Introduction: Habermas and the Historians

Abstract

In his most recent attempt to sustain the memory of Auschwitz, tided The Drowned and the Saved, Italian author Primo Levi describes an encounter with a fifth-grader in which the boy offered an elegantly simple plan for escaping from the concentration camp. After examining the layout, the youngster averred that Levi could simply have cut the guard's throat, stolen his clothes, cut off the power to the searchlights and the electrified fence, and then walked free. Both bemused and disturbed by the boy's naivete, Levi writes that episode illustrates quite well the gap that exists and grows wider every year between things as they were 'down there' and things as they are represented by the current imagination fed by approximative books, films, and myths. It slides fatally toward simplification and stereotype. ... It is the task of the historian to bridge this gap, which widens as we get farther away from the events under examination.' Written shortly before his tragic suicide just one year ago, Levi's acute observations on the failure of memory serve as a useful preface to understanding the current debates over the history of the Holocaust in West Germany.