Magazine / Society / Holocaust Denial / Article | 18/04/2007

An integrated history of the Holocaust

The history of the Holocaust is not only confined to German decisions and actions. It is therefore necessary to recount an integrated history which also takes account of the Jewish perspective.

The need for an integrated history of the Holocaust first became clear to me during the debates of the mid and late 1980s, and particularly as a result of the confrontation with Martin Broszat regarding his 1985 "plea for the historicization of National Socialism.”

Warning in the heart of Berlin: Peter Eisenmann's field of columns
commemmorates Holocaust victims.
Photo: stock.xchng

One of Broszat's arguments, it may be remembered, was directed against the traditional representation of the Third Reich as a simplistic, black-and-white rendition that had to give way to various shades of gray. Broszat's barely hidden subtext, which emerged during our exchange of letters in 1988, contended that the Jewish survivors' perception of this past, as well as that of their descendants, albeit "worthy of respect," nonetheless represented a mythical memory that set a coarsening obstacle on the path of a rational German historiography.

This view perpetuated the intellectual segregation of the history of the Jews during the Nazi epoch and left it, at best, to Jewish historians. My own work, begun in 1990, was meant to show that no distinction was warranted between historians of various backgrounds in their professional approach to this subject, that all historians dealing with this theme had to be aware of their unavoidably subjective approach, and that all could muster enough self-critical insight to restrain this subjectivity. What mattered most to me in my own project was the inclusion of the Jewish dimension, along all others, within an integrated historical narrative.

In this brief presentation I shall first address the very notion of an integrated history of the Holocaust, then turn to some narrative and interpretive choices demanded by such an approach and, finally, evoke the kind of concrete issues that this form of history may bring up.

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