[Miriam_Dobson,_Benjamin_Ziemann]_Reading_Primary_(BookZZ.org)

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recounting of a human life. One cannot truly listen if one does not hear the humanity of one’s witnesses.

Notes

1P. Levi, Survival in Auschwitz, trans. S. Woolf, New York: Collier Books, 1960, p. 27.

2For an excellent historical overview, see A. Wieviorka, The Era of the Witness, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006.

3H. White, Metahistories: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth Century Europe, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975 and H. White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987.

4M. Bloch, The Historian’s Craft, Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1954, pp. 60–61.

5On the origins of ‘scientific’ history, see G.G. Iggers, The German Conception of History: The National Tradition of Historical Thought from Herder to the Present, Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1968.

6Bloch, Historian’s Craft, p. 62.

7See D.H. Fischer, Historians’ Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought, New York: Harper & Row, 1970, pp. 132–140.

8This is a point that historians of gender have particularly stressed in recent decades by pointing to the ways in which gender norms are silent, taken for granted, in a wide variety of historical sources. See for instance J.W. Scott, ‘Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis’, AHR 91 (1986), 1053–1075, 1070.

9G. Reitlinger, The Final Solution: The Attempt to Exterminate the Jews of Europe, 1939–1945, New York: Beechhurst Press, 1953.

10For correctives to this trend, see S. Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, vol. 1, The Years of Persecution, 1933–1939, New York: Harper Collins, 1997, and I. Gutman,

Resistance: The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1994.

11P. Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will be Killed with our Families: Stories from Rwanda, New York: Picador, 1998, p. 201.

12Bloch, Historian’s Craft, p. 64.

13Sir W. Hamilton, Lectures on Metaphysics and Logic, vol. 2, Logic, Boston: Gould and Lincoln, 1860, p. 459.

14‘Only in Israel and nowhere else is the injunction to remember felt as a religious imperative to an entire people.’ Y.H. Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1982, p. 9.

15See for example, D.K. Dunaway and W.K. Baum, Oral History: An Interdisciplinary Anthology, 2nd edn, Walnut Creek, Calif.: Altamira Press, 1996, or D.A. Ritchie, Doing Oral History, New York: Twayne Publishers, 1995.

16See my analysis of these matters in D.O. Pendas, The Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial, 1963–1965: Genocide, History and the Limits of the Law, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006, pp. 161–168.

17In general, see R.I. Rotberg and D. Thompson, Truth v. Justice: The Morality of Truth Commissions, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000, and P.B. Hayner,

Unspeakable Truths: Facing the Challenge of Truth Commissions, New York: Routledge, 2002.

18On the better atmosphere for victims in Truth Commissions, see M. Minow, Between Vengeance and Forgiveness: Facing History after Genocide and Mass Violence, Boston: Beacon Press, 1998, pp. 61–74.

19For the German expellees, see T. Schieder (ed.), Dokumentation der Vertreibung der Deutschen aus Ost Mitteleuropa, 8 vols, Munich: DTV, 2004 [1954–61]. On the history of these volumes, see M. Beer, ‘Die Dokumentation der Vertreibung der Deutschen aus

Testimony 241

Ost-Mitteleuropa: Hintergründe—Entstehung—Wirkung’, Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht 50 (1999), 99–117. On the Veterans History Project, see http://www.loc. gov/vets/ [accessed on September 20, 2007].

20For the Fortunoff Archive, see http://www.library.yale.edu/testimonies/ [accessed on September 20, 2007]. For the Shoah Foundation, see http://www.usc.edu/schools/ college/vhi/ [accessed on September 20, 2007].

21See for example J. Barton (ed.), Turkish Atrocities: Statements of American Missionaries on the Destruction of Christian Communities in Ottoman Turkey, 1915–1917, Ann Arbor, Mich.: Gomidas Institute, 1998, or J. Lepsius, Der Todesgang des armenischen Volkes: Bericht über das Schicksal des armenischen Volkes in der Türkei während des Weltkrieges, Potsdam: Tempelverlag, 1919. For a recent compilation, see D.E. Miller and L.T. Miller, Survivors: An Oral History of the Armenian Genocide, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.

22Oxford English Dictionary, online ed., s.v. ‘hear’.

23Ibid., s.v. ‘listen’.

24For this distinction, see M.M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981.

25See e.g. H. Greenspan, On Listening to Holocaust Survivors: Recounting and Life History, Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1998.

26R. Eaglestone, The Holocaust and the Postmodern, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004, p. 158.

27Fritz Bauer Institut and State Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau (eds), Der AuschwitzProzeß: Tobandmitschnitte, Protokolle, Dokumente, DVD-Rom, Berlin: Directmedia Publishing, 2004. Das Verfahren: 70 Verhandlungstag, p. 13403.

28B. Naumann, Auschwitz: A Report on the Proceedings against Robert Karl Ludwig Mulka and Others Before the Court at Frankfurt, trans. J. Steinberg, London: Pall Mall, 1966, p. 56.

29Hamilton, Lectures on Metaphysics and Logic, p. 457.

30Though both older, the standard histories of the SS remain: H. Höhne, The Order of the Death’s Head: The Story of Hitler’s SS, trans. R. Barry,New York: Coward-McCann, 1970, and G. Reitlinger, The SS: Alibi of a Nation, 1922–1945, New York: Viking Press, 1957.

31See for example R. Zürcher, ‘Wir machten die schwarze Arbeit des Holocaust’: Das Personal der Massenvernichtungsanlagen von Auschwitz, Nordhausen: Verlag Traugott Bautz, pp. 191–94 and K. Orth, Die Konzentrationslager-SS: Sozialstrukturelle Analysen und biographische Studien, Göttingen: Wallstein, 2000, pp. 201–203.

32The details are complicated. See Pendas, The Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial, pp. 61–71.

33D.J. Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, New York: Knopf, 1996, pp. 467–468.

34J.T. Gross, Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland 1941, New York: Penguin, 2001, p. 92.

35C. Browning, Collected Memories: Holocaust History and Postwar Testimony, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003, p. 39.

36See for example Goldhagen’s critiques of Browning in Hitler’s Willing Executioners and Browning’s response in C. Browning, ‘Afterword’ in Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, New York: Harper Perennial, 1998 [1992], pp. 191–223.

37Browning, Collected Memories, p. 39.

38Ibid., pp. 43, 46.

39The ‘memoir’ is B. Wilkomirski, Fragments: Memories of a Childhood, trans. C. Brown Janeway, New York: Schocken, 1996. For the best account of the affair, see S. Maechler,

The Wilkomirski Affair: A Study in Biographical Truth, trans. J.E. Woods, New York: Schocken, 2001.

40‘Die Sprache die niemand versteht’, Frankfurter Neue Presse, July 28, 1964.

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41 F.-M. Balzer and W. Renz (eds), Das Urteil im Frankfurter Auschwitz-Prozess, 1963–1965, Bonn: Pahl-Rugenstein, 2004, p. 207.

42On Hausner’s strategy, see L. Douglas, The Memory of Judgment: Making Law and History in the Trials of the Holocaust, New Haven: Yale University Press, pp. 123–149.

43Attorney Gen. of Israel v. Eichmann, 36 I.L.R. 5. http://www.vex.net/~nizkor/ hweb/people/e/eichmann-adolf/transcripts/Sessions/Session-006-007-008-01.html. [Accessed on May 12, 2007].

44Ibid.

45H. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, rev. edn, New York: Penguin, 1964.

46For an important reflection on the Holocaust as the murder of European Jewish culture, see M. Postone, ‘Anti-Semitism and National Socialism’, in A. Rabinbach and J. Zipes (eds), Germans and Jews since the Holocaust: The Changing Situation in West Germany, New York: Holmes & Meier, 1986, pp. 302–314, p. 314.

47Attorney Gen. of Israel v. Eichmann, 36 I.L.R. 5. http://www.vex.net/~nizkor/hweb/ people/e/eichmann-adolf/transcripts/Sessions/Session-026-01.html.

48Ibid.

49W. Bartoszewski and A. Polonsky (eds), The Jews in Warsaw: A History, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991.

50For the definitive account, see Eric Friedler, Babara Siebert and Andreas Kilian, Zeugen aus der Todeszone: Das jüdische Sonderkommando in Auschwitz, Lüneberg: zu Klampen Verlag, 2002.

51B. Mark, The Scrolls of Auschwitz, Tel Aviv: Am Oved Publishers, 1985, pp. 159–160, quote p. 208.

52Ibid., p.221. Loewenthal’s manuscript was recovered in 1962 and was heavily damaged by humidity. The dashes represents illegible words in the original.

Select bibliography

Browning, C., Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, New York: Harper Perennial, 1998 [1992].

Browning, C., Collected Memories: Holocaust History and Postwar Testimony, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003.

Friedlander, S. (ed.), Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the ‘Final Solution’, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992.

Goldhagen D. J., Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, New York: Knopf, 1996.

Greenspan, H., On Listening to Holocaust Survivors: Recounting and Life History, Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1998.

Gross, J.T., Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland, New York: Penguin, 2001.

Hilberg, Raul, Sources of Holocaust Research. An Analysis, Chicago: I.R. Dee, 2001. Langer, L.L., Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory, New Haven: Yale University

Press, 1991.

Mark, B., The Scrolls of Auschwitz, Tel Aviv: Am Oved Publishers, 1985, Wieviorka, A., The Era of the Witness, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006.

Glossary

Concept A word (usually a noun and its related adjectives) which has accumulated not only a set of key and generally accepted meanings, but also a cluster of diverse and sometimes contested connotations over time. Concepts are thus an important element in the social and political semantics of a society. The history of concepts, or Begriffsgeschichte in German, is an interpretative approach developed by historians such as Quentin Skinner and Reinhart Koselleck which seeks to trace the evolution of these meanings over time. ‘Freedom’, ‘Liberalism’, ‘Modern’ and ‘Modernisation’ and ‘Terror’ are examples of important political concepts.

Discourse From the Latin discurrere, meaning ‘running back and forth’. Traditionally, discourse either meant a treatise on an intellectual subject (as in René Descartes, Discours de la méthode, 1637) or the reasoned dialogue between different speakers. In the wake of the linguistic turn, the term discourse has acquired a distinctively different meaning. The term now denotes a body of assertions and utterances which are related to a certain topic and follow a certain set of rules. Discourse analysis is thus the attempt to reconstruct the rules according to which these assertions or enunciations (in French: énoncés) are created. Discourse history follows the changes of these rules over long periods of time. Discourse analysis differs from a history of concepts or Begriffsgeschichte, because it extends the object of analysis beyond the level of terms or sentences to the level of whole texts. With the history of concepts and other forms of enquiry inspired by the linguistic turn it shares the focus on the surface and materiality of the text and the rejection of the hermeneutical idea to search for intentions or interests ‘behind’ the text.

Deconstruction An approach to textual interpretation developed by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930–2004). Deconstruction relates the meaning of a text not to the identity of a stable subject or author (as in hermeneutics), but rather to the instability of differences between terms and concepts in the text which constitute that meaning. Deconstructing a text means to unearth the hidden oppositions and contradictory connotations which constitute the meaning of a text, without being fully visible in it. A text might for instance comment on the possibility of openly admitting homosexuals to a career in the armed forces, and the problems that might create. A deconstruction of such a

244 Glossary

text would look out for the différance (shifting difference) between homosexuality and heterosexuality, and would ask if and how the meaning of that text is constituted by the (implicit) assumption that these categories are fixed opposites, rather than alternatives with fluid boundaries.

Emplotment The narrative structure or plot of a text determines the order of appearance, the nature and the significance of events which are included in a story. The relationship between the ‘hero’ of a story and the wider world is another important aspect of emplotment. In his critical analysis of nineteenthcentury historiography, the philosopher Hayden White has posited romance, comedy, tragedy, satire as the four basic forms of emplotment. In the context of primary source interpretation, attention to the mode of emplotment points to the importance of the narrative structure for the overall message or ‘morale’ of a text.

Hermeneutics From the Greek hermeneuein, meaning ‘to interpret’. In a more narrow sense, the term refers to techniques of textual interpretation which have been practised in classical philology, Protestant theology and jurisprudence since the sixteenth century. In a wider sense, the nineteenth-century tradition of philosophical hermeneutics, developed by authors such as Friedrich Schleiermacher, Johann Gustav Droysen and Wilhelm Dilthey, which sees the ‘objectivity’ of research in the humanities based on the understanding of ‘subjectivity’. Historical research in this tradition is thus partly a reconstruction and re-enactment of and partly a dialogue with subjects in the past, and with the overarching ‘spirit’ (Geist) which formed the context of their actions. Hermeneutical interpretation of texts and other cultural artefacts from the past aims to reconstruct the meaning subjects have invested in them.

Historicism Name for a nineteenth-century intellectual current on the continent, particularly in German-speaking Central Europe. In a more narrow usage, the term denotes research-based academic historiography which rests on the hermeneutical ‘understanding’ of the past, as it had been developed by Ranke, Droysen and other authors since 1800. In a wider usage, the term denotes the genuinely historical orientation of all humanities in the nineteenth century. Around 1900, controversies about historicism affected Protestant theology, economics and philosophy, when the alleged relativistic consequences of this historical orientation for moral values and for the concept of ‘truth’ came under attack. Critics argued that the notion of historicity would not allow the upholding of ‘eternal’ values.

Linguistic turn A line of reasoning in the humanities that refers back to the linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913), but that has only fully come to the fore since the late 1960s in the writings of Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and other French post-structuralist thinkers. The proponents of the linguistic turn do not deny the existence of a physical reality outside language and texts (of which they have sometimes been accused). They do, however, reject the older, representational understanding of the nature of language, according to which language and its basic elements, signs, are a mere representation or reflection of objective reality. For the

Glossary 245

post-structuralists, language can never be a neutral medium. Following de Saussure, they point to the arbitrary nature of the connection between the word (the signifier) and the idea or object to which it refers (the signified). Because of its arbitrary nature, this connection evolves over time, meaning it is never fixed. Proponents of the linguistic turn believe that the attempt to stabilise the meaning of signifiers is one of the key operations which constitutes culture and society. At the level of tropes and emplotment, the ‘linguistic turn’ implies that the strict distinction between a ‘literal’ and a ‘figurative’ use of language is problematic, or even fundamentally flawed.

Metaphor From the Greek meta-pherein, meaning ‘carrying over’. This is the most widely used trope. In tune with the literal meaning, a metaphor carries meaning from one semantic field into another. At least three different functions of metaphors in texts can be distinguished: in their illustrative function, they are meant to increase the plausibility of an argument; in their heuristic function, they offer a new perspective on a well-known topic; in their constitutive function, they substantiate a fundamentally new understanding of a certain topic.

Semantics In literary studies a sub-discipline which studies the meaning of words. Those interested in historical semantics study the repertoire of key concepts which provided a set of shared assumptions and expectations at a given moment in the past. A wide usage of semantics sees it as an equivalent of culture, i.e. the web of meanings that is framing our interpretation of the social world.

Signs A wide definition of signs includes words, images, sounds, graphic symbols, gestures and so on, and sees them as means of communication. According to Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913), a sign is defined as the difference between the form or signifier (i.e. the word or symbol) and the content or signified (the object or idea to which it refers). In the wake of the linguistic turn, literary scholars tended to reject the idea that signifiers simply reflect the signified objects, but rather posit that language is based on the infinite possible relations between signifiers.

Text Usually a written statement of varying length. In discourse theory, the term denotes a sequence of utterances or signs which show a connection with regard to their meaning, or, in other words, a semantic structure. Thus, also a series of photos, the questionnaire of an opinion poll or a statistical tabulation can be interpreted as a text.

Trope The figurative use of expressions, i.e. a figure of speech. The four basic tropes are irony, metaphor, metonymy, and synecdoche.