method – 13 – The Tenacious Struggle Over Form –

The Tenacious Struggle Over Form –

The process of coming to terms with and representing history in societies is a tenacious struggle over the form of that representation. The Israeli historian Saul Friedländer made the following observation regarding the question of objective versus subjective perspectives in the debate among German historians in the 1980s:

“Historians are critical of Jewish historians who lived through the Shoah. In the Historians’ Dispute, they said: but how can they be objective when they are victims themselves? I wrote to the German historian Martin Broszat, who has written outstanding works on the Nazis. Broszat was someone who always kept the fact that he was in the Hitler Youth to himself. But he was also a party member in his final year. Well, he was a young man. But you could sense that about him, especially in the 1980s—that is, during the Kohl era in Germany when nationalist sentiments were on the rise and German reunification was taking place. That was also precisely the time of the “historians’ dispute,” a debate among German historians about the singularity of the Shoah. They wanted to say that the victims, in a certain sense, were not capable of writing their own history. (laughs) They wouldn’t see that … I said … … … … I replied to him in my letter as follows: don’t you think, Martin Broszat, regarding your statement that we, the victims, we, the Jews … uh … that we are incapable of seeing, that is, of perceiving things in an objective context, because we are too burdened by the past. We are entirely… uh… uh… subjective in what we perceive and in what we write. And don’t you think that someone like you, who was in the Hitler Youth, also has to grapple with his own subjectivity? ”

Interview with Saul Friedländer; historian; Jusqu’au dernier: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKbcYKYYMXc

For his epic story telling of the history of the Shoah—the persecution and extermination of the Jews during the Nazi regime in Europe—Saul Friedländer was awarded the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade in 2007