The Holocaust and Historical Methodology, edited by Dan Stone

Abstract

and Historical Methodology, edited by Dan Stone. Making Sense of History series. New York, Berghahn Books, 2012. xii, 323 pp. $95.00 US (cloth). As editor Dan Stone notes in his introduction to this useful collection of compact, largely theoretical essays, the as historical subject confronts longstanding tenets of best historical practice, including impartiality, objectivity, progress, clarity of meaning, and scholarly rigor. Although the field of history shares epistemological challenges common to all historical subjects, Stone maintains difficulties present themselves with especial clarity in the case of the Holocaust (p. 4). Stone's ambitious book considers its subject broadly and deeply, and engages directly with complex, jargon-prone theoretical questions. On the one hand the book focuses on historical theory, historical method, and the practice of historical methodology. But it also probes closely how theoretical questions have defined studies and, in turn, how the has defined theory. Stone notes correctly while scholars of film, literature, museum studies, and the visual arts have engaged actively with representation, historians have been slower to grasp the challenges and opportunities presented by new understandings of the Holocaust. His book encourages historians to view the subject through the varied lens of comparative genocide studies, culture, ecology, memory, and testimony. fourteen contributors to and Historical Methodology confront these challenges head on. They treat four broad subjects: memory and culture in the Third Reich; testimony and commemoration; the meaning of Saul Friedlander's classic text, Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the Final Solution (1992); and the in history. essayists investigate not only the varied meanings emerge from the historical record on the Holocaust, but how historical method and methodology on the topic pose serious challenges to those who study it. In Part I Alon Confino reconceptualizes the as an imagined, future-oriented project by the Nazis to create a without Jewish people. Their emnity against and extermination of the Jews was part of a Nazi universe of racial enemies and exterminations (p. 38). Following in vein, Stone emphasizes the importance of comprehending the in cultural terms--assuming that the Nazis meant what they said, they created reality to fit in with their belief system and not-vice-versa--as the outcome or a German narrative through which the perpetrators made sense of the world (p. 56). The Nazis attempted to influence and control contemporary and later images of their crimes and their writes Dirk Rupnow. The perpetrators tried to establish their own structure of memory and representation which would have determined our contemporary attitude toward the crimes ... (p. 67). Amos Goldberg urges researchers to utilize social psychology, ethnography, and anthropological history to understand the cultural history of Nazi victims, not the perpetrators. He faults previous investigators for sanctifying victims at the expense of understanding the transformation of their helplessness. Boaz Neumann frames the Holocaust, not ideologically, politically, or racially, but in eco-logical terms--removing Jews from the and their ability to be-in-the world (p. 119). Samuel Moyn begins Part II by examining the theological origins of witnessing, especially its use by historians as a moral paradigm. …