Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- 1 The Holocaust's Life as a Ghost
- 2 Hannah Arendt: Politics and Understanding after the Holocaust
- 3 Whither the Broken Middle? Rose and Fackenheim on Mourning, Modernity and the Holocaust
- 4 Good against Evil? H.G. Adler, T.W. Adorno and the Representation of the Holocaust
- 5 ‘After Auschwitz’: Trauma and the Grammar of Ethics
- 6 Lyotard: Emancipation, Anti-Semitism and ‘the Jews’
- 7 Eradicating Evil: Levinas, Judaism and the Holocaust
- 8 Silence – Voice – Representation
- 9 Friends and Others: Lessing's Die Juden and Nathan der Weise
- 10 The Visibility of the Holocaust: Franz Neumann and the Nuremberg Trials
- 11 Holocaust Testimony and the Challenge to the Philosophy of History
- 12 Open Behind: Myth and Politics
- Notes on Contributors
- Name Index
- Subject Index
11 - Holocaust Testimony and the Challenge to the Philosophy of History
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- 1 The Holocaust's Life as a Ghost
- 2 Hannah Arendt: Politics and Understanding after the Holocaust
- 3 Whither the Broken Middle? Rose and Fackenheim on Mourning, Modernity and the Holocaust
- 4 Good against Evil? H.G. Adler, T.W. Adorno and the Representation of the Holocaust
- 5 ‘After Auschwitz’: Trauma and the Grammar of Ethics
- 6 Lyotard: Emancipation, Anti-Semitism and ‘the Jews’
- 7 Eradicating Evil: Levinas, Judaism and the Holocaust
- 8 Silence – Voice – Representation
- 9 Friends and Others: Lessing's Die Juden and Nathan der Weise
- 10 The Visibility of the Holocaust: Franz Neumann and the Nuremberg Trials
- 11 Holocaust Testimony and the Challenge to the Philosophy of History
- 12 Open Behind: Myth and Politics
- Notes on Contributors
- Name Index
- Subject Index
Summary
One does not need to be a prophet to predict that Holocaust research will provide an impetus for history as a whole, strong enough to throw overboard a whole string of its paradigmatic fortifications…The century of ideologies is coming to an end – even in the explanatory patterns of historiography.
Ulrich RaulffIn her testimony written in the immediate aftermath of the war, Suzanne Birnbaum, stunned by the pace at which the Jews of Hungary had been decimated at Auschwitz, wrote that 600,000 were murdered in July and August of 1944. The reality was somewhat less – we know now that the number of Hungarian Jews killed in this period was around 435,000. Nevertheless, Annette Wieviorka, in her study of testimonies of the immediate post-war period – of which there are a surprisingly large number – notes in response to this error that it ‘makes no difference to the insane scale of the massacre’.
But discrepancies of this sort do exercise historians, and rightly so, since they aim to compile the most accurate body of information possible. A well-known example of this sort of error is recorded by Dori Laub. At a conference on Holocaust education, a survivor's testimony was shown during which the narrator described how, during the Sonderkommandouprising at Auschwitz, she had seen the four chimneys of the crematoria blown up. The historians objected:
Historically, only one chimney was blown up, not all four. Since the memory of the testifying woman turned out to be, in this way, fallible, one could not accept – nor give credence to – her whole account of the events. It was utterly important to remain accurate, lest the revisionists in history discredit everything.
But as Jean-François Lyotard has shown, it is precisely because the factual record will remain incomplete, a result of the nature of the events themselves as well as the loss of documents, that Holocaust negationists are able to ply their trade. When historians argue over the number of people killed in death camps, for example, the negationists claim that nothing relating to the Holocaust can be ascertained. Turning the assumptions of historians on their heads, Lyotard argues that ‘the “perfect crime” does not consist in killing the victim or the witnesses…but rather in obtaining the silence of the witnesses, the deafness of the judges, and the inconsistency (insanity) of the testimony’.
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- Information
- Social Theory after the Holocaust , pp. 219 - 234Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2000