The Historiographical Narrative of the Holocaust Postmodernism, Postmemory and the Discourse of the Holocaust Postmodernism argues that historical reality is constructed by historians and the written documents they study, and that historical truth is shaped by and reflects the perspective of the historian. Conclusions are subjective and postmodernism encourage suspicion of hierarchy and claims to essential universal truths. Historians can never completely replicate or reconstruct the past, hence the need for deconstructionism.1 Dylan Fortushniok 4718938 Friday March 28th, 2014 1 Caroline Hoefferle, The Essential Historiography Reader, (Boston : Prentice Hall, 2011), 212- 214. I will attempt to argue how current Holocaust historiography applies an interdisciplinary approach of postmodern thought in which multiple Holocaust narratives, through the analysis of postmemory, socially construct its discourse.* Through a cross-disciplinary method I will apply a decentered deconstructionist approach using a postmodern lens in the broader sense and a psychohistorical view of memory in the narrow sense in order to uncover the formation of historical truth regarding Holocaust historical narratives. In How the Holocaust Looks Now: International Perspectives, the authors detail the well-established themes in Holocaust representation: “the crucial importance of individual and collective memories of genocide; the uses and abuses of historical narrative; the role of museums, memorials, and works of art in Holocaust commemoration.” 2 Through a postmodern lens a modern historical consciousness is revealed, one that exposes the appropriation of the Holocaust narrative for political or social means. According to Davis and Szejnmann, the state of Israel utilizes the narrative of the Shoah as an influential symbolic concept in public discourse on issues of welfare policies to relations with the Arab world, specifically Palestine. 3 Furthermore, even Yad Vashem endured an archival purge in the 1950s by survivors who thought that Zionism could best be served by documenting resistance against the Germans and identifying the Palestinians with the Nazis.4 Additionally, with the end of Nazi occupation and the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe the Holocaust is employed for nationalist means like in Ukraine, Poland and Hungary. Therefore, a postmodern interpretation reveals the Holocaust discourse because where identity is contested; each nation selects the memories in which its own historical narrative becomes significant. * Discourses create épistémès, mental structures which organize knowledge and prioritize new information as important/unimportant, true/false, or belief/skepticism. These épistémès then shape the identity of individuals and create the mental world in which they live. Individuals are products of discourses in their lives, like ideas of witchcraft, rather than historical agents with their own free will. 2 Martin L. Davies, and Claus-Christian Szejnmann, eds, How the Holocaust Looks Now: International Perspectives, (Palgrave Macmillan: Basingstoke and New York, 2007), 12. 3 Ibid., 118. 4 Ibid., 121. Alan Milchman and Alan Rosenberg in Postmodernism and the Holocaust reveal how the juxtaposition of these two terms manifests a paradox because those who identify with poststructuralism, deconstruction, or revisionism, are the most insistent on the significance of the Holocaust to the experiment of civilization and experience of modern humankind. 5 Furthermore, to discuss postmodernism and the Holocaust is to explore the possibilities for different narrative representation and what modes of discourse are included since there is no unified postmodern theory. However, it is within this matrix of critiquing historical and ahistorical truisms, its acknowledgment of the dark side of modernity, its insistence that there are multiple rationalities and narratives, and that to recognize the Holocaust as a discourse is to allow historiographical analysis of how we come to understand our world today and how events and memories of the Holocaust not only shape who we are and how we think, but how we view the world around us.6 For that reason, the triangle of discourse can be applied to better comprehend social deconstructionism and intertextuality (Figure 1.0).7 As well, the historical interpretation of narratives like that of the Holocaust can be perceived – not exclusively – but only in three ways: progress, decline, or a meander of episodes. (Figure 2.0).8 To understand the Holocaust as a discourse, I attempt to analyze how Holocaust narratives as a social construction created the history from memories, and ultimately defined the ‘Holocaust experience’ and how postHolocaust generations and historians are to study the subject. Foucault states how this battle of ‘memories’ – historical truth versus ‘lived truth’ – insinuates that the need to recognize the Holocaust was a symptom of awareness, that a religion and ethnic minority was subjugated to bureaucratic and systematic murder, cultural genocide, dehumanization, and alienation, and thus 5 Alan Milchman and Alan Rosenberg, Postmodernism and the Holocaust, (Rodopi, 1998), 1. Ibid. 7 Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 10. 8 Ibid., 234. 6 needs to be remember, preserved, and not reduced to a historical lesson of, “thou shall not ever do it again.” 9 History is cyclical, and reducing the Holocaust to a lesson in history, ultimately ignores the various narratives and complex historiographical perspectives. Hence a postmodernist approach allows historians not only to recognize the Holocaust as a discourse but also to utilize and appreciated the emerging abundant and nuanced analysis the farther away historical analysis is form the actual event. With that said, psychohistory and the application of postmemory allows for historians to continue to utilize testimonies and inherited experiences passed down to future generations to reveal new layers that were once not there before. Through a Foucaultian lens, the complexity of Holocaust historiography and historical narrative can be attributed to a discourse of knowledge, truth, and power; where survivor testimonies, preservation of culture or social justice share the single attribute of “postmemory” and how historical narratives construct the past either through heritage commemoration or generational inheritance of experiences not to be forgotten. Michel Foucault in Madness and Civilization suggests that the voices of story tellers (who either have the knowledge to impose power or are imposed upon) in Holocaust narrative prevail over the historical research (hence the shift of historiography once more Nazi documentation began to be released), and that the criticisms and analysis of historians are neither influential enough nor persuasive to alter the ‘truth’ of testimonies.10 The most accurate sources of evidence are testimonies because they tell the ‘truth’, but the most reliable sources of evidence are actual documentation. Therefore, from a postmodern and psychohistorical framework both sources of evidence used in tandem with each other can be deconstructed not so that just stories coincide with physical evidence, but that a discourse about Holocaust narratives is revealed. Although, this would in turn offer many more 9 Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: a History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, (New York: Pantheon, 1965), 279, 284. 10 Ibid., 279-281. questions needed to be answered, if there to say is an answer even available. Therefore, as historians analyzing the Holocaust and the historical narratives it creates we must begin to rethink the approach itself, rather than just individual case studies relying on testimonies or solely an analysis of documental evidence, whether it be more studies in a comparative or unifying nature, the discourse of the Holocaust and its historiography may begin to limit the numerous questions still left unanswered. As there are many categories of historians, consequently various theoretical suppositions of postmodernism have become part of historians' everyday sensibility, as textual deconstruction and revisionism becomes a ‘second nature’ of analysis when historiography is at the forefront of Holocaust study. 11 For that reason, I contend that in the case of the historiography of the Holocaust there are complicated issues when interpreting and defining the Holocaust narrative. Thus, a postmodernist perspective does not attempt to define the Holocaust as postmodernism acknowledges it as a discourse and that there are multiple narratives. However it does attempt to deconstruct its greater meaning to historians and how their studies have the power impact societal knowledge, and ultimately the ‘true or truer’ Holocaust narrative. Dan Stone in The Holocaust and Historical Methodology debates about how postmodernism often turned on the Holocaust because it is an event at the climax, and those who favored postmodern approaches and who saw the need to defend a historical narrative use the Holocaust as a discourse.12 There is a transposed parallel between the nearness of an event in history and the inclination by historians to critically engage theoretically with it.13 Ultimately, the study of the Holocaust may help historians to reassess the requirements of historiography in general when considering postmodernism and discourse. 11 Dan Stone, The Holocaust and Historical Methodology, (Berghahn Books, 2012), 9. Ibid., 10. 13 Ibid. 12 The study of the Holocaust cannot be normalized or finite as it does not reside in a vacuum; it cannot be confined to the figurative concentration camp of historical research or studies. Thus, the approach of postmodernism allows for a more interpretive cross-disciplinary study of the Holocaust as a discourse. Foucault himself makes very little mention of the Holocaust, but trough the critical theories he developed, the Foucaultian tradition to question modernity, the current state of reason, and how discourse shapes our understanding of a particular narrative is crucial to understand the Holocaust differently.14 Historiography focusses on the study of how history is researched and written. The emphasis is placed on various analytical, methodological, philosophical, and theoretical aspects of study. Bankier and Michman in Holocaust Historiography in Context mention that studies on historiography used to be concerned primarily with the criticism and description of various topics like the Holocaust and the subsequent research surrounding it.15 Yet, there is now increased awareness that historiography is constructed within historical contemporary contexts that is interwoven across other scholarly disciplines like philosophy, political science, and anthropology. As for studying how historians research and write about the Holocaust, Bankier and Michman state that until the mid-1990’s the emergent field assumed traditional historiography that focused on, “major themes, theses, and approaches that had already been developed.”16 However, in recent decades scholars like Conny Kristel and Dalia Ofer have conducted research pertaining to the circumstances which motive the development of contemporary historical Holocaust studies. For instance, Kristel surveys inquisitorial inspiration behind the research and the consequent historiographical yield of Holocaust historians, and interprets this as ways of 14 Peter Beilharz, The Worlds We Create: Bauman Meets Foucault and Some Others, (Melbourne, Australia, La Trobe University Press, 2004), 249. 15 David Bankier and Dan Michman, Holocaust Historiography in Context: Emergence, Challenges, Polemics and Achievements, (Jerusalem: Yad Yashem; New York: Berghahn Books, 2008), 9. 16 Ibid. coping with the traumatic past studied, inherited, or experienced.17 From a more postmodern perspective to a psychohistorical conceptualization, Ofer compares testimonies provided in the latter half of the 1940’s and 1950’s with those given recently. Ofer concludes that differences between earlier and later testimonies cause scholars to prefer earlier ones due to their ‘historical accuracy’, but stresses the psychological significance for the survivors and collective memory of the later ones because sometimes new information is brought forth and timing of the Holocaust narrative does not make it any less important.18 The scholars mentioned above tried to situate new research and schools of thought within the framework of collective and individual processes of overcoming a horrific past both by perpetrator and victim societies where the Holocaust narrative is predominantly developed.19 Therefore, the tensions between historians regarding the historiographical construct of current Holocaust narratives require to be seen from a postmodernism and postmemory perspective with the use of a psychohistorical framework. Bankier and Michman demonstrate that the origins of Holocaust historiography, which was initiated by Jewish historians during and immediately after the Holocaust, accredited the utmost importance to survivor testimony together with a broad variety of written and visual documentation. Hence, many of the testimonies were recorded throughout the first postwar era. However, Bankier and Michman argue that the dominant aspect of Holocaust research became the perpetrators perspective once German documentation of various kinds slowly began to be uncovered and released.20 Accordingly, as scholarly research and the development of Holocaust narrative and memory in the world began to increase over the past two decades, the field of holocaust historiography expanded into avenues like psychohistory once again emphasizing the 17 Ibid., 207. Ibid., 519. 19 Ibid., 10. 20 Ibid., 21. 18 importance of survivor testimonies.21 For example, Dominick LaCapra in Representing the Holocaust describes that the selective memory of testimonies fashion a form of discerning narrative, one that provides many different alternative meanings of the Holocaust, because for the, “interviewer and the analyst, one would attempt to put oneself in the other’s position without taking the other’s place requiring a certain distance from the experience and creation of narrative.” 22 Therefore, overcoming a traumatic past and the memories it encapsulates can involve not only the retelling of experiences as a way of coping, but also selectively forgetting important details that may be too horrific to recall for Holocaust victims. Marianne Hirsch in The Generation of Postmemory utilizes “postmemory” to describe the relationship that the generation after endures to the cultural, collective, and personal trauma of those prior.23 Postmemory is significant to the Holocaust narrative because current generations experience it by means of stories, images, and behaviours among those who they grew up with, and thus these experiences can affectively manifest as personal memories of their own when recalling or retelling of such experience. For that reason, Hirsch argues that postmemory’s connection to the past is not mediated by recall, but by, “imaginative investment, projection, and creation,” of a Holocaust narrative whereby events of the past continue to effect the present and shape the future. 24 Thus, a postmodern historiographical analysis provides a nuanced direction on how the future comes to know and understand the Holocaust. Holocaust survivor Primo Levi in The Gray Zone questions testimony and representation because of the difficulty to understand 21 Ibid. Dominick LaCapra, Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma, (Cornell University Press, 1996), 167. 23 Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust, (Gender and Culture, New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 5. 24 Ibid. 22 survivors’ experiences and to help others make sense of it like historians.25 The memory of those who perished will forever be preserved in history and create a narrative that would serve as a warning for future generations. Levi thus studies notorious instances of such “gray, ambiguous persons,” to demonstrate the confines of a modern understanding and judgment from the relative safety of our views.26 Postmodernism and poststructuralism mark both a critical detachment and reflective interdependence with modernism and structuralism. They are both a reaction or antithesis of what came before and an ill sustaining concept which requires its suffix for it to still have meaning. Hence, the ‘post’ in “postmemory” according to Hirsh indicates more than a temporal delay, a location in an aftermath, or that it follows linear sequential logic.27 In an era of postHolocaust, the struggle is to determine what happened during the actual event, not how the event is interpreted. In a postmodern framework, in order to understand the complexity of the Holocaust in a ‘post’ period, the varying interpretations require a deconstructionist approach so that the various layers of perpetrators, victims, bystanders, and collaborators are uncovered through the testimonies, documents, images, and historical analysis. Michel Foucault writes that postmodernism is a means to critique history understood as a set of hegemonic narratives that govern how a culture chooses, orders, and conserves the past. 28 Only once the layers of a narrative are peeled back and deconstructed can a modern conceptualization of Holocaust historiography be utilized to understand the event itself, and the millions of people it affected on an international an individual level. Primo Levi, “The Gray Zone,” in Bartov, The Holocaust: Origins, Implementation, Aftermath, (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 251. 26 Ibid., 252. 27 Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory, 2012, 6. 28 Ibid., 227. 25 The emphasis on “postmemory” and Holocaust historiography reveals a narrative discourse about post-generational identity formation. There is a state of apprehension survivors have when reliving traumatic experiences of the Holocaust for historical analysis. Accordingly, the same can be said for the generation of individuals who inherited the memories, from their family member or friend who suffered, either for the purpose of remembering, preventing, or experiencing the past. Thus, to question one’s memory during a ‘post’ era, is to challenge historical identity, cultural heritage, and what the Holocaust ‘truly’ means to an individual or group of peoples. Historians need to go beyond the sentimental value of the Holocaust, and through a postmodern lens analyze whether or not humanity can learn from its grim past: “Memory is…a very important factor in struggle…If one controls people’s memory, one controls their dynamism…It’s vital to have possession of this memory, to control it, shape a narrative, administer it as ‘truth’, and tell the narrative what it must contain because it shapes who they are, their identity…Once the individual memory is shaped the collective will soon too follow. Those who control ‘the memory’, oversee the discourse, and create how we come to know.”29 Therefore, the difference in historical questioning is anchored in a variance of epistemological meaning and how historians come to know and understand the Holocaust. Gary Weissman in Fantasies of Witnessing mentions that only a couple decades ago Holocaust scholars spoke of trasnferential knowledge, documented information, and historical lessons, now the significant word is ‘memory’.30 I argue that memory is so prevalent in Holocaust studies discourse because of the prominence Jews have placed on memory and sociocultural preservation since biblical times – likewise Raul Hilberg would share the same sentiment regarding Jewish passivity as a means of preservation and survival. However, Weissman would counter this argument by stating how this explanation superimposes the degree F. C. DeCoste, and Bernard Schwartzm The Holocaust’s Ghost: Writings on Art, Politics, Law, and Education, (University of Alberta, 2000), 411. 30 Gary Weissman, Fantasies of Witnessing: Postwar Efforts to Experience the Holocaust, (Cornell University Press, 2004), 101. 29 to which this word ‘memory’, as habitually employed by the ‘second wave’ of Holocaust scholars, has little or no real connection to the collective memory of Jewish peoples.31 Nonetheless, the use of the concept postmemory in Holocaust historiography reveals the political, social, economic, and ideological implications memory has on the creation of a Holocaust narrative. Lawrence Langer in Holocaust Testimonies is uninterested in conceptualizing, “a Jewish view of the past,” because he prefers to express a universal detachment amid our human and inhuman past.32 Langer offers an explanation to why there has been such a turn to memory in Holocaust studies and historiography. He explains that possibly scholars have finally begun the ‘second wave’ of Holocaust analysis, departing from what we know of the event (postwar testimonies and official documentation) to how we remember it, which transfers the responsibility of the Holocaust narrative to our own contemporary imaginations and what we are prepared to admit there. 33 Corresponding with Langer, Weissman elucidates that we are no longer principally concerned with researching, writing or revising the historical narrative of the Holocaust; instead focus has moved to the question of “how to remember it” or how to best preserve and transmit the Holocaust to future generations.34 Therefore, to understand this new shift in Holocaust studies, historiography has also come to the forefront of research in order to uncover how the narrative is already written and preserved. I argue that as historians we sometimes utilize ‘memory’ as a synonym for ‘history’ to temper our prose, humanize it, and make it more manageable since ‘memory’ modestly sounds less distant and appealing because it disseminates a juxtaposition we feel has been lost from history, historical debate, or the narrative itself. 31 Ibid., 101. Lawrence L. Langer, Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory, (Yale University Press, 1991), 51. 33 Ibid., 128. 34 Gary Weissman, Fantasies of Witnessing, 2004, 102. 32 Subsequently, those who control the narrative restrict how the public might represent or think about the Holocaust in attempts to muddle our understanding of it as a discourse, to silence what is critically analyzed, improper, or inadequate about the narrative. Weissman attempts to illustrate that astonishing and often inadvertently disconcerting significance exist in even the most “credible” or historically accurate accounts and testimonies of the Holocaust due to the fallacies of collective and individual memory.35 Nevertheless, such forbidden meaning or undignified interpretation of the narrative can reveal more about how historians and historiography recognizes and hopes to further understand the Holocaust than can the familiar reverent statements of indebted ‘never forget’ rhetoric of horror that has long dominated discussion and representation of the Holocaust narrative.36 This requires historians to move beyond apologetic history and utilize a postmodern perspective in order to uncover nuanced stratums of the academic and societal comprehension of the Holocaust as a discourse. Dominick LaCapra in Writing History, Writing Trauma argue that in history there is a crucial role for empathy as an aspect of understanding which interpretations upset the narrative yet allows for a tense interplay between critical, necessarily objectifying deconstruction and affective revision to the voices of victims already analyzed.37 Accordingly, I would entertain the possibility that contemporary historians risk experimental cross-disciplinary approaches in an attempt to come to terms with the event and its socially constructed narrative. Survivor testimony and the interviewing procedure is a new but problematic incomplete genre with consequences for oral history, predominantly in sensitive areas of research like the Holocaust.38 Mosihe Postone and Eric Santner in Catastrophe and Meaning mention that historians have not yet distinguished 35 Ibid., 216. Ibid., 216-217. 37 Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma, (JHU Press, 2001), 109. 38 Moishe Postone and Eric L. Santner, Catastrophe and Meaning: The Holocaust and the Twentieth Century, (University of Chicago Press, 2003), 224. 36 the appropriate ways of using survivor testimonies, hence why I argue that a psychohistorical perspective becomes applicable when analyzing the individual memories of experiences and how it in turn shapes collective memories and identity through a specific narrative because different people have different ways of coming to terms with the past. 39 Furthermore, the inclination of some historians question to exclude or marginalize survivor testimonies as untrustworthy evidence of history, yet I claim that how testimonies are used and memories interpreted is more important to realize their significance rather than historical accuracy to the Holocaust narrative. The Holocaust narrative through memory offers a process of providing a believable human feel for experience and emotion which is tough to accomplish through only documentary methods.40 Keith Crome in The Nihilistic Affirmation of Life states how Foucault suggests a connection between biopower*, biopolitics* and the Holocaust reveal, “the possibilities of modern civilized progress, as it is possible both to protect life and to authorize a holocaust,” because the affirmation of today’s Holocaust narrative in a postmodern world is about remembering not to forget what made society modern, while at the same time preventing historical analysis from becoming subjective, and a therapeutic experience of working-through traumatic memories.41 For that reason, utilizing the concept of postmemory and a psychohistorical perspective when analyzing the Holocaust as a discourse is imperative if historians wish to remain critically objective in their studies and conclusions. A postmodern 39 Ibid., 225. Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma, 2001, 13. * "Biopower" is a concept created by French historian and social theorist Michel Foucault. It corresponds to the practice of modern nation states and the regulation of their people through "an explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugations of bodies and the control of populations" Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Vol. 1: The Will to Knowledge, (London: Penguin Press, 1998), 140. * "Biopolotics" as a concept from a postmodernist perspective is defined by Michel Foucault as denoting social and political power over life. Foucault, The History of Sexuality Vol. 1, 1998, 141. 41 Keith Crome, The Nihilistic Affirmation of Life: Biopower and Biopolitics in ‘The Will to Knowledge’, (Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy: Journal of Critical Philosophy (6) 2009), 41. 40 perspective used to analyze the Holocaust and its historiography also reveals two important aspects about discourse: first that what makes studying the Holocaust so disturbing is due to it still being a part of society’s collective consciousness and individual memory, and secondly that a dominant narrative of genealogical rationality gave birth to a modern child of mass murder is still hauntingly plausible today. Certainly I do not want to be understood to be claiming that because historians invoke the memories of survivors or other post-generational testimonies that only horrible experiences will be relived and remembered, because a shine of hope does illuminate from the abyss of darkness that surrounds the Holocaust narrative. Rather, like Crome, I am claiming that Foucault’s genealogical attention to the effectiveness of biopower allows historians to distinguish through postmemory what defines a modern genocide and how the Holocaust as a discourse manifests a referential narrative one that relies on imperial precedent (Armenian genocide, Boer War etc.) to be defined, but also depends on statutory uniqueness be that (Yugoslavian or Rwandan genocide) to be redefined.42 Thus, the Holocaust narrative takes many forms, and requires various collective and individual memories coinciding with documentation from perpetrators, collaborators, bystanders, and victims in order to provide a grandeur narrative, one with a lesson or warning for future generations, but even that relies upon the historiographical direction of who is telling the story. The antithesis to the child of modernity concept as raised by historians like Dan Stone in Historiography of the Holocaust would explain that the Holocaust was a reversion to barbarism when the pinnacle of modern civilized rationality could no longer bear witness to the radicalization of ideas, war, and justifiable dehumanization of peoples. However, According to Clegg Stewart in Bureaucracy, the Holocaust and Techniques of Power at Work, a postmodern lens reveals that the mass extinction program by the Nazi’s was made possible by the features of 42 Ibid., 42. modern society that made it civilized and rational.43 The Holocaust narrative occupies a special chapter in the annals of twentieth century history with tales of ordinary people in extraordinary times. To understand the Holocaust as a discourse is to recognize that the material conditions in which historiography about the Holocaust is written can possibly alter the narrative, and just like memory, what was once forgotten can be remembered, and what was once never written can now be told. The many layers of the Holocaust narrative are still unknown, and subsequently approaching it from a multidisciplinary perspective reveals the complexity and plethora of unanalyzed questions. However, this postmodern historiographical process does not take away from the fact that more than six million people were annihilated, national and cultural histories irrevocably expunged, and generations sundered through rational organization.44 The Holocaust is the crime of the twentieth century because it is not some horrible means to an end, but it was the end in itself, the end for the struggle of modernity giving birth to an era of postmodernism. Miclhman and Rosenberg in Michel Foucault and the Genealogy of the Holocaust discuss the postmodern implications of using the Holocaust as a narrative for other holocausts or genocides in different societies because it would suggest that the Holocaust or Shoah was not unique to Nazism, social Darwinism, the radicalization of modern bureaucracy and antiSemitism. 45 However, the biopolitics unique to that era fashioned a biopower, which encompassed the whole surface of human life in modernity, understood through the genealogy of the Holocaust. 46 So as a discourse, the Holocaust narrative can be appropriated for many uses and through historiography have diverging interpretations. Nevertheless, contemporary study 43 Stewart Clegg, Bureaucracy, the Holocaust and Techniques of Power at Work, (Sydney: University of Technology, Rainer Hampp Verlag Press, 2009), 345. 44 Ibid., 345-346. 45 Alan Milchman and Alan Rosenberg, “Michel Foucault and the Genealogy of the Holocaust,” (The European Legacy 2 (4): 1997), 697. 46 Ibid., 698. returns to the testimonies, experiences, and memories analyzed through a psychohistorical perspective, which gives the Holocaust its human characteristic, as the notion of postmemory allows voids in historical accuracy, where the historical search for objectivity and the truest of the true is permitted to have a nature of bias, because once the layers are peeled back, it is the human experience that is the most significant. But, Foucault reminds us that postmodernism also has the ability to reveal the melancholy of modernity in both comprehending the event of the Holocaust and in foreshadowing the genuine menace of potential new holocausts to arise. 47 As the curtains of the twentieth century have drawn to a close, the Holocaust appears to be assuming the character of a precedential narrative in historiography, like the climax of modernity, and the one ‘true’ genocide as a generational transcending event.48 The reasons behind this are multifarious and fluctuate based on culture, religion, nationalism, and how the Holocaust narrative is interpreted and appropriated for different purposes. Dan Diner in The Destruction of Narrativity argues that although the manifestation of the Holocaust in public discourse is definitely found in historical and historiographical contexts, its significance for universal historical consciousness and moral standards became irrevocable only after 1989 and subsequent collapse of Eastern Bloc Communism.49 Consequently, this epochal turning point elicited a revisionist and postmodern approach to the Holocaust narrative and the historical memories symbiotically attached. Today the Holocaust stands at the dark void of Western civilizations self-understanding, but the centrality of the Holocaust to historical consciousness is not to be projected as the zenith of dialectics and inquiry in the annals of modern history. 47 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Vol. 1: The Will to Knowledge, (London: Penguin Press, 1998), 137. 48 Dan Diner, The Destruction of Narrativity: The Holocaust in Historical Discourse, edited by Moishe Postone, and Eric L. Santner in Catastrophe and Meaning: The Holocaust and the Twentieth Century, (University of Chicago Press, 2003), 67. 49 Ibid., 68. Diner reveals that there are specific conceptual complications faced by the historian in struggling to effectively incorporate the event of the Holocaust and its narrative into the ebb and flow of twentieth-century history and historiography.50 First and foremost the author explains that the predominant method of discussing the Holocaust as part of the narrative of European or German anti-Semitism needs to be considered because such a narrative has the benefit of fabricating a chronological configuration of representation which begin with the remote past and reaching its homicidal culmination with Auschwitz and the Final Solution.51 However, Diner goes on to argue that the narrative grounded on the story of anti-Semitism tells us why Jews were selected for collective persecution, but other analyzed historical interpretations (cumulative radicalization for instance) that indicate genocidal tendencies which lead to the implementation of the Holocaust illustrate how the different practices and ideas thought about the destruction of human beings.52 Finally, Diner concludes by stating that, “the integration of the Holocaust into the course of history, the construction of an appropriate historical narration for an event unprecedented in its brevity and extremity,” is an insurmountable task for historians alone to undertake. 53 Therefore, it seems that the only sombre endeavour to deal with it historiographically is to approve its fundamental and functionalist irreconcilability with the Holocaust’s narratives, but a postmodern perspective suggests otherwise. The Holocaust has been both repressed and hallowed in historical studies, because it functions as a clandestine rift between the modern and postmodern in historiography. LaCapra explains that careful inquiry into the Holocaust from multiple angles may expose concealed facets of the genealogy of postmodernism and deconstructionist thought, and also provide 50 Ibid., 69. Ibid., 77. 52 Ibid. 53 Ibid., 78. 51 diverse means of viewing and raising questions about assured obvious affinities in contemporary thought, such as, “the fixation on the sublime or the almost obsessive preoccupation with loss, aporia, dispossession, and deferred meaning.” 54 Additionally, such an inquiry encourages one to examine whether psychoanalysis – which is met with responses from delicate reconsideration to total condemnation – should be understood not just as a psychology of the individual, but as an intrinsically historicized method of thought closely interwoven with social, political, and ethical issues.55 With the appropriation of psychohistory and postmemory, I explore the trasnferential relation between the historian, their impact on the Holocaust narrative from interpreting memory, and how historiography can be used to revise and deconstruct the hegemonic socially constructed narrative to uncover its discourse. LaCapra distinguishes between two approaches to historiography of the Holocaust. The first is a documentary or self-sufficient research model where positivism is the extreme practice of analysis and collecting evidence to create referential statements in the form of truisms based on that evidence constitutes as essential and appropriate conditions of historiography.56 Subsequently, the second approach is the antithesis of the first which construes evidence in a way that spawns radical constructivism where referential statements of truisms are applicable only to events and are historiographically centred on, “social, figurative, rhetorical, ideological, and political factors that socially construct structures, narratives, arguments, interpretations, and explanations so referential statements are embedded and take on meaning and significance.”57 The discourse of the Holocaust divulges an overarching characteristic of historical narrative; the memories of survivors require various groups to have a vested interest in them 54 Dominick LaCapra, Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma, (Cornell University Press, 1996), xi. 55 Ibid., xii. Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma, (JHU Press, 2001), 1. 57 Ibid. 56 succeeding to become historical truth as a prerequisite for them to even begin. According to Foucault, “power is synonymous with effectiveness,” and historians writing the history of the Holocaust look for objectivity, “the truest of true”, even if no such thing can be found in the memories and testimonies of people who lived through its history, the historical narrative is still required to be told in order to exist. 58,59 Therefore, the emphasis on historiographical analysis of the Holocaust from not just a postmodernist and psychohistorical perspective is important, but a multi-disciplinary approach provides nuanced questions and avenues in which to unfold a tapestry of stories yet to be told, documents yet to be discovered and connected, and memories not ready to be forgotten. Certainly my methodological deductions reinforce that the Holocaust as a discourse contain numerable related cases that are subject to diverse forces interpreted in many unique ways through various historiographical perspectives resulting in various conclusions. Foucault articulates that we can generalize about what the multiplicity of issues and infinite possibilities for any particular case in accordance with the broader cultural, religious and epistemological tensions within modern society.60 Therefore, the complexity of the factors involved in any Holocaust narrative and the need to penetrate beyond the private memories and testimonies by capturing their meaning to the individuals and families still involved today requires a crossdisciplinary historiographical understanding of discourse. I have simply tried to peel back the layers from a broad perspective to suggest what evidence we might have from which to begin such a process of analyzing discourse. This in turn has thrown light on the historiographical significance researching the Holocaust.61 58 Foucault, Madness and Civilization, 280-282. Foucault, Power/Knowledge, 109-113. 60 Ibid., 51-52, 82-83. 61 Ibid., 275. 59 Appendix Figure 1.0 Figure 2.0 Harrmony or DIssonance Between Narratives 12 Progress Narrative Decline Narrative 10 8 6 4 2 0 Progress of Historical Narratives Zigzag Narrative Bibliography Bankier, David, and Dan Michman. Holocaust Historiography in Context: Emergence, Challenges, Polemics and Achievements. Jerusalem: Yad Vashem; New York: Berghahn Books, 2008. Bartov, Omer, editor. The Holocaust: Origins, Implementation, Aftermath. London and New York: Routledge, 2000. Bauman, Zygmunt. Modernity and the Holocaust. John Wiley & Sons, 2013. Beilharz, Peter. The Worlds We Create: Bauman Meets Foucault and Some Others. Melbourne, Australia, La Trobe University Press, 2004, 245-261. Clegg, Stewart. Bureaucracy, the Holocaust and Techniques of Power at Work. 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