The Development of Holocaust Studies
Saleem Suzah
12 / 10 / 2014
Brief Introduction
Writing about the Jewish Holocaust has never been an easy task. It has always been a complicated issue because of the way researchers approach it. Each scholar has its own methodology in approaching this historical event. Several disciplines have been used to explain how the Holocaust took place. Why has it occurred in the first place? What lessons should we learn from this atrocity? Why do we need to remember the Holocaust forever? These are some of the questions that drove researchers to study the Holocaust. My goal in this essay is to take a look at how researchers answered these questions and what disciplines they used to explain their own perspective. This will help us to understand how the Holocaust studies developed over time. In the conclusion, I will also give my personal opinion on which methodology is more accurate in explaining the Holocaust.
Why Kill Jews? Functionalists Vs. Intentionalists.
“Why have Germans killed Jews?” This is the question that drove the author of “Ordinary Men”, Christopher Browning, to study the Jewish Holocaust. Browning relies very much on the two psychological experiments, Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment[1] and Miligram’s Obedience to Authority Experiment[2], in his explanation of why the German Reserve Police Battalion 101 brutally committed systematic killing against Jews. He argues that the German people were ordinary men, but there were some important factors that played a role in turning them, or some of them, into killing machines. He concludes that “wartime brutalization, racism, segmentation and routinization of the task, special selection of the perpetrators, careerism, obedience to orders, deference to authority, ideological indoctrination, and conformity” are the factors behind how the Holocaust occurred (Browning 159). Browning’s approach falls into what it is called a “Functionalist Explanation” in which researchers review the Holocaust as a historical event that was not intentionally planned by perpetuators. The extermination of Jews, or what it is called “The Final Solution”, occurred gradually through several stages of development. This differs to what the “Intentionalists” believe. Intentionalists argue that the extermination of Jews was intentional from the day that the Nazi party came to power in Germany. Hitler planned to destroy Jews and establish a “Clean Europe” from the beginning, before he even became a leader of Germany. They think that the Holocaust would have never happened, if there was no support from the majority of German society. “Aversion toward the Jews” was rooted in that society as the Intentionalists try to prove. One of the prominent Holocaust researchers that adopted the Intentionalist view in approaching the Jewish Holocaust issue is Daniel Goldhagen. In his “Hitler’s Willing Executioners” book, Goldhagen criticizes Browning’s book “Ordinary Men” and disagrees with the idea that there was no choice for the German Reserve Police Battalion 101 to step out of killing Jews. Based on some examples that Browning himself brought to attention, Goldhagen points out that there was a choice made for those policemen, but the majority of them decided not to take advantage of it. They were driven by their hatred to kill more and more Jews. He states that the study of the Battalion 101 “demonstrates that the Germans’ opportunities to extract themselves from killing operations render ‘following orders’ a more complex psychological and motivational problem than has been generally acknowledged” (Goldhagen 377). Goldhagen’s intentionalist approach stresses that the Holocaust was possible simply because Germans wanted it. It is a unique genocide that cannot be compared to other historical genocides. It is a “Sui Generis”. Many researchers have criticized Goldhagen for allying with the “moral uniqueness thesis” in which the Holocaust is a unique event that cannot be comprehended like other genocides. Peacock and Roth, as we will see in the next section, have highlighted this fallacy. They criticize Goldhagen because he:
"Avails himself of social scientific methods; he himself describes his intent as ‘primarily explanatory and theoretical’ rather than straightforwardly narrative-historical. Yet, on the other hand, he does not relate the Holocaust via these methods to other historical phenomena. Rather, he insists on the Holocaust’s uniqueness with regard to its being a case of morally aberrant behaviour" (Peacock and Roth 3).
This ongoing debate between the “Functionalists” and “Intentionalists” has been always reinforced in the Holocaust literature. The reason why I chose these two famous books is because the Intentionalist and Functionalist views are strongly presented in them. I had to do a brief review on them before we dig deeper into how the Holocaust was interpreted over time.
The Holocaust is a Crime Against Humanity
The argument between the “Intentionalists” and “Functionalists” had moved the Holocaust studies to a different stage -- the stage where some researchers start to look at the Holocaust in a more moral way. Some researchers insist to focus on this crime as an isolated crime, not because it was against a specific group of people. Whether it is an Intentionalist or Functionalist issue, it is a crime against humanity before it is a crime considered against Jews. The most important lesson out of the Holocaust is how to prevent such an atrocity from happening again. William Borth says, “The Holocaust is no longer just history … it is, after all, an account of what humans did to humans” (Borth 346). He criticizes the educational curriculum in high schools for its lack of Holocaust courses and condemns studying the Holocaust as a historical event for history’s sake. Borth wants us to consider “the timeless implications of the Holocaust beyond its historical context,” as there are important lessons to be learned (Borth 345). Although such claims are considered neutral in studying the Holocaust, I would argue that naturalizing the Holocaust as a historical atrocity -- which means it is not different than other genocides in our history -- is a helpless attempt in interpreting the Holocaust. How can we avoid any future Holocausts if we do not analyze the main reasons that led to the Jewish Holocaust? What lessons do we learn then if we are unable to understand the Holocaust? In my opinion, the Holocaust is a unique event. Understanding the uniqueness of it will help us to better understand what was going on in Europe at that time and, in turn, to protect humanity from having a new potential Holocaust. With that being said, the uniqueness of the Holocaust should not be an obstacle that prevents us from studying this historical event. It should instead be a motivation that pushes us to more research on it for the sake of clear understanding.
One of the problems that researchers face in Holocaust studies is the “uniqueness” of the Holocaust. Some insist that the Holocaust is a unique event that cannot be compared with other historical phenomena. It cannot be comprehended at all. For them, theorizing this horrible event will diminish its uniqueness and, in turn, will diminish its moral impact. Therefore, researchers who try to theorize the Holocaust are often condemned and accused of being politically driven to play down the uniqueness of the Holocaust. Believing in such an unreal uniqueness places the Holocaust beyond the reach of any theoretical study. It makes it hard to be understood. I would dare to call such a belief a “metaphysical belief”. The Holocaust now moves from being a “Realistic Holocaust” to what I call a “Metaphysical Holocaust” in which no one can comprehend it. How can we learn from it then, if it is something beyond comprehension?
Peacock and Roth argue that to better investigate the Holocaust and learn moral lessons from it, we need to deal with it as a phenomenon (Peacock and Roth 2). We need to understand it in a more human sense and this will not be achieved if we think of the Holocaust “metaphysically”. What they want to do is to establish a relationship between the Holocaust and our new conceptions. That way we can use what we are learning now from the new disciplines of the knowledge and apply it to the Holocaust in order to get an accurate explanation of it. Peacock and Roth conclude:
"By probing the Holocaust analogically, we establish a two-way relation between the Holocaust and aspects of 'our new society' which are more familiar to us. We can thereby learn things about the Holocaust and about our own society which were previously foreclosed to us …. But only by confronting such comparisons can we hope to learn therefrom" (Peacock and Roth 12).
I do not know why some historians think that such conclusion diminishes the uniqueness of the Holocaust; I do not think that this way of thinking diminishes the uniqueness of the Holocaust. It is just not enough to approach the Holocaust and understand it. Although Peacock and Roth’s attempt is a respectful attempt to set up a serious methodology in analyzing the Holocaust, I personally have reservations on it. Using our new society conceptions and applying them on a historical phenomenon like the Jewish Holocaust will not be a good way to understand the Holocaust. Our present cannot explain the past, especially if that past was in a different culture, in a different context, and in a different circumstance. It is hard sometimes to evaluate the past through the eyes of present, as it is hard for the past to interpret our present’s phenomena. The past is unable to understand the present because it belongs to a different time, and same thing with the present as well. The present cannot understand the past without using proper means. Yes, we need to use our new knowledge in approaching the Holocaust, but not without travelling to the past and living that moment, the moment where the Holocaust took place. To do so, we have to have the right tools. We should have historical, sociological, archeological, philosophical, psychological, anthropological, political, and all other related tools before we dig deeper into that period. We should think in an interdisciplinary way on how to use all these disciplines together in order to precisely address the Holocaust event. Interdisciplinarians do not give their explanation of any historical phenomenon without their interdisciplinary tools. They take into consideration the historical context of the event when using their “new tools” or their new knowledge. The Holocaust is an interdisciplinary issue in which history intersects with sociology, philosophy, politics, and other related disciplines. Only an interdisciplinary study can give us a better understanding of the Holocaust.
Holocaust in Literature
In literature, the Holocaust has been shaped in a way that an emotive dimension appears to dramatically cover the other aspects. Although autobiographies, first-person narratives, and memoirs generally function similar to history, they are academically considered insufficient documents for the historians to rely on. That is because they are written to narrate the past based on the author’s own perspective. Their perspective on history is “necessarily selective. It cannot englobe the entire record of the past” (Popkin 78). Popkin argues that relying on first-person narratives and Holocaust survivors’ autobiographies, which is always the first step of studying the Holocaust, gives us a biased picture of the event. Such stories confuse interested historians because each Holocaust survivor is an exceptional case and has his/her own story. “The historian should seek as much as possible to work from sources generated at that time of the event, and written without any eye toward telling a story” (Popkin 53). So what literature does is actually removing the Holocaust event from being a historical genocidal event into an emotional narrative. It concentrates on emotions and passions rather than understanding the event itself. That is why Popkin concludes “that the historian’s methods produce a representation of past events that is in some sense truer and more accurate than that of those who were actually there” (Popkin 53). Popkin implies here that history is the right discipline for the Holocaust. Do others agree with him? We will see shortly.
How Historians Recall the Holocaust
Speaking of History, Wlad Godzich in his essay “The Holocaust: Questions for the Humanities” presents a very strong critique to historians who try to naturalize the Holocaust and equalize it with the other genocidal events that occurred in our history. He reviews some interesting Holocaust arguments from some famous thinkers like: Heidegger, Derrida, and Lyotard, and compares each argument with the other and to each other before he states his conclusion. For Godzich, the interpretation of Holocaust is a philosophical problem in which no one will ever “know how to speak of the Holocaust, for it will never allow itself to be neatly invested in the fixatives of discourse” (Godzich 147). He believes that the Holocaust does exceed representation; therefore, historians are unable to represent it. They are unable to speak of the Holocaust. He brings up what Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe concluded in his work “Heidegger Art, and Politics” that the Holocaust is a caesura, “no representation of it is possible” (Godzich 141). It is a caesura that:
"Which within history interrupts history and 'opens up another possibility of history' or forecloses all possibility to history. Thus, a caesura is that which opens up a new temporality that does not in the least resemble the earlier one. It ruptures time into a before and an after where the two are incommensurate and cannot be totalized. Neither does the caesura itself belong to the one or the other, since it is that which has made them possible" (Godzich 141).
For some historians, this statement is an exaggerated conclusion. The Holocaust is not more than a history. Such historians try to naturalize the Holocaust; they think about it as a condemned crime, but happened a lot in history. For them, this type of extermination is not unusual. It is what Stalin did to millions in Russia. Such form of political activity became normal in Europe at that time. Large-scale extermination of “enemies” was not a German-type policy. It was first a Russian-type policy. Moreover, there is a “causal explanation” behind what happened to Jews in WWII. The Nazi Party saw Jews as enemies because of the document of the president of the World Zionist Organization that said during the WWII, “All Jews should consider themselves at war with Nazi Germany” (Godzich 135). Those historians recant that this should not be a justification of what Hitler did to Jews, but it is an attempt in understanding the Holocaust within the historical context. It is a history that Germany should no longer be blamed for. Recalling the Holocaust over and over will definitely reinforce certain aversion against Germans, as some historians believe. To me, such a historical approach is inaccurate. Recalling a historical event does not always mean recalling its emotions and passions. It is the function of history to take the historical event out of its emotive context. As Godzich smartly put it, “History recalls the facts but actively forgets, that is represses, the emotions, the passions. It may recall tyranny or civil war, but it represses them by representing them” (Godzich 137). Indeed, this is how history should look at the historical events. However, one may ask, is history enough for the Holocaust? Godzich says, “No.” Historians may not be able to give content to the object they seek to represent because the object is either inaccessible or it exceeds representation, as the Holocaust does (Godzich 138). Now, we are back to where we left off at the historical problem of representing the Holocaust. How should we think of the Holocaust since it exceeds representation? How do we speak of it? It is a philosophical question rather than a historical problem. This question will keep challenging our thinking “when we believe that we have built better theories, better methodologies that stand up by themselves” (Godzich 147). It is the question that the humanities should face together. This is a sober acknowledgement that history alone cannot give us a clear understanding of the Holocaust.
Holocaust in Education
Many researchers and history class teachers still resent the lack of Holocaust classes in the western educational system. The argument here is that students and young people should adequately learn about the Holocaust. They should learn why and how it happened in order to have a better understanding of our past and to protect it from being distorted. Paul Salmons’s main idea about the Holocaust is that “failure to engage with its historical and highly complex reality in fact leaves young people open to manipulation and coercion from those who would use the past to push their own social or political agendas” (Salmons 56). There are now many institutions, museums, educational programs, and research organizations adopt such claims and ask for the Holocaust to be instructed in early-age schools. This “institutionalized” Holocaust has been politically used to enforce some false facts and ideas about the Holocaust, since most of those organizations are owned and run by biased politicians. This problem makes Holocaust studies face new challenges. The Holocaust became a “ruling symbol” in our culture today, as Salmons says. It has been used in different fields and for different reasons, ethical, religious, political, or others. For instance, some of animal rights organizations educate people against the meat industry by using emotional slogans like “Holocaust on your plate”. Other NGOs, in opposing laws on abortion, also write, “abortion is today’s Holocaust” (Salmons 57). It is being politically used in the ongoing conflict between Israel and other Arab states. Such political and ethical use of the word “Holocaust” is sometimes distorting the realty of the Holocaust. There are more than 175 separate voluntary associations worldwide that focus on the issue of the Holocaust (Horowitz, Evolution 501). These associations vary in their size from small groups to larger ones like the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, which has over 400 salaried personnel and 300 volunteers (Horowitz, Evolution 501). It is not just the risk of having the Holocaust used politically; it is, as Horowitz states:
"There are, to be sure, risks in the professionalization of Holocaust studies — perhaps none greater than to convert an enormous human tragedy into a series of academic groupings debating minutiae as if they were picking through the final leavings of a rummage sale. But such problems are a concern only for select academics that spend careers on the subject" (Horowitz, Evolution 501).
This is why the professionalization of Holocaust studies gets critiqued by a lot of researchers these days.
Interdisciplinary Stage
Looking at the Holocaust from one discipline’s perspective is not enough for us to understand it. For instance, we saw how history struggles to interpret the Holocaust. The historical explanation does not answer “why was the Holocaust more severe in one nation and less in another? Why did the behavior of the perpetrators vary from one concentration camp to another, one village to another, one person to another?” (Horowitz, Natural History 78). To appropriately answer such questions we have to consider other fields of knowledge, the fields of knowledge that were integrated in Holocaust studies over the time. Horowitz divides the Holocaust studies’ period into four identifiable stages. First, the literature stage includes memoirs, narratives, and autobiographies of Holocaust survivors. The Second stage is the historical and journalistic stage in which historians became interested in those memoirs and eyewitnesses accounts. The Third is the psychological and social scientific stage in which researchers began to take into account the psychological issues along with long-term historical considerations. Fourth is the stage in which all related disciplines, including the stages above, had been incorporated into one body of knowledge (Horowitz, Natural History 78-79). In his other essay “Stages in the Evolution of Holocaust Studies: From the Nuremberg Trials to the Present,” Horowitz calls this stage “microanalysis stage” in which the Holocaust studies moved from macroscopic to microscopic analysis (Horowitz, Evolution 496). It moves from “the metaphysical to the material conditions under which the Holocaust actually took place” or in other words, it is a movement from “large-scale to small-scale study of phenomena” (Horowitz, Natural History 79). In this stage, researchers benefit from all related disciplines we have. They microscopically review the historical records that were taken for granted in the past. They combine the three stages mentioned above, not just to rethink about the Holocaust, but also to study the stages themselves, the way they were shaped and presented, and the way researchers posited their findings within each stage. This is a highly complex methodology in approaching the Holocaust as a historical event and as an ongoing study. It is the study of how the Holocaust studies developed over time before it is considered a study of the Holocaust event itself. Horowitz praises this new way of thinking and concludes based on this stage’s new methodology that:
"The older tradition of choosing either impersonal history or personal narrative to explain the pattern of genocide has given way to a common sense set of realizations. It is the interaction, more, the incubation, of objective structures and personal decisions that changed the situation under Nazism from the random denunciation of the Jews, to the deprivation of their civil liberties and livelihood, and finally to their systematic annihilation" (Horowitz, Natural History 86).
Although the fourth stage of the Holocaust studies sounds like a more accurate way to approach the Holocaust, there is a risk of being deluded and deceived in adopting such a methodology. What if one discipline we use was not accurate in its findings? What happens then if we figured out that we were wrong in relying on a specific discipline’s theory? Does it not threaten our entire understanding of the Holocaust since we build that understanding on a set of theories from various disciplines? It is worth thinking of such an interdisciplinary problem when we use the fourth stage methodology in studying the Holocaust or other historical phenomena.
Conclusion
As we saw from the earlier discussion, the Jewish Holocaust has been differently interpreted over time. It is no longer a matter of history since history alone cannot give us a clear understanding of how the Holocaust happened. The Holocaust now became a combination of historical, philosophical, psychological, sociological, and other related disciplines’ questions that need to be solved in order to have a better picture of why the Holocaust happened. This is how the Holocaust studies developed and moved from one stage to another. I would say that the most accurate methodology in approaching the Holocaust is the “ interdisciplinary methodology,” not because I am biased to my field of study, but because it simultaneously takes into account several disciplines when trying to explain highly complex historical phenomena. With the interdisciplinary methodology, the Holocaust becomes a field by itself. It is a new way of looking at the Holocaust and a new way of understanding it.
Notes:
1 - More info on Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment on this link: http://www.prisonexp.org/
2 - YouTube on Miligram’s Experiment: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BcvSNg0HZwk
Works Cited:
Borth, William F. "Holocaust Studies: We Need to Do More." The Clearing House 56.No. 8 (1983): 345-46. Taylor & Francis, Ltd. Web. 11 Nov. 2014. <http://www.jstor.org.ezproxy1.lib.asu.edu/stable/10.2307/30186217?origin=api>.
Browning, Christopher R. Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. New York: HarperCollins, 1992. Print.
Godzich, Wlad. "The Holocaust: Questions for the Humanities." Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas 7.1 (2009): 133-148. Project MUSE. Web. 12 Nov. 2014. <http://muse.jhu.edu/>.
Goldhagen, Daniel J. Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. New York: Knopf, 1996. Print.
Horowitz, Irving Louis. "Toward a Natural History of Holocaust Studies." Human Rights Review 2.4 (2001): 77-87. ProQuest.Web. 12 Nov. 2014.
Horowitz, Irving Louis. "Stages in the Evolution of Holocaust Studies: From the Nuremberg Trials to the Present." Human Rights Review 10.4 (2009): 493-504. ProQuest. Web. 12 Nov. 2014.
Peacock, Mark S., and Paul A. Roth. "Holocaust Studies: What Is to Be Learned?" History of the Human Sciences 17.2-3 (2004): 1-13. Sage Journals. Web. 11 Nov. 2014. <http://hhs.sagepub.com.ezproxy1.lib.asu.edu/content/17/2-3/1>.
Popkin, Jeremy D. "Holocaust Memories, Historians' Memoirs." History and Memory 15.1 (2003): 49. ProQuest. Web. 12 Nov. 2014.
Salmons, Paul. “Universal Meaning or Historical Understanding?” Teaching History 141 (2010): 57-63. Academic Search Premier. Web. 12 Nov. 2014.
Back to the articles page
Saleem Suzah
12 / 10 / 2014
Brief Introduction
Writing about the Jewish Holocaust has never been an easy task. It has always been a complicated issue because of the way researchers approach it. Each scholar has its own methodology in approaching this historical event. Several disciplines have been used to explain how the Holocaust took place. Why has it occurred in the first place? What lessons should we learn from this atrocity? Why do we need to remember the Holocaust forever? These are some of the questions that drove researchers to study the Holocaust. My goal in this essay is to take a look at how researchers answered these questions and what disciplines they used to explain their own perspective. This will help us to understand how the Holocaust studies developed over time. In the conclusion, I will also give my personal opinion on which methodology is more accurate in explaining the Holocaust.
Why Kill Jews? Functionalists Vs. Intentionalists.
“Why have Germans killed Jews?” This is the question that drove the author of “Ordinary Men”, Christopher Browning, to study the Jewish Holocaust. Browning relies very much on the two psychological experiments, Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment[1] and Miligram’s Obedience to Authority Experiment[2], in his explanation of why the German Reserve Police Battalion 101 brutally committed systematic killing against Jews. He argues that the German people were ordinary men, but there were some important factors that played a role in turning them, or some of them, into killing machines. He concludes that “wartime brutalization, racism, segmentation and routinization of the task, special selection of the perpetrators, careerism, obedience to orders, deference to authority, ideological indoctrination, and conformity” are the factors behind how the Holocaust occurred (Browning 159). Browning’s approach falls into what it is called a “Functionalist Explanation” in which researchers review the Holocaust as a historical event that was not intentionally planned by perpetuators. The extermination of Jews, or what it is called “The Final Solution”, occurred gradually through several stages of development. This differs to what the “Intentionalists” believe. Intentionalists argue that the extermination of Jews was intentional from the day that the Nazi party came to power in Germany. Hitler planned to destroy Jews and establish a “Clean Europe” from the beginning, before he even became a leader of Germany. They think that the Holocaust would have never happened, if there was no support from the majority of German society. “Aversion toward the Jews” was rooted in that society as the Intentionalists try to prove. One of the prominent Holocaust researchers that adopted the Intentionalist view in approaching the Jewish Holocaust issue is Daniel Goldhagen. In his “Hitler’s Willing Executioners” book, Goldhagen criticizes Browning’s book “Ordinary Men” and disagrees with the idea that there was no choice for the German Reserve Police Battalion 101 to step out of killing Jews. Based on some examples that Browning himself brought to attention, Goldhagen points out that there was a choice made for those policemen, but the majority of them decided not to take advantage of it. They were driven by their hatred to kill more and more Jews. He states that the study of the Battalion 101 “demonstrates that the Germans’ opportunities to extract themselves from killing operations render ‘following orders’ a more complex psychological and motivational problem than has been generally acknowledged” (Goldhagen 377). Goldhagen’s intentionalist approach stresses that the Holocaust was possible simply because Germans wanted it. It is a unique genocide that cannot be compared to other historical genocides. It is a “Sui Generis”. Many researchers have criticized Goldhagen for allying with the “moral uniqueness thesis” in which the Holocaust is a unique event that cannot be comprehended like other genocides. Peacock and Roth, as we will see in the next section, have highlighted this fallacy. They criticize Goldhagen because he:
"Avails himself of social scientific methods; he himself describes his intent as ‘primarily explanatory and theoretical’ rather than straightforwardly narrative-historical. Yet, on the other hand, he does not relate the Holocaust via these methods to other historical phenomena. Rather, he insists on the Holocaust’s uniqueness with regard to its being a case of morally aberrant behaviour" (Peacock and Roth 3).
This ongoing debate between the “Functionalists” and “Intentionalists” has been always reinforced in the Holocaust literature. The reason why I chose these two famous books is because the Intentionalist and Functionalist views are strongly presented in them. I had to do a brief review on them before we dig deeper into how the Holocaust was interpreted over time.
The Holocaust is a Crime Against Humanity
The argument between the “Intentionalists” and “Functionalists” had moved the Holocaust studies to a different stage -- the stage where some researchers start to look at the Holocaust in a more moral way. Some researchers insist to focus on this crime as an isolated crime, not because it was against a specific group of people. Whether it is an Intentionalist or Functionalist issue, it is a crime against humanity before it is a crime considered against Jews. The most important lesson out of the Holocaust is how to prevent such an atrocity from happening again. William Borth says, “The Holocaust is no longer just history … it is, after all, an account of what humans did to humans” (Borth 346). He criticizes the educational curriculum in high schools for its lack of Holocaust courses and condemns studying the Holocaust as a historical event for history’s sake. Borth wants us to consider “the timeless implications of the Holocaust beyond its historical context,” as there are important lessons to be learned (Borth 345). Although such claims are considered neutral in studying the Holocaust, I would argue that naturalizing the Holocaust as a historical atrocity -- which means it is not different than other genocides in our history -- is a helpless attempt in interpreting the Holocaust. How can we avoid any future Holocausts if we do not analyze the main reasons that led to the Jewish Holocaust? What lessons do we learn then if we are unable to understand the Holocaust? In my opinion, the Holocaust is a unique event. Understanding the uniqueness of it will help us to better understand what was going on in Europe at that time and, in turn, to protect humanity from having a new potential Holocaust. With that being said, the uniqueness of the Holocaust should not be an obstacle that prevents us from studying this historical event. It should instead be a motivation that pushes us to more research on it for the sake of clear understanding.
One of the problems that researchers face in Holocaust studies is the “uniqueness” of the Holocaust. Some insist that the Holocaust is a unique event that cannot be compared with other historical phenomena. It cannot be comprehended at all. For them, theorizing this horrible event will diminish its uniqueness and, in turn, will diminish its moral impact. Therefore, researchers who try to theorize the Holocaust are often condemned and accused of being politically driven to play down the uniqueness of the Holocaust. Believing in such an unreal uniqueness places the Holocaust beyond the reach of any theoretical study. It makes it hard to be understood. I would dare to call such a belief a “metaphysical belief”. The Holocaust now moves from being a “Realistic Holocaust” to what I call a “Metaphysical Holocaust” in which no one can comprehend it. How can we learn from it then, if it is something beyond comprehension?
Peacock and Roth argue that to better investigate the Holocaust and learn moral lessons from it, we need to deal with it as a phenomenon (Peacock and Roth 2). We need to understand it in a more human sense and this will not be achieved if we think of the Holocaust “metaphysically”. What they want to do is to establish a relationship between the Holocaust and our new conceptions. That way we can use what we are learning now from the new disciplines of the knowledge and apply it to the Holocaust in order to get an accurate explanation of it. Peacock and Roth conclude:
"By probing the Holocaust analogically, we establish a two-way relation between the Holocaust and aspects of 'our new society' which are more familiar to us. We can thereby learn things about the Holocaust and about our own society which were previously foreclosed to us …. But only by confronting such comparisons can we hope to learn therefrom" (Peacock and Roth 12).
I do not know why some historians think that such conclusion diminishes the uniqueness of the Holocaust; I do not think that this way of thinking diminishes the uniqueness of the Holocaust. It is just not enough to approach the Holocaust and understand it. Although Peacock and Roth’s attempt is a respectful attempt to set up a serious methodology in analyzing the Holocaust, I personally have reservations on it. Using our new society conceptions and applying them on a historical phenomenon like the Jewish Holocaust will not be a good way to understand the Holocaust. Our present cannot explain the past, especially if that past was in a different culture, in a different context, and in a different circumstance. It is hard sometimes to evaluate the past through the eyes of present, as it is hard for the past to interpret our present’s phenomena. The past is unable to understand the present because it belongs to a different time, and same thing with the present as well. The present cannot understand the past without using proper means. Yes, we need to use our new knowledge in approaching the Holocaust, but not without travelling to the past and living that moment, the moment where the Holocaust took place. To do so, we have to have the right tools. We should have historical, sociological, archeological, philosophical, psychological, anthropological, political, and all other related tools before we dig deeper into that period. We should think in an interdisciplinary way on how to use all these disciplines together in order to precisely address the Holocaust event. Interdisciplinarians do not give their explanation of any historical phenomenon without their interdisciplinary tools. They take into consideration the historical context of the event when using their “new tools” or their new knowledge. The Holocaust is an interdisciplinary issue in which history intersects with sociology, philosophy, politics, and other related disciplines. Only an interdisciplinary study can give us a better understanding of the Holocaust.
Holocaust in Literature
In literature, the Holocaust has been shaped in a way that an emotive dimension appears to dramatically cover the other aspects. Although autobiographies, first-person narratives, and memoirs generally function similar to history, they are academically considered insufficient documents for the historians to rely on. That is because they are written to narrate the past based on the author’s own perspective. Their perspective on history is “necessarily selective. It cannot englobe the entire record of the past” (Popkin 78). Popkin argues that relying on first-person narratives and Holocaust survivors’ autobiographies, which is always the first step of studying the Holocaust, gives us a biased picture of the event. Such stories confuse interested historians because each Holocaust survivor is an exceptional case and has his/her own story. “The historian should seek as much as possible to work from sources generated at that time of the event, and written without any eye toward telling a story” (Popkin 53). So what literature does is actually removing the Holocaust event from being a historical genocidal event into an emotional narrative. It concentrates on emotions and passions rather than understanding the event itself. That is why Popkin concludes “that the historian’s methods produce a representation of past events that is in some sense truer and more accurate than that of those who were actually there” (Popkin 53). Popkin implies here that history is the right discipline for the Holocaust. Do others agree with him? We will see shortly.
How Historians Recall the Holocaust
Speaking of History, Wlad Godzich in his essay “The Holocaust: Questions for the Humanities” presents a very strong critique to historians who try to naturalize the Holocaust and equalize it with the other genocidal events that occurred in our history. He reviews some interesting Holocaust arguments from some famous thinkers like: Heidegger, Derrida, and Lyotard, and compares each argument with the other and to each other before he states his conclusion. For Godzich, the interpretation of Holocaust is a philosophical problem in which no one will ever “know how to speak of the Holocaust, for it will never allow itself to be neatly invested in the fixatives of discourse” (Godzich 147). He believes that the Holocaust does exceed representation; therefore, historians are unable to represent it. They are unable to speak of the Holocaust. He brings up what Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe concluded in his work “Heidegger Art, and Politics” that the Holocaust is a caesura, “no representation of it is possible” (Godzich 141). It is a caesura that:
"Which within history interrupts history and 'opens up another possibility of history' or forecloses all possibility to history. Thus, a caesura is that which opens up a new temporality that does not in the least resemble the earlier one. It ruptures time into a before and an after where the two are incommensurate and cannot be totalized. Neither does the caesura itself belong to the one or the other, since it is that which has made them possible" (Godzich 141).
For some historians, this statement is an exaggerated conclusion. The Holocaust is not more than a history. Such historians try to naturalize the Holocaust; they think about it as a condemned crime, but happened a lot in history. For them, this type of extermination is not unusual. It is what Stalin did to millions in Russia. Such form of political activity became normal in Europe at that time. Large-scale extermination of “enemies” was not a German-type policy. It was first a Russian-type policy. Moreover, there is a “causal explanation” behind what happened to Jews in WWII. The Nazi Party saw Jews as enemies because of the document of the president of the World Zionist Organization that said during the WWII, “All Jews should consider themselves at war with Nazi Germany” (Godzich 135). Those historians recant that this should not be a justification of what Hitler did to Jews, but it is an attempt in understanding the Holocaust within the historical context. It is a history that Germany should no longer be blamed for. Recalling the Holocaust over and over will definitely reinforce certain aversion against Germans, as some historians believe. To me, such a historical approach is inaccurate. Recalling a historical event does not always mean recalling its emotions and passions. It is the function of history to take the historical event out of its emotive context. As Godzich smartly put it, “History recalls the facts but actively forgets, that is represses, the emotions, the passions. It may recall tyranny or civil war, but it represses them by representing them” (Godzich 137). Indeed, this is how history should look at the historical events. However, one may ask, is history enough for the Holocaust? Godzich says, “No.” Historians may not be able to give content to the object they seek to represent because the object is either inaccessible or it exceeds representation, as the Holocaust does (Godzich 138). Now, we are back to where we left off at the historical problem of representing the Holocaust. How should we think of the Holocaust since it exceeds representation? How do we speak of it? It is a philosophical question rather than a historical problem. This question will keep challenging our thinking “when we believe that we have built better theories, better methodologies that stand up by themselves” (Godzich 147). It is the question that the humanities should face together. This is a sober acknowledgement that history alone cannot give us a clear understanding of the Holocaust.
Holocaust in Education
Many researchers and history class teachers still resent the lack of Holocaust classes in the western educational system. The argument here is that students and young people should adequately learn about the Holocaust. They should learn why and how it happened in order to have a better understanding of our past and to protect it from being distorted. Paul Salmons’s main idea about the Holocaust is that “failure to engage with its historical and highly complex reality in fact leaves young people open to manipulation and coercion from those who would use the past to push their own social or political agendas” (Salmons 56). There are now many institutions, museums, educational programs, and research organizations adopt such claims and ask for the Holocaust to be instructed in early-age schools. This “institutionalized” Holocaust has been politically used to enforce some false facts and ideas about the Holocaust, since most of those organizations are owned and run by biased politicians. This problem makes Holocaust studies face new challenges. The Holocaust became a “ruling symbol” in our culture today, as Salmons says. It has been used in different fields and for different reasons, ethical, religious, political, or others. For instance, some of animal rights organizations educate people against the meat industry by using emotional slogans like “Holocaust on your plate”. Other NGOs, in opposing laws on abortion, also write, “abortion is today’s Holocaust” (Salmons 57). It is being politically used in the ongoing conflict between Israel and other Arab states. Such political and ethical use of the word “Holocaust” is sometimes distorting the realty of the Holocaust. There are more than 175 separate voluntary associations worldwide that focus on the issue of the Holocaust (Horowitz, Evolution 501). These associations vary in their size from small groups to larger ones like the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, which has over 400 salaried personnel and 300 volunteers (Horowitz, Evolution 501). It is not just the risk of having the Holocaust used politically; it is, as Horowitz states:
"There are, to be sure, risks in the professionalization of Holocaust studies — perhaps none greater than to convert an enormous human tragedy into a series of academic groupings debating minutiae as if they were picking through the final leavings of a rummage sale. But such problems are a concern only for select academics that spend careers on the subject" (Horowitz, Evolution 501).
This is why the professionalization of Holocaust studies gets critiqued by a lot of researchers these days.
Interdisciplinary Stage
Looking at the Holocaust from one discipline’s perspective is not enough for us to understand it. For instance, we saw how history struggles to interpret the Holocaust. The historical explanation does not answer “why was the Holocaust more severe in one nation and less in another? Why did the behavior of the perpetrators vary from one concentration camp to another, one village to another, one person to another?” (Horowitz, Natural History 78). To appropriately answer such questions we have to consider other fields of knowledge, the fields of knowledge that were integrated in Holocaust studies over the time. Horowitz divides the Holocaust studies’ period into four identifiable stages. First, the literature stage includes memoirs, narratives, and autobiographies of Holocaust survivors. The Second stage is the historical and journalistic stage in which historians became interested in those memoirs and eyewitnesses accounts. The Third is the psychological and social scientific stage in which researchers began to take into account the psychological issues along with long-term historical considerations. Fourth is the stage in which all related disciplines, including the stages above, had been incorporated into one body of knowledge (Horowitz, Natural History 78-79). In his other essay “Stages in the Evolution of Holocaust Studies: From the Nuremberg Trials to the Present,” Horowitz calls this stage “microanalysis stage” in which the Holocaust studies moved from macroscopic to microscopic analysis (Horowitz, Evolution 496). It moves from “the metaphysical to the material conditions under which the Holocaust actually took place” or in other words, it is a movement from “large-scale to small-scale study of phenomena” (Horowitz, Natural History 79). In this stage, researchers benefit from all related disciplines we have. They microscopically review the historical records that were taken for granted in the past. They combine the three stages mentioned above, not just to rethink about the Holocaust, but also to study the stages themselves, the way they were shaped and presented, and the way researchers posited their findings within each stage. This is a highly complex methodology in approaching the Holocaust as a historical event and as an ongoing study. It is the study of how the Holocaust studies developed over time before it is considered a study of the Holocaust event itself. Horowitz praises this new way of thinking and concludes based on this stage’s new methodology that:
"The older tradition of choosing either impersonal history or personal narrative to explain the pattern of genocide has given way to a common sense set of realizations. It is the interaction, more, the incubation, of objective structures and personal decisions that changed the situation under Nazism from the random denunciation of the Jews, to the deprivation of their civil liberties and livelihood, and finally to their systematic annihilation" (Horowitz, Natural History 86).
Although the fourth stage of the Holocaust studies sounds like a more accurate way to approach the Holocaust, there is a risk of being deluded and deceived in adopting such a methodology. What if one discipline we use was not accurate in its findings? What happens then if we figured out that we were wrong in relying on a specific discipline’s theory? Does it not threaten our entire understanding of the Holocaust since we build that understanding on a set of theories from various disciplines? It is worth thinking of such an interdisciplinary problem when we use the fourth stage methodology in studying the Holocaust or other historical phenomena.
Conclusion
As we saw from the earlier discussion, the Jewish Holocaust has been differently interpreted over time. It is no longer a matter of history since history alone cannot give us a clear understanding of how the Holocaust happened. The Holocaust now became a combination of historical, philosophical, psychological, sociological, and other related disciplines’ questions that need to be solved in order to have a better picture of why the Holocaust happened. This is how the Holocaust studies developed and moved from one stage to another. I would say that the most accurate methodology in approaching the Holocaust is the “ interdisciplinary methodology,” not because I am biased to my field of study, but because it simultaneously takes into account several disciplines when trying to explain highly complex historical phenomena. With the interdisciplinary methodology, the Holocaust becomes a field by itself. It is a new way of looking at the Holocaust and a new way of understanding it.
Notes:
1 - More info on Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment on this link: http://www.prisonexp.org/
2 - YouTube on Miligram’s Experiment: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BcvSNg0HZwk
Works Cited:
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Browning, Christopher R. Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. New York: HarperCollins, 1992. Print.
Godzich, Wlad. "The Holocaust: Questions for the Humanities." Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas 7.1 (2009): 133-148. Project MUSE. Web. 12 Nov. 2014. <http://muse.jhu.edu/>.
Goldhagen, Daniel J. Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. New York: Knopf, 1996. Print.
Horowitz, Irving Louis. "Toward a Natural History of Holocaust Studies." Human Rights Review 2.4 (2001): 77-87. ProQuest.Web. 12 Nov. 2014.
Horowitz, Irving Louis. "Stages in the Evolution of Holocaust Studies: From the Nuremberg Trials to the Present." Human Rights Review 10.4 (2009): 493-504. ProQuest. Web. 12 Nov. 2014.
Peacock, Mark S., and Paul A. Roth. "Holocaust Studies: What Is to Be Learned?" History of the Human Sciences 17.2-3 (2004): 1-13. Sage Journals. Web. 11 Nov. 2014. <http://hhs.sagepub.com.ezproxy1.lib.asu.edu/content/17/2-3/1>.
Popkin, Jeremy D. "Holocaust Memories, Historians' Memoirs." History and Memory 15.1 (2003): 49. ProQuest. Web. 12 Nov. 2014.
Salmons, Paul. “Universal Meaning or Historical Understanding?” Teaching History 141 (2010): 57-63. Academic Search Premier. Web. 12 Nov. 2014.
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