Lessons and Legacies: Volume 12: New Directions in Holocaust Research and Education (Lessons & Legacies) - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0810134497 ISBN 13: 9780810134492

Publisher: Northwestern University Press, 2017

Synopsis

Lessons and Legacies XII explores new directions in research and teaching in the field of Holocaust studies. The essays in this volume present the most cutting-edge methods and topics shaping Holocaust studies today, from a variety of disciplines: forensics, environmental history, cultural studies, religious studies, labor history, film studies, history of medicine, sociology, pedagogy, and public history. This rich compendium reveals how far Holocaust studies have reached into cultural studies, perpetrator history, and comparative genocide history. Scholars, laypersons, teachers, and the myriad organizations devoted to Holocaust memorialization and education will find these essays useful and illuminating.

About this title

About the Author

Wendy Lower is the John K. Roth Professor of History at Claremont McKenna Collegeand director of the Mgrublian Center for Human Rights.

Lauren Faulkner Rossi is a professor of history at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver,Canada.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Lessons and Legacies XII

New Directions in Holocaust Research and Education

By Wendy Lower, Lauren Faulkner Rossi

Northwestern University Press

Copyright © 2017 Northwestern University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8101-3449-2

Contents

Foreword Theodore Zev Weiss Wendy Lower and Lauren Faulkner Rossi, 
Introduction Jan T. Gross, 
Opportunistic Killings and Plunder of Jews by Their Neighbors — a Norm or an Exception in German-Occupied Europe? Dagmar Herzog, 
The Obscenity of Objectivity: Post-Holocaust Antisemitism and the Invention of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, 
I. New Cultural Approaches to the Holocaust, 
Rumors in the Ghettos: A Case Study of Cultural History Amos Goldberg, 
I Am (Not) to Blame: Intent and Agency in Personal Accounts of the Holocaust Doris L. Bergen, 
"To Encompass the Unseeable": Foreign Film, Taste Culture, and the American Encounter with the Postwar Holocaust Film Steven Alan Carr, 
A World without Jews: Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide Alon Confino, 
II. Contemporary Controversies and Their Historical Origins, 
Former Ukrainian Policemen in the Ukrainian National Insurgency: Continuing the Holocaust outside German Service John-Paul Himka, 
The SNCF Affair: Cheminots in the Divided Memories of Vichy France Ludivine Broch, 
Keep Your Distance: "Ethical Duplicity" and the Holocaust Mark Joel Webber, 
III. Recovery and Loss, 
Khurbn Yiddish: An Absent Absence Perla Sneh, 
The First Returnees: Holocaust Survivors in Vienna in the Immediate Postwar Period Elizabeth Anthony, 
The Dispersal and Oblivion of the Ashes and Bones of Babi Yar Karel C. Berkhoff, 
IV. The Holocaust and Social History: Gender and the Family, 
Jewish Girls in Catholic Schools in Nazi Germany, 1933–1938 Martina Cucchiara, 
Daily Survival: Social History of Jews in Family Bunkers in Eastern Galicia Natalia Aleksiun, 
Secretaries, Secrets, and Genocide: Evidence from the Postwar Investigations of the Female Secretaries of the RSHA Rachel Century, 
V. Reconsidering Perpetrators, 
Hitler's Ostkrieg and the Indian Wars: Comparing Military Strategies of Conquest and Annihilation Edward B. Westermann, 
Intrigues and Conflicts of Interest as to the Exploitation of Jewish Labor in Radom, 1942–1943 Idit Gil, 
Not "How Was It Possible," but "Who Made It Possible": The Topic of Perpetrators in Holocaust Education in Austria Lukas Meissel, 
Notes on Contributors, 

CHAPTER 1

Rumors in the Ghettos: A Case Study of Cultural History

Amos Goldberg

How should the history of the Jews in the Holocaust be written? From what perspective? How should its main object of research be defined, and what should its focal point be? Historians and scholars have asked these fundamental questions since the very beginning of the field of Holocaust studies and actually already during World War II. In this short essay, I will try to address them by reflecting on the extent to which cultural history can contribute to the field of Holocaust history. In the second part of this essay, I will substantiate my view through an initial analysis of the spread of rumors in Jewish ghettos during the war.

Cultural History and Holocaust History

In a recently published article in Dapim: Studies on the Holocaust, Dan Stone argued that despite the fact that cultural history has proved both a popular and fertile paradigm within the historical discipline, it has not staked much ground for itself in the study of the Holocaust. It is not that "cultural histories" were not written on the Holocaust. One can mention, for example, the writings of Alon Confino, Claudia Koonz, Dominick LaCapra, Thomas Kühne, and Dan Michman as works affiliated with cultural history. However, these scholars and Stone himself mostly relate to the history of the perpetrators. But what about a cultural history of the Jews during the Holocaust?

By "cultural history," I do not mean in this context a history that portrays Jewish cultural institutions during the Holocaust. Moshe Rosman has already reminded us in the context of Jewish history that cultural history is not interested in the products of creative forces within a particular group, but in the meanings these forces and products convey. Or, in other words, cultural history is not concerned with describing cultural and religious institutions or their products, but rather in the mechanism of meaning-making within a society, or in what Peter Burke sees as the common basis of all branches of cultural history: "dealing with the symbolic and its interpretation."

In this field of "the history of the Jews in the Holocaust," one can say that cultural history's impact is even smaller, although not altogether absent. Alexandra Garbarini and Jacek Leociak's books on diaries written by Jews during the Holocaust are good examples. Samuel Kassow's monograph on Emanuel Ringelblum or Debórah Dwork's work on the experiences of Jewish children and youth are yet other good examples. However, even these works, as well as others, do not always fully expose what I consider the radical significance of cultural history to Jewish history during the Holocaust.

I believe that the fundamental challenge of writing the history of the victims in extreme cases such as genocide is to write a history of powerlessness. This is evident in the case of the Holocaust, where the devastating experience of extreme powerlessness dominates all contemporaneous sources, such as diaries and letters, written by the victims. So the questions are, how can a history of powerlessness be written, and what methods of cultural history could help us in this?

These questions are even more acute from a theoretical perspective because history usually depicts what there is, not what is missing. It tends to focus on positive nouns as its objects of research and not on negative ones with the suffix "lessness," as in our case, powerlessness — the feeling and reality of lack of power — of impotence! Not total impotence in the sense of lacking any aspect of selfhood or agency, but still, overwhelming and devastating powerlessness — a sense that one's life is completely dominated by external powerful, vicious and lethal forces, evident in almost every passage of the victims' wartime writings.

Much of Holocaust historiography, which focuses on the Jews and which gained huge achievements in reconstructing Jewish life in that time, seems to have failed in this challenge. For the most part, this historiography tends to portray the victim as an autonomous, reactive, historical, more or less full agent, while avoiding altogether this challenge of powerlessness! To put it in Walter Benjamin's words, it is a historiography that wishes to write the history of the defeated as a history of the victorious. Hence, in many cases, the historical image of the victim is constructed through the stark binary opposition of "inside" and "outside." For example, in many Holocaust narratives, both academic and popular, it is assumed that the victims kept, in one way or another, their "internal" individual, psychological, and communal identity more or less intact while the Holocaust took place only on the "outside" of historical reality, which was totally dominated by the Germans. Such narratives make fundamental use of such keywords as "struggle," "response," "amida" (a Hebrew term that will discussed later), "voices," "dignity," "agency," and at times even "resistance," because they all assume that in the Holocaust there were two distinct historical autonomous agents — the Jews and the Germans. The latter persecuted the former, but as long as there was any option for the former to "respond," "struggle against," "utter their voices," "manipulate circumstances," or even "resist," they did that. Obviously, they managed to do so only until they were completely overpowered.

I do not contend that this historiography is simplistic and superficial. It certainly does relate incidents, communities, and ghettos that failed to execute such responses, but nonetheless the focus is on "response," and this is practically its main object of research. "Response" is what historians usually look for, even when they are honest about admitting their failure to find it. The question that the historian explicitly or implicitly asks within this historiographical framework is whether and to what extent a Jewish "response" did or did not take place.

This tendency dominates large parts of the Israeli school of Holocaust research, although even Christopher Browning's Remembering Survival, which reconstructs, on the basis of 292 postwar Jewish testimonies, the history of the Wierzbnik ghetto and Starachowice labor camp in the Radom district of Poland, fails to fully depict this immanent and eminent aspect of the victims' experience and consciousness. Indeed, it does portray many aspects of the "choiceless choices" (as he calls them, following Lawrence Langer's well-known articulation) of collaboration and internal social Darwinist style rivals for survival that are inherent in the victims' gray zone. But at the same time, it celebrates and emphasizes every moment of unexpected bravery and internal solidarity. Browning asserts, in the book's concluding remarks, that terms such as "resistance" and "amida" are insufficient to describe the Jewish struggle for survival. He therefore suggests alternative vocabulary of such words as "ingenuity, resourcefulness, adoptability, perseverance and endurance." However, and this is most important for my argument, he does not emphasize the experience and consciousness of powerlessness itself as the object of research on which one should focus. So, even if the book's historical reconstruction is extremely accurate and illuminating in the factual sense, it lacks a fundamental analysis of the victim's traumatic experience and consciousness.

The most comprehensive conceptual summary of this historiographical approach has been formulated by Yehuda Bauer in his book Rethinking the Holocaust. In two chapters of this work, Bauer discusses the problem of the character of the history of the Jews in this era. He considers these chapters to be his major interpretive contribution to the field of Holocaust history. The key terms of Bauer's historiography, according to his own affirmation, are "resistance," "response," "reaction," and most importantly, "amida."

In the original English edition of the book, Bauer claims that the concept of amida is difficult to translate into a foreign language. The term, he says, connotes both armed and unarmed resistance, but also the smuggling of food; cultural, religious, educational, and political activity; as well as other types of action aimed at bolstering the personal and collective capacities for survival. According to him, amida is the focal point and object of research for historians who seek to portray the history of the Jews during the Holocaust.

This historiographical tendency to grant the victim full agency has an ethical urgency as well. It is many times rightly justified by the ethical imperative to "rehumanize" the victims and to let them regain their faces, their voices, and their identity. This is undoubtedly a right and just cause because it wishes to redeem the victims from being once again an object of the perpetrators' history. As Israel Gutman has pointed out, the Israeli school in Holocaust history sought to present the Jews in both the individual and the collective sense as having resisted Nazi persecution as long as even the most meager means were available to them to do so, including actual armed resistance. As a consequence, the concept of resistance was sweepingly expanded to include almost any organized or even private act that enabled or supported Jewish existence during this era. As such, Israeli historiography constituted the Jewish historical subject — on both the collective and individual planes — as an active agent, as the owner of his or her own history, whose own interiority or whose mental, cultural, religious, communal, and ethical self continued to stand strong and invincible. The Jews are therefore constructed as proud historical agents whose interiority and identity cannot be crushed or even undermined.

However, this image, whether explicitly portrayed or implicitly embedded or assumed in historical representations, might be somewhat misleading because, as noble as the endeavor to "rehumanize" the victim might be, the victims in many cases were actually dehumanized. The "outside" penetrated and transformed the "inside." Take, for example, the following words of Josef Zelkowicz, a leftist-oriented Yiddish intellectual of the Lódz ghetto who wrote extensively in the ghetto and was eventually murdered in Auschwitz:

It is not only the external form of life that has changed in the ghetto ... It is not only the clothing that has come to look tattered and the faces to wear masks of death, but the entire Jewish trend of thought has been totally transformed under the pressure of the ghetto ... The ghetto ... has swiftly obliterated the boundaries between sanctity and indignity, just as it obliterated the boundaries between mine and yours, permitted and forbidden, fair and unfair.

This short quotation is typical of almost all Jewish texts written during the Holocaust and in the first years thereafter. Almost all of them testify to a deep transformation of basic concepts and the collapse of fundamental and essential distinctions in individual and collective life and thought under Nazi persecution. The analysis of such a transformation is precisely what Holocaust historiography lacks. As a matter of fact, these transformations were the main object of research and observation among many of the first generation of Holocaust scholars and ethnographers — many of whom perished in the Holocaust. I am talking about such figures as Chaim Kaplan, Oskar Rosenfeld, Nachman Blumenthal, Rachel Auerbach (Rokhl Oyerbakh), Hannah Arendt, and many others. But academic historiography almost completely abandoned these aspects, which are the core of the "powerlessness experience," in the seventies and thereafter. As a matter of fact, they follow, to a large extent, a dominant trend in interwar East European Jewish writings embodied, for example, in the work of Max Weinreich, one of the founders of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. During the 1920s and 1930s, he immersed himself in depicting the sociopsychological outcomes of discrimination among the Jews of East Europe — examining it in larger comparative, which included also the African Americans in the Southern United States.

Following these precedents, I would like to contend that cultural history can give us some methodological tools to portray these transformative processes that the victim underwent and was powerless to resist. This is because, as Lynn Hunt puts it, cultural history is more about "the deciphering of meaning, rather than the inference of causal laws," In other words, the diverse field of cultural history focuses on the processes of producing meaning and their failures. Hence, cultural history could be suitable for portraying the victims' breakdown of structures and cultural mechanisms, which failed to give meaning to their radical experiences.

I will illustrate this by briefly relating to the issue of rumors, which were a fundamental and extremely commonplace phenomenon in the Jewish ghettos.

Analyzing Rumors

That rumors were commonplace among the Jewish population during the war is of very little wonder. As students of rumor research know, rumors are a practice of communication that exists in all modern societies. No matter how enlightened, technologically advanced, and rational a society is, and how developed and modernized its systems of communication, rumors always circulate. Rumors increase at times of crisis and war, when such stories tend to flourish and become a significant social and cultural phenomenon and sometimes even a dominant form of mass communication. Hence, such historians as Marc Blochand Paul Fussel paid much attention to the historical and cultural significance of rumors during "The Great War." And Maureen Healy's study on Vienna during World War I shows how rumors came to dominate the Viennese public sphere and how they became an eminent problem for the regime. This was also true for Nazi Germany during World War II. Ulrich Rauf has suggested a kind of formula that is extremely relevant to our case: rumors flourish in a community under imagined or real threat, whose inmates experience isolation, loss of normal social contacts, fear, and exhaustion. In addition, in such circumstances people typically have the feeling that information is controlled and often severely distorted by the regime. Rumors tend to dramatically increase when rational critical capacities are weakened.

It is no wonder, then, that rumors played a dramatic role in Jewish societies during the war, especially in the ghettos. Rumors on various themes circulated daily and wildly, and they are constantly mentioned and dealt with in the writings of the time. The Lódz ghetto even performed a play titled Plotkes — "Rumors."

It is obvious what circumstances created this phenomenon: the isolation of the Jews from the world at a time of great, crucial, and fatal events; the lack of reliable modern means of communication — written, oral, and visual; unreliable Nazi sources of information; unprecedented and meaningless occurrences, along with constant expectation and knowledge that things were happening or about to happen; and a constant feeling of fear and immediate threat to one's life. All of these factors created conditions for rumors to flourish dramatically.

But how should one approach this major phenomenon? What questions should a historian ask about it? How can we analyze and conceptualize it to better understand Jewish life during these horrendous times?

One way to look at it is empirically, as have, for example, Christopher Browning, Israel Gutman, and Alexandra Garbarini. Browning and Gutman analyzed reports written in the spring of 1942 by Jewish informers who worked in the service of the Nazis in the Warsaw ghetto. One of the major issues depicted in these reports was the rumor that circulated in the ghetto about the fate of Jews outside the ghetto and their effect on the ghetto mood (Stimmung). Browning is mostly interested in the accuracy of the information and the speed of its dissemination. Thus, after comparing these documents to German documents, he concluded that the time it took rumors about the gassing of Lublin Jews in the Belzec death camp in southeastern Poland to reach the Warsaw ghetto was not longer than the time it took this information to reach German officials in Lublin and Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi minister of propaganda, in Berlin. The difference lies in the details and the level of certainty of the news, not in the speed of its spread.

Gutman, on the other hand, is interested in reconstructing the motivation of these informants to report so intensively on rumors and in assessing how destructive these reports were from the ghetto point of view. His conclusion, in the spirit of the historiographical school described earlier, was that they did not cause and did not mean to cause much harm.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Northwestern University Press
• Publication date: 2017
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0810134497
• ISBN 13: 9780810134492
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 416
• Editor: Lower Wendy, Rossi Lauren Faulkner