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Christian Goeschel, The Holocaust: Critical Historical Approaches, The English Historical Review, Volume CXXII, Issue 498, September 2007, Pages 1111–1112, https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/cem177
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Extract
This short and thoughtful book reviews the Holocaust's recent historiography and offers some new avenues for research. Its four chapters deal with what the authors call the Holocaust's ‘victims’, ‘perpetrators’ and ‘bystanders’. Chapter One delivers a lucid discussion of survivors’ testimony. Few would deny that we must study this type of source critically, as any other Holocaust-era documents, in order to gain an insight into survivors’ experiences of the Holocaust. Testimony should be a central focus of Holocaust historiography and not merely tacked on to debates of the final solution's bureaucratic details. But such testimony rarely tells us anything new about the decision-making process leading up to the final solution. Chapters Two and Three analyse what the authors call ‘perpetrators and perpetration’. The authors reject the notion that there was a direct link between anti-Semitism and the Holocaust both on a general level of causation and on a specific level of individual motivation, arguing instead that there was a ‘twisted road to Auschwitz’, as Karl A. Schleunes first suggested in 1970. Bloxham and Kushner insist that the Holocaust had its specific characteristics, like any other historical event; but they dismiss the concept of the Holocaust's ‘uniqueness’. This notion, the authors claim, obscures our understanding of the final solution and prevents us from studying it in a comparative context, which in turn would help us understand it better (p. 159). Chapter Four turns to the category of ‘Bystanders’. Bloxham and Kushner argue persuasively that ‘the bystander category is in danger of aiding the tendency to see the subject in manichean terms, as a symbol of mass evil alongside much less prevalent absolute good’ (p. 184). Historians should beware the moral high ground. In this light, one wonders why Bloxham and Kushner use repeatedly the essentially simplistic categories of ‘victims’, ‘perpetrators’ and ‘bystanders’, instead of avoiding them. One of the volume's particular strengths is above all the authors’ insistence that we must try to understand and explain individual actions during the Holocaust rather than condemn them. The authors offer some fruitful new approaches towards the Holocaust. Gender and age are key concepts for a more nuanced understanding of those who were murdered. And the Holocaust should not be studied in isolation, but in the context of other genocides. This very sophisticated and thought-provoking volume is an ideal up-to-date introduction to the Holocaust's historiography. It deserves a wide readership.
