical “truth.” This debate culminated in a conference on the boundaries of Holocaust representation, organized by Saul Friedländer at UCLA in 1990, and a subsequent publication of a conference volume in 1992 entitled Probing the Limits of Representation.²³ In his introductory remarks, Friedländer articulated reservations regarding White’s narrative approach, while also acknowledging the Holocaust as an event that challenges our traditional modes of representation.²⁴ The conference volume included an essay by White, in which he acknowledged that the Holocaust imposes certain limitations on the aesthetic representation available to historians. Notwithstanding his considerations, White was met with accusations of relativism, as critics expressed concerns that his celebrated historical imagination might inadvertently diminish the factual nature of the Holocaust. Carlo Ginzburg contended that White’s Metahistory echoed the anti-positivist stances of the fascist philosopher Giovanni Gentile.²⁵ In contrast, Martin Jay maintained a more balanced response. Recognizing “that there is no way to overcome the tensions” between the “truth” of facts and the “meaning” of their narrative reconstruction, Jay observed that both White and Ginzburg failed to establish a comprehensive perspective that combines both the linguistic mediation and the ability to make persuasive claims about truth in history writing.²⁶

These debates played a pivotal role in shaping scholarly discourses among historians for years that followed.²⁷ The interrogations prompted by narrative theory not only brought historians’ epistemological background assumptions to the forefront but also acted as a moral benchmark in the context of Holocaust historiography. White thus stepped into a deeply contested field of historiography when he was confronted with what Lubomír Doležel famously referred to as “the Holocaust test.”²⁸ In the ensuing years, Dan Stone further explored this aspect, aiming to find a middle ground and mediate between these opposing extremes. With regard to White’s legacy, Stone contended that historical texts are constructed,

but not out of nothing … History as a variety of poesis is not in contradiction with a rigorous reliance on the available evidence, which must be selected, interpreted, and written about in ways that are familiar to all historians … White’s claim that there is nothing in the historical record itself which tells us what the past means or which narrative explanations should prevail seems to have become widely accepted.²⁹

Stone concluded that “debates over the validity of historical arguments are a sign of freedom” and concluded that “history should stay ‘ceaselessly unfinished.’”³⁰

Friedländer’s conference, which sparked critical discussions on the representation of history, has continued to resonate in recent years. The most recent manifestation of this resonance is evident in a subsequent volume featuring White and Friedländer engaging in a thought-provoking exchange.³¹ Their encounter revealed that the disparities between their contrasting epistemological approaches were not as entrenched as initially expected; rather, they reinforced one another. Berel Lang has gone so far as to suggest that the convergence of these two positions heralded a “Pax Historiana—in other words, a warm peace instead of the Cold War” that many had anticipated.³²

Microhistory

As demonstrated by the preceding overview, the controversies on narratives in Holocaust historiography extend across a diverse spectrum of historical genres and disciplines within the humanities, engaging with fundamental questions of representation and historical “truth.” However, these facets gain particular prominence and urgency when examined through a microhistorical lens. As the following sections will illustrate, microhistorical approaches that explore the lives of everyday people, utilize fictional elements to a greater extent, compared to macrohistories that focus on larger historical frameworks. With this in mind, I will present a brief contextual overview of microhistory, before embarking on the analysis of Christopher R. Browning’s and Omer Bartov’s works.

Microhistory, along with associated genres such as historical anthropology, emerged as a prominent field within historiography in the 1970s, placing significant emphasis on the study of the medieval and early modern periods.³³ In the subsequent decade, German Alltagsgeschichte, the “history of everyday life,” was similarly conceptualized as a “history from below.”³⁴ Since the 1990s, microhistorical perspectives have expanded their scope beyond these realms to include contemporary history, including the Holocaust. However, it is worth noting that not all Holocaust historians who adopt bottom-up perspectives explicitly profess their programmatic allegiance to microhistory.³⁵

According to Sigurður Gylfi Magnússon and István M. Szijártó, microhistory is the intensive historical study of relatively well-defined smaller objects such as a single event, person, or a village. At the same time, microhistory aims for more far-reaching and representative explanations about culture, nations, or social groups. Microhistorians “search for answers to large questions in small objects” and try to show how individuals in the past saw themselves and their lives and the meanings they attributed to their environment.³⁶ Thus, microhistory should not be misinterpreted as a set of jigsaw puzzle pieces, the only purpose of which is to contribute to historical metanarratives. Rather, the focus on smaller units and spaces entails a paradigm shift in the way history is both conceptualized and written.

Microhistory has been occasionally linked to the emergence of postmodernism and narrative theory, although the exact nature of this relationship remains somewhat ambiguous. On the one hand, the “Italian school” of microhistory, represented by scholars such as Giovanni Levi, revolted against “the reduction of the historian’s work to a purely rhetorical category.”³⁷ On the other hand, Magnússon took up a typical postmodernist stance against metanarratives when advocating for a “singularization of history.”³⁸ This perspective is inherently intertwined with another fundamental aspect of microhistory, namely its pronounced utilization of literary elements. As Gianna Pomata claimed, microhistorians have the same effect on readers as novelists and referred to Carlo Ginzburg’s approach as “an ideology that had similar goals to the novel.”³⁹ Magnússon also emphasized that, although narration is crucial in all types of historiography, “in microhistory the stakes are especially high.”⁴⁰

The significance of microhistory within the context of Holocaust historiography becomes evident when we consider its emphasis on narrative and literary elements, as the main part of this article will illustrate. This is of particular significance because earlier academic discussions concerning the interplay between fact and fiction within Holocaust historiography, as previously explored, did not encompass the pivotal role of microhistory. Thus, the debates surrounding the role of narrative and fiction stand to gain greater depth and insight through the inclusion of microhistory. Having elucidated the main tenets of microhistory, my focus will now shift toward Gérard Genette’s model. His approach to fictional and factual narratives will serve as a lens through which we can analyze microhistorical approaches to the Holocaust.

Between fictional and factual narrative

It has become commonplace today for narrative theory to extend beyond the realm of fiction. Yet, the nature of factual discourse is still poorly understood.⁴¹ While it may be difficult to precisely gauge the disparities between non-fictional and fictional narratives, we do not have to go as far as John Searle, who stressed that there are no textual properties at all that indicate if a text is fictional or not.⁴² In fact, we have a variety of criteria at our disposal for categorizing narratives as either fictional or factual, and numerous approaches have substantially contributed to this field of inquiry.⁴³ To be sure, the line cannot always be drawn clearly, and there is no consensus as to whether there are universal signposts that delineate fictional from factual discourse. Nevertheless, studies such as Dorrit Cohn’s The Distinction of Fiction, questioned common postmodern claims that all narratives are fictional and showed that the differences between academic history writing and fiction can be systematically investigated.⁴⁴ This article will, however, employ another model as proposed by Gérard Genette. Although considered as one of the most influential literary theorists,⁴⁵ Genette’s theory is, except for Alun Munslow’s contributions to the field, far less known by historians.⁴⁶ Genette elaborated on his initial model from 1972 in Narrative Discourse Revisited (1988) and in an article, which was published in Poetics Today two years later.⁴⁷ By employing five categories—order, speed, frequency, mood, and voice—he focused on the question of how to discern between fictional and factual narratives. Genette’s model focusses first and foremost on intratextual aspects. Besides textual indices, there are obviously other, paratextual signposts, which indicate if a narrative is factual or fictional. The phrase “a novel” on a book’s cover may indicate that the work is fiction, while a referencing system clearly would characterize the scientific prose found in factual texts. There is a plethora of other possible markers, such as the opening words “once upon a time,” which, by convention, would indicate fictionality. While it is possible to extend the list of potential criteria, this exploration will limit itself to Genette’s five categories.

The following part aims to bring Genette’s theoretical considerations into dialogue with microhistories of the Holocaust. Taking Christopher R. Browning’s and Omer Bartov’s monographs as an example, I will discuss the ways in which these two accounts make use of fictional elements. Genette’s model will not be followed blindly but rather used as a blueprint for an enquiry into possible indices of fictionality.

Indices of fictionality in Browning’s and Bartov’s works

Christopher R. Browning’s Remembering Survival offers a richly detailed exploration of the Starachowice slave-labor camps which were run by Nazi authorities in the General Government in Poland during World War II. A microhistorical approach offered him a novel way “to explore the history of the Holocaust from below, as experienced by the victims and involving multiple actors,” with Browning underscoring that the history of the Holocaust “cannot be written solely as either perpetrator history or history from above.”⁴⁸ As the introductory chapter reveals, it was a flagrant miscarriage of justice in postwar Germany that inspired Browning to shed light on the history of Starachowice during the Holocaust. In February 1972, the retired police-officer Walther Becker stood for trial for his role during the liquidation of the Jewish ghetto in Wierzbnik-Starachowice thirty years earlier. In his verdict, the presiding judge eventually exonerated Becker and stated that eyewitness testimonies cannot be counted as reliable evidence. It is precisely these eyewitness accounts, dismissed by the German justice system in 1972, that are at the core of Browning’s book. By taking a rich testimony of nearly 300 survivors as a starting point, Browning unfolds a meticulously researched study that reconstructs the every-day life of the labor camps and their role during the Holocaust. The narrative commences with an outline of the prewar history of Wierzbnik-Starachowice and depicts how the early months of German occupation and the dissolution of the Jewish ghetto in 1942 affected Jewish life. The main chapters of the book narrate the everyday life inside the slave-labor camps, the Jewish prisoners’ struggle for survival, and their attempts to escape. By integrating a plethora of survivor voices into his plot, Browning reveals how multifaceted the motives and actions of Jewish prisoners, German occupiers, and Ukrainian guards were inside the camps. Besides bribery and corruption which were prevalent, Jewish prisoners adopted several other strategies to survive. Browning’s microhistorical account resists simplistic distinctions between passivity and agency and thus demonstrates how fruitful it is for historians to integrate a bottom-up perspective into the history of the Holocaust.

Omer Bartov’s Anatomy of a Genocide similarly reconstructs the everyday life of a small town before and during the Holocaust. His study focusses on the Galician town of Buczacz in today’s western Ukraine, which is also known as the hometown of the Nobel Prize laureate Shmuel Yosef Agnon. It is the result of two decades of meticulous research into several archives, but it is also a personal project, as the author’s own family has its roots in Buczacz. The book traces the Nazi genocide back to the hostilities which grew between Jews, Poles, and Ukrainians in Galicia before the Second World War. As part of the historical region of Galicia, Buczacz has been home to Poles, Ukrainians, Jews and several other ethnic minorities. The narration starts with the sweeping history of the region from the medieval period to the Austro-Hungarian rule during the nineteenth century. Underlying ethnic animosities and conflicts already existed during that period but aggravated during and after the Great War. Jews found themselves caught in the crossfire between Poles and Ukrainians, who both regarded the Jewish minority with suspicion. These legacies of resentment and a “competition of atrocities” paved the way for the genocidal violence rendered possible by Nazi-Germany during the Second World War.⁴⁹ With its detailed descriptions, Bartov adopts a bottom-up view of the Holocaust and provides a counter piece to grand narratives the Holocaust. The plot is based on a “thick description” of events and avoids sweeping theorizations of mass murder or genocide. Just as in Browning’s text, Bartov uses a plethora of direct quotations from postwar trials and survivor testimonies and paints a dramatic picture of victims, perpetrators, and bystanders, who sometimes alternated between these extremes.

Readers will find several passages in Browning’s and Bartov’s accounts that allow for a reading through the lens of Genette’s model. Factual narratives often refer to past events with an independent chronological order, thus rearranging the sequence of the given story. However, the idea that chronological order in a narration is a distinguishing feature of certain genres has been refuted by Genette and others. Genette emphasized that “no narrative, including extrafictional and extraliterary narrative, oral or written, can restrict itself naturally and without special effort to a rigorously chronological order” and that “nothing prevents factual narrative from using analepses or prolepses.”⁵⁰ Thus, the linearity (or non-linearity) of sequences will not tell us anything about the grade of fictionality. In addition, the claim that narratives can be synchronic or anachronic raises some serious ontological and epistemological problems. It implies that there is a disparity between the outside world and the narrative or between content level and expression level, between fabula and syuzhet. Applied to the treatment of temporality, this alleged dualism postulates the existence of two different time orders: namely, the order of occurrence and the order of discourse. As Genette remarked, this claim “implicitly assume[s] the existence of a kind of zero degree that would be a condition of perfect temporal correspondence between narrative and story.”⁵¹ In other words, when narrative theorists speak of non-linear sequences or anachronisms, they inevitably imply the possibility of a linear sequence, which the author rearranges at the discourse level. Even if theorists question the very existence of a given set of events prior to their textualization, they admit, nevertheless, that there are a few genres, such as historical, non-fictional narratives, that refer to past events with an independent chronological order. Nobody would seriously question, for example, that the French Revolution took place before the First World War. As Barbara Herrnstein Smith underlined, in these cases alone “it makes sense to speak of the narrative in question as having rearranged the sequence of some given set of events or the events of some given story.”⁵²

Bartov employs such rearrangements at different points of the narrative. The book opens with a scene in Tel Aviv where the author’s mother recalls her own childhood in Buczacz, before the author sets out to narrate the town’s history throughout the centuries. Browning similarly starts with the postwar trial of Walther Becker in February 1972, before taking the reader back in time to expose the fate of the Jewish community in Wierzbnik-Starachowice during the German occupation. Both authors also use analepses and prolepses when, for example, the narration jumps back and forth between describing the protagonists’ actions during World War II and their testimonies at the postwar trials in West Germany. There are also many passages where Bartov anticipates the Holocaust, such as the following: “It was a decade of great hopes and looming threats that remained etched in the memories of all those who survived its immediate aftermath; many did not.”⁵³ In other sections, the authors refer to events in the perpetrators’ biographies that occurred long before the 1940s: “Kurt Köllner [was born] in 1908 and raised in the town of Bad Dürrenberg in Saxony. Köllner began working as a mechanic and driver in 1926 [and] married in a church ceremony 1934.”⁵⁴ Browning correspondingly introduces many protagonists by establishing links between their biographical background before the war, and the events during the Holocaust. The reader learns, for example, that Kurt Otto Baumgarten, the deputy for security at the Strzelnica camp, was born in Alsace in 1908 and joined the SA Brownshirts in 1932, served as an auxiliary policeman before finally joining the elite SS.⁵⁵ Browning’s and Bartov’s narratives also combine archival sources and oral history, thus switching between written accounts from the 1940s and the memories of surviving witnesses after World War II.

The category of narrative speed exhibits characteristics similar to those of chronological order and does not indicate if a narrative is fictional or not. The disparity between the speed of an event and the speed of the narrative is self-evident and a consequence of the nature of our language. Historical events such as the Battle of Hastings obviously lasted longer than it takes us to pronounce “the Battle of Hastings.” Genette argued that a written narrative “fully exists, only in an act of performance, whether reading or recitation, oral or silent; and that the act has indeed its own duration.”⁵⁶ Drawing on Genette, Alun Munslow clarified this aspect by pointing out that the “discourse time of history is located in words, sentences, paragraphs, chapters, or how long it takes to read. This condition creates a separation between the sequence in which past events took place (content-story), and the order in which events are written (discoursed).”⁵⁷ In this context, accelerations, decelerations, ellipses, and pauses can be employed in both fictional and factual texts. Another, far more significant aspect is the presence of detailed scenes and dialogs reported at full length and verbatim. Here, Genette referred to the German literary theorist Käte Hamburger, who was one of the pioneers to explore these indices of fictionality.⁵⁸

Browning’s and Bartov’s books exhibit several variations in narrative speed, such as accelerations and decelerations. Bartov’s plot embarks on a story of Buczacz, starting in 1260, galloping through several centuries before eventually decelerating again and describing the impact of the Great War in a more comprehensive manner. Although the retrospection is not as extended as in Bartov’s account, Browning also commences his narrative with the prewar Jewish community of Wierzbnik-Starachowice. Speed variations are also expressed in various detailed scenes and dialogs which are often quoted verbatim. These detailed descriptions of characters, which Genette would subsume under decelerations, exemplify the distinction between micro- and microhistory:

• “After the initial jubilation, panic began to set in as prisoners realized that evacuation was still imminent. Some prisoners went to the kitchen and grabbed all the remaining food supplies. Others who had been determined to attempt an escape resolved to make their bid that night.”⁵⁹

• The commander of factory security Ralf Althoff is portrayed as wearing “a three- quarter-length leather jacket lined and trimmed in white fur, tall leather boots, and white leather gloves. When he came to camp for major killing actions, however, he wore rubber coat, boots and gloves to keep his fine clothing from being spattered with the blood of his victims.”⁶⁰

• “The principal and his wife made a snap decision: ‘under no circumstances did we want to stay with the Muscovites [. . .]. Within ten minutes they set out for the train station, where they encountered ‘uncontrollable chaos’. As ‘the fleeing and wailing Jews were pushing into the train cars,’ the ‘Germans were striking them with both rods and batons and shouting, ‘Go away you damned Jews!’”⁶¹

To be sure, many passages are characterized by intertextuality, as Browning and Bartov extensively quote from archival records and personal testimonies, thus integrating primary sources into the narrative.

Genette did not elaborate much on the question of whether frequency holds distinctive features which can distinguish fictional from factual texts since both types can make use of singulative or iterative narratives. Unlike frequency, mode (or mood, as Genette proposed in his initial theory from 1972), refers to the distance and perspective of a narrative and how far it positions itself from recounted events. A specific trait of this category is focalization, which denotes the perspective or point of view from which events are narrated—for example, that of a character. The main question here is whether the narrator has direct access to the inner world of characters. Using interior monologues for example would only be feasible if the character were fictional. According to Genette, even factual narratives can make use of what he calls internal focalization, psychological explanations of characters’ inner life. However, factual texts would need to justify this perspective by referring to sources which often do not exist. The opposite narrative attitude, which Genette called external focalization, is characterized by avoiding any intrusion into characters’ states of mind. Instead, the narrator adopts a “behaviorist” perspective, confining himself to describing characters’ actions as seen from the outside. Genette claimed that all types of focalizations (he even referred to a third type: zero focalization) are characteristic of fiction and not to be found in factual narratives.⁶²

Browning, as well as Bartov, skillfully employ various narrative modes that blend factual and fictional devices. As shown previously, Genette claimed that external focalization is characteristic of fiction and incompatible with factual narratives. However, Browning’s and Bartov’s accounts do not support this claim. Historiography, particularly microhistory, which is interested in the agency of ordinary people, constantly makes use of external focalization, depicting characters “from the outside.” As an example, Bartov portrays a Polish family that was deported to the Soviet Union during the short Soviet rule in Galicia in 1939. In this passage, the author reproduces the story of a contemporary witness reporting how six families were brought to an assembly point in the village: “Some wept, others lamented, still others sat quite still, or cursed. The Jew had fulfilled his mission. He extended his hand to my mother but she did not respond, and he said to us: Goodbye!”⁶³ There are a few passages in both books which even make use of internal focalization. Since the narrator has no direct access to the mind-set of its real-life characters, the authors thus switch to a fictional discourse. Browning depicts Walther Becker, a notorious representative of the Security Police or Sicherheitspolizei in Starachowice, as “insatiable in his relentless search for goods to confiscate [but] relatively restrained and ostentatiously cruel—more greedy than bloodthirsty.”⁶⁴ In a similar vein, Bartov depicts the Gestapo driver Albert Brettschneider as a person who “unwittingly exposed a small portion of that potent mix of prejudice, self-righteousness, and sense of inferiority that motivated and rationalized his brutality.”⁶⁵ These examples are a clear indication that fictional elements are integrated into the narration.

Genette’s last category, voice, refers to the relationship between author, narrator and characters. It addresses the question of whether the narrator is identical to or dissociated with the character, which Genette called homodiegetic or heterodiegetic, respectively. This distinction also divides factual from fictional narrative, as factual narrations such as historiography are typically heterodiegetic. As regards the relationship between author and narrator, the identification of each is typical of factual narratives, in which the reader is able to distinguish between the two. The dissociation of author and narrator, however, defines fictional texts. Genette therefore proposed a triangular diagram exemplifying how historical (factual) narratives differ from fiction (Figure 1). In this respect, all genres within academic history writing are heterodiegetic, regardless of the scale of their inquiry.

Figure 1. Gérard Genette’s model illustrating the relationship between author (A), narrator (N), and characters (C) in factual (historical) narratives and homodigetic fiction. ⁶⁶

Browning’s and Bartov’s monographs prove Genette’s model with respect to voice in factual narrations as author and narrator overlap in both accounts. As for the relationship between narrator and the characters, the books also confirm Genette’s criteria for heterodiegesis, as the narrator is constantly dissociated from the characters. Although the authorial voices are prominent throughout the narratives, both authors let plenty of their eyewitnesses narrate and the plot becomes predominantly descriptive, which following examples illustrate:

• “Althoff was ‘not at all as bad,’ ‘more decent.’ and ‘not as feared’”⁶⁷

• “The distance ‘to the actual execution site’ was a mere ‘10–15 minute’ walk ‘from my house’. There were ‘men, women, and children of all ages’”⁶⁸

Browning and Bartov are bound by the requirements of academic history writing and indicate with quotation marks when eyewitnesses “speak,” thus making it possible for the reader to clearly dissociate the narrator from the characters.

Conclusive remarks

The findings point to a clear contrast between microhistorical accounts and grand narratives of the Holocaust. Unlike macrohistories that focus on large-scale events and employ scientific prose, microhistorical approaches, which delve into the history of ordinary people, incorporate fictional elements to a greater extent. This is primarily evident in what Genette refers to as narrative mode. The works examined in this article by Browning and Bartov employ internal focalization, thereby indicating a shift toward a fictional discourse due to the narrators’ lack of direct access to the thoughts and perspectives of real-life characters. Consequently, microhistorians are compelled to employ a broader range of fictional skills compared to macrohistorical approaches, such as economic or social history. The scale of historical investigation, thus, determines how prevalent fictional elements are. In contrast to master narratives, microhistory can give us a more detailed picture and make this inconceivable chapter of European history at least a bit more intelligible. Christopher R. Browning’s Remembering Survival and Omer Bartov’s Anatomy of a Genocide illustrate in a compelling manner that the use of fictional elements can foster this endeavor. In Daniel R. Schwarz’ words,

Holocaust narratives … transmute facts in the crucible of art and have become a prominent part of how the collective memory of the Holocaust is shaped and survives. [It] is when Holocaust history is personalised and dramatised, when abstractions and numbers give way to human drama, that the distance between us and Holocaust victims closes.⁶⁹

By virtue of their approach, microhistorians strive to minimize this distance, granting readers a greater opportunity to immerse themselves in the immediate life-world of historical characters. In a similar vein, Claire Zalc and Tal Bruttmann have argued that microhistorical perspectives are more instructive in Holocaust education than grand narratives. Reducing the scale of investigation can serve as a catalyst for knowledge, unveiling the complexity of historical processes and offering closer insights into the daily lives of individuals during the Holocaust.⁷⁰ Holocaust Museums worldwide also stand as poignant reminders of the potential for personalizing and dramatizing the history of the Holocaust. Through their endeavor, visitors redirect their attention from abstract numbers to human narratives, ultimately narrowing the divide between themselves and those who endured the Holocaust.⁷¹

By stressing everyday life experiences and by striving for a Magnússon, “The Singularization of History.” microhistory has also challenged the Rankean ideal of making history objective. More than other sub-disciplines within historiography, microhistory vividly demonstrates that every historical account, no matter how rigorously rooted in evidence, inevitably carries a literary dimension that cannot be escaped. Simultaneously, while microhistory draws inspiration from literary models, it still operates with a notion of truth and claims to reconstruct the past in a verifiable manner. Thus, academic history writing has not faced any methodological setback, despite the contentious discussions surrounding narrative theory and postmodernism. Present-day historians are still bound to the “veto right of primary sources,” as Reinhard Koselleck famously put it, and do not obliterate the difference between academic and fictional history writing.⁷² The novelty, rather, lies in historians’ heightened awareness of the diverse interdependencies that exist between academic history writing and fiction, as well as in their dismantling of the rigid dichotomy between scientific and literary prose.⁷³ Literary elements resulting from the narrative nature of historiographical discourse do not indicate that a given text is fictional. Rather, there is a growing understanding that reciprocal interferences and borrowings are inevitable.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Radu Harald Dinu

Radu Harald Dinu is an assistant professor in history at the School of Education and Communication, Jönköping University (Sweden). He received his PhD in history from The Max Weber Center for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies, Erfurt University and a MA degree in East European History from Leipzig University (Germany). His research encompasses a broad spectrum of topics, ranging from the modern history of Eastern Europe to the field of disability history.

Notes

1. Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews.

2. Friedländer, Probing the Limits, 3.

3. Curthoys and Docker, Is History Fiction?

4. Rigney, “History as Text.”

5. Raphael, “The Implications of Empiricism”; Seignobos and Langlois, Introduction aux études historiques.

6. Droysen, “Grundriss der Historik,” 24–5; Droysen, “Outline of the Principles of History,” 51–3.

7. Czarniawska, “The Narrative Turn”; Herman, The Cambridge Companion to Narrative, 3.

8. Rigney, “History as Text.”

9. Doctorow, “False Documents.”

10. Adorno, Prisms, 34.

11. Langer, The Holocaust, 1.

12. Lang, “Writing and the Holocaust,” 1.

13. Rosenfeld, “The Problematics of Holocaust Literature.”

14. Nomberg-Przytyk, Auschwitz, 166.

15. Nomberg-Przytyk, Auschwitz, 166.

16. Epstein, King of the Jews.

17. Young, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust, 76.

18. Spiegelman, Maus.

19. Schwarz, “Holocaust Narrative.“

20. White, Metahistory.

21. Ryan, “Panfictionality,” 417.

22. Doran, Philosophy of History.

23. Friedländer, Probing the Limits.

24. Friedländer, Probing the Limits, 3.

25. Ginzburg, “Just One Witness.”

26. Jay, Of Plots, Witnesses, and Judgments, 107.

27. Dean,“Metahistory.”

28. Doležel, “Fictional and Historical Narrative,” 251.

29. Stone,“Excommunicating the Past?”, 551–2.

30. Stone,“Excommunicating the Past?”, 562.

31. Fogu, Kansteiner, and Presner, Probing the Ethics.

32. Lang, “Review of White, Friedländer,” 259.

33. Magnússon, “The Singularization of History,” 701–35.

34. Lüdtke, Alltagsgeschichte.

35. Frydel, “The Ongoing Challenge,” 624–31; Zalc and Bruttmann, Microhistories of the Holocaust.

36. Magnússon and Szijártó, What is Microhistory?, 5.

37. Magnússon and Szijártó, What is Microhistory?, 19.

38. Magnússon, “The Singularization of History,” 701–35.

39. Pomata, “Telling the Truth,” 35.

40. Magnússon and Szijártó, What is Microhistory?, 24.

41. Herman, Jahn, and Ryan, Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, 163.

42. Searle, “The Logical Status,” 319–32.

43. Zetterberg Gjerlevsen, “Fictionality.”

44. Cohn, The Distinction of Fiction.

45. Prince, “Gérard Genette,” 535–7.

46. Munslow, Narrative and History.; Munslow, “The Historian as Author.”

47. Genette, Figures. 3; Genette, Narrative Discourse; Genette, Narrative Discourse Revisited; Genette, “Fictional Narrative.”

48. Browning, Remembering Survival, 291.

49. Bartov, Anatomy of a Genocide, 9.

50. Genette, “Fictional Narrative,” 758.

51. Genette, Narrative Discourse, 35–6.

52. Herrnstein Smith, “Narrative Versions,” 228.

53. Bartov, Anatomy of a Genocide, 86.

54. Bartov, Anatomy of a Genocide, 185.

55. Browning, Remembering Survival, 142.

56. Genette, “Narrative Discourse Revisited,” 33.

57. Munslow, “The Historian as an Author,” 83.

58. Genette, “Fictional Narrative,” 761; Hamburger, Die Logik der Dichtung.

59. Browning, Remembering Survival, 219.

60. Browning, Remembering Survival, 115.

61. Bartov, Anatomy of a Genocide, 57.

62. Genette, “Fictional Narrative,” 761.

63. Bartov, Anatomy of a Genocide, 148.

64. Browning, Remembering Survival, 46.

65. Bartov, Anatomy of a Genocide, 197.

66. Genette, “Fictional Narrative,” 766.

67. Browning, Remembering Survival, 142.

68. Browning, Remembering Survival, 222.

69. Schwarz “Holocaust Narrative,“ 222.

70. Zalc and Bruttmann, Microhistories of the Holocaust.

71. Hansen-Glucklich, Holocaust Memory Reframed.

72. Koselleck, “Standortbindung und Zeitlichkeit,“ 17.

73. Berkhofer, Beyond the Great Story.