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History and Theory, Theme Issue 47 (May 2009), 25-53 © Wesleyan University 2009 ISSN: 0018-2656

SUCCESS, TRUTH, AND MODERNISM IN HOLOCAUSTHISTORIOGRAPHY: READING SAUL FRIEDLÄNDER THIRTY-FIVE

YEARS AFTER THE PUBLICATION OF METAHISTORY 1

WULF KANSTEINER

ABSTRACT

This essay provides a close reading of Saul Friedländer’s exceptionally successful com-prehensive history of the Holocaust from the theoretical perspective of Hayden White’sphilosophy of history. Friedländer’s The Years of Extermination has been celebrated asthe rst synthetic history of the “Final Solution” that acknowledges the experiences of the

victims of Nazi genocide. But Friedländer has not simply added the voices of the victimsto a conventional historical account of the Holocaust. Instead, by displacing linear no-tions of time and space and subtly deconstructing conventional concepts of causality, hehas invented a new type of historical prose that performs rather than analyzes the victims’

point of view. Friedländer’s innovation has particularly radical consequences for the con-struction of historical explanations. On the one hand, Friedländer explicitly argues thatanti-Semitism was the single most important cause of the Holocaust. On the other hand,

his transnational, multifaceted history of the “Final Solution” provides a wealth of datathat escapes the conceptual grasp of his explicit model of causation. Friedländer choosesthis radically self-reexive strategy of historical representation to impress on the reader

the existential sense of disbelief with which the victims experienced Nazi persecution.

To Friedländer, that sense of disbelief constitutes the most appropriate ethical responseto the Holocaust. Thus the narratological analysis of The Years of Extermination revealsthat the exceptional quality of the book, as well as presumably its success, is the result of

an extraordinarily creative act of narrative imagination. Or, put into terms developed byWhite, who shares Friedländer’s appreciation of modernist forms of writing, The Years of

Extermination is the rst modernist history of the Holocaust that captures, through literary

guration, an important and long neglected reality of the “Final Solution.”

Keywords: epistemology, Saul Friedländer, Holocaust, modernism, narratology, relativism,Hayden White, The Years of Extermination

What does it take to become a successful historian? How is a history book con -structed that wins prizes, garners the admiration of professional historians, and

nds lots of appreciative readers in the general public? These questions invoke

a number of different criteria for success that rarely apply to one and the same

1. I appreciate the helpful comments I have received on earlier drafts of this paper from ChristophClassen, Claudio Fogu, Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, Judith Keilbach, Chris Lorenz, Alexandra

Przyrembel, Ann Rigney, Dan Stone, and Harald Weilnböck. I am also grateful to Alon Confino,

Keith Jenkins, and Jan-Holger Kirsch who shared important resources with me. While writing thisessay I enjoyed the exemplary hospitality of the Jena Center 20th Century History and its directorNorbert Frei; I am very thankful for this support.



WULF KANSTEINER26

book. Many scholarly publications nd admiring readers in academia but are ei-ther unintelligible or unappealing to lay readers. At the same time, quite a few

university-trained historians write for a mass audience, but experts in history de-partments rarely take their work seriously. Success in history, as in so many other

disciplines, is in the eye of the beholder and seems to be best conceptualized asan effect of collective interests and identities. The study of historiographical suc-cess might reveal a great deal about consumers of historical prose but promises toprovide limited insight into the intrinsic qualities of a specic historical account.

Thus the present inquiry into the secrets of success in the old-fashioned busi-ness of history-writing appears quaint and outdated from the get-go. Instead of

beginning this account with trenchant insights into the sociology of historical

knowledge and ironic remarks about the collective memories of academic histo-rians, I talk with a straight face about the pursuit of historical truth. I invite the

reader to entertain, at least temporarily, a whole sequence of seemingly naïve and

counterfactual illusions. Let’s pretend, for instance, that getting the story right hassomething to do with the sales gures of publishing houses and the self-propel-ling, often self-glamorizing, sometimes vindictive, and rarely self-reexive rou-tine of academic reviewing. Let’s imagine that it is possible to dene historical

truth as something other than an effect of successful, mediated communication.And why stop here? Let’s pretend furthermore that we can differentiate between

epistemological factors of success, on the one hand, and aesthetic or politicalfactors, on the other hand, despite the fact that the latter appear to play such animportant role in the collective processes of distributing academic accolades anddetermining market shares.

It might be easier to keep up these pretenses if we base our reections about

historical truth on an incontrovertible, extraordinary success story of scholarlypublishing. In 2007, Saul Friedländer, who holds the 1939 Club Chair at UCLA,

published The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945.2 By all accounts The Years of Extermination is an amazing success. With few ex-ceptions reviewers in Europe and the U.S. are simply enthusiastic about this new

comprehensive history of the Holocaust. Friedländer won a Pulitzer Prize and

Germany’s most prestigious cultural-intellectual award, the peace prize of the

German book publishers’ association. Moreover, the tome of 870 pages is selling

briskly on both sides of the Atlantic. How did this success come about? Is The

Years of Extermination primarily an aesthetic or an epistemological achievement?

Or are we dealing with a rare cross-over success that appeals to different audi-ences for altogether different reasons?

In order to lay the conceptual foundation for the analysis of The Years of Exter-

mination—and as a welcome antidote to all this talk about historical truth—I will

turn to another historiographical success story that took shape at UCLA, albeit

over thirty-ve years ago: Hayden White’s Metahistory.3 For White, historical

2. Saul Friedländer, The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945 (New

York: HarperCollins, 2007); the book is the sequel to Friedländer’s very successful Nazi Germany

and the Jews: The Years of Persecution, 1933–1939 (New York: Harper Perennial, 1998).3. Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe

(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973).



SUCCESS, TRUTH, AND MODERNISM IN HOLOCAUST HISTORIOGRAPHY 27

truth has never been an important or complicated subject. He readily accepts thathistorians produce historical facts, although he considers them the most pedes-trian, least creative, and least interesting part of their work. Let’s see how the two

classics illuminate each other. Can White’s path-breaking analysis of historical

narrative explain the exceptional success and ethos of The Years of Extermina-

tion? Does Friedländer’s instant classic shed light on the limits of epistemological

relativism?

I. NARRATOLOGY OF HISTORY: AN UNFINISHED PROJECT

Hayden White launched his provocative analysis of historical writing and historio-graphical ideology in two steps in the early 1970s and early 1980s respectively. In

Metahistory he proposed a systematic, structuralist methodology for the study ofthe poetics of history that set the models of causality, the ideological orientation,and rhetorical styles of a given work of history in relation to its overall narrative

structure. White emphasized that historical texts are rst and foremost narrative

constructs whose aesthetic complexities can be fully appreciated only if the texts

are subjected to the type of narratological critique that has been conventionally

reserved for the analysis of narrative ction. To this end, White probed the writ-ings of nineteenth-century historians and philosophers, for instance Michelet andMarx, with narratological methods derived from Northrop Frye and others. White

showed that the compelling visions of the past crafted by the early masters of the

historical discipline were an effect of their idiosynchratic narrative styles. Readers

of Metahistory were treated to a powerful and insightful critique of the historians’

craft, but they walked away from the book with a complicated, partly redundant,

and generally unwieldy tool kit for the analysis of historical writing. Reading

Metahistory sometimes raises more questions than it answers: How precisely did

White conceptualize the relationship between modes of emplotment and the four

basic tropes? Are there really only sixteen registers for the analysis of historical

prose as White suggests in the introduction of Metahistory?4 In the years after the publication of Metahistory White continued his critique

of historical practice by revisiting nineteenth-century classics, and by publishingreections on historical theorists like Michel Foucault and Paul Ricoeur. Unfortu-nately, White never developed his structuralist methodology further, for instance,by analyzing contemporary works of history. But White’s essays nevertheless pre-sented important additional insights into the concrete mechanics of historical nar-rative, which became particularly apparent when White published a collection of

his essays in 1987.5 Already in the rst chapter of The Content of the Form, Whitepresented a seemingly pedestrian yet radical argument. By exploring the relation-ship between historical chronicles and historical narratives White demonstrated

in a particularly compelling fashion that works of history cannot be reduced to

the sum of their factual components. According to White, the writings of profes-

4. White, Metahistory, 29.

5. Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987); see also Nancy Partner, “Hayden White: The

Form of the Content,” History and Theory 37, no. 2 (1998), 162-172.



WULF KANSTEINER28

sional historians contain many factual statements that can be veried by generally

agreed-upon rules of evidence, but the narrative frameworks that integrate facts

into coherent stories are imposed on the data and are not found in the historicalrecord. In essence, White saw facts in a state of narrative innocence; he recog-nized no conceptual relation between specic factual statements or specic types

of historical data and the different story lines that historians employ to make sense

of these facts and to convey their insights about the past to their readers.6 White also developed new terminology to grasp the complex relationship be-

tween historiography and its discursive and non-discursive contexts. For White,

works of history relate to at least two different referents. The primary referent

encompasses past events and actants whose factuality has been conrmed by es-tablished rules of evidence. By adhering to these rules of evidence, historiansdifferentiate themselves from novelists and mark their writing as works of non-

ction. But on the level of the secondary referent, fact and ction can no longer

be clearly distinguished from each other, because the secondary referent of a work

of history includes the narrative conventions and associated political and aestheticpreferences that historiography shares with other genres and media of narrative

communication.7 Historiography might be appreciated for its apparently authenticrepresentation of past events, but this reality-effect is a carefully crafted illusionproduced by the systematic conation of primary and secondary referents. Histo-rians and their audiences (primarily other historians) pretend that the secondaryreferents of their writings have the same factual integrity as their primary refer-ents, although this is manifestly not the case. The past never occurred in the formof stories and most certainly not in the form of the kind of stories one nds in

history books. Facts become history and can help fulll the social and communi -cative function of history only when they are integrated into narrative frameworks

that might have all kinds of qualities, but factual accuracy is not one of them.

To date White has offered the most comprehensive narratological critique of

historical writing. He has been widely recognized for his efforts but the impact

of his work nevertheless remains limited. Thirty-ve years after the publication

of Metahistory we can safely conclude that there will never be a White School

of historical criticism. The main reason for this development is easily identied.

Historians, including intellectual historians, have simply not welcomed the idea

that they should analyze and appreciate their work from the vantage point of the

linguistic turn and relinquish their claims to historical realism.8 Moreover, histo-rians are terrible at explaining their work to outsiders and therefore have been un-able to counter the relativist charge of White and others by presenting a compel-ling account of what they actually do when they write history.9 At the same time,

6. White, The Content of the Form, 24-25 and passim.7. Ibid ., 43.8. On the reception of White’s work among historians, see Richard Vann, “The Reception of

Hayden White,” History and Theory 37, no. 2 (1998), 143-161; Frank Ankersmit, “Hayden White’s

Appeal to the Historians,” History and Theory 37, no. 2 (1998), 182-193.9. I am not aware of any case studies that demonstrate a positive correlation between a given set

of events/facts and their specific narrative emplotment. See in this context the intriguing case studyconducted by Steven Shepard, Philip Honenburger, and Allan Megill about contemporary knowledge

regarding the Thomas Jefferson/Sally Hemmings affair. The authors show that contemporary knowl-




academics in other elds who are interested in narrative nd White’s insights

generally acceptable, though hardly radical, and prefer to study works of lm and

ction that offer more exciting narrative entertainment and more complex dis-cursive structures than the latest piece of historical scholarship. Finally, White’srhetoric and his idiosyncratic methods of analysis have not helped his cause. Allof these factors explain the interesting reception-history of White’s texts. Onlya few academics have used White’s insights and those of like-minded theorists

for concrete analyses of historical prose. These studies are often highly original,but their number still disappoints considering White’s extraordinary importancefor twentieth-century philosophy of history.10 At the same time, White’s work re-mains vilied by some mainstream historians,11 is more frequently cited by nar-ratologists and literary scholars,12 and retains a faithful following only among a

small group of postmodern-inclined historical theorists.13 White focused on the macro level of historical writing. He dealt with the broad

strokes, the overarching narrative schemes that historians employ to make sense

of the world. Moreover, White’s subject matter corresponded to his abstract theo -retical concepts. He applied his narratological tools as an intellectual historian,dealing with the grand historical models of Hegel, Marx, Tocqueville, and Croce,

among others, and even when he engaged with more nuts-and-bolts historians like

Ranke, White read their work in search of their overall perception of the histori-cal process and the underlying philosophy of history implicit in their writings.

White’s penchant for the philosophical side of historiography has never broughthim face to face with the less glamorous, more pedestrian aspect of historiograph-ical writing. He has never scrutinized a set of standard historical monographs to

edge was not widespread, but they do not address the question of how establishing that fact places

limitations on the range of possible emplotments of the affair within larger narrative contexts; see

Allan Megill, Historical Knowledge, Historical Error: A Contemporary Guide to Practice (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 2007), 125-150. Critics of White have astutely pointed out that White’sinability to see a conceptual connection between historical narratives and historical research might

stem from an inversion of positivist ideology. However, that compelling observation does not in itself

demonstrate how narrative and research are epistemologically linked to each other; see Chris Lorenz,

“Can Histories be True? Narrativism, Positivism, and the ‘Metaphorical Turn’,” History and Theory 37, no. 3 (1998), 309-329.

10. Ann Rigney, The Rhetoric of Historical Representation: Three Narratives of the French

Revolution (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Robert Berkhofer, Beyond the

Great Story: History as Text and Discourse (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995);

Sande Cohen, Historical Culture: On the Recoding of an Academic Discipline (Berkeley: Universityof California Press, 1987); and Claudio Fogu, The Historic Imaginary: Politics of History in Fascist

Italy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003).11. Richard Evans, In Defence of History (London: Granta, 1997). Compare this to the much more

nuanced and compelling engagement with White’s epistemological relativism in Megill, Historical

Knowledge, 56-57; 185-86; and C. Behan McCullagh, The Truth of History (London: Routledge,1998).

12. Jakob Lothe, Narrative in Fiction and Film (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).Apparently, literary scholars have also had some reservation about White’s conflation of fact and fic-tion in narrative discourse; see Kuisma Korhonen, “The History/Literature Debate,” in Tropes for the

Past: Hayden White and the History/Literature Debate, ed. Kuisma Korhonen (Amsterdam: Rodopi,2006), 9-20, 11; and Vann, “The Reception of Hayden White.”

13. Frank Ankersmit, Historical Representation (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002); Alun

Munslow, Deconstructing History, 2nd ed. (Routledge: London, 2006); Keith Jenkins, Why History: Ethics and Postmodernity (London: Routledge, 1999); and especially Keith Jenkins, “‘Nobody does

it better:’ Radical History and Hayden White,” Rethinking History 12, no. 1 (2008), 59-74.



WULF KANSTEINER30

gure out how average historians set up their main concepts or try to back up

their particular historical emplotments in their notes. As a result, White’s methodsare suitable tools for the close reading of introductions and conclusions in which

historians generally present their terminology, dene the subject matter of their

work, relate their approach to the publications of other historians, and in the pro-cess reveal their assumptions about the categories of identity and difference andthe forces of continuity and change that inform the historical eld under observa-tion. But White has little to say about the linguistic contexts in which primary

and secondary referents meet, that is, about the long and often tedious passagesof detailing prose in which historians arrange their facts in ways that, assumingly,

support their specic narrative choices. In this respect, the narratological-semio-logical analysis of historiography is an unfullled promise of the 1970s and 1980s

that arrived on the academic scene with great fanfare but never amounted to much

of a practical success.

II. WHITE AND HOLOCAUST HISTORIOGRAPHY

In 1982 White famously argued that Holocaust deniers violate fundamental rulesof evidence of the historical profession by rejecting the fact that the Nazi govern-ment and its collaborators murdered six million Jews. But he added immediately

that many other Holocaust emplotments that one might consider unacceptable donot suffer from the same epistemological shortcoming. White gave two examples

for such morally awed but factually accurate interpretations of the Holocaust.

He imagined a (neo)Nazi emplotment of the “Final Solution” that acknowledges

all the details of the genocide of European Jewry but celebrates it as a brave and

admirable act of necessary racial cleansing. White also invoked the Zionist inter-pretation of the Holocaust that sublates the horrors of the “Final Solution” within

an overarching narrative of Jewish martyrdom and heroism. He found neither of

these stories politically acceptable, but emphasized that both could be written in

such a way that they live up to the standards of evidence developed in the histori -cal profession.14

White provided excellent examples to illustrate that factual accuracy, moral in-tegrity, and political effectiveness are independent variables in Holocaust culture(and historical culture in general) that might coexist in a given representation ofthe “Final Solution” but that are not linked conceptually. One can easily nd other

suitable examples of comic and romantic emplotments of the Holocaust that sup-port White’s argument, especially in the realm of popular culture. By celebratingHolocaust survivors, rescuers, and liberators, the vast genre of popular lms and

documentaries about the “Final Solution” thrive on the challenge of casting the

seemingly gloomy topic of Nazi genocide into optimistic, uplifting narratives ofgreat entertainment and monetary value.15 Both sides of the narrative equation,

the gloom as well as its cheerful deconstruction, are carefully constructed aes-thetic effects. Moreover, a great deal of popular Holocaust culture has been me-

14. White, The Content of the Form, 76-80.15. Judith Doneson, The Holocaust in American Film, 2nd ed. (Syracuse: Syracuse University

Press, 2002).




ticulously and professionally fact-checked, often on the basis of recent Holocaust

scholarship.16 In this respect, White correctly stresses the compatibility between

academic and non-academic branches of the Holocaust culture industry.In 1990, however, White equally famously seemed to reverse himself when

challenged by Saul Friedländer to develop further his provocative remarks on the

politics of Holocaust historiography. In a paper delivered at UCLA, White thenconceded that “in the case of an emplotment of the events of the Third Reich in a

comic or pastoral mode, we would be eminently justied in appealing to the facts

in order to dismiss it from the list of competing narratives of the Third Reich.”17 Unfortunately, in 1990 White did not explain this passage or his position on thematter in any detail.18 Consequently, the ambiguity and possible reversal can be

read as White’s acknowledgment of and adaptation to the perceived limits of aca-demic culture.19 White could have easily—as well as more consistently, force-fully, and successfully—argued that Holocaust historiography can accommodateall kinds of emplotments of the “Final Solution” without any of them violating the

rules of evidence accepted by the practitioners in the eld.20 White has revisited the themes of his 1990 lecture in a number of publications

that shed new light on his interpretation of Holocaust representations. In his dia-logue with Friedländer, White had suggested that modern catastrophes like the

Holocaust cannot be successfully studied with the representational repertoire of

nineteenth-century historical culture. Events like the “Final Solution” are most

truthfully captured through a modernist aesthetic framework.21 White’s argumentimplied an epistemological correspondence between twentieth-century events

and modernist aesthetics, and previous events and realist aesthetics, and therebycalled into question his epistemological relativism. White later elaborated that the

mismatch between nineteenth-century tools of representation and twentieth-cen-

16. The best example is Schindler’s List ; see Christoph Classen’s contribution in this issue, andYosefa Loshitzky, Spielberg’s Holocaust: Critical Perspectives on Schindler’s List (Bloomington:Indiana University Press, 1997).

17. Hayden White, “Historical Emplotment and the Problem of Truth,” in Probing the Limits of

Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution,” ed. Saul Friedländer (Cambridge, MA: HarvardUniversity Press, 1992), 37-53, 40; reprinted in Hayden White, Figural Realism (Baltimore: Johns

Hopkins University Press, 1999), 27-42.

18. Kansteiner, “Hayden White’s Critique of the Writing of History,” History and Theory 32, no.3 (1993), 273-295.

19. In 1992, many historians, especially those of White’s and Friedländer’s generation, were stillintellectually engaged in the Historians’ Debate that had erupted in Germany in the mid-1980s. In thecourse of that debate a number of highly respected conservative historians of modern German his-tory had been massively attacked for emplotments of Nazi history that constituted small, incremental

deviations from mainstream postwar German historiography but that had considerably fewer radical

implications than White’s counterfactual Nazi emplotment of the “Final Solution.” In seeking to

distance himself from this conservative crowd (and avoid their fate) White illustrated the importance

of political factors in the writing of history while unfortunately discouraging others from engaging

in radical, narratological critiques of Holocaust historiography. On the generational dimension of the

historians’ debate, see Norbert Frei, “Farewell to the Era of Contemporaries: National Socialism and

Its Historical Examination en Route into History,” History and Memory 9, no. 1-2 (1997), 59-79.20. In 2000, White explicitly commented on the apparent reversal of his 1990 opinion, claim-

ing that such a reversal never took place; see Hayden White, “An Old Question Raised Again: Is

Historiography Art or Science? (Response to Iggers),” Rethinking History 4, no. 3 (2000), 402.21. White, Figural Realism, 41-42; see also White, “The Modernist Event,” in White, Figural

Realism, 66-86.



WULF KANSTEINER32

tury catastrophes cannot be primarily attributed to some qualities inherent in the

events themselves, although modern genocide, warfare, and capitalism are cer-tainly unprecedented events. Instead, a sense of incommensurability has devel-oped only in hindsight as some modern events, including the “Final Solution,”

have been perceived to transcend the limits of representation.22 In principle,however, this is not an unusual occurrence since the diversity of the past always

exceeds the semantic registers of any given historical culture.White also set out to demonstrate that Holocaust testimony succeeds in convey-

ing the horrors of the camps only through the extensive use of gurative language.

Primo Levi, for instance, who took pride in his plain, scientic language, mod-eled the plot structure of Survival in Auschwitz after Dante’s Divine Comedy. Inaddition, Levi’s exceptionally compelling characterization of the people and situ-ation he encountered in Auschwitz relies on a wide range of rhetorical devices,

including prolepses, ellipses, similes, and anthropomorphisms. Levi’s testimonyis factual in the sense that he did not invent events and people; but White arguesthat Survival in Auschwitz “derives its power as testimony, less from the scientic

and positivistic registration of the ‘facts’ of Auschwitz, than from its enactment as

poetic utterance of what it felt like to have had to endure such ‘facts’.”23 Thus forWhite, there is “no conict between the referential function of Levi’s discourse

and the expressive, affective and poetic functions.”24 Quite the contrary, Levi’s

realism, his ability to capture the feelings induced by an experience of extraordi-nary violence, could be accomplished only through extensive narrative and non-narrative guration.

With White’s analysis of Survival in Auschwitz we have already started a close

reading of The Years of Extermination. Levi and Friedländer write in different

contexts, and their books belong to different genres, but they deploy similar sty -listic means for similar ends. They use seemingly simple and understated, at timesterse, at times slightly ironic, language and avoid explicit moralizing and exten-sive explanation. In this way they try to capture the many nuances of the experi -ences of the victims. At the same time, Friedländer and Levi pursue differentscales of analysis and address different audiences. Levi writes a memoir about

Auschwitz designed to express his subjective experience as faithfully as possi-ble. Friedländer deals with the totality of the Holocaust in a book of professional

scholarship. His readers expect information about the causes and consequences of

the “Final Solution” as well as insights into the experiences of the victims, with

the rst expectation conventionally taking precedence over the second. As a result

of these differences, Survival in Auschwitz is an artful but ultimately consistentbook, whereas The Years of Extermination is a deeply ambivalent text.

22. Ewa Domanska, “A Conversation with Hayden White,” Rethinking History 12, no. 1 (2008),6-7; and “The Aim of Interpretation is to Create Perplexity in the Face of the Real: Hayden White in

Conversation with Erlend Rogne,” History and Theory 48, no. 1 (2009), 74.23. Hayden White, “Figural Realism in Witness Testimony,” Parallax 10, no. 1 (2004), 123

(emphasis in the original); see also White, “Historical Discourse and Literary Writing,” in Korhonen,

Tropes for the Past , 25-33.24. Hayden White, “Introduction: Historical Fiction, Fictional History, and Historical Reality,”

Rethinking History 9, no. 2, 3 (2005), 149.




Friedländer’s mastery consists of using the potentially debilitating conict be-tween explanation and emotion as an additional, powerful channel of communica-tion. While apparently keeping the conict undecided, he actually tips the balance

ever so slightly toward emotion, using the historians’ focus on explanation as a

way to make his readers look at the events of the Holocaust from the vantage

points of the victims. This effect is accomplished through the book’s dispersive

structure which stages (and hides) a pervasive yet subtle deconstructive dialogue

between our attempts to explain the Holocaust and our recognition that some fac-ets of its history seem to defy explanation. In essence, in the last resort The Years

of Extermination sacrices explanation for moral insight and thus shatters the

limits of conventional historical writing.

Put into White’s terms, The Years of Extermination is a modernist text thatcaptures the reality of the modern event “Holocaust” not through an analysis but

through a gurative performance. As a result of the innovative design of his book,

Friedländer addresses the lingering and debilitating effects of Holocaust violencemuch more successfully than conventional historical prose ever could. The Years

of Extermination and White’s thoughts on Levi thus mark an interesting conver-gence. While White and Friedländer took very different intellectual paths that only

crossed occasionally, for instance in Los Angeles in 1990, they have ultimatelydrawn the same radical conclusions about historical writing after Auschwitz.25

III. HISTORIOGRAPHY AND HISTORICAL CULTURE

Friedländer writes a transnational European history of the “Final Solution” that

pays particular attention and tribute to the victims of Nazi genocide. This focusis one of the reasons for the unfamiliar structure of the book. Each chapter and

most subchapters deal with seemingly clearly dened chronological segments of

the history of the Holocaust. But each of these segments incorporates a multitudeof historical locations, and features an impressive array of Jewish and non-Jewish

eyewitness testimony culled mostly from diaries found after the war. Let’s consid-er, for example, subchapter VI in chapter 7 (433-438). The chapter covers eventsfrom July 1942 to March 1943 and deals with deportations and the situation in the

Eastern European ghettos. The subchapter begins with two and a half pages on

the Lodz ghetto featuring no fewer than eleven quotes from three different diaries.

Some quotes are quite extensive, and they are carefully interwoven to provide

multiple perspectives on the same events or topics. The next page refers to Lwow

and focuses on the diarist Bruno Schulz. The last two pages of the subchapter

describe the situation in Vilna, citing ten passages from four different diaries. Allof this happens within seven pages.

Subchapter VII, dealing with the confusion among European Jews as a result

of the Nazi onslaught, presents an even more rapid change of locations causingthe reader to experience a faint echo of that state of confusion: Amsterdam, Vilna,Theresienstadt, Paris, Dresden, Lodz, Warsaw, London, The Hague, Brussels—al-

25. See in this context Robert Eaglestone’s interesting dialectical reading of the relationshipbetween Friedländer’s work and Derridean deconstruction, The Holocaust and the Postmodern (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 191-193.



WULF KANSTEINER34

most all of these locations are represented through quotes and all of this is achieved

in the course of ve and a half pages (438-444). Considering this structure, it is

amazing that The Years of Extermination is a very accessible, readable, and en-gaging text. One begins to understand how much work went into identifying the

passages from the diaries and into embedding the quotes into a context that keeps

the reader focused on the topic at hand and provides the necessary informationabout each diarist and each location. All of this is accomplished without upstaging

the quotes and their authors, who remain the intellectual and emotional highlights

of each passage. Friedländer is a master of economic understatement.Friedländer never ends a chapter, not even the nal chapter, with an explicit

analytical message. He never spells out what specic insights the events offer

that he has just described, and he does not nish the book by expounding lessons

of history regarding the origins of the “Final Solution” and the need to prevent

its reoccurrence. Instead, the chapters end as they began: in medias res and oftenwith an eyewitness having the last word. Friedländer keeps the reader historically

up to date, that is, he tells the audience where they are at any given point in the

story, but he refuses to keep the reader analytically up to date, that is, he refuses

to tell the audience what the preceding text means for Holocaust historiography

in particular and Holocaust history in general. Friedländer thus entices the readerto consider the events from the perspective of the victims of the “Final Solution”

who had historical insight (meaning they can tell us a lot about their specic ex-perience if one bothers to ask them) while frequently lacking analytical insight

into the reasons for their suffering. At the end of each of the chapters, as a resultof their circular structure, the reader is again with the victims and therefore also

more likely to consider the next chapter and the next Nazi attack from the vantage

point of the victims. None of this would be possible if Friedländer had followed

standard historiographical practice by rst describing a sequence of historical

events, then stepping back, interrupting readers’ immersive experience, and tell-ing them in detail what insights the events under description offer for the research

question at hand. Moreover, Friedländer would have certainly not achieved this

effect if he had offered the kind of conciliatory redemptive survivor stories that

inform most mass-media representations of the “Final Solution.”

Historians often underestimate the interdependencies between popular and elite

culture because they seek to distance themselves from what they consider non-

professional types of historical representation. As a result, they fail to realize towhat extent scholarly innovations depend on larger cultural transformations. The

rise of Holocaust research in the 1990s is, for instance, closely linked to the inven-tion of the popular Holocaust paradigm in the 1980s.26 Yet despite interdependen-cies, the products of academic and popular historical cultures remain in manyrespects incompatible. Scholars pursue research questions and choose formats

for the dissemination of their research results that allow them to engage in com-plex, laborious, and sometimes highly abstract reections about causality. Media

professionals consult historical scholarship but translate it into the conventionalparameters of history entertainment. Put bluntly, historians ask why a specic

26. Frank Bösch, “Film, NS-Vergangenheit und Geschichtswissenschaft: von Holocaust zu Der

Untergang,” Viertelsjahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 55, no. 1 (2007), 1-32.




event happened, whereas media professionals seek to tell their audiences how past

generations felt during a specic event or era.

These general remarks make us appreciate another accomplishment of Friedlän-der’s book. Instead of categorically distancing himself from popular formats of

historical entertainment, Friedländer engages in a complex dialogue with con-temporary visual culture. On the one hand, like many of his academic colleagues,

Friedländer challenges key conventions of popular Holocaust culture. The Years

of Extermination systematically subverts the kind of uplifting survivor story that

informs so many mass-media representations of the Holocaust. On the other hand,Friedländer appropriates popular formats of historical reection when these for-mats serve his purposes, and in this respect reveals himself to be a much morecompetent commentator on contemporary popular culture than many of his col-leagues. The Years of Extermination frequently features Holocaust iconography

because the icons offer an efcient way to set up a scene and focus the reader’s

attention—a particularly important task given the book’s dispersive structure. The

beginning of section IX in chapter 5 is a tting example. In the course of a few

pages and often using only a few words, Friedländer evokes well-known images

of deportations. The text creates in the reader’s mind registration procedures, de-portation lists, the rounding up of the victims, their march to the railway station,

and the terrible trip and arrival in the East (306-307). The passage also cites morespecic images, including scenes of multiple suicides and last-minute rescues,

which are well known from lms like Schindler’s List and Holocaust .The effective communication with his readers through Holocaust iconography

allows Friedländer to dedicate a lot of space to the voices of eyewitnesses. But the

use of Holocaust iconography serves an additional, more important purpose. Theoriginality of The Years of Extermination arises from the elegant juxtaposition ofthe familiar and the unfamiliar. The well-known icons and the unknown and pre-cisely deployed eyewitness testimony enter into a dialogue with each other and,

in the process, subtly shift the reader’s perception of the Holocaust. The interac-tion and tension between icon and testimony, and the creation of a new narrative

universe, is nicely illustrated in the already mentioned passage about the deporta-tion of Jews from Germany in 1941. When the topic of deportation is introduced

at the beginning of the section, the reader might think of scenes in Holocaust depicting Jewish victims being assembled at railway stations under the shame-ful, yet passive gaze of the German population. Friedländer directly challengesthis scene; he cites victims who report that the bystanders loudly and gleefully

welcomed the deportation and heaped abuse on the victims (307). As a result, the

reader might adopt a new mental image of Nazi anti-Jewish policies that contains

a more critical view of the bystanders and a better appreciation of the victims and

their feelings of utter betrayal. In essence, Friedländer renders the bystander per-spective less comfortable than most contemporary Holocaust products, which is a

particularly important accomplishment considering that the bystander perspectivestructurally resembles the perspective of the cinema audience.

Focusing on the visual elements in The Years of Extermination reveals how

much the book has in common with contemporary popular culture, in terms of

both content and structure, and how little many parts in the book correspond to the



WULF KANSTEINER36

conventional formats of Holocaust historiography.27 But the most fruitful pointsof comparison are not Schinder’s List or other pieces of visual Holocaust ction.

Rather, in some respects, The Years of Extermination is the discursive equivalent

of the type of prime-time historical documentaries that has revolutionized historytelevision since the 1990s. On rst glance, many passages of the book read like

scripts for documentaries produced by Ken Burns or the German television histo-rian Guido Knopp. The precise thematic and visual foci, the rapid changes of loca-tion, and the relative dearth of analytical exegesis correspond to the catchy rhythm,fast pace, and exceptional entertainment value of the last generation of highly suc-cessful TV documentaries. Moreover and more important, both The Years of Exter-

mination and contemporary non-ction TV aesthetics try to engage their audiences

emotionally; the readers and viewers are invited to feel their way into the past and

get a sense of how the events were experienced by people directly involved in

them.28 Also, for both Friedländer and Burns and Co. the eyewitnesses constitute

the most important vehicle of historical identication. The testimony and faces of

the eyewitnesses are built up as a privileged site of knowledge; they represent the

spice and texture of history and the guarantors of the book’s and the documenta-ries’ historical authenticity.29 At this point, however, the parallels end. Friedländer

uses evocative techniques of historical representation to encourage overdue identi-cation with the victims, whereas Knopp has often invited viewers to partake in the

dubious illicit pleasure of temporarily identifying with the perpetrators. Moreover,

while Friedländer crafts his text in such a way that it is always perceptive about the

interests and emotions of the victims, Knopp and his team make the testimony t

their dramaturgic design regardless of their interviewees’ intentions.30

IV. THE ORIGINS OF THE “FINAL SOLUTION”

Friedländer faces an interesting dilemma. He set out to write a synthetic history of

the Holocaust that pays close attention to the perspective and experiences of thevictims of the “Final Solution.” Yet the victims, as Friedländer emphasizes repeat-edly, did not cause their own destruction and had little knowledge of the factors

27. Only a few reviewers of The Years of Extermination have thus far commented on the excep-tional visual quality of many passages in the book; see Klaus-Dietmar Henke, “Die Stimmen der

Opfer,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (October 4, 2006); Dan Diner, “Chor der Opfer,” Die Welt (September 30, 2006); and especially Alon Confino’s exceptionally perceptive, “Narrative Form and

Historical Sensation: On Saul Friedländer’s The Years of Extermination,” forthcoming in History and

Theory 48 (October 2009).28. On Burns, see, for example, David Thelen, “The Movie Maker as Historian: Conversations

with Ken Burns,” Journal of American History 81, no. 3 (1994), 1043; and David Harlan, “Ken

Burns and the Coming Crisis of Academic History,” Rethinking History 7, no. 2 (2003), 169-192. OnKnopp, see Wulf Kansteiner, In Pursuit of German Memory: History, Television, and Politics after

Auschwitz (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006), 175-177.29. On eyewitness testimony in TV documentaries, see, especially, Judith Keilbach,Geschichtsbilder

und Zeitzeugen: Zur Darstellung des Nationalsozialismus im bundesdeutschen Fernsehen (Münster:Lit, 2008).

30. Friedländer’s radically self-reflexive aesthetics are partly the result of his critique of the his -

torical culture of the 1970s; see Reflections of Nazism: An Essay on Kitsch and Death (Bloomington:Indiana University Press, 1993).




that set the Nazi genocide into motion. They speculated frequently and widely

about the motives of their opponents and possible strategies of survival, but hadonly limited insight into the political, social, and ideological dynamics of the dif-ferent levels of the Nazi bureaucracy (xxiv-xxv, 43, 440-441). Friedländer’s mostunusual and most extensively used sources, the diaries of the victims, provide in-triguing answers to his primary research question, that is, what did the Holocaust

mean to its victims, but they are largely silent on the problem of causation, which

has to play a decisive role in any comprehensive history of Nazi genocide.Friedländer begins his study with a series of prolepses; the most powerful of

these is featured in the epigraph at the very beginning of the book. Citing the dia -rist Stefan Ernest, Friedländer tells his readers “this is not the truth, this is only a

small part, a tiny fraction of the truth” (vii). This gesture of humility is followed

by other disarmingly frank admissions of gaps and problems. Friedländer explains

that for lack of sources some questions will probably never be answered satisfac-torily, for instance, concerning the attitudes of some of the bystanders (xxii). Healso emphasizes that “no single conceptual framework can encompass the diverse

and converging strands” of the history of the Holocaust (xvi). Thus Friedländer’s

conceptual focus, “the centrality of ideological-cultural factors as the prime mov-ers of Nazi policies,” represents for him the most important fraction of the truth

but hardly the whole truth (xvii).

In Friedländer’s description, Hitler was the spider in the middle of an anti-

Semitic web that spanned all of Germany and ultimately all of Europe. Hitler

adapted his public display of anti-Semitism to his tactical priorities. At the begin-ning of the war, for instance, he still hoped to come to a power-sharing agreement

with Great Britain and uttered occasional, merely perfunctory threats against Jews

in public (xix, 18). In addition, Hitler had to accommodate many powerful social,

economic, and political constituencies. As a result, “the imperatives of anti-Jew-ish ideology had . . . to be attuned to a multiplicity of structural hurdles” (xxi).

But Friedländer stresses time and again that Hitler never wavered in his extreme,

redemptive anti-Semitic views: “Nothing seemed to have changed in Hitler’s in-nermost ideological landscape from his earliest forays into political propagandain 1919 to the last months of his crusade against ‘the Jew’” (645). Moreover

and more important, Hitler also pulled the political strings by closely monitoringthe anti-Jewish policies of the regime to the point that no major decision could

be taken without him: “No matter of any importance in the ongoing anti-Jewish

harassment could be settled without Hitler’s consent” (142; see also 471). For

Friedländer, the Holocaust would not have happened without Hitler (xvii).

Yet Friedländer does not simply analyze Hitler’s anti-Semitic convictions; rath-er, at key junctures in the story, he puts Hitler on stage and makes him perform his

anti-Semitism. For instance, over ten pages of the book, Friedländer quotes exten-sively from anti-Jewish statements that Hitler made on over twenty-ve different

occasions in the weeks between October 2 and December 17, 1941 (272-281).31

31. Friedländer uses the same rhetorical strategy on other occasions albeit on a smaller scale, or,

more precisely, he very effectively reminds the reader of the chronicle of outbursts documented onpages 272-281 by deploying phrases like “crescendo,” “diatribes,” “deluge of anti-Jewish tirades,” or

“full-scale raving”; see 335, 402, 541, and 660.



WULF KANSTEINER38

Friedländer chooses this rhetorical strategy to demonstrate the causal connectionbetween Hitler’s intense anti-Jewish hatred and the nal decision to exterminate

the Jews of Europe that was made in the fall of 1941 and, according to Friedlän-der, probably after December 11 as a result of the American entry into the war.32 The ten-page-long chronicle of condensed, repetitive invectives counts among themost unusual and powerful passages of the book. In a sense, these ten pages are

the performative equivalent of a Hitler order that probably never existed on paper.

But on closer examination one can still raise a lot of questions about the following

sentence that captures Friedländer’s strategy in a nutshell: “As the deadly threats

spewed by ‘the highest authority’ became one continuous rant, the ever more mur-derous campaign developed apace” (282). How are the rst and the second part

of the sentence related? The phrase “developed apace,” which appears frequently

in the book, begs the question of who precisely does the developing and for what

reasons while Hitler is ranting.33

Friedländer provides a series of multi-layered answers to these questions that

are not developed in as much detail as his analysis of Hitler’s redemptive anti-Semitism, but that nicely correspond to and corroborate that analysis. In a sense,the answers take on the shape of a set of Russian dolls that tightly t into each

other. Friedländer rst points toward the Nazi leadership. He emphasizes that the

ideologically reliable party old-timers quickly assumed responsibility for anti-

Jewish policies. They often developed idiosyncratic anti-Semitic styles and oc-casionally butted heads, but generally collaborated frightfully effectively (23, 75).According to Friedländer, the same is true for the second and third tier of Naziofcials. In this context, however, Friedländer’s language assumes an almost cir-cular structure:

In order to be effective, however, the ideological impetus had to emanate not only from the

top but also be fanatically adopted and enforced at intermediate levels of the system by thetechnocrats, organizers, and direct implementers of the extermination—by those in shortwho made the system work, several levels below the main political leadership. Key figures

in the agencies involved—particularly some of the best organizers and technocrats—were

motivated by anti-Jewish fanaticism. (479; see also 502)

It seems here as if Friedländer invokes the terrible effectiveness of the system as

proof of the ideological cohesion of the Nazi bureaucracy. What if anti-Semitic fa-naticism was only one of many factors that made the system so effective? Maybe

32. Friedländer follows the assessment of Christian Gerlach, who argued forcefully for a December

decision. Gerlach, Krieg, Ernährung, Völkermord: Forschungen zur deutschen Vernichtungspolitik

im Zweiten Weltkrieg (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 1998). In this respect, Friedländer disagreeswith most Holocaust historians, who assume that Hitler had already settled on genocide earlier in

the fall; see, for example, Christopher Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution

of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939–March 1942 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004).

It is interesting to note, however, that after having made a strong case for a December decision,

Friedländer backs off and concludes that “the decision was taken sometime during the last three

months of 1941” (286). For Friedländer, it is ultimately not that important to settle the factual ques-tion about the timing of the decision, which other Holocaust historians have debated with much

vigor. Acknowledging a certain measure of indecidability seems to be the most appropriate position

to take in light of the existing gaps in the archival record. Plus, that measure of indecidability servesFriedländer’s aesthetic, moral, and historiographical objectives very well.

33. For similar phrasing see 144, 160, 170, 237, 282, 356, 495, and 544.




the ideological impetus assumed its destructive force not primarily by being rep-licated on the lower levels of Nazi bureaucracy and society, but by absorbing and

integrating a wide range of motives and emotions into the crime of genocide.

Goebbels is the next Russian doll that Friedländer carefully unwraps for us.

He was Hitler’s most loyal disciple and plays a key role in the narrative universe

of The Years of Extermination. For Friedländer, Nazi propaganda in general andGoebbels’s efforts in particular provided the communicative conduit between the

Führer and his people. Time and again Friedländer emphasizes how effectively

Nazi propaganda, especially Nazi cinema, indoctrinated the German soldiers and“penetrated the minds of the Volksgenossen” (513).34 The combination of tradi-tional and Nazi anti-Semitism gave rise to anti-Jewish obsessions that survived

Hitler’s rapid decline in popularity in 1945 and lasted well into the postwar years

(636, 654). In his discussion of Goebbels’s “total war” speech, Friedländer once

more casts his argument into a particular compelling image: “Tens of millions

of Germans, glued to their radios, were engulfed in a rhetoric of rage and ven -geance” (473). Obviously, in Friedländer’s assessment, these Germans were not

just glued to the radio but also glued to one another by their shared anti-Semiticconvictions.

The Nazis were able to hold ideological sway over their people as easily as

they did because traditional elites failed to provide any proper moral guidance.Friedländer puts particular blame on the churches. Due to the traditional religiousanti-Semitism inherent in Christianity, the vast majority of Catholic and Protestantofcials remained publicly silent about deportations and exterminations, and only

occasionally extended a helping hand in private, and then primarily to convertedJews. These “basic facts,” as Friedländer calls them, set a powerful example for

the ninety-ve percent of the German population who regularly attended religious

services (574, 55).35 Unfortunately, church ofcials were hardly the only members

of the elite who failed their people. Military leaders also quickly adapted their

anti-Semitic ways to radical Nazi anti-Judaism (210). Even members of the mili-tary opposition to Hitler, who were willing to risk their lives in the ght against

the Führer, saw no need to abandon long-held anti-Semitic views (55, 635; see

also 513).At this stage, we have amassed a depressingly vast collection of anti-Semitic

dolls: Hitler, his immediate entourage, old Nazi ghters, Nazi technocrats, ordi-nary soldiers, regular Germans, church ofcials, military leaders, and resistance

ghters. But the collection is still not complete. Friedländer writes a transnational

history of the Holocaust and thus adds more layers of analysis that appear to t

perfectly around their German core. Friedländer sees a combination of “modern

anti-Jewish hostility” and “national anti-Semitic rantings” sweeping half of Eu-rope, including Portugal, Spain, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, Romania, Croatia,

and France (71). In the course of his analysis Friedländer pays particularly closeattention to France and Poland, adds Lithuania and Belgium to the list (221, 259),

34. On the successful indoctrination of soldiers see also 28, 134, 189, and 211-212 and on Nazi

film 19-22, 99-102, and 160.35. The failure of the churches is extensively covered in The Years of Extermination; see, for

instance, 72-75, 94, 184-187, 229, 298-303, 465-466, and 561-577, and here especially 574.



WULF KANSTEINER40

and highlights the anti-Semitic leanings of key ofcials in the British and U.S.

governments (85, 89; see also 270). On several occasions Friedländer explicitlymentions additional motives like greed, fear, and political opportunism (53, 180,

479, 500, 535). But it is clear that, for Friedländer, anti-Semitism was the single

most important cause of the anti-Jewish policies of the German government and

the submissiveness, passivity, assistance, and occasional all-out support with

which these policies were greeted across Europe.

Friedländer, ever the visual historian, develops a powerful metaphor that brings

all the layers together and that conveys his explanatory model in a particularlyvivid way:

This anti-Jewish frenzy at the top of the Nazi regime was not hurled into a void. . . . [T]he

flames that the Nazi leader set alight and fanned burned as widely and intensely as they

did only because, throughout Europe and beyond . . . a dense underbrush of ideologicaland cultural elements was ready to catch fire. Without the arsonist the fire would not have

started; without the underbrush it would not have spread as far as it did and destroyed an

entire world. (xix)

V. CAUSATION AND ANALYTICAL UNEASE

In my summary of the book I have in a sense committed an error that many Ho -locaust historians are guilty of and that Friedländer identied in his introduction:

I have domesticated the disturbing history of the “Final Solution” by casting it

into standard, consistently structured historical prose. I have accomplished thisact of discursive normalization in three steps: (1) by eliminating the voices of the

victims since they do not speak to the question of causality; (2) by rearrangingFriedländer’s fragmented story into neat little packages that are part of a clear,

hierarchical structure reaching from Hitler to the European periphery; (3) by de-ploying the metaphors of the spiderweb and the Russian doll that convey the

structure of my argument to the reader and that thereby enhance the summary’sappeal and legitimacy.36

One might assume that providing such a consistently structured summary is anappropriate way to explain and test Friedländer’s analytical model. After all, the

synopsis is based on a close reading of the text and identies Friedländer’s most

important explicit statements about the origins of the Holocaust. Nevertheless, in

some respects the summary is already a serious misrepresentation of Friedländer’swork because it completely ignores the text’s many implicit and ultimately nega-tive statements about historical causality that are expressed through the book’s un-usual structure. We have already seen that The Years of Extermination can inducea subtle feeling of spatial confusion. On closer examination, every single passageand statement can be clearly linked to a specic location. But the rapid sequence

of sometimes seemingly haphazardly arranged sites of action conveys a faint echoof the sense of displacement that the victims of Nazi policies experienced as theywere cut off from society and rushed through Europe toward their death.

36. Incidentally, some reviewers have chosen to offer such a ‘translation’ of The Years of Extermination; see, for instance, Jeffrey Herf, “The Whole Horror,” New Republic (September 10,2007).




A similar effect is triggered by the way that Friedländer deals with time. On

rst inspection, his narrated time follows a clear chronological sequence. Each

chapter covers an explicitly identied period, and the book takes the reader in an

orderly fashion from “September 1,” 1939 on page 3 to “May 1 or 2,” 1945 on

page 661. But Friedländer juggles so many different people, locations, and narra-tive strands that the seemingly strict chronological chapter sequence gives way to

a multidirectional chronological web once the reader enters the narrative. There

are three interesting aspects to Friedländer’s subtle displacement of linear time.First, the book is constructed in such a way that key months are covered twice in

two different chapters and sometimes even in two different parts of the book. That

applies to May 1940, December 1940, June 1941, September 1941, December

1941, July 1942, March 1943, October 1943, and March 1944. In addition to this

overlap, Friedländer chooses to discuss some events in chapters into which they

‘ofcially’ do not belong.37 Finally and most important, Friedländer rapidly goesback and forth within each chapter. Consider, for example, chapter 5 (261-328).

During the rst thirteen pages, and then again during the last forty pages of the

chapter, Friedländer’s timeline jumps violently back and forth between Septem-ber and December 1941 as he covers many different aspects of that crucial period.The ten successive pages in the middle of the chapter that do unfold in a strictchronological fashion are a massive exception both in the chapter and in the book

as a whole. These ten pages cover the already mentioned performance of Hitler’s

anti-Semitism (272-281). Thus the book is certainly not a strictly chronologically

structured account, as a number of reviewers have suggested.38 Quite the contrary,

linear chronology is such an unusual occurrence in the book that Friedländer can

use it as an extraordinarily effective tool of rhetorical emphasis.The constant chronological vacillation can have some rather disturbing effects,

as the example of Reinhard Heydrich illustrates. Heydrich, who died on June

4, 1942 after having been wounded by Czech commandos a few days earlier, is

featured prominently in The Years of Extermination. He appears on seventy-threepages of the book. On some of these pages, however, Heydrich literally returns

from the dead. Heydrich dies for the rst time on pages 349 and 350; he is alive

again on page 352, dead on page 357, alive on pages 362, 367, and 368, dead onpage 374, alive on page 377, and then never mentioned again. In every singleinstance that Heydrich appears, the context explains the situation completely ad-equately. Most readers may never consciously register Heydrich’s zombie-like

existence in the pages of the book. Nevertheless, his reappearance from the dead

(and his staying alive) is a little disturbing and, on a subconscious rather than aconscious level, calls into question simplistic, comforting illusions of linear time

to which historians conventionally subscribe.

In addition to the subtle deconstruction of linear concepts of space and time,The Years of Extermination also undermines naïve concepts of causality. While

Friedländer explicitly identies anti-Semitism as the common causal denomina-

37. In this context I am not referring to events that qualify as prehistory to events that clearly

belong to the respective chapters; see, for example, 303, 314-315, 426, and passim.38. See, for example, Stephan Speicher, “Von Mördern und Mitläufern,” Literaturen 2 (2007),

55-59, 59.



WULF KANSTEINER42

tor of the transnational history of the Holocaust, his collage of countless, small-scale and large-scale events provides ample deconstructive ammunition to callinto question the primacy of anti-Jewish ideology:

• The comparison of developments in the Netherlands and Belgium raises a num-ber of interesting questions. Friedländer reports that the Dutch, especially those

living in the cities, were very tolerant of Jews. Nevertheless, the docile Dutch

police and the highly efcient Dutch bureaucracy proved terrible weapons in

the quest to rid the country of Jews, most of whom had lived in the Nether-lands for many generations (122, 375, 406). Belgium, in comparison, featuredrabidly anti-Semitic, pro-German organizations whose members staged their

own pogroms (259). Yet many foreign-born Jews who had found refuge in the

country without being integrated into Belgian society were ultimately rescued

by ordinary citizens (423). Timing, administrative structures, political convic-

tions, and other factors appear to have played a more important role in thesecases than seemingly malleable anti-Jewish dispositions. In Holland, in par-ticular, anti-Semitism appears to have been a result of the deportations, not oneof its causes (609).

• The situation seems to have been similarly confusing in France. The French elitewith their picture-perfect, anti-Semitic credentials collaborated quite enthusias-tically in the deportation of Jewish immigrants. But the very same leaders were

far more hesitant to hand over their Jewish compatriots (175, 378, 551). Real

and imagined xenophobic divisions appeared to have played a more importantrole than anti-Semitic convictions. Friedländer mentions that in France “anti-

Semitism may well have been outweighed by sheer indifference” (175).

• Friedländer recounts on several occasions that the Jewish community in Pales-tine, especially its leadership, displayed a disturbing indifference about eventsin Europe. The political elite worried primarily about the dearth of future immi-grants once European Jewry had been exterminated (153, 305-306, 457, 597).

Since anti-Semitism does not appear to be a likely motive in this case, reactions

in Palestine raise interesting questions about contemporary European societies.

Maybe the social-psychological dynamics at play in Palestine also explain thewidespread indifference with which most Europeans and Americans responded

to Nazi anti-Jewish policies.

• In his extensive coverage of German perpetrators and bystanders, Friedländersystematically focuses on their anti-Semitism. On several occasions, however,

he discusses Nazis and soldiers who did not appear to hate Jews but neverthe-less, as far as we know, contributed their share to the success of the genocidal

mission. The most famous person in this category is Kurt Gerstein (459), butFriedländer mentions many others including a soldier who reported to his par-ents about the spoils of colonial power. In Friedländer’s assessment the “author

of the letter does not read like a born murderer or dyed-in-the-wool anti-Semite,

but rather like someone who just went along and enjoyed his newly acquired

power.” Friedländer adds that “this was probably the case of most soldiers ofthe Ostheer” (210).




• Friedländer puts a lot of blame on the shoulders of church ofcials for fail -ing to provide moral guidance and occasionally even egging on the killers of

Jews. He links that behavior to pervasive Christian anti-Semitism. Friedländer

is particularly interested in explaining the passivity of the pope. In the end, heattributes it to political motives and concludes “there is no specic indication

that the pope was anti-Semitic or that his decisions during the war stemmed,

in part, from some particular hostility toward Jews” (571). Moreover and more

important, on many occasions, often in passing, Friedländer reports that churchofcials played an important role in rescue operations and in bringing about a

reversal of anti-Jewish policies. The change of heart came toward the end of the

war, but it occurred all across Europe, including in countries whose leaders had

been particularly eager collaborators (Slovakia: 373, 485; Netherlands, 410;

France, 421, 553-554; Belgium, 423, Romania, 450; Bulgaria 485; Italy, 561;Hungary 620).39

• Friedländer mentions that some Eastern Europeans took German occupation

as an opportunity to stage spontaneous anti-Jewish riots, but he also reports

that on many occasions the Einsatzgruppen initially failed to convince Poles,Russians, Ukrainians, and Lithuanians to launch pogroms against their Jewish

compatriots and that propaganda efforts proved futile (223-224).

• Ironically, the Italian government and Italian troops quickly emerged as the

most efcient protectors of Jews in Croatia, France, and Greece (230, 453,

489, 553). After German troops occupied Italy, Italian police ofcers occasion-ally rounded up Jews when no German soldiers were present (612). Friedlän-

der never discusses the extent of anti-Semitism in Catholic Italy. Similarly, welearn very little about the motives of large collectives of helpers in Denmark,

Bulgaria, and Belgium. What kind of people acting under what circumstances

escaped the grasp of anti-Semitism or intervened despite their anti-Jewish prej-udices in the age of ideology?

• According to Friedländer the deportation of the Jews of Salonika resulted from

a range of factors including the presence of collaborators and “periodic ten-sions” between Greeks and post-World War I Jewish refugees. Friedländer

stops short of calling the Greeks anti-Semitic; nevertheless the deportations

proceeded depressingly swiftly (487-488).

The more one studies the multiple facets of Holocaust history presented inThe Years of Extermination, the more the key concepts that Friedländer has so

carefully erected begin to fray at the edges and appear questionable. As a re -sult of Friedländer’s evenhandedness and scrupulous fairness in the handling of

39. With regard to the actions of church officials, Friedländer constructs an interesting contra-diction. In his discussion of the German clergy he points out that church officials had considerableinfluence on public opinion and could therefore, for instance, force the Nazi government to conducteuthanasia killings in much less visible ways. Consequently, Friedländer finds their silence about the

Holocaust particularly blameworthy (202, 303). At the same time, he seems to suggest that the public

statements of bishops in other Catholic countries had no influence on the population: “A few Catholicbishops courageously spoke out in their dioceses but these were lone voices that could not have a

major impact on the attitude of the Hungarian population” (620).



WULF KANSTEINER44

evidence, readers are left with a lot of different anti-Semitisms that had different

consequences in different settings. Plus, we get a sense of other factors at work,

but only a few of them are identied for us, and Friedländer never integrates

these factors into an overarching analytical model. The explicit framework “anti-

Semitism” is implicitly overwhelmed by empirical excess. On a few rare occa-sions—surprisingly rare considering the heft and structure of the book—one can

even catch Friedländer questioning the soundness of his own analytical model.

For instance, on the one hand, Friedländer puts a lot of emphasis on the extentand success of Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda, and stresses the fact that the Nazileadership paid close attention to public opinion. On the other hand, Friedländerconcedes in passing that the success of the Nazi propaganda efforts was ultimately

unimportant because “German policies regarding the Jews did not depend on the

level of anti-Semitism in German and European opinion” (189).

The list above provides the basis for an illuminating counterfactual scenario.If Friedländer had rst and foremost aimed at providing a comprehensive, ana-lytically fully satisfactory explanation of the Holocaust, he could have easily de-veloped a more complex causal model that systematically integrates a varietyof factors. If we consider, for a moment, the tensions and contradictions in The

Years of Extermination as an analytical problem, social-psychological modelscould provide an analytical solution so long as they included an important rolefor ideology.40 The German scholar Harald Welzer, for instance, has developedsocial-psychological methods for perpetrator research that stress the importanceof ideological factors, especially in providing mass murderers with an interpre-tive framework that renders their task meaningful.41 His methods offer the op-portunity to conceptualize the many crimes and crime scenes that make up the

vast event of the Holocaust as the outcome of complex constellations of factorswhose precise composition could have differed from case to case despite the fact

that all contributed to the same outcome. By way of Welzer’s insights, Friedlän-der’s relatively static model could easily be transformed into a more dynamic andexible conceptual framework that accounts for the existence of different types

of anti-Semitism and their different effects in different settings.42 In addition, a

40. Friedländer dismisses the explanatory power of “common social-psychological reinforce-ments, constraints, and group dynamical processes” if they are considered “independent of ideological

motivations.” He does not try to integrate the two factors within one overarching causal model (xx).41. Harald Welzer, Täter: Wie aus ganz normalen Menschen Massenmörder werden (Frankfurt:

Fischer, 2005). Welzer refers extensively to Friedländer’s The Years of Persecution and his conceptof redemptive anti-Semitism and has only one point of criticism. For Welzer there is nothing unusualor inexplicable about the process that turns normal people into murderers: see Täter, 74-75.

42. Welzer is very visible in the German media, and his book made quite a splash when it was

published in Germany in late 2005. Nevertheless, I have seen only one review that makes the obvi-ous connection between the two media events, that is, Welzer’s Täter and Friedländer’s Years of

Extermination: “Friedländer mono-causally argues that ‘normal’ Germans became mass murderers

as a result of a fanatic and deeply-rooted anti-Semitism. One look into Harald Welzer’s social-

psychological analysis of perpetrators, published in 2005, would have added a central explanatory

component to Friedländer’s thorough book” (Jörg von Bilavsky, “Die Chronik des Unfassbaren,” Das

Parlament [January 29, 2007]). Bilavsky’s charge is unfair because Friedländer’s book was already

in production when Täter was published, but he made a connection that other critics missed or choseto ignore. The prominent journalist Volker Ulrich, for example, reviewed both books, giving ample

praise to Welzer and even more to Friedländer without connecting the two. At the same time, in his




more dynamic framework could more effectively explain, following the lead of

Christopher Browning, how groups of German men and non-German collabora-tors who did not feel passionately about Jews in one way or another nevertheless

quickly turned into efcient killers.43 The point is, however, that Friedländer does not want to present a comprehen-

sive, analytically pleasing explanation of the Holocaust. There are a number ofhints to that effect throughout the book, in addition to the very explicit statement

in the introduction where Friedländer announces that he wishes “to offer a thor-ough historical study of the extermination of the Jews of Europe, without elimi-nating or domesticating that initial sense of disbelief” caused by the recognition

that the Nazis indeed intended to murder all Jews without exception (xxvi). To

maintain that sense of disbelief Friedländer has to protect it from knowledge that

“rushes in and smothers it,” as Friedländer puts it on the same page. The task of

producing and protecting disbelief entails, among other things, that Friedländerimplicitly trips up his own analytical framework, thus rendering anti-Semitism

both omnipresent and always a little opaque.

Friedländer maintains a sense of analytical unease by refusing to explicitly ad-dress and resolve the tensions between his forcefully presented analytical frame-work (that is, anti-Semitism), and the many truthful historical vignettes that de-mand additions to and revisions of that framework.44 On the one hand, Friedländeradopts the role of magisterial historian who, with the full weight of his scholarly

experience and in complete command of the research literature, presents to thereader the most important fraction of the truth of the history of the Holocaust.On the other hand, he declines the role of the omniscient narrator by leaving thereader in charge of dealing with the many tensions and contradictions included

in his book. On a few occasions, Friedländer explicitly addresses analytical prob-lems inherent in the historical record, but rather than resolving them he simplyhighlights them. Thus, when acknowledging the puzzling willingness of so many

Belgians to rescue Jews, he highlights the important role played by the commu-nist party but in the end calls the issue “unresolved” and “probably unresolvable”

(423). In addition, on a few more occasions, he endorses the sense of confusion

among eyewitnesses not as a reasonable but as an accurate interpretation of events.

In this vein he cites Ruth Klüger, who calls the behavior of helpers, like the Bel-gians, “incomparable and inexplicable” (578). For the same reason, Friedländer

highlights the inconclusiveness of the testimony of his star witness Viktor Klem-perer: “To Klemperer the attitudes of the population appeared as contradictory as

ever,” meaning that Germans refused to act consistently anti-Semitically despite

review of The Years of Extermination, Ulrich referred extensively to another 2005 media event, thepublication of Götz Aly’s Hitlers Volksstaat (Frankfurt: Fischer, 2005); see Ulrich, “Mörder, die sich

nicht als Mörder fühlen,” Tagesanzeiger (October 6, 2005); and Ulrich, “Die Stimmen der Opfer,”

Die Zeit (September 28, 2006).43. Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in

Poland (Cambridge, MA: HarperCollins, 1992). 44. The term “analytical unease” is derived from Friedländer’s theoretical writings about

Holocaust historiography; see Friedländer, Memory, History, and the Extermination of the Jews of Europe (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993); see also Friedländer, Den Holocaust besch-

reiben: Auf dem Weg zu einer integrierten Geschichte (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2007).



WULF KANSTEINER46

all the evidence that attests to their anti-Jewish dispositions and that Friedländer

has carefully assembled for us (518).The eyewitness testimonies and Friedländer’s refusal to adopt the role of omni-

scient historian are linked in other ways as well. By leaving the reader alone with

the analytical dissonances triggered by his text, Friedländer yet again simulatesthe perspective of the victims who did not fully understand the reasons for the

persecution they endured but could not afford to ignore the riddle that the behav-ior of the perpetrators presented to them. Finally, eyewitness testimony, historical

vignettes, and Friedländer’s interpretive reticence are also closely intertwined on

a concrete textual level. As already mentioned, Friedländer ends chapters and sub-chapters with survivor testimony or little stories that comment on the events that

have just been covered. Often, the testimony or story presents particularly vividand emotionally disturbing information and raises more questions than it answers.

Thus the unsettling testimony/story takes the place in the scholarly text that histo-rians conventionally use to summarize the insights provided in the previous pagesand to place them within the overall narrative trajectory and conceptual frame-work of the book. By refusing to provide that service to the reader, and by adding

yet another layer of data that increases rather than reduces complexity, Friedlän-der enhances the impact of the homeopathic doses of analytical unease. The Years

of Extermination is a narrative balancing act designed to protect Friedländer’skey concept from implosion while raising just enough doubt about the tools of the

trade, including his own concepts, to impress on the reader the very fragility and

fundamental insufciency of historiographical semantics.45 So is The Years of Extermination a truly modernist text? Sometimes the surface

of the text certainly looks that way. The book does not have a proper beginning. It

starts in the middle with an episode from September 1942 and then offers twenty

pages of conceptual introduction. Twenty-eight pages into the book there is an-other beginning, which is immediately announced as an end: “Viktor Klemperer

wrote in his diary on September 3. ‘I said to Eva [that] a morphine injection or

something similar was the best thing for us; our life was over’” (1). The book also

does not have a proper end with scenes of liberation and closure as we see in the

movies. Instead, the reader learns that Germans were still anti-Semitic, that most

of the diarists whom they have met in the previous 660 pages were murdered

though a few had stayed alive, and that the suffering continued because the survi-vors were trapped in the past: “Recurrently it pulled them back into overwhelming

terror and, throughout, notwithstanding the passage of time, it carried along with

it the indelible memory of the dead” (663). Finally, the book lacks a conventional

narrative focus. Hitler, who comes closest to lling that role, performs very often

but acts very rarely; he oats above the events as they are unfolding.

At other times the text looks like a chronicle or a realist novel in the tradition

of Tolstoy’s War and Peace.46 These similarities to premodern and realist forms

45. Alon Confino has described this balancing act very well; see Confino, “Narrative Form and

Historical Sensation.”

46. Incidentally, in an analysis of Tolstoy’s War and Peace White argued in 2007 that one of thearchetypical texts of literary realism consists of “a series of vignettes, anecdotes, [and] small histo-ries” that braid together three different genres—political history, everyday history, and philosophical




of historical writing highlight the genre-busting, hybrid qualities of The Years

of Extermination. In the last analysis, however, the book is indeed a thoroughly

modernist work of history. On a structural level, Friedländer performs a radically

self-conscious deconstruction of notions of causality that have informed profes-sional historiography since its beginnings in the nineteenth century and that were

still in statu nascendi at the time when Tolstoy nished his study of the Napole-onic wars.

VI. HISTORY, IDENTITY, AND TRUTH BEYOND EPISTEMOLOGY

So what is the primary, what the secondary referent of The Years of Extermina-

tion? What messages is Friedländer sending his readers by way of the unusual

structure of his book? What is the point in trying to induce a sense of analytical

unease? Let me rst try to summarize the primary referent of the book, that is, the

basic, historical plot structure of The Years of Extermination:

A small group of extreme racial anti-Semites managed to organize an unprece-dented genocide because they had political power and found many collaborators

in Germany and abroad who held less radical, yet compatible views. Together,

with the small group always in control, they invented a bureaucratic, techno-logical process for mass murder that combined conventional mass shootingswith new technologies for mass murder, ultimately succeeding in killing six

million Jews. Several hundred thousand perpetrators committed the crime and

a very large number of people knew about it. Yet the people in occupied Europe

and beyond did not intervene to stop the genocide because they failed or didnot want to understand the full extent of the crime, and because many proted

from the policies of the NS regime. First and foremost, however, people did not

intervene because they shared a traditional, Christian, anti-Semitic worldview

and thus failed to identify with the victims. The victims themselves were in-creasingly desperate and isolated from society. Some communities managed tomaintain a sense of cultural identity for a surprisingly long time. Others disinte-grated more quickly as Jews were forced to participate in their own destruction.

In the end, the behavior of the victims, including isolated attempts at armedresistance, did not have any effect on the outcome of the murder campaign.

This basic plot summary applies to a number of books that have been written

about the Holocaust, for instance Leni Yahil’s The Holocaust .47 But Friedländeradds an important twist to the story that radically changes the form of the book

and constitutes its secondary referent. I would call this secondary referent the

historiographical plot structure of The Years of Extermination. On this level, thebook is without precedent in Holocaust historiography:

treatise—and render the past “unreasonable and incomprehensible,” all for the purpose of conveying

“what it felt like to fight in a battle, to be wounded, march beyond exhaustion, suffer imprisonment

or risk death.” Thus White makes War and Peace look very much like The Years of Extermination (minus Friedländer’s radical self-reflexive edge) in an essay appropriately entitled “Against Historical

Realism,” New Left Review 46 (2007), 89-110, quotes from 90, 91, and 109.47. Leni Yahil, The Holocaust: The Fate of European Jewry, 1932–1945 (New York: Oxford

University Press, 1990).



WULF KANSTEINER48

Understanding the perpetrators and the origins of the “Final Solution” is im-portant, but it is time to shift focus and pay close attention to the victims. First,because the victims deserve our empathy, and that empathy has not been forth-coming to a sufcient degree from mainstream Holocaust historians. Second

and much more crucial, because in important respects we are still in the same

epistemological boat as the victims were. Our boat is not tossing and turning

constantly and throwing us into the abyss, but it is rolling to such an extent that

we cannot always be one hundred percent sure about our bearings. I know the

history of the Holocaust as well as any scholar and I am convinced that anti-

Semitism was the most important factor. But as our boat keeps moving, mainly

as a result of the upheaval that was the Holocaust, I see aspects of the history of

the “Final Solution” that complicate and cloud the picture. Occasionally, I even

wonder about the soundness of my conceptual convictions. These complicating

aspects need to be included in the story. It is a question of honesty and truthful -ness about history, historiography, and the relationship between the two. More-over, in acknowledging the complicating aspects of the story and keeping alive

that sense of disbelief that the victims experienced in a much more radicalway, historians are making a small contribution to building a morally sensitive

cultural universe whose consumers are hopefully more willing to transform

disbelief into resistance than their twentieth-century relatives were.

The historiographical plot structure of the book, its secondary referent, is an

ethical axiom that informs every single page of the book. It is also the book’s

most important message, and it cannot be veried or falsied according to any

established rules of evidence.Friedländer’s radical and honest balancing act exposes the contradictory rai-

son d’ être of historical writing with exceptional clarity. Historians certainly seek

to establish facts and explore origins and causal links, but because of the limits

inherent in their source material their analyses rarely rise to the level of causalprobability that is routinely attained in other social sciences. After all, especiallysocial scientists who study present society and work with quantitative data can

design and set up their own experiments and thus produce the kind of evidence

that speaks directly to their questions. They are not limited to material that has

been haphazardly left behind by others and that almost never provides representa-

tive, conclusive sets of data. Therefore, from a social-science perspective, the waythat historians deal with evidence seems rather peculiar. It would be difcult for a

political scientist or a communication studies expert, for instance, to analyze theattitudes of German soldiers or the reception of a specic lm on the basis of a

few letters or diary entries without having rst been able to establish these sources

as representative expressions of opinion of all members of the target group.But since historians have a lot more exibility in their manipulation of evidence

than do scholars from other disciplines, they can address the really importantmoral and political questions that generally escape social-scientic scrutiny. The Years of Extermination is a perfect example in this regard. Friedländer provides

models and evidence of causality, but he accomplishes a lot more. The book in-vents for the reader a complete narrative universe, a simulation of the 1940s, that




contains all the main players and factual events as well as countless minor players

and factual occurrences, and, on the basis of that total, yet contradictory, vision,captures the atmosphere in Europe during World War II, creates empathy with the

victims of Nazi persecution, renders a verdict of moral justice about the behaviorof victims, bystanders, and perpetrators, and, last but not least, by nurturing asense of disbelief, insists on the hope that, despite all the evidence to the contrary,the Nazi genocide will remain a unique event, perhaps not in the world but at least

in the West. One might disagree with every single aspect of Friedländer’s vision,

with the way he captures the atmosphere, his standards of moral judgment, his

utopian hope, or, least likely, even the way in which he creates empathy for the

victims. But these assessments are not subject to the rules of historical evidence,underdeveloped as they are in the rst place. Friedländer’s opinions regarding

these big topics can be questioned on the basis of diverging emotions, tastes,

intuitions, philosophies, and identities. They cannot be proven untruthful in theway that specic factual statements in his account might turn out to be false, for

instance, regarding the number of victims that the Finnish government handedover to Nazi authorities.48

Reviewers have enthusiastically welcomed the publication of The Years of Ex-

termination, especially Friedländer’s inclusion of the voices of the victims intohis integrated history of the Holocaust.49 They have often mentioned Friedlän-der’s intention to maintain a sense of disbelief in the face of the “Final Solution”

and have occasionally voiced polite reservations about his model of causality.50 But they have refused to fully engage with Friedländer’s conceptual preferences,

narrative design, and empirical claims. Instead, they quickly have elevated The

Years of Extermination to the status of a historical monument than is unworthy

of historiographical squabble.51 Thus, at this early stage, nobody has taken the

publication of The Years of Extermination as a opportunity to take stock of what

the dynamic eld of Holocaust studies, and especially perpetrator research, has

accomplished in the last fteen years. During this period, historians in Germany

and elsewhere have worked their way through a number of interrelated dialectical

48. Compare Friedländer, The Years of Extermination, 449, to Dieter Pohl, “Der Chronist der

Apokalypse,” Der Spiegel (October 9, 2006).49. My comments about reception are focused largely on Germany where scholarly reviews have

already appeared in the national press; reviews in U.S. scholarly journals are still in the pipeline asI am writing this essay. For representative reviews, see Ulrich Herbert, “Die Stimmen der Opfer,”

Süddeutsche Zeitung (September 29, 2006); and Norbert Frei, “Gesichter des Schreckens,” Neue

Züricher Zeitung (October 2, 2006).50. Hans Mommsen, for instance, not known for critical reticence, mentions that the role of the

German bureaucracy and the key turning points in the Nazi persecution of Jews are not described with

as much precision as he would have liked to see, and then concludes that “we owe a debt of gratitude

to Friedländer for his impressive humanitarian lifetime achievement;” see “Fassungslosigkeit, die

sich mitteilt,” Frankfurter Rundschau (October 4, 2006). Dieter Pohl offers a few factual corrections,

for instance regarding the collaborative measures of the Finnish government, and points out thatFriedländer might have exaggerated the extent of anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe in general and inPoland in particular, and then insists in closing, citing Ranke, that “anybody who wants to know what

really happened has to read this book;” Dieter Pohl, “Der Chronist der Apokalypse,” Der Spiegel,

(October 9, 2006). See also Richard Evans’s “Whose Orders,” New York Times (June 24, 2007).51. Klaus-Dietmar Henke calls The Years of Extermination “the historiographical monument for

the murdered Jews of Europe,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (October 4, 2006).



WULF KANSTEINER50

concepts. They have tried to understand the precise interaction between the center

and the periphery of the Nazi empire in the decision-making process. In addition,

they have sought to determine to what extent the perpetrators were driven by

ideological motives and/or were subject to non-ideological, social-psychological

factors that quickly turned them into murderers. This conceptual map—center vs.

periphery and ideology vs. structure/psychology—was pregured in theoretical

publications of the 1970s and 1980s and fully developed in path-breaking publi-cations like Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men. As we have seen, Friedländer

positions himself very clearly in this conceptual landscape. He identies ideo-logical commitments and the center of Nazi power as the origins of the “Final

Solution.” This is hardly surprising because Friedländer has held these beliefs

throughout his long career as a Holocaust historian.Many factors have inuenced the critics’ reaction. First and foremost, The Years

of Extermination is indeed a stunning achievement. None of the other syntheticstudies of the subject presents a truly transnational history of the “Final Solu-tion” and systematically integrates into that history the perspectives and voicesof the victims. Friedländer has written a book that makes it impossible to return

to the historiographical status quo ante. Its narrative design is so compelling and

the literary execution so masterful that any future comprehensive history of theHolocaust will be held up to the same standards. A synthetic history of the “Final

Solution” that does not render justice to the victims will no longer be acceptable.

But the critics’ humility is also the result of other factors, including the fact thatthe eld of Holocaust studies has recently moved in Friedländer’s direction. After

a string of publications in the 1990s that emphasized non-ideological factors andthe importance of decision-making processes on the ground in occupied Eastern

Europe, the pendulum has again swung the other way. New research stresses that

local perpetrators were closely attuned to Berlin’s ideological priorities as a result

of direct interventions and frequent visits by Himmler and other Nazi leaders.52 In addition, there is a question of historiographical etiquette linked to Friedlän-

der’s status as Holocaust survivor/scholar. As we have seen, it would make some

analytical sense to criticize Friedländer for not discussing the motives of theperpetrators in terms of a multi-dimensional, social-psychologically informedresearch design that some of the methodologically more innovative Holocaustscholars have adopted during the last fteen years. But it does not make much

political or moral sense to tell the survivor Friedländer, who has written the rst

truly victim-centered comprehensive history of the Holocaust, that he has failedto understand the perpetrators—that, in essence, he lacks historical empathy for

the thousands of German and non-German murderers who perhaps held no anti-

Semitic views before they embarked on their careers as mass murderers.

Finally, the critics might have preferred praise over detailed critical engagementbecause Friedländer’s resistance to the domestication of disbelief raises uncom-fortable questions about Nazi perpetrator research, Holocaust historiography, and

historical writing in general. The Years of Extermination excels in moral and epis-temological terms because, unlike so many colleagues before him, Friedländer

52. Dan Stone, “Who is a Perpetrator? The Changing Construction and Interpretation over Time,”

at http://www.bpb.de/files/BLGDJB.pdf (accessed March 26, 2009).




recognized that a history of an event like the Holocaust can succeed as an ethical

and intellectual intervention only if the text acknowledges the limits of historical

explanation, and features honest reections on these limits as an integral part of its

narrative design. Through that bold move Friedländer has written a multifaceted

book that, as narrative performance, eliminates the conventional power differen-tial between historians and their sources, including eyewitness testimony. He does

not fall into the trap of recreating the perspective of the contemporaries in quasi-

mythical fashion. Instead, he assembles eyewitnesses, other sources, and histori-ans around a table without, a priori, privileging any of their respective points of

view. The truly unusual part is, however, that Friedländer also sits down at that

table and applies a healthy dose of skepticism to his own dual role as eyewitness

and author. Consequently, if the critics were to take their praise of the book as

seriously as they should, they would never write history in the same way again.

It would be foolish to suggest that Friedländer’s emphasis on eyewitness tes-timony and his insistence on a certain measure of inexplicability in Holocausthistory are unrelated to his personal experience as a victim of Nazi persecution.53 Friedländer is certainly also reecting on his own subject position and responsi-bility as scholar and survivor when he cites Walter Laqueur in his introduction:

“There are certain situations which are so extreme that an extraordinary effort is

needed to grasp their enormity, unless one happened to be present” (xxv). Perhaps

Friedländer’s intuitions are more immediately applicable to some research ques-tions rather than others. His intuitions might be a particular asset for the studyof victims’ testimony and less useful for the research on Nazi decision-making

dynamics, or vice versa. But then there is hardly an independent vantage pointfrom which to measure the intellectual potential and truthfulness of scholarly in-tuition. Perpetrator researchers in Germany, for instance, have followed their own

intuitions when they have analyzed the mindset and institutional culture of Nazi

and Wehrmacht murderers. Their research has yielded impressive results, but itis hardly surprising that German scholars have either assumed or concluded thatmost organizers and implementers of the “Final Solution” were perfectly normal

individuals whose behavior can be fully explained on the basis of the available

data and research tools. After all, it might be comforting to know that people liv-ing in other times and other cultures can learn the business of genocide just aseasily as the murderers to whom one is linked by name, culture, and family ties.

In this sense Martin Broszat’s bizarre claim, in his exchange with Friedländer, that

German academics can study the Holocaust more objectively than their Jewish

colleagues retains a troublesome relevance today.54

53. Saul Friedänder, When Memory Comes (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003).54. Martin Broszat/Saul Friedländer, “Um die ‘Historisierung des Nationalsozialismus:’ Ein

Briefwechsel,” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 36 (1988), 343; see also Nicolas Berg, Der

Holocaust und die westdeutschen Historiker (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2003). Dan Stone has wisely

concluded that debates like the Broszat/Friedländer exchange should be revisited in light of “the con-tinued stress on a more or less positivist methodology in the history-writing of the Holocaust—espe -

cially in perpetrator research;” see Stone, “ Nazi Germany and the Jews and the Future of HolocaustHistoriography,” forthcoming in Years of Persecution, Years of Extermination: Saul Friedländer and

the Future of Holocaust Studies, ed. Paul Betts and Christian Wiese (New York: Continuum, 2009).



WULF KANSTEINER52

White has faced an interesting strategic and also ethical dilemma when he en-courages historians to embrace the creative potential of their craft and to write

attractive and compelling histories in support of all kinds of progressive causes.

It is unclear how historians should assume this kind of political agency if they are

no longer able to speak in the name of historical truth, which is the one quality,

however illusory it may be, that the public still appreciates about academic histo-riography. White always had conceptually and intellectually compelling answers

for this kind of criticism, but he did not show the way toward narrative formats

of historical writing that combined popular and political success with epistemo-logical relativism.55 Friedländer is the rst historian who has found a practical

solution for the problem by casting seemingly conventional historical prose intoa decidedly dispersive narrative structure with the result of crafting an ethical

intervention of exceptional lucidity.Translated into the terminological world of Metahistory, Friedländer’s achieve-

ments could be described in the following way. On a meta-tropological level,

Friedländer’s book is an ironic treatment of the history of the Holocaust that

negates on the gurative level what is positively afrmed on the literal level,

for instance the causal force of anti-Semitism.56 On the one hand, Friedländer’sirony highlights the fallibility of language and calls into question the belief of his

colleagues who assume that they can capture the truth of the Holocaust in con-ventional, large-scale historical narratives. On the other hand, meta-tropologicalirony claims a special space for successful, non-gurative representation of the

“Final Solution.” Friedländer reserves this space for eyewitnesses and especially

victims, to whom he ascribes the ability to provide truthful insights into the emo-tional experience of persecution on a lesser scale of narrative complexity.

On a tropological level, the ironic effect of The Years of Extermination isachieved through a vigorous ght between the two master tropes of metonymy and

synecdoche. In a classic gesture of synecdoche, Friedländer rigorously integrateshis book under the ideological-cultural sign of anti-Semitism. At the same time,

the book teems with metonymic detail that cannot be reduced to any overarching

causal principle. This gurative clash is not a weakness; quite the contrary. White

has argued that routine works of history are often consistently structured accord-ing to one dominant trope, whereas historical masterpieces thrive on the tension

between conicting tropological centers of gravity.57 By this standard, the epicstruggle among irony, synecdoche, and metonymy that takes places in the pages

of The Years of Extermination will endure for many generations.58

55. For a passionate critical exploration of White’s relativism, see A. Dirk Moses, “Hayden White,

Traumatic Nationalism, and the Public Role of History,” History and Theory 44, no. 3 (2005), 311-332; see also White’s compelling response, “The Public Relevance of Historical Studies: A Reply to

Dirk Moses,” History and Theory 44, no. 3 (2005), 333-338, and Moses’s rejoinder to White, “The

Public Relevance of Historical Studies: A Rejoinder to Hayden White,” History and Theory 44, no.3 (2005), 339-347.

56. The precise place of irony in White’s work has been subject to substantial discussion; see

Herman Paul, “An Ironic Battle against Irony: Epistemological and Ideological Irony in Hayden

White’s Philosophy of History, 1955–1973,” in Korhonen, Tropes of the Past , 35-44; and Ewa

Domanska, “Hayden White: Beyond Irony,” History and Theory 37, no. 2 (1998), 173-181.57. White, Tropics of Discourse, 70.58. One can also describe Friedländer’s achievement in different theoretical terms and call his




Stuck between a profession that is refusing to leave behind nineteenth-century

realism and a hyperactive and interactive twenty-rst-century postmodern culture,

White and Friedländer have decided to split the difference and have developed afondness for early twentieth-century high modernism. It is hard to tell from the

reactions of their colleagues in history, however, if the subtle and responsible play

with time, space, and causality, which was a provocative literary statement ninety

years ago, will nally nd a home in history departments across the West, or if all

the accolades and prizes that Friedländer has garnered also attest to a profoundsense of helplessness with which professional historians react to the fact that one

of their own has gone all-out modern.

State University of New York,

Binghamton

refusal of historicization and closure a narrative performance of the sublime; see Ankersmit. Sublime

Historical Experience (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005). The Years of Extermination

thus also constitutes a powerful negative and practical answer to Martin Broszat’s “Plea for theHistoricization of National Socialism,” in Reworking the Past: Hitler, the Holocaust, and the

Historians’ Debate, ed. Peter Baldwin (Boston: Beacon Press, 1990), 77-87.

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