Between Integrated and First-Person History: Writing the Holocaust from Within

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay offers some reflections on the links between Saul Friedländer’s notion of writing an integrated history of the Holocaust, as articulated and practiced in his magnum opus, Nazi Germany and the Jews, published between 1997 and 2007, and my own attempt to write a first-person account of the history and destruction of a single Galician town in Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz (2018). Both approaches, I suggest, are intimately linked to personal and vicarious biographical experiences, eloquently expressed in Friedländer’s acclaimed 1978 memoir, When Memory Comes, and forming the backbone of my recent study, Tales from the Borderlands: Making and Unmaking the Galician Past (2022), which applies a first-person approach to the history of the region in the centuries preceding the violence of the world wars. Such works, I argue, highlight the importance of understanding traumatic historical events both by way of conventional analyses of causes, events, and consequences, and as experienced by those subjected to history’s fury. In other words, this article stressed the need to view the event not only from above, but also from below; not just from the center, but also from the margins; not merely with detachment, but also with empathy; and not strictly from without the event, but also from within: that is, looking as directly as one can at the face of the Gorgon, as Primo Levi has written, through its reflection in the shield that protects us from self-annihilation.