James E. Young

Toward a received history of the Holocaust

In this article, I examine both the problem of so-called postmodern history as it relates to the Holocaust and suggest the ways that Saul Friedlanders recent work successfully mediates between the somewhat overly polemicized positions of “relativist” and “positivist” history. In this context, I find that in his search for an adequately self-reflexive historical narrative for the Holocaust, Hayden Whites proposed notion of “middle-voicedness” may recommend itself more as a process for eyewitness writers than as a style for historians after the fact. From here, I look at the ways Saul Friedlanders reflections on the historians voice not only mediate between Whites notions of the ironic mode and middle-voicedness, but also suggest the basis for an uncanny history in its own right: an anti-redemptory narrative that works through, yet never actually bridges, the gap between a survivors “deep memory” and historical narrative. For finally, it may be the very idea of “deep memory” and its incompatibility to narrative that constitutes one of the central challenges to Holocaust historiography. What can be done with what Friedlander has termed “deep memory” of the survivor, that which remains essentially unrepresentable? Is it possible to write a history that includes some oblique reference to such deep memory, but which leaves it essentially intact, untouched and thereby deep? In this section, I suggest, after Patrick Hutton, that “What is at issue here is not how history can recover memory, but, rather, what memory will bequeath to history.” That is, what shall we do with the living memory of survivors? How will it enter (or not enter) the historical record? Or to paraphrase Hutton again, “How will the past be remembered as it passes from living memory to history?” Will it always be regarded as so overly laden with pathos as to make it unreliable as documentary evidence? Or is there a place for the understanding of the witness, as subjective and skewed as it may be, for our larger historical understanding of events? In partial answer to these questions, I attempt to extend Friedlanders insights toward a narrow kind of history-telling I call “received history”—a double-stranded narrative that tells a survivor-historians story and my own relationship to it. Such a narrative would chart not just the life of the survivor-historian itself but also the measurable effect of the tellings—both his telling and mine—on my own lifes story. Together, they would compose a received history of the Holocaust and its afterlife in the authors mind—my “vicarious past.”

The memorial’s arc: Between Berlin’s Denkmal and New York City’s 9/11 Memorial

Without direct reference to the Holocaust or its contemporary “counter-monuments,” Michael Arad’s design for the National 9/11 Memorial at Ground Zero is nonetheless inflected by an entire post-war generation’s formal preoccupation with loss, absence, and regeneration. This is also a preoccupation they share with post-Holocaust poets, philosophers, artists, and composers: how to articulate a void without filling it in? How to formalize irreparable loss without seeming to repair it? In this article, I imagine an arc of memorial forms over the last 70 years or so and how, in fact, post-World War I and World War II memorials have evolved along a discernible path, all with visual and conceptual echoes of their predecessors. As Maya Lin’s design for the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial was informed by earlier World War I and even World War II memorial vernaculars, her design also broke the mold that made Holocaust counter-memorials and other negative-form memorials possible.