FORUM Cultural History and the Holocaust

German History Vol. 31, No. 1, pp. 61–85

© The Author 2013. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the German History Society.All rights reserved. doi:10.1093/gerhis/ghs123

FORUM

Cultural History and the Holocaust

To what extent, and with what e!ect, has cultural history influenced the ways we write about the Holocaust? Cultural history—understood here less as a prescription or well-defined method than a loose set of interrelated concerns and projects that have created new conceptual and interpretative possibilities—has provided a language with which to ask new questions about the past, and focused attention on new historical problems and actors. Cultural historians have argued that archives are not mere repositories of ‘infor-mation’, but continually evolving sites of knowledge production. They have historicized subjectivity and insisted on the perspectival nature of history; they have interrogated the naturalized categories of race, gender and sexuality, among many others. Cultural histori-ans have emphasized ‘reading’ social practices and have explored the historically situated symbolic purchase and meanings of those practices. They have taken seriously the role of fantasy, memory and imagination in history. Perhaps most signally, cultural historians have brought questions of representation to the forefront of discussions of historical epistemol-ogy. With some of these ideas in mind, the editors invited Monica Black (University of Tennessee) and Jennifer Evans (Carleton University) to convene a forum. They invited Alon Confino (University of Virginia), Amos Goldberg (Hebrew University), Jack Halberstam (University of Southern California), Regina Mühlhäuser (Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung) and Jürgen Zimmerer (Universität Hamburg) to participate.

1. It is di!cult to imagine a historiographical account of any field in modern German history that does not acknowledge the transformative influence of cultural history. Has cultural history had the same impact on the historiography of the Holocaust?

Mühlhäuser: Questions and methods of cultural history have had a decisive impact in perpetrator research (Täterforschung), i.e., in the attempt to grasp the ways in which not only perpetrators but also facilitators and beneficiaries of the Third Reich understood and shaped their world. In the course of this development, the focus on racial ideology to explain the actions of average Germans has been called into question more and more thoroughly. The latest cycle of this debate was generated by Sönke Neitzel and Harald Welzer’s analysis of wiretap-transcripts of conversations Wehrmacht soldiers and SS-men had as POWs in British and American camps. Decisive for the destructive behaviour of the Wehrmacht soldiers was, in their opinion, not Nazi ideology, but rather the logic of soldiering. In response, however, Michael Wildt has argued that this approach—which focuses on the conditions of war in general—does not explain the changes in what was considered to be normal: from the Weimar Republic, where the killing of people designated as ‘alien others’ was not yet a norm, to the particularity of ‘morals’ during National Socialism. Building on Wildt’s argument, I"would like to underline the importance of grasping the reciprocal e!ects of racial ideology and other factors such

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as masculinity ideals that were made and remade through cultural practices and shaped the mindset of the historical actors. Wildt has described the complex process that ena-bled the ‘communalizing’ (Vergemeinschaftung) of antisemitic violence—i.e., the right of everyone considered to be a national comrade (Volksgenosse) to participate in violence against Jews. His study demonstrates that antisemitism was produced socially through cultural ideas, everyday sentiments and practices that reinforced homogenized ascrip-tions of individual victims as well as of all people designated as Jews. Similarly, Elissa Mailänder has argued that most of the young women who became camp guards in Majdanek were not, at the outset, committed Nazis, or more precisely: that racial ide-ology alone does not explain why they adapted to the use of physical violence against prisoners so quickly. She asserts that we need to look at a combination of factors to start understanding their actions—like the women’s desire to make a living on their own, their positionality in relation to the male guards and so on. It was through the process of iden-tifying with the female guard role that they developed and articulated particular forms of Nazi racism. Studies such as Wildt’s and Mailänder’s indicate that by exploring cul-tural ideas, sentiments, assumptions of everyday life (‘that’s just the way it is’), and forms of habitus, we achieve a better picture of the complexity of the self-understandings of historical subjects, their interpretations and actions, and of the dynamics of belonging and exclusion.

The ways in which the average German’s experiences of belonging and exclusion were universal and, at the same time, personal becomes clear when one looks at sexual practices and politics. Dagmar Herzog has made us aware that Nazi racial hierarchy was to some extent enabled and given meaning through the regulation of sexual behav-iour. Studies such as Herzog’s have recognized that antisemitism and racism were suf-fused with sexual references, and helped us to understand how the Jews were excluded from German society: not merely politically or socially, but in culturally normative and intimate ways.

To further explore the complexity of this societal atmosphere, the analysis of the transformation of meanings is crucial. For one thing, the semantics of concepts such as the people’s community (Volksgemeinschaft), illegitimate (unehelich) and fornication (Unzucht) changed significantly between 1933 and 1945. Interpretations of concepts (and of corresponding actions) could not only change over time, but also vary due to prevailing ideas and interests in di!erent territories. Maybe most important, not all aspects that shaped cultural meanings and formed the societal atmosphere during the Third Reich were spelled out and presented in direct verbal forms—let"alone in written documents. On the contrary, particular messages were communicated in visual and ver-bal images or through cultural practices that rested on implicit understandings passed on from generation to generation.

Recent work on violence in military formations, for example, has highlighted the impact of ideas and practices of gender in an armed group at a given time. Correspondingly, it is necessary to look at the ways boys and men who became Wehrmacht soldiers or SS-men embodied and performed masculinities through formal as well as informal practices central to male socialization, military training and culture. Thomas Kühne has examined some of the ways in which comradeship was important for Wehrmacht soldiers, and fuelled their participation in common rituals, in the course of which their involvement in crimes appeared to be normal or necessary ‘for the good

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of the Volksgemeinschaft’. Even after 1945, comradeship remained the central, allegedly apolitical myth that kept former—and new—soldiers together. Implicitly connected to the idea of comradeship were essential ideas of male strength, dependability, sexual virility and so on, which were not necessarily spelled out, but nevertheless culturally understood and passed on within the male community. To grasp these ideas gives us a much more precise understanding of Wehrmacht soldiers’ sense of self, their interpreta-tions, emotions and actions—as individuals, within their small units and for the institu-tion as a whole.

Halberstam: As someone who teaches the Holocaust in relation to issues of gen-der and sexuality and who has written about the relations between German fascism and homosexuality, and questions of postmemory and generational legacies of both trauma and violence, I"personally use the paradigm of cultural history to rethink some of the formulaic ways in which gender and sexuality have been theorized in relation to both the victims and the perpetrators of genocide. Like Regina, I"look at the ways that modern conceptualizations of race were saturated with assumptions about sexual-ity. There was indeed an intimate, cultural and even physical element to the exclusion that made an association with Jews unthinkable for Germans. It is in relation to these embodied forms of understanding of the permissible and the forbidden that we see the importance of the frame of cultural history.

Dan Stone has outlined concerns (via Peter Burke) concerning the use of cultural history as a paradigm through which to think about the Holocaust. Paramount seems to be a fear of the disintegration of the discipline of history itself, anxieties about postmodern spins on social facts, and concern about blurring the lines between vic-tims and perpetrators. Having acknowledged these concerns, Stone then lays out the motivations for examining some of the questions that emerge in any consideration of the Holocaust, about humanity and inhumanity, violence, submission, authority, gov-ernance, and so on through cultural representations or in relation to symbolic systems. He also insists that we think of a cultural history approach to the Holocaust in terms of a kind of Foucauldian history of ideas, a history, in other words, of how people came to think the way they did about Jews, about the nation, about life and death and how that way of thinking made certain genocidal proposals seem perfectly plausible to one population (Germans) while remaining unthinkable to others (Jews, Roma and Sinti, most Europeans). The cultural history frame here requires that we reach back to the early part of the twentieth century and find the building blocks of an ideol-ogy that made so many unremarkable men and women ‘willing executioners’. But, as Regina suggests, it also requires us to historicize all terms of inquiry: ‘unremarkable’ and extraordinary, ‘ordinary’ alongside the pathological. A"cultural historical frame, as many voices in this forum also remind us, allows us to apply what we learn about this distinctly other period to the cultural contradictions of our own period and their violent outcomes.

For me, cultural history is crucial precisely because more orthodox discussions of the Holocaust leave too many categories unexamined. Just as an example, too many of the discussions on ‘women in the Holocaust’ already presume to know what constitutes the category of ‘woman’ and read women’s experiences in camps and in hiding in terms of their relationship with men or family. Authors in Ofer and Weitzman’s 1998 volume,



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for example, have a tendency to represent women as overly concerned with hygiene and with the production of even meagre forms of domesticity; too much of this volume also situated women in relation to marriage and husbands—even though at least one survivor testifies that for the most part, sexual desire disappears with hunger and pain. Women are repeatedly positioned as maternal, nurturing and essentially morally supe-rior to men under the same circumstances.

Here we can potentially learn much more about women and camps from reading memoirs than from reading essays about the general experience of female prison-ers. A"memoir such as Ruth Klüger’s Still Alive, for example, disrupts some of these conventional narratives that place female experience firmly in relation to family and romance. Published notably by the Feminist Press, Still Alive narrates Klüger’s experi-ences as a young girl in Vienna before the war; her growing awareness of the building threat of nazification and finally her deportation with her mother to Theresienstadt and then Auschwitz and finally the work camp Gross-Rosen. Klüger’s memoir disrupts expectations about the mother–daughter relationship, family dynamics and kinship. Rather than cleaving to her mother in a crisis, Klüger actually resents her, berates her and often, after they both survive the war and the camps, pulls away from her and from family altogether. Rather than being the foundation of connection and kinship, Klüger expresses multiple times a desire to keep her distance from family, intimacy and belonging.

Memoirs like Klüger’s, pock marked as they are by disappointment, irritation, minor incidents and small hurts and wrongs, seem at odds with the epic event, the Shoah, from which they issue. Klüger’s refrain that ‘nothing good ever came out of the camps’ and her refusal to play the role of the survivor, to forgive her German colleagues or even to make peace with her mother not only is at odds with our expectations of the emotional orientation of ‘women’ but also frustrates the reader’s desire to emerge, with the survivor, out of the hell of the camps with some kind of special knowledge.

Confino: Cultural history has certainly had an impact on Holocaust historiogra-phy, and this could not have been otherwise given the dominance of the approach in the historical discipline in the last generation. But the question is what kind of impact emerged at the meeting point between cultural history and the particularities of Holocaust historical writing? Here the story becomes more intricate, and we may detect di!erent views. My view is that the influence of cultural history extended up to a specific point—but not beyond—in terms of method, interpretation and historical imagination. It seems important to point out at the outset that ‘culture’ does not signify a magic interpretative wand or a sense of methodological avant-garde. Indeed, it would be retrograde to presume the innovation of ‘culture’ when at present one can refer to the triviality of cultural history. The only important thing about applying a body of work to a given historical topic is: does it reveal factors previously unobserved and does it enable us to have a better understanding of what may have been observed but not entirely understood and interpreted?

A loose set of approaches that emphasizes the social and the cultural as inter-preted in terms of representation, experience, subjectivity, negotiation, agency and shifting relationships, and that interrogate the categories of race, gender, sexuality, nationhood and others—these have enriched the history of the Holocaust and of



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the Third Reich. One can single out, for example, the tremendous research of the last generation on Nazi ideology as a key interpretative result of the meeting point between cultural history and Holocaust history: it combined notions of subjectivity, agency, rep-resentation, and the construction of key categories, as illuminated by the responses of Jack and Regina.

But to my mind the limits of this influence should also be made clear. One obstacle to cultural approaches, paradoxically, has been the hegemony of racial ideology as the ultimate source of motivations, beliefs and values in the Third Reich. There is no doubt about the interpretative importance of racial ideology to understanding the Third Reich. But this view has now turned into a catechism, depreciated by exces-sive use and acquiring a metaphysical explanatory status. An unexpected interpreta-tive consequence of this view has been that ideology now stands for culture. Ideology is not culture, of course: it is part of culture. Sentiments, memories and sensibilities exist outside, below, above and to the sides of ideology. To liberate our interpretative imagination we need to let go of the straightjacket of ideology: as a statement about the mental horizon of the Third Reich, it is intellectually undemanding—too cerebral to encompass people’s ways of thought in the past.

I say ‘imagination’ because I"think it has a place in our discussion. Cultural histori-ans attempt (among other things, of course) to reconstruct the imagination of people in the past, how people fashioned identities in amazingly short periods of time while believing simultaneously these had existed from time immemorial, and how these iden-tities played out in politics, power and society. This procedure involves, consciously or unconsciously, a process of imagining by the historian herself, as she narrates how her protagonists imagined themselves in the past. But one perception of the Holocaust is that it was unimaginable and is unrepresentable. How can you fully explore the Holocaust as cultural history if the starting point is that it could not be imagined? Now, it is true that most historians would not subscribe today to this view, which was more dominant several decades ago. But a self-imposed methodological and interpretative restraint still exists. A"quiet residue of uniqueness and at times of pious moralizing, in various shades, still hovers over parts of the field and determines, often imperceptibly, choices of problems posed and methods used. What, a reader may interrupt, are you suggesting that as historians we can imagine the Holocaust? This is outrageous! No, what I"am suggesting is that we cannot imagine the Holocaust in the sense that, simi-larly, we cannot imagine the French Revolution, the Reformation or the creation of the Sistine Chapel. Historians can never fully imagine the past or adequately reconstruct it, the Holocaust or any other. From this point of departure, historians make their best e!ort to imagine and reconstruct it—and this procedure should apply to the Holocaust as well. This requires us to drop all emotional barriers to treating the Holocaust as his-tory, similar to other events. The extermination happened, and if it happened it was somehow imagined and put into words. Cultural history would pose the questions: how did Germans imagine a Germany and a world without Jews? How and why did the persecution and extermination of the Jews make sense? How did the persecution and extermination become conceivable and imaginable? What was the ground of culture, memories, feelings and sensibilities that made them possible? How and why did the fantasies about the Jews speak to key elements of life in Germany at the period, and what made them persuasive as ways to experience the world?



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Goldberg: Let me begin with a short introduction regarding my ‘subject position’. First, I" live and work in Israel, to be more specific Jerusalem, and this means that issues such as those raised in our forum have explicit or implicit political contexts and perhaps also ramifications. Second, I"am a historian of Jewish history. This is impor-tant because most of Holocaust historiography known in the German- and English-speaking academic worlds focuses on the perpetrators—namely on Nazi Germany and its collaborators. This makes perfect sense when we seek answers to explanatory and causal questions: why and how did it happen? Or even to weaker questions such as: what enabled it? or: from what historical contexts did the Holocaust emerge? Only by focusing on German and European (short- or long-term) history (including colonial history and the history of European antisemitism) one can provide answers to such historical queries. Here, as the participants in this Forum show so elegantly, cultural his-tory can play a productive role by providing new data and contexts for understanding the ‘conditions of possibility’ of the genocide. I"would note, though, that one should be very cautious as to how to articulate these connections. Although Jack and Regina have claimed very convincingly that cultural history can help us better understand the mechanism of exclusion, I"would still hesitate with regard to Jack’s formulation—‘there was an intimate, cultural and even physical element to the exclusion that made an asso-ciation with Jews unthinkable for Germans.’ I"don’t think it was really unthinkable. As is evident in Klemperer’s diary, for example, some Germans kept their contacts with Jews even under the circumstances of the Third Reich.

But my field of Jewish history makes a di!erent historical case. It focuses mostly on the Jews as its historical protagonists; it mainly makes use of Jewish sources; and it asks questions from Jewish points of view (whatever these may be).

In this field, the history of the Jews in the Holocaust, one can say that there is very little evidence of the impact of cultural history, although it is not altogether absent. Alexandra Garbarini’s Numbered Days: Diaries and the Holocaust and Jecek Leociak’s Text in the Face of Destruction: Accounts from the Warsaw Ghetto Reconsidered, on diaries written by Jews during the Holocaust, are good examples. Samuel Kassow’s book on Ringelblum’s communal and clandestine archival work in the Warsaw ghetto is another very good one. Kassow identifies lines of continuity between Ringelblum’s radical leftist and Yiddishist ideology before the war and his phenomenal social and historical work dur-ing the war. However, even those books don’t fully expose what I"consider to be the radi-cal significance of cultural history to Jewish history in the Holocaust. Following Alon’s important guideline as stated in this forum: ‘The only important thing about applying a body of work to a given historical topic is: does it reveal factors previously unob-served?’, I"believe that cultural history could contribute much more to understanding Jewish existence under Nazi rule.

If, as Lynn Hunt puts it, cultural history is more about ‘The deciphering of meaning, rather than the inference of causal laws’, then a history of the Jews in the Holocaust that takes cultural history seriously should focus on the transformation of meaning not less than on themes of continuity during the Holocaust. This, I"believe, is because cul-tural history, as exemplified with regard to the Germans by Regina, is to a large extent about the transformation of meaning.

Moreover, much of Jewish Holocaust history is written in Israel. Here the major tendency was, and to a certain extent still is, to focus either on German ideological



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motives—namely antisemistism—or on Jewish (often institutional) reactions to the catastrophe as it happened. This historiography portrayed the Jewish victim as an autonomous reacting historical agent while avoiding altogether the challenge of writ-ing a history of powerlessness. In Walter Benjamin’s words it is a historiography that wishes to write the history of the defeated as a history of the victorious. To my mind, this is the core of the project of Israeli historiography—to reconstruct the victim as a fully autonomous, reactive agent. This misses what to my mind is the great challenge of writing the history of the Jews in the Holocaust. This historiography has to depict what is so dominant in Jewish writings during and immediately after the Holocaust—pow-erlessness and defeat. Jack’s discussion of Ruth Klüger’s wonderful memoir Still Alive is very pertinent here. Cultural history might give us the methodological tools to portray the transformative processes that the victim underwent as a human being and not as a spiritual hero; as a defeated agent and not only as a reactive and autonomous one.

Zimmerer: Yes and no. Yes, because the study of the Holocaust is, in my opinion, a cultural study field par excellence. And no, because I"am not sure that I"agree with the premise of this question, i.e., that cultural approaches have indeed transformed how we write (and read and study) modern German history as deeply as the question implies. I"am not well enough embedded in German (national) history, but the impression I"have as a reader of German history and as a teacher of global history (including German history) is that many students of history still believe in and follow a naïve Rankean approach to history. They believe that a historical truth simply needs to be unearthed by finding (new) documents and describing their content. Others have indeed followed the theoretical innovations of what can be labelled the ‘cultural turn’, know about the constructedness of any historical narrative, and engage with the construction of mean-ing, value systems, fantasies or obsessions, to name but a few.

The same seems to be true for the history of the Holocaust or for the history of the Third Reich in general. One can identify two trends. On the one hand, many impor-tant studies are rather positivistic in their approach and devote great energy to the reconstruction of historical processes in detail, often but not exclusively basing their argument on administrative and military records. They have produced meticulous studies of the horrors of the Holocaust and the war of annihilation; however, they have avoided contextualizing their findings within larger historical interpretations. On the other hand, others have concentrated on the representations of the Holocaust and the impact of the Holocaust on identity politics in a global setting. I"think we are fac-ing the acute danger of a complete separation of the two directions of scholarship, a tendency that can perhaps already be detected in the emergence of a new discipline: Holocaust Studies. The immediate task for the future is therefore to bring the two schools of thought together again, i.e., to have a culturally informed understanding of the factual history of the Holocaust, which also takes frames of reference and meaning seriously and includes personal imaginations and institutional knowledge. The postco-lonial interpretation of the Holocaust is one such attempt.

2. A"recent forum in German History discussed the potential and pit-falls of de-centring the Third Reich from master narratives of German history. In that forum, readers were reminded of the Broszat-Friedländer



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debate and the problems once invoked in discussions of historicizing the Holocaust. Does cultural history provoke any particular anxieties for writing Holocaust history? If so, why?

Confino: Of course it does. But this anxiety is sui generis neither to cultural his-tory as an interpretative approach nor to the Holocaust as a historical event. Writing Holocaust history is fraught with an anxiety that is characteristic of foundational events, namely those events that are perceived as endowed with particular moral, historical and political meaning and that are essential to the identity of given groups. We can think of the French Revolution, the American Civil War and the Palestinian Nakba. On some level, all history-writing is fraught with anxiety about the role of the past in the present, as much as it simultaneously engenders a sense of liberation from the past. Most histo-rians don’t reflect on these emotions in their day-to-day practice. But not all events are born equal: foundational pasts force these emotions to the forefront (in a way that an investigation of, say, Merovingian society would not) and make plain the essence of the historical discipline as a form of storytelling that commingles evidence, method, theory and present concerns.

Anxiety has thus been a constant emotion in historians’ writing of Holocaust his-tory, that is, in the way they have determined choices of method, narrative and inter-pretation. There has been the anxiety of not being able adequately to represent and explain the Holocaust, which has led to the notion that an accumulation of facts, and an almost positivistic attachment to them, will enable the crafting of narratives that carry their own truth. There has been an anxiety about the role of evidence, as in the rejection of witness testimony in favour of the putative true facts of the documents; an anxiety about the impact of new approaches, as in the resistance of Friedländer, in his debate with Broszat, to everyday-life history as diluting the moral responsibility of the Germans (he later used it to great e!ect in his own books); an anxiety about the consequences of looking squarely at the motivations of the perpetrators and the role of German society, which led to explanations of the extermination as an impersonal process inherent in the Nazi system of government, as if structures kill, and not peo-ple; and an anxiety over placing the Holocaust within a broader history of modern genocides, which has led some scholars, especially in Israel, again to insist passionately on the historical uniqueness of the Holocaust and of Jewish su!ering. These anxieties reflect the intersection between the historical discipline and issues of morality, identity and politics. They give historians a token of humanity that is often obscured behind the self-assuredness of scholarly detachment and objectivity. We historians are the sum of our discipline and our societies.

But, really, we should ask, what kind of anxieties does cultural history provoke now that it is a methodological banality? This is a good question because the issue is not about using these or other approaches and categories of cultural history—these have existed all over Holocaust historiography for a long time. The point, to my mind, is a di!erent one. The anxiety (if this is the right word, ‘self-restraint’ may be more suitable) concerns acknowledging the full consequences of cultural history: the simple yet pro-found demand that the Holocaust be treated as history. For behind the historiographi-cal anxieties mentioned above hovers the idea that the Holocaust as a topic of historical research demands, at least to some degree, special treatment, and that we cannot (and,



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for some scholars, that we should not) use our imagination as historians to reconstruct it in the same way that we do for other events. That is, specifically, by treating Nazi antisemitism as a problem of culture we make it possible to shift our interests from problems of strict causes, structures and decision-making in the context of war to those of plots, narratives and meanings.

Goldberg: I"do think that cultural history raises a very fundamental and particular anxiety among some Holocaust scholars. I"want to suggest that, very generally speak-ing, two major ‘postmodern’ debates took place within the historical discipline in the last three or four decades. One focused on ‘probing the limits of representation’ and it emerged mostly vis-à-vis the Holocaust. Friedländer’s well-known book bearing this name became its canonical text. Here Hayden White’s relativistic approach became particularly controversial when applied to the Holocaust: if, as he seemed to claim, his-tory is a non-referential, arbitrary narrative, then Holocaust denial is just as legitimate a historical narrative as any other. Within this discussion, all kinds of path-breaking suggestions were raised as to how one should represent such a traumatic history with-out denying its unrepresentability. However, this extremely interesting discussion and its daring theoretical suggestions have ultimately had little impact on the very practice of writing history—least of all on writing the history of the Holocaust which, as Dan Stone has claimed, for the most part has remained very ‘positivistic’ and conservative in its nature.

Another ‘postmodern’ discussion took place vis-à-vis the development of cultural his-tory. This discussion focused, as I"understand it, less on the problem of representation than, following Foucault, on the relevance of the concept of ‘discourse’ to historical analysis and, following Geertz and Turner, on the processes of ‘meaning production’ in history. The major relativistic question raised here was not so much ‘how could grand traumatic events be represented?’ but ‘how do people and societies make sense of their world?’ Or, to put it a bit di!erently: ‘how do people construct their symbolic universe within specific historical circumstances?’ These questions have been extremely fruitful in creating what is now called cultural history, which has created a fundamental change in the practice of historical writing. I"believe that, at its best, cultural history does pre-cisely what Jürgen expects it to do—combines the theoretical with the factual while sharpening the historian’s awareness of her own discourse and partialness. I"share with Jürgen the concern that this goal has still to be accomplished in the field of Holocaust studies.

However, why is this such a threat to Holocaust scholarship and memory?There is an inherent paradox in the role the Holocaust has come to play in the

Western world currently. On the one hand, according to Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider and many others, it sustains much of the (post)modern (or late/second modernity) anti-essentialist, liberal-humanist, cosmopolitan ethical discourse and com-mitment to human rights. This discourse is anti-foundational and anti-fundamental at its core. It’s a discourse, in its variants, committed to values of tolerance, free and critical speech and thought, and to some degree or other also to multiculturalism. It appears as a modest ethical discourse which shies away from totalities.

On the other hand, however, the Holocaust has itself become, at least for the West, a symbolic fundamental and foundational event which every civilized human being is



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expected to remember. It has become an object of a new categorical imperative: ‘thou shalt remember the Holocaust’. Antisemitism has become for the West the worst and most completely intolerable ‘hate crime’. Denying the Holocaust has not only become an unforgivable sin (and, in many countries, a criminal act) but it also marks one as a barbarian. There are very good reasons and justifications for this state of a!airs, but nonetheless, a paradox is very explicit here: although restricting freedom of speech could be justified in liberal cosmopolitan discourse only in cases of severe and direct security threats, in the case of the Holocaust in Western countries, denial is a cul-tural-ethical (and, in many countries, criminal) taboo. A"person can deny any event he wishes—including all other genocides and mass atrocities (although he might be con-sidered insane or malicious)—but not the Holocaust. So in our extremely destabilized ‘liquid’ (Zygmunt Bauman) world we are left, at least in the West, with one untouchable event—the Holocaust.

And here is precisely where cultural history interferes. Since its major objects of research are the processes of meaning production and the construction of discourses in any given culture, it would ask with regard to the Holocaust: how did the Holocaust become what Alon has called ‘a foundational past’? How did it become an event that functions as a fundamental ethical symbol and how does it function within our sym-bolic universe? It would not only seek answers to these questions in some essence (or uniqueness) of the event itself, but also and perhaps primarily in the way it functions in current Western culture. In the cultural history of medicine, twenty-first century medical discourse is analysed in exactly the same way that eighteenth-century medical discourse is, without reference to the truth value of either—each of them is just a dis-course. By examining it, one seeks to understand its mechanism of producing authority, knowledge, and so on. The same would be asked in regard to Holocaust memory and history—what kind of knowledge does it produce? How is its authority achieved? How does it interact with other discourses?

I think this is the major threat that cultural history presents in regard to Holocaust history and memory. It relativizes the event’s memory and history as a cultural phe-nomenon, which tells us more about our world and its power relations, its episteme and so on, than about any essential significance of the event itself (without diminishing its extreme and horrific dimensions). Perhaps in some other historical, political and cul-tural circumstances, another event—not even a catastrophic one—would have taken this foundational role.

Zimmerer: It should not! And perhaps it does not. The anxieties referred to above have, in my opinion, less to do with cultural history than with a debate about the posi-tion of the Holocaust, particularly in German history. There has been an attempt to draw a final line (Schlussstrich) to meet (political) demands for ending the process of com-ing to terms with this chapter in German history and to treat the years between 1933 and 1945 just like any other decade. Many fear this would eventually mean submerging the history of the Third Reich within ‘normal’ German history and thus rendering it far less visible. More generally speaking, the debate is about the historical position (Ort) of the Holocaust in human history at large. It has not, however, been caused by cultural history. On the contrary, the fact that the Holocaust is recognized in its iconic status is a result of the influence of cultural history.



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The Holocaust has now become a universal chi!re and no longer ‘belongs’ only to German history—in fact it never did. Although there cannot be any doubt that the main responsibility lies with the Germans, the Holocaust has transnational aspects because perpetrators and bystanders came from various countries. More important, even the Jewish-German victims (i.e., those who defined themselves as German prior to the new Nazi laws, not to mention at this point the non-German Jewish victims) themselves accepted or were forced to accept a transnationally defined identity when they were forced to give up their German citizenship and adapt their German identity. Most of the survivors chose to live outside postwar Germany, transnationalizing their experience even further. And as Amos has ably demonstrated, the Jewish approach to the Holocaust is again completely di!erent.

Many of the anxieties mentioned above, understandable as they may be, have little to do with cultural history, but with a discussion about the position of the Holocaust in German, Jewish and world history. Cultural history both assists with historicizing the Holocaust by comparing it to other instances of mass violence and genocide and helps by constructing the Holocaust as an almost ahistorical black box through the develop-ment of a whole new field around one historical event.

However, as Amos has mentioned, there exists a more general anxiety that a radical-constructivist approach might reduce the Holocaust to a mere narrative, which in turn might open avenues for Holocaust denial. This anxiety needs to be taken seriously and, in particular, the most radical representatives of cultural history will have to discuss their premises using the Holocaust as an example.

Mühlhäuser: Building on Alon’s and Amos’s responses to this question, I"think that a central anxiety in writing Holocaust history lies in accepting it as a historical event that does not lie outside of or contrary to German history or, for that matter, human history. As Jan Phillip Reemtsma has argued, ‘to call the Holocaust a “monstrosity without precedent” does not mean that the deeds of the individual perpetrators were without precedent’. Throughout history, human beings have committed atrocities that leave us speechless.

Historical studies such as Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men showed that most perpetrators of the Holocaust were neither pathological outsiders nor indoctrinated ideologists (interpretations common until the early 1990s), but average men who acted in spaces or situations where certain forms of violence were considered necessary or valuable or grew out of group dynamics. The way in which the term ‘ordinary men’ is used today, however, is problematic. Christoph Schneider points out that the ordinary man appears as an ahistorical, anthropological figure with a stable identity and person-ality who—in a situation where allegedly exceptional (even pathological) circumstances are at stake—fulfills a certain role, and afterwards returns home: to a normal life as a family man.

Schneider emphasizes a need to look at these subjects as having multiple identities at their disposal. The crucial question would then be the preparedness and willingness of a subject to adapt certain roles, i.e., to actively create roles by using a ‘constitutive repertoire of performance’ that has been acquired by mimesis and is based on cultural ideas. Following Schneider’s approach, I"think that one of the crucial subjects for cul-tural history is to explore cultural images, values and behaviours that were regarded as



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‘normal’ before the beginning of the war and the ‘Final Solution’ and to analyse how these were transformed over the years.

In this regard, the questions and methods of cultural history might indeed provoke a specific anxiety when dealing with the Holocaust, because ultimately they reveal the connections to pre- and postwar histories—the importance of which Jack has outlined. Needless to say, much brilliant scholarship since the 1950s has demonstrated that the Third Reich was not merely a disruption out of the blue—for instance by depicting that eugenic ideas were not exclusively German or that Nazi functionaries continued to occupy positions of power after 1945. Still, the methods and questions of cultural history open up a new view on the complexity of this longue durée.

Halberstam: As I"stated earlier, it seems that cultural history challenges Holocaust history by reminding us that history itself unfolds di!erently for di!erent communities at di!erent times in relation to di!erent political projects. Of course this will produce certain anxieties in relation to material on genocidal periods in general because it threat-ens to inject uncertainty, relativity and interpretation into a set of discussions where fac-ticity, actuality and authenticity have been both questioned and hard won. While Alon reminds us that histories of all foundational events provoke similar anxieties, he also seeks to ‘liberate’ the Holocaust from ‘special treatment’ in terms of its classification as unrepresentable. Amos similarly wants to interrogate how and why the Holocaust has become ‘a fundamental ethical symbol’ and an ‘untouchable fundamental event’ in an otherwise ‘liquid’ world. Behind both of these moves to resituate the Holocaust within history, we can locate an important epistemological project—that of understanding our own world through the ways we use, classify and mystify the Holocaust.

Multiple debates about the politics of representation have ricocheted through the chasm left by the genocidal projects of Nazi Germany. Friedländer’s book on ‘the limits of representation’ collects some of these debates, but we can look also at the many debates over the uses of the visual materials of atrocity. While Claude Lanzmann famously decided not to use documentary footage at all in his film Shoah, a recent film by Yael Hersonski, A Film Unfinished (2010), reclaims documentary footage from a Nazi project titled simply ‘Das Ghetto’ to show how the apparently ‘real’ images from the Warsaw ghetto were actually staged. Hersonski found other reels of this film and located within them scenes that were shot and reshot, staged and restaged within a relentless propaganda project supposedly designed by the Nazis to document the cal-lousness with which Jews in the ghetto treated one another. The ‘unfinished film’ is not just the propaganda film itself but also the very project of representing the death and destruction of hundreds of thousands of Jews in the ghetto.

Georges Didi-Huberman’s book Images In Spite of All takes up the question of rep-resentation in another way. This polemical set of essays was published to defend his use of four photos—supposedly taken in Auschwitz by Sonderkommandos working in the crematoria—in a 2001 exhibition in France on Nazi concentration camps. Some critics argued that these photos, whose provenance cannot be verified, allow for the indulgence of voyeuristic pleasure and sadism, and others accused Didi-Huberman of a fetishistic investment in evidence. For these commentators, the photos accomplish nothing; they simply make us feel that we can handle the horror of the Holocaust because now it is imaginable. Didi-Huberman’s counter-argument was that the photos cannot and do



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not represent the Holocaust but that they do stand for something, something real, some shred of the real pulled back from Hell, from the burning of everything. In relation to this debate, what is important is not the desire to settle the argument, to decide whether or not, definitively, the photographs should or should not be shown; but the debate does highlight the concerns and anxieties about representation in relation to catastrophe.

In terms of the idea that we might consider decentring the Third Reich from the master narrative of German history, that we might imagine a history before the rise of the Third Reich that, presumably, does not inevitably build to the nazification of Germany, certainly one wants to avoid any model that freezes dynamic flows of eco-nomic, social, religious and political interests into a predetermined set piece. But the problem with decentring the Third Reich is obviously that doing so allows Nazism to be read as an aberration interrupting the normal flow of historical reality in Germany. Regina addresses this issue when she notes that male comradeship remained a central part of both wartime and postwar notions of masculinity, community and society in Germany. The question is not ‘How do we or should we decentre the Third Reich?’ Rather, we might ask, ‘What of the Third Reich remained and remains embedded in all kinds of everyday modes of intimacy, norms of association and commonsensical assumptions about bodies, conduct and care?’

Indeed, the Nazi project cannot be bound by the comforting dates of, say, 1933 to 1945. It both extends beyond 1945 into postwar understandings of race and sex, as Dagmar Herzog’s work shows, but it also reaches back to the period of German or Prussian colonial ambitions. Here, I"would refer readers to a brilliant book by Fatima El-Tayeb, European Others: Queering Ethnicity in Postnational Europe (2011). In this book El-Tayeb shows how the roots of a Nazi genocidal project should be sought not only in nineteenth-century antisemitism, as Goldhagen and others have done, but also in German colonial projects in Southwest Africa. She also argues that contemporary European nations in general, because they have not adequately understood or exam-ined the production of race as central to nationalism, continue to produce images of themselves as white and then are able to justify the exclusion of the racialized foreigner. These racist practices continue unabated precisely because we continue to see the nation as a natural and even biological association of people and families. These kinds of racist representations of the nation, of course, were central to National Socialist ideologies of blood and soil.

3. In a recent article, Omer Bartov argued for the use of oral testi-monies to provide insights into victim experiences. Yet, the use of oral history is commonplace in many other fields of modern history, includ-ing genocide studies. Why does such an approach still require particular justification when it comes to writing histories of the Holocaust? And is this likely to change in future?

Mühlhäuser: Oral testimony or written autobiographical accounts cannot be approached as documentation that represents historical truth ‘as it actually was’. On the contrary, these sources need to be examined as narrative constructions that shape a person’s memories of the past according to her/his interests (personal, collective, national, social) at a certain point in time. Consequently, the analysis of testimonies and autobiographical



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texts is open to interpretation. This is true of all sources, but it appears particularly di#cult when dealing with the experiences of Holocaust survivors. In her insightful essay about the gendered discourse of Holocaust experiences, Pascale Bos has suggested that ‘perhaps there is something so inherently overwhelming about the experience of the Holocaust—and in particular about our direct encounter with survivors and their trauma—that makes us feel that sophisticated theoretical (poststructuralist) models are inappropriate and makes us fall back on older, more familiar ones’.

Bos’s own approach, however, has demonstrated that it is indeed useful to explore the narratives of survivors in order to understand how prewar self-understandings and identities shaped, first, the experiences, second, the memories and third, the narrative constructions of victims/survivors/witnesses over time. While the transformation of values was a more or less gradual process within the Volksgemeinschaft, the victims of Nazi persecution had no culturally accepted narratives through which they could make sense of what was happening to them. Following Bos’s line of analysis, it is illuminat-ing to analyse oral and written narratives in order to understand how di!erent mod-els of interpreting and situating the victim’s/survivor’s experiences of the Holocaust came into being—modes of interpretation that have shaped our understanding of the Holocaust ever since.

In doing so, it is also crucial to keep in mind what is not being said, i.e., what is for-gotten, suppressed or deliberately concealed (from oneself; from the interviewer; from family members, friends and acquaintances; or from the potential yet ‘unknown’ audi-ence). Thinking about my own research on sexuality in war, one can see, for instance, that experiences of sexual violence are still often associated with stigma and shame. Working with such testimonies means struggling with the stigma inscribed on a victim/survivor and the e!ects it still has on her memory. As Hyunah Yang has asserted in her work with survivors of Japanese ‘comfort stations’, ‘a survivor’s absent or unclear memory springs not so much from a weak memory or undereducation as from an inability to access certain information’. Indeed, the question of which insights may we gain from the experiences of victims/survivors via their own narratives depends not only on the methods of interpretation, but also on the process through which a narra-tive is generated.

Goldberg: It seems that it is already changing. Some of the most interesting recent books in Holocaust historiography make extensive use of oral history. Christopher Browning’s 2010 study Remembering Survival is devoted to the reconstruction of the his-tory of a single labour camp—Starachowice. This study relies almost exclusively on 292 testimonies of Jewish survivors, collected between 1945 and 2008. The study par-allels, almost like a mirror image, his famous book about Order Police Battalion 101, which, as is well known, was based on later court testimonies. Another significant study is Daniel Blatman’s The Death Marches: The Final Phase of Nazi Genocide. As a matter of fact, in Israeli historiography it has become very common to use such testimonies. The works of Yehuda Bauer and Sara Bender, as well as many others, are evidence for that.

However I’d like to take this question in a slightly di!erent direction. It seems that when we talk about oral history we mean first and foremost the victim’s oral testi-mony. And here I’d like to ask from cultural history’s perspective: what does that mean? Why did the victim-witness become such a major and important cultural and historical



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figure in the last two or three decades? Why did our era become ‘the era of the witness’, as Annette Wieviorka has named it, and what are the consequences of such trends?

I’d like to suggest that this is connected, at least partially, to far-reaching trends in Western consciousness. It is intimately connected, for example, to what the cultural sociologist Eva Illouz calls the rise of the homo sentimentalis in a culture that has adopted a fundamentally therapeutic narrative of the self. She regards this as one of the most prevalent features of current Western culture and she portrays this cultural age as cen-tred on the su!ering of the individual, which becomes its major feature in constructing the self. Such an image of the self is so fundamental in our era because, as Robert Hughes puts it: ‘Our culture is an increasingly confessional culture, one in which the democracy of pain reigns supreme’.

However democratic and universal this culture of pain is, it has also established its own hierarchies: some su!ering witnesses gain special, sometimes even ‘sacred’, sta-tus compared to others. In some historical situations, di!erent witnesses compete—or perhaps, are culturally and politically constructed as competing—for example in the Middle East. Here the Jewish victim-witness and the collective that is identified with him, namely Israel, tells the world, ‘You should bear witness to and responsibility for what has been done to me (or my ancestors, or my people) and support me’, while the Palestinian victim-witness cries out loud, ‘Bear witness to what is being done to me in the ongoing present and support me in my struggle against those former victims.’ It seems that the tendency in the Western world today is to give far more support to the Holocaust witness and the collective identified with him, because empathizing with them has become an essential part of contemporary European identity. This reveals that what is at stake from a Western perspective is not only the politics of ethics, respon-sibility and morality but also, and perhaps even more so, the politics of identity.

Halberstam: This is an ambiguous question because I"think for many scholars oral testimony is central to the project of representing the Holocaust. Think of a film such as Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah that prefers oral history to archival footage. Or think of the Shoah foundation at the University of Southern California that sets so much store by witness testimony. In fact, I"would rephrase this question to ask whether the fetishization of oral testimony in Holocaust archives actually promises an authenticity that it cannot possibly deliver given the tricks that memory plays, the formulaic quality of many of the interviews and the way in which films and mainstream narratives have now shaped a master narrative about the Holocaust that then sometimes finds its way into oral testi-mony. As Regina puts it: ‘these sources need to be examined as narrative constructions that serve to shape a person’s memories of the past according to her/his interests (per-sonal, collective, national, social) at a certain point in time’. Many of the witness archives also select some testimonies over others and so we stand, as readers, in a complex rela-tion to what Derrida calls ‘Archive Fever’, or the knowledge that the archive excludes as much as it retains or rejects in the process of selecting this testimony over another.

And of course, even when people do use oral testimonies, as Christopher Browning does in Ordinary Men—most of which came from court testimonies, as Amos notes—there can be complete and utter disagreement as to what those testimonies actually tell us. The di!erence between Browning’s readings of the testimonies, letters and accounts of the police battalions and those of Goldhagen, using the same archive, is astounding



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and arises out of completely di!erent sets of assumptions about violence, the ordinary, culpability and the meaning of the human.

Zimmerer: The use of oral testimony, be it from victims, perpetrators or bystand-ers, can certainly provide interesting insights into historical processes of mass violence. Oral testimonies of the victims are also an important balance to the ‘o#cial’ historical record, where we normally have many more traditional written sources from the per-petrator side than from the victims. In particular, bureaucratically organized mass mur-der, such as the Holocaust, produces an incredible number of administrative sources, usually in the form of written texts. The perspective of the victims is therefore often underrepresented. Oral testimony o!ers an alternative, gives a voice to the marginal-ized and helps to create a fuller picture of the Holocaust. However, I"completely agree with Regina and Jack that we must critically assess the source value of oral testimony in each case just as we do with written documents.

To what extent oral sources should be used depends ultimately on the perspective and the overall question one hopes to answer. For example, research into perpetrator motivation or the political unfolding of the Holocaust has far less to gain from victims’ testimonies than would the study of the human consequences of those policies. Unless one wants to prioritize one approach over the other, one should not make general state-ments about the extent to which oral sources can and should be used.

Confino: It is changing. Or rather, Holocaust historiography is at the cusp of neces-sary changes, some of which we can predict based on recent interpretative trends, while some will surprise us as original scholars link elements that now seem unconnected and come up with new insights. Some of these changes will emerge from cultural history, others from completely di!erent methods, approaches and problematics. We can know only one thing for certain: Holocaust historiography (as any historiography) will be predictably unpredictable, and will turn our predictions upside down and inside out.

Things are changing because the writing of history is based on the constant historio-graphical procedure of revision, even if revision is a tangled process. Yet the enormous innovation of Holocaust historiography in the last generation is now accompanied by diminishing interpretative return. We know more of the same things. But what are the new questions we ask about why they happened? A"huge body of scholarship is—for all its contributions—running out of interpretative steam, even as it overwhelms scholars by its volume. This scholarship posited several key arguments to explain the Holocaust: the importance of racial ideology, the brutalizing circumstances of the Second World War, and the state-dominated process of extermination. There is no doubt about the contributions of these arguments; they do describe part of the historical picture of the persecution and extermination of the Jews. But the limits of these arguments should also be clear. They have hardened now into an orthodoxy that frames a certain way of imagining the Holocaust. Certainly, this is an orthodoxy made of superb scholar-ship— but following the vast increase in our knowledge about the Holocaust, it is an orthodoxy nonetheless.

It is in this context that there is a search for new sources, approaches and interpreta-tions. All sorts of taboos are being broken and new roads taken. This forum attests to that. Jack, Jürgen, Regina and Amos have illuminated the methodological problems



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involved in using oral testimonies. I"don’t have much to add here, apart from noting that Bartov’s assertion—that oral testimonies ‘given decades after the event have all the freshness and vividness of a first account’ as ‘the memory of the event was kept sealed inside the mind’—seems to me a myth (whose origin is Freud, of course). His essay and the value of the testimonies are revealing enough without this claim.

At any event, for the historian, all approaches and all sources are game: none has inherent qualities, be they good or bad, for they all depend on the way the historian critically makes sense of them in the spirit that is the foundation of all serious historical work: the intent of truth and fairness in the representation of the past.

4. One of the most productive directions in the recent historiography of the Holocaust has debated possible linkages and points of compari-son between European colonialism, colonial violence and the Holocaust. What impact might the cultural turn have on these debates?

Zimmerer: In many ways the discussion about the relationship between colonialism and the Holocaust would not be possible without the cultural turn. Only the influence of the cultural turn opened up the possibility for a postcolonial interpretation of the Third Reich. As I"have argued elsewhere, it is by examining ideas, spatial imaginations and administrative fantasies, to name but a few, that we can uncover frameworks that are clearly colonial. Colonialism o!ered a framework of reference and a legitimization which was generally seen as positive and which, apparently, lay outside Nazi ideology.

The application of postcolonial theory to Nazism is already a result of a cultural turn, and the latter has also changed our understanding of colonialism. Colonialism is no longer reduced to formal colonial rule, but includes the study of imaginations and frames of reference. ‘Othering’ and ‘binary opposites’ have become key terms in understanding the epistemological foundations of colonialism and colonial rule. Keeping these understandings in mind, a model has been developed which allows us to explain how racial hierarchies have been developed and how they are used to establish exploitative systems and settlement regimes. Postcolonial theory also stresses the fact that during the process of othering, dichotomies are established which not only define the ‘inferior’ colonized, but also the colonizing, superior self.

If one applies this model to the Nazi state and its occupation regime, then parallels become visible which place those processes within a global history of racism, settle-ment and exploitation. It is crucial to understand that applying postcolonial methods and integrating the Third Reich into a global history of colonial domination in no sense means equating historical phenomena or relativizing experiences. However, it does allow for useful comparison and understanding which are the preconditions of any concepts of prevention.

Goldberg: There is a tendency in Jewish Holocaust historiography and in popular representations of the Holocaust (and other catastrophic events), such as museums and memorial sites—which more and more tend to focus on the victims—to portray the (mostly) Jewish victims in a victorious way and to glorify their spiritual resistance. This is often justified by the ethical imperative to ‘rehumanize’ the victims, and to let them regain their faces, their voices and their identities. This is undoubtedly a right cause;



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however, in such cases, the historical image of the victim is often constructed through the stark binary opposition of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’. In many Holocaust narratives it is assumed that the victims kept, in one way or another, their ‘internal’ individual, psy-chological and communal identity while the Holocaust took place only on the ‘outside’ of historical reality which was almost completely dominated by the Germans. Such narratives make fundamental use of keywords such as ‘struggle’, ‘response’ and ‘resist-ance’ because they all assume that in the Holocaust there were two distinct historical autonomous subjects—the Jews and the Germans. The latter persecuted the former but as long as there was any option for the former to ‘respond’, ‘struggle against’ or even ‘resist’, they did that. Obviously they managed to do that only until they were completely overpowered. In such a narrative the Holocaust took place only on the ‘out-side’ of reality. But on the ‘inside’ of their moral cultural and psychological identity, the victims could stay more or less intact.

This image, whether explicitly portrayed or implicitly embedded or assumed in his-torical representations, is of course completely mythic, and reality was obviously much more complex. There were very many Jewish informers, collaborators, corrupted func-tionaries and hated Jewish policemen. (Of course, not all of them were hated and this issue is very complex. In many cases Jewish policemen were very loyal to their communities.) But what contemporaneous texts (such as diaries) also reveal is that the ‘internal’ Jewish identity was far from being kept intact. Between the victims and the perpetrators existed a whole spectrum, not only of moral but also epistemological and psychological ‘grey zones’. In those grey zones, identities and identifications somehow tended to blend. Just to give one brief example: the clandestine left-wing Zionist news-paper P$omienie (flames) published in Warsaw in September 1940 an article discussing the situation of the youth under Nazi occupation. It stated:

the soul of the slave is solidified and the back is bent. Our youth have learned to do! their hats in front of the Germans. They have learned to smile a smile of slavery and obedience. Deep in their hearts burns jealousy and a deep appreciation of the evil Fascist arrogance. And disguised in the depths of their heart is the dream of being one of them—handsome, elegant, firm and full of self-confidence so we too can kick someone without being brought to justice; to hit, rob, despise others as I"am now despised.

One of the fields that developed sophisticated methodologies for analysing such complex cultural phenomena is the field of colonial and postcolonial studies for which, as Jürgen reminds us, ‘binary opposites’ have become key terms in understanding the epistemological foundations of colonialism and colonial rule itself (and are therefore deconstructed). And although the historical situation of the Holocaust (which is itself a name for very many events in very many sites and along a significant time span) is obvi-ously completely di!erent from the colonial one, I"am convinced that these theoretical and methodological tools could and should be adopted in reading Jewish texts from the Holocaust. Hence for example Fanon’s analysis in ‘Black skin white masks’, or Homi Bhabha’s concept of ‘mimicry’, could be pertinent also to reading Jewish texts (with obvious essential adjustments).

Confino: I"wonder, as I"begin thinking about this question, in what ways exactly the search for continuity and discontinuity is illuminating. It is obviously at the centre of historical thinking on any subject. But at times it is not quite clear what the benefits are of posing it. The devil is in the detail, in the kind of relations of meaning articulated



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in specific studies to illuminate National Socialism and what lies around it, before and after. The image in my mind, as I"think of this, is not of a process (or a policy, an iden-tity, a social practice, or the like) producing continuities separated from a di!erent pro-cess producing discontinuities, but of the same process that at one and the same time produces commingling, unpredictable continuities and discontinuities, thus revealing the co-existence of common denominators and particularities.

The most innovative and challenging interpretation of the Holocaust in the last dec-ade, for me, has been the view that places it within the history of modern genocides and colonialism. Even while I"disagree with some of its key claims, the main thrust of view-ing the Holocaust within the history of modern genocides remains interpretatively fun-damental, for it insists on placing the Holocaust squarely within the broader context of its historical case, namely genocide. But this approach sharpens for me not only com-mon denominators between the Holocaust and other genocides but also particularities of the Holocaust. This may not have been the intention of some of the proponents of the approach, who—in their zeal to provide the necessary corrective to the argument about the uniqueness of the Holocaust—have at times given an implicit impression that the Holocaust had no particularities at all. I"wonder about that. Historical events that belong to the same genre (revolution, genocide and the like) are not identical. The French, Russian, Cuban and Iranian revolutions share something as modern revolu-tions, yet each has some particularities defined by space, time and history. I"have learned from comparative scholarship that the Jewish genocide was tied up with a whole set of racial ideas that produced other mass killings and genocides of, among others, mentally ill patients, Ukrainians and Russians. But by sharpening the similarities and di!erences between the Holocaust and other genocides, this scholarship has also made it evident that for the Nazis the persecution and extermination of the Jews was more urgent and historically significant. What did the Jews symbolize that made their extermination so urgent to the foundation of the Nazi empire? Why were Jews hunted all over Europe, but not Poles, homosexuals or mentally ill patients? Why is it that in the subjective experi-ence of Nazis from Paris to Kiev the extermination of the Jews was viewed as particular among the universe of genocides that was Europe in the 1930s and 1940s?

Placing the persecution and extermination of the Jews in all sorts of histories, cul-tural and others, that commingle common denominators and particularities, seems to me more insightful, interesting, and in accordance with how things really happen in human history than emphasizing only what genocides share, or claiming the Holocaust is unique, and is in itself an approach to the issue of continuity/discontinuity.

Halberstam: I"want to return to Fatima El-Tayeb’s book, European Others. In this book, El-Tayeb addresses the historical conditions that have produced the Black German as an apparent impossibility within modern Germany. The production of the German state as white has a history that, as in other European nations, overlaps with imperial ambitions, colonial expansion and nineteenth-century theories of race and di!erence. As El-Tayeb argues convincingly, historians have tended to see antisemitism as the only form that racism has taken in Germany, and the role of racism directed at other ethnic minorities has been downplayed. But El-Tayeb demonstrates the importance of think-ing of antisemitism and other forms of German racism together and cites examples from German colonial history of the deployment of genocidal logics of extermination and



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elimination used against black Africans before they became the centrepiece of mid-twentieth century antisemitic policies.

Anyone who has spent time in European universities in the last decade will be aware of a troubling tendency among white European academics to see race as something specific to North America. Europeans instead like to think in terms of migrant popula-tions and they also speak of migrant populations as ‘precarious’, but the di!erences between various immigrant groups becomes hard to articulate when the language of race has been pushed to one side. Covering a huge amount of ground and discussing debates in France, Holland, Germany and Switzerland in amazing detail, El-Tayeb, clearly and with admirable economy, draws out the irrationality of continuing to cleave to an understanding of these nations as white and their minority populations as eter-nally foreign. Arguing that the relative homogeneity of European nations was only secured by the genocidal politics of the Second World War and that the legacy of the Holocaust should be an association of epic violence with all attempts to secure the whiteness of the nation, El-Tayeb asks why it has been so di#cult to recalibrate the meaning of community in Europe to include ethnic minorities. The absence of histories such as the one El-Tayeb traces obscures the discursive architecture that still constructs contemporary German citizenship as white and produces blackness as a primary marker of the foreign and inassimilable. Some of the most powerful sections of European Others are devoted to accounts of queer of colour activist groups and their organized opposition to neo-nationalist assaults on immigrant populations. On account of their separateness from the dominant ideologies of national belonging, El-Tayeb suggests, queer ethnic minorities in particular have been able to reimagine and rethink Europe in postethnic terms.

In relation to the legacies of violence and racism, and legacies that still leak into con-temporary nationalisms the world over, I"think that Amos and I"are arguing along simi-lar lines here given his careful but charged critique of Israeli historiography that seeks to ‘reconstruct the victim as a fully autonomous, reactive agent’. Amos wants us to rec-ognize the challenge of writing the history of defeat without seeking, self-indulgently, to claim to be involved in a kind of restorative or redemptive project. Gay and lesbian his-tory has not been free of this kind of historiography, which favours the victim: and so, despite ample evidence that gays and lesbians participated in the Fascist war machine in Nazi Germany, served in the army, worked as camp guards and so on, we tell only the histories of the victims of state homophobia enacted through Paragraph 175. The question of homosexuality within fascism, however, as Geo!rey Giles has shown, lies in one of those grey zones of ambiguity in relation to the Holocaust and cannot be resolved simply by casting all homosexuals as victims. And so, given that homophobia continues to exert a powerful pressure on queer people in many di!erent places, how can we attend to the role played by some gays and lesbians in the Third Reich while grappling with the after-e!ects of the o#cial persecutory stance against homosexuality?

Mühlhäuser: Theories on identity and othering as well as intersectionality, which were largely developed in postcolonial theory, have inspired some very important work in Holocaust studies, for instance on the positionality of female perpetrators and facilita-tors of the Nazi regime. When I"speak about positionality I"imply that any individual or group can only be understood in relation to other individuals or groups within relations



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of power. Is this guard female? In that case I"see her exercising power over female pris-oners. Does she act in the same way or in distinctly di!erent ways towards male pris-oners? In that case, I"may see her disadvantaged in terms of power in comparison to her male counterparts. How does this a!ect her actions? And how does she relate to her female colleagues? What e!ect does class, age or sexual identification play in her self-understanding and her actions? Indeed, theories developed in the study of colonial history do present a very valuable tool for discerning the ways in which certain factors that influence the interpretation and actions of historical subjects rest on long-standing cultural ideas that, at the same time, interact with new meanings.

In addition, cultural history can help us to understand how colonial imaginations played a direct role in the Third Reich and during the Holocaust. Susann Lewerenz, for instance, is exploring the history of artists of African and African-American as well as of Asian and Arabic descent working in German show-business between 1920 and 1960. She analyses show-business as a field in which social hierarchies, political and racial power relations and national identities are negotiated, and both symbolic and actual borders are drawn. Combining questions of social and cultural history, she investigates the forms, functions and e!ects of visual displays of the ‘exotic’, as well as the living and working conditions and the agency of artists of colour in Germany. Her assessment of racism in German visual culture during National Socialism, and the agency of non-white artists (many of whom were migrants from the colonies) reveals the impact of colonial imaginings during the Third Reich. And of course, as Jack stresses, these do not just fizzle out or disappear after 1945.

5. Cultural history’s critical perspective on the production and authori-zation of knowledge has opened up new perspectives on what constitutes useful or legitimate forms of documentation. In other fields, subjective narratives, fables, folklore, photography, soundscapes and material cul-ture stand side by side with government documents, trial records and newspaper accounts. Do these kinds of sources promise ways of rethink-ing or expanding existing narratives of the Holocaust?

Halberstam: Absolutely. There are so many sources that still have not been examined for information about the legislation of the Holocaust and the adoption in Germany, Poland and Austria in particular of what Goldhagen calls, controversially, an eliminationist relationship with Jews and Gypsies. I"think we have still not well under-stood the role of women in fascism, for example, beyond their roles as mothers and wives of soldiers and o#cers. Regina o!ers some great sources on this topic and situates the study of the complicity of women in the Third Reich within the domain of cultural history. The idea that women who signed up to be prison guards imagined themselves to be on some kind of ‘civilizing mission’ is congruent with other colonial projects, such as the British in India, where women have played central roles.

What about female perpetrators of violence? Of course, there is a vast literature on this topic, most notably books by Elizabeth Harvey (Women and the Nazi East), Wendy Adele-Marie Sarti (Women and Nazis), Claudia Koonz (Mothers in the Fatherland), but little of this literature reflects queer theoretical formulations of sex and gender and some leaves the category of ‘women’ intact as self-evident. However, when we do look into



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the question of female violence, both in terms of historical accounts and in terms of representations of how such violence plays out, we often encounter the stereotype of the predatory lesbian. As Carolyn Dean says in her book The Fragility of Empathy After the Holocaust, commentators often imply without confirming that female prison guards in Nazi concentration camps for women may have been lesbian. For Dean, this causes some concern and she takes a remark by Gisela Bock to the e!ect that women who worked in such camps were mostly ‘unmarried and childless, tough and e#cient’ as a subtle form of homophobia. As Dean suggests, the implication of such a characteriza-tion is that the toughness and e#ciency of such women is continuous with and logically connected to not being married or having children. How do we parse the di!erence between homophobic attempts to connect violence to sexual ‘perversity’ and evidence of the participation of lesbians in the militarism of Third Reich? Recently I"heard some unpublished work on this topic presented and was taken aback when one of the women accused of being a camp guard was described as ‘butch’ in the court records (although the speaker could not tell me in the Q and A"what the German word for ‘butch’ had been). Was this term an indicator of lesbianism? Female masculinity? Was it an insult after the fact? How do we deal with potential evidence that the kinds of women who were recruited as guards (young, unmarried, physically strong) might have been lesbians? How do we narrate that part of the story without simply feeding homo-phobic stereotypes?

So, it is not just about what kinds of sources are available to us, it is also about new ways of reading them in the light of new epistemologies of sex and gender and race. Given the challenging images in the Abu Ghraib scandal of female soldiers leering at their Iraqi prisoners and brutally assaulting them, understanding earlier forms of female military violence might be very useful.

Mühlhäuser: They already do. The political scientist Paula Diehl, who has exam-ined bodily images of SS-men, argues that images are more than external or pictorial representations. Rather, they present internal perceptions, descriptions and metaphors that constitute both one’s individual social imaginary, and serve as a foil for everyday experiences and behaviour. In this sense, it is certainly central to look at photographs, pictures, drawings, postcards, films and other kind of visual (and for that matter, audio) material that was important to the historical actors in order to grasp their sense of self. The photo-historian Petra Bopp asserts that photographs do not present an ‘authentic’ illustration of the war; instead, they show the ‘space of experience’ of the men—some-times including scenes that were eliminated from the o#cial photographic documenta-tion. On the one hand, soldiers photographed what aroused their tourist curiosity or triggered their craving for sensation. On the other hand, they used a great amount of film taking pictures of each other performing everyday tasks such as cleaning. A careful assessment of these kind of pictures by Bopp and others has demonstrated that they reveal information about the intertwinedness of everyday routine with violence and excess in a way that textual sources simply cannot.

The postwar use of soldiers’ private photographs also o!ers insights into the narra-tivization of the war and the Holocaust after 1945. Often, the men put their pictures in albums—either immediately after the war or decades later. Occasionally women also took pictures; for instance, one guard in Ravensbrück concentration camp composed



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an album that shows female guards enjoying their free time, sometimes with their male counterparts. Looking at these pictures leaves many feeling speechless because the young women look charming and cheerful. The album thus challenges a view of female perpetrators that is dominant to date: that the women who operated as guards in con-centration camps were a specific kind of masculinized brutal female, not ‘real women’.

I have not had the chance, yet, to listen to Wendy Lower’s new work on this issue of female perpetration. But I"am not surprised to hear that female guards were sometimes called ‘butch’ during war crimes trials. In fact, Elissa Mailänder, Ljiljana Heise and others have asserted that it was by no means an exception that survivors designated their tormentors as ‘manwomen’ or lesbians. They thereby othered them as ‘deviant’ and tried to explain their deeds by pathologizing them. The choice of an expression such as butch during the collection of evidence at postwar trials does not necessarily disclose any information about the sexual identity of a female guard; rather it reveals that prejudices against gay women remained part of the mindset of historical subjects after the end of the war.

Based on the assumption that women became perpetrators regardless of their sexual identification (which is, I"agree with Jack, a subject that should be dealt with in queer studies), researchers such as Mailänder or Heise have tried to gain information on the sexual desires and practices of these women. However, this has proved to be extremely di#cult, since sources that actually disclose this kind of information are extremely scarce.

Questions such as these and many others are still unanswered and there is defi-nitely a lot more research to do. Still, the subject of female perpetrators and Nazi agents (camp guards, female SS auxiliaries, female Wehrmacht auxiliaries, women in the Eastern deployment (Osteinsatz), wives of SS-men, functionaries in Nazi women’s organizations and so on) has been tackled since the 1980s, and there is a substantial body of scholarship on the biographical origins of the women, the ways they adapted to their functions, their scope of interpretation and action and their representation in media or trials after the end of the war. Curiously, this scholarship seems to be widely unknown. One could consider this to be a cultural phenomenon in itself. Why has it, to date, seemed to be so di#cult to deal with women as perpetrators?

Goldberg: I"was teaching this year a seminar on the ‘cultural history of the Warsaw ghetto’. In this seminar we asked how Jews made sense (or failed to make sense) of the catastrophic situation into which they were unwillingly thrown. We disconnected the history of the ghetto from its horrible aftermath of annihilation, which began for the Warsaw Jews in July 1942. We tried to understand aspects of continuity and of transfor-mation in Jewish internal life in the ghetto. We treated the ghetto not as a phase on the way to the ‘final solution’ but as an ‘urban space’, strictly segregated from other parts of the city by a wall that was a realization of a radical racial policy, one which gradually culminated in terrible famine and plague. We investigated what happens to meaning under such extremely harsh conditions. We examined, for example, what new mean-ings fundamental concepts such as ‘city’, ‘communication’, ‘society’, ‘home’, ‘death’, and so on gained under such circumstances. By so doing we could investigate aspects of continuity in the ghetto inhabitants’ symbolic world and aspects of breakdown or transformation. Hence we could also compare it to other historical cases of disaster and to the ways the various victim communities tried to make sense of their situation.



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What we actually achieved was to secularize and historicize the Warsaw ghetto beyond its mythical and sacralized images.

Often students who study the Warsaw ghetto wonder why it was so di#cult for its various political movements to unite. Contrary to students’ expectations, not all those political groups could combine to form one underground movement to fight the Nazis, once most of the ghetto Jews had been sent to Treblinka. As is well known, two Jewish fighting organizations fought in the Warsaw ghetto uprising—one on the Left and one on the Right. They coordinated the fighting but did not manage to unite into one organization.

However, by reading their writings from the Holocaust in the context of their sym-bolic and ideological worlds, which were basically formed between the two world wars, we were able to understand that they lived and acted, to a large extent, according to the syntax and grammar of their past world views, fantasies, images, ideologies and identities.

These show how, by using cultural history methodological tools, we could on the one hand historicize our image of the era, and on the other make it more compa-rable to other events in order to understand the cultural, social, intellectual and psy-chological mechanisms by which victim communities of mass political atrocities make sense or fail to make sense of their world. We were enabled better to understand the radical transformative processes that these communities undergo under such dramatic circumstances.

Zimmerer: In the light of the discussion above, it is obvious that we should include as many di!erent types of sources as possible in our analysis of the Holocaust. The cultural turn has taught us how varied a picture can be once we approach it from hitherto unusual directions. It also demonstrates, among other things, the importance of the imaginative realm. There is no way back. One cannot and should not ‘undo’ the cultural turn. As explained above, the world of administrative, military or imperial fantasies opens up new avenues of contextualization. Reflections on the meaning of the Holocaust for contemporaries, the descendants of victims, bystanders and perpetrators, as well as for later generations—as the example of the discussion of the development of human rights after 1945 shows—are now also a legitimate part of any engagement with the Holocaust.

Confino: Some of these sources have been fruitfully used over the years, others are new, and some old sources will teach us new things. What will determine the originality of all these sources are the questions we shall ask them and the answers we will be open to hear in terms of method, narrative, interpretation, and, not least, our own emotional readiness to make sense of the Holocaust as a historical case. Here lies to my mind the key to new narratives of the Holocaust that challenge our usual perceptions. So I"find that I"don’t quite have a specific answer to this question, and find the contributions of Regina and Amos a good way to move forward here.

Let me tell a short story instead. In 1937 in Frankenwinheim, in Lower Franconia, a man told his friends in the local pub that he had bought the house of his Jewish neighbour who had left for America. He mentioned that before leaving, the neighbour apparently threw a dead calf into an unused well on the property. A"rumour quickly



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spread that the Jews had poisoned the town’s water resources. From then on Jews could not go in the village without being mistreated. One Saturday, stormtroopers hounded young Jews from their homes and into the local pub and violently mistreated them. In the meantime the Jew who had sold the house, now in the United States, was informed of the events. He wrote to the mayor of Frankenwinheim that he indeed dispensed of one of his dead calves before leaving by burying it in his yard, and gave the exact loca-tion. This information could have stopped the rumour, but as the mayor later explained he kept the content of the letter secret since the Jew broke the law by burying the calf in his yard and not outside the village.

Is this human a!air best understood with respect to racial ideology? Or perhaps as a quirk case of odd Germans? I"doubt it. The point of the cases is not that Germans in the mid-1930s necessarily believed in these accusations against Jews, or that the story proved an unbroken antisemitic tradition since the middle ages. Indeed, the full story includes hints that some Germans, even the Gestapo, did not believe the accusations at all. But it is precisely contemporaries’ incredulity that makes this case illuminating: fantastic stories, which for most Germans belonged to a di!erent historical period and were not credible, were nonetheless a vehicle for violent social actions against Jews. The important point is not whether Germans really believed the story (what does really believed mean, really?). Rather, it is about the horizons of imagination available to members of society at a given time and place. In the mid-1930s in Germany, the Jews were constructed in metaphors of fantasy and legend. They became a subject of wild stories, and any fable could be attached to their identity. In this respect, the accusation of poisoning the water resources in 1937, as a German construction of identity based on fantasies about the Jews, was not that di!erent from the introduc-tion in the same year to the permanent exhibition of the history Regional Museum in Braunschweig (Landesmuseum) of a section about the Jews as a racial ‘alien body’ set to destroy Germany. The Jews set the imagination free with images of the past and the present, of origins and modernity, that made up a new identity commingling racial, religious and national ideas. Germans expressed their obsession with the Jews in social actions and cultural representations that commingled old and new symbols. For Nazism saw itself as a radical historical departure—a creation of a new society based on persecution and extermination of groups of people—and precisely because of that it paid particular attention to the past, particularly the one that had to be destroyed to make space for Nazi civilization.



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