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"Nazi Germany and the Jews": Reflections on a Beginning, a Middle, and an Open End
Historical writing that bears witness to a tragedy approaches the past with an interest much more urgent than historical curiosity or even political effect. The perceivable difference between an "objective `prehistory of the present'" and "the subjective...possession of history understood as the prehistory of the self," is so overwhelming, that it can rarely be overcome.(1) These two observations, together and separately, when applied to Saul Friedlnder, are at the basis for my claim that he was the "ideal type" to challenge Broszat's plea for historicization with his own version, avoiding the former's pitfalls. Among historian-thinkers of the Nazi era Friedlnder is rather unique in that he was both, in "real time" and subsequently, a subject of the tragedy of the Shoah, as well as a spectator of it; hence his ability to integrate an "objective `prehistory of the present'" with a "history understood as the prehistory of the self."
It is only in the form of narrative, if at all, that the past "as it was" then and as it is remembered since can be joined. Yet this task is fraught with obstacles; central to them is an insurmountable dissonance between certain living memories that resist merging even in their afterlife as history. What these different memories evoke creates still a wider abyss.
"On the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the end of Nazi rule in May 1985, I published an essay entitled `A Plea for the Historicization of National Socialism'...."(2) These were Broszat's opening lines in his first letter to Friedlnder, which constitutes a call for an "objective `prehistory of the present'." For those who fought to defeat Nazism, as well as for an increasing number of Germans since, each May from 1945 on is undoubtedly a historical cause célèbre of a new beginning. For them, many springs were to follow. For others, however, the historical days of May 1945 conveyed a totally different discovery -- of an end.
It was also in May (25, to be exact) 1945 that Madame Fraenkel came to visit Paul-Henri Ferland. "I began by asking her if she had had news of my parents. She said no...." "If, let's say, your parents...