Holocaust Controversies in the 1990s: The Revenge of History or the History of Revenge?

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Notes

 1 Peter Novick, The Holocaust In American Life (London, 1999); Norman Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering (London, 2000).

 2 William Slaney (ed.), US and Allied Efforts to Recover and Restore Gold and Other Assets Stolen or Hidden by Germans During World War II (Washington, DC, May 1997), p. 58; Novick, The Holocaust In American Life. See also the editor's introductory remarks in Hilene Flanzbaum (ed.), The Americanization of the Holocaust (Baltimore, 1999), pp. 9–15.

 3 Over 25 historical commissions have investigated or are due to report on the record of countries, banks and corporations with respect to the spoliation of the Jews, the treatment of Jewish refugees, Jewish and non-Jewish slave labor. World Jewish Congress, Policy Dispatches, No. 54 (September 2000), lists Argentina (1992, 1997), Austria (1998), Belgium (1997), Brazil (1997), Croatia (1997), Czech Republic (1999), Estonia (2000), France (4 in 1997), Israel (1999), Italy (1998), Latvia (1999), Lithuania (1999), Netherlands (3 in 1997), Norway (1997), Portugal (1996), Spain (1997), Sweden (2 in 1997), Switzerland (4 in 1996–97), UK (1996, 1997), USA (several since 1997), Turkey (1998), Paraguay, and Uruguay (on fugitive Nazis). For some of the books charting aspects of the banking scandal, looted art and compensation for slave labor, see Adam LeBor, Hitler's Secret Bankers: The Myth of Swiss Neutrality during the Holocaust (London, 1997); Tom Bower, Blood Money: The Swiss, the Nazis and the Looted Billions (London, 1997); Jean Ziegler, The Swiss, The Gold, and the Dead, trans. John Brownjohn (New York, 1998); Gregg J. Rickman, Swiss Banks and Jewish Souls (New Brunswick, NJ, 1999); George Carpozi, Nazi Gold (Far Hills, NJ, 1999); Itamar Levin, The Last Deposit: Swiss Banks and the Holocaust Victims' Accounts, trans. N. Dornberg (Westport, CT, 1999); Hector Feliciano, The Lost Museum: The Nazi Conspiracy to Steal the World's Greatest Works of Art (New York, 1997); Elizabeth Simpson (ed.), The Spoils of War: World War II and Its Aftermath: The Loss, Reappearance, and Recovery of Cultural Property (New York, 1997); Peter Harclerode and Brendan Pittaway, The Lost Masters: The Looting of Europe's Treasurehouses (London, 1999); Christopher Simpson, The Splendid Blonde Beast: Money, Law and Genocide in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1995); Reinhold Billstein et  al., Working for the Enemy: Ford, General Motors and Forced Labour in Germany during the Second World War (Oxford, 2000), esp. pp. 229–47; Jonathan Steinberg, Deutsche Bank and Its Gold Transactions during the Second World War (Munich, 1999); Harold James, The Deutsche Bank and the Nazi Economic War against the Jews (Cambridge, 2001).

 4 Elazar Barkan, The Guilt of Nations: Restitution and Negotiating Historical Injustices (New York, 2000). David Cesarani, “The Holocaust Is/As News,” in Stephanie McMahon-Kaye (ed.), The Memory of the Holocaust in the 21st Century: The Challenge for Education (Jerusalem, 2001), pp. 109–28.

 5 See David Cesarani, “Is There, and Has There Ever Been a ‘Holocaust Industry’?” in Latvian Commission of Historians (eds.), The Issues of the Holocaust Research in Latvia (Riga, 2001), pp. 83–99.

 6 David Cesarani, “Memory, Representation and Education,” in Elizabeth Maxwell and Franklin Littell (eds.), Remembering for the Future 2000, Vol. 3, The Holocaust in an Age of Genocide (London, 2001), pp. 231–6.

 7 Annette Wieviorka, Déportation et genocide: Entre mémoire et l'oubli (Paris, 1992); Robert S. C. Gordon, “Holocaust Writing in Context: Italy 1945–47,” in Andrew Leak and George Paizis (eds.), The Holocaust and the Text: Speaking the Unspeakable (London, 2000), pp. 32–50; Pieter Lagrou, The Legacy of Nazi Occupation: Patriotic Memory and National Recovery in Western Europe, 1945–1965 (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 251–61. See also the important revision of assumptions about the key case of Israel in the 1940s and 1950s by Anita Shapira, “The Holocaust: Private Memories, Public Memory,” Jewish Social Studies, Vol. 4, No. 2 (1998), pp. 40–58; Dalia Ofer, “The Strength of Remembrance: Commemorating the Holocaust during the First Decade of Israel,” Jewish Social Studies, Vol. 6, No. 2 (2000), pp. 24–55; Jeffrey Shandler, While America Watches: Televising the Holocaust (New York, 1999), esp. pp. 41–79.

 8 Hans Mommsen, “Hannah Arendt's Interpretation of the Holocaust as a Challenge to Human Existence,” in Steven E. Aschheim (ed.), Hannah Arendt in Jerusalem (Berkeley, 2001), pp. 224–31; Richard E. Cohen, “Breaking the Code: Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem and the Public Polemic: Myth, Memory and Historical Imagination,” Michael, No. 13 (1993), pp. 30–41. See also Sharon Muller, “The Origins of Eichmann in Jerusalem: Hannah Arendt's Interpretation of Jewish History,” Jewish Social Studies, Vol. 43 (1981), pp. 237–54.

 9 Stanley Milgram, “The Compulsion to Do Evil,” Patterns of Prejudice, Vol. 1, No. 1 (1967), pp. 3–7; Richard Rubinstein, The Cunning of History: The Holocaust and the American Future (New York, 1974); Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (London, 1989), ch. 6. Cf. Ian Parker, “Obedience,” Granta, No. 71 (2000), pp. 99–126.

10 See the prefatory remarks by Volker Berghahn in Hannes Heer and Klaus Naumann (eds.), War of Extermination: The German Military in World War II, 1941–1944 (Oxford, 2000), pp. xvi–vii. For this element of the new historiography, see Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York, 1992); and idem, “Nazi Resettlement Policy and the Search for a Solution to the Jewish Question, 1939–1941,” in his The Path to Genocide: Essays on Launching the Final Solution (Cambridge, 1992); Götz Aly, The Final Solution: Nazi Population Policy and the Murder of the European Jews (London, 1999), first published in German in 1995.

11 David Reynolds, One World Divisible: A Global History since 1945 (London, 2000); Samuel Tottens et  al. (eds.), Genocide in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1975).

12 Edward Shapiro, A Time for Healing: American Jewry since World War II (Baltimore, 1992), pp. 223–5; Deborah Lipstadt, “The Failure to Rescue and Contemporary Jewish Historiography of the Holocaust: Judging From a Distance,” in Michael J. Neufeld and Michael Berenbaum (eds.), The Bombing of Auschwitz: Should the Allies Have Attempted It? (New York, 2000), pp. 233–4.

13 For the classic summary, see Ian Kershaw, The Nazi Dictatorship, 4th edn. (London, 2000), pp. 93–133.

14 Geoffrey H. Hartman (ed.), Bitburg in Moral and Historical Perspective (Bloomington, 1986).

15 Peter Baldwin (ed.), Reworking the Past: Hitler, the Holocaust and the Historians' Debate (Boston, 1990); Charles S. Maier, The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust, and German National Identity (Cambridge, MA, 1988); Richard J. Evans, In Hitler's Shadow: West German Historians and the Attempt to Escape from the Nazi Past (London, 1989).

16 Gavriel D. Rosenfeld, “The Politics of Uniqueness: Reflections on the Recent Polemical Turn in Holocaust and Genocide Scholarship,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Vol. 13, No. 1 (1999), pp. 28–61.

17 James Walston, “History and Memory of the Italian Concentration Camps,” Historical Journal, Vol. 40, No. 1 (1997), pp. 169–83.

18 Times Higher Education Supplement, 5 April 2002.

19 Bettina Birn, “Austrian Higher SS and Police Leaders and their Participation in the Balkans,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Vol. 6, No. 4 (1991), pp. 351–72; Jürgen Matthäus, “What About the ‘Ordinary Men’? The German Order Police and the Holocaust in the Occupied Soviet Union,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Vol. 10, No. 2 (1996), pp. 134–50; Konrad Kwiet, “From the Diary of a Killing Unit,” in John Milfull (ed.), Why Germany? National Socialist Anti-Semitism and the German Context (Oxford, 1991), pp. 75–90; and “Rehearsing for Murder: The Beginning of the Final Solution in June 1941,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Vol. 12, No. 1 (1998), pp. 3–26; Martin Dean, Collaboration in the Holocaust: Crimes of the Local Police in Belorussia and Ukraine, 1941–44 (London, 2000); Peter Longerich, “From Mass Murder to the ‘Final Solution’: The Shooting of Civilians during the First Months of the Eastern Campaign within the Context of Nazi Jewish Genocide,” in Bernd Wegner (ed.), From Peace to War: Germany, Soviet Russia and the World, 1939–1941 (Oxford, 1997), pp. 253–75; Robert Waite, “‘Reliable Local Residents’: Collaboration in Latvia, 1941–1945” in Latvia in World War II, symposium of the Commission of Historians of Latvia (Riga, 2000), pp. 115–44.

20 Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York, 1996), is implicitly and explicitly an assault on the earlier work of Christopher Browning: see Browning's response in the 2nd edn. of Ordinary Men (London, 2001), pp. 191–223. For the full debate on Goldhagen's thesis, see Robert R. Shandley (ed.), Unwilling Germans? The Goldhagen Debate, trans. J. Reimer (Minneapolis, 1998); and Gavriel Rosenfeld, “The Controversy That Isn't: The Debate over Daniel J. Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners in Comparative Perspective,” Contemporary European History, Vol. 8, No. 2 (1999), pp. 249–73. For Browning's response, positing the idea that the assault on the Jews was a European phenomenon, see his “Ordinary Germans or Ordinary Men? Another Look at Perpetrators,” in Donald Schilling (ed.), Lessons and Legacies, Vol. 2, Teaching the Holocaust in a Changing World (Evanston, IL, 1998), pp. 13–25.

21 The Independent, 29 June 1992; Le Monde, 30 June 1992.

22 See, for example, Luisa Passerini (ed.), Memory and Totalitarianism (Oxford, 1992); James E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven, 1993); Andreas Huyssen, Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (London, 1995); Martin Evans and Ken Lunn (eds.), War and Memory in the Twentieth Century (Oxford, 1997); Jay Winter and Emmanuel Sivan (eds.), War and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, 1999).

23. See Barkan, The Guilt of Nations.

24. See The Last Days, directed by James Moll (1998); Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport, directed by Mark Jonathan Harris (1999). For an example of the marketing of survivor memory, see the growth of the list published by Frank Cass in England, the series produced by Beth Shalom and the lists of all major US university publishers.

25 Pierre Nora, “General Introduction: Between Memory and History,” in Pierre Nora (ed.) Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past, Vol. 1, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York, 1996), p. 11. See Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (Seattle, 1982).

26 Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, The Convent at Auschwitz (New York, 1991); Michael Steinlauf, Bondage to the Dead: Poland and the Memory of the Holocaust (Syracuse, 1997), esp. pp. 117–21, 135–9; Michael Marrus, “The Future of Auschwitz: A Case for the Ruins,” in Peter Hayes (ed.), Lessons and Legacies, Vol. 3, Memory, Memorialization, and Denial (Evanston, 1999), pp. 169–77; Lea Rosh, “Die Juden, das sind doch die anderen”: Der Streit um ein deutsches Denkmal (Berlin, 1999); Caroline Wiedmer, The Claims of Memory: Representations of the Holocaust in Contemporary Germany and France (Ithaca, 1999), pp. 120–63; James E. Young, “Daniel Libeskind's Jewish Museum in Berlin” and “Germany's Holocaust Memorial Problem — And Mine,” in idem (ed.), At Memory's Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture (New Haven, 2000), pp. 152–83, 184–223; Tony Kushner and Donald Bloxham, “Exhibiting Racism: Cultural Imperialism, Genocide and Representation,” Rethinking History, Vol. 2, No. 3 (1998), pp. 349–58.

27 See n. 20 above, and Heer and Naumann (eds.), War of Extermination. The profusely illustrated catalogue to the exhibition testifies to the sheer visual impact of the exhibition: The German Army and Genocide, trans. S. Abott (New York, 1999). In general, see Young, At Memory's Edge, and Barbie Zelizer (ed.), Visual Culture and the Holocaust (London, 2001).

28 Saul Friedländer (ed.), Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution (Cambridge, MA, 1993), especially the editor's introduction, pp. 1–21. Also, the editors' introduction to Alan Milchman and Alan Rosenberg (eds.), Postmodernism and the Holocaust (Amsterdam, 1998), pp. 1–15.

29 Proceedings of the Stockholm International Forum on the Holocaust (Stockholm, 2000), p. 34.

30 See n. 28 above, and the extracts from journal debates in Keith Jenkins (ed.), The Postmodern History Reader (London, 1997), pp. 384–433.

31 Richard J. Evans, Lying About Hitler: History, Holocaust, and the David Irving Trial (New York, 2001); Sue Vice, Holocaust Fiction (London, 2000).

32 See, for example, Sue Vice “The Demidenko Affair and Contemporary Holocaust Fiction,” in Leak and Paizis (eds.), The Holocaust and the Text, pp. 125–41.

33 Mark Roseman, A Past in Hiding: Memory and Survival in Nazi Germany (London, 2000). See also Lawrence L. Langer, Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory (New Haven, 1991); Henry Greenspan, On Listening To Holocaust Survivors: Recounting and Life History (Westport, CT, 1998);

34 Deborah Dwork, Children with a Star: Jewish Youth in Nazi Europe (New Haven, 1991); Jane Marks, The Hidden Children (London, 1993); Dalia Ofer and Lenore J. Weitzman (eds.), Women in the Holocaust (New Haven, 1998); Judith T. Baumel, Double Jeopardy: Gender and the Holocaust (London, 1998).

35 Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl: The Definitive Edition, ed. Otto H. Frank and Mirjam Pressler (London, 1997). Reflecting the renewed wave of interest in Anne Frank, three biographies of her (by Mirjam Pressler, Melissa Muller and Carol Ann Lee) and an acclaimed TV documentary by Jon Blair for the BBC appeared in English in 1998–99.

36 Gabriel Schoenfeld, “Auschwitz and the Professors,” Commentary, Vol. 105, No. 6 (June 1998), pp. 42–6; and letters, Commentary, Vol. 106, No. 2 (August 1998), pp. 14–25.

37 Berel Lang, “Holocaust Memory and Revenge: The Presence of the Past,” Jewish Social Studies, Vol. 2, No. 2 (1996), pp. 1–20.

38 Naomi Seidman, “Elie Wiesel and the Scandal of Jewish Rage,” Jewish Social Studies, Vol. 3, No. 1 (1996), pp. 1–19. See also the discussion of Jean Améry's tergiversation on revenge and resentment in Nancy Wood, “The Victim's Resentment,” in Bryan Cheyette and Laura Marcus (eds.), Modernity, Culture and “the Jew” (Stanford, 1998), pp. 257–67.

39 Henry Armin Herzog, … And Heaven Shed No Tears (London, 1995); Joseph Harmatz, From the Wings (London, 1998); Rich Cohen, The Avengers: A Jewish War Story (London, 2000). For shifting images of the Jewish male, see Paul Breines, Tough Jews: Political Fantasies and the Moral Dilemma of American Jewry (New York, 1990); and David Biale, Eros and the Jews: From Biblical Israel to Contemporary America (New York, 1992).