In Mark Baker’s text The Fiftieth Gate and Deborah Lipstadt’s text History on Trial, the authors’ representations of ideas and history and memory are crucial to their discussion of the Holocaust. By choosing to represent history and memory through the validations of individual experiences and an untenable truth, both authors show the impact of gaining understanding rather than an ultimate truth. The Fiftieth Gate and History on Trial each discuss the importance of affirming individual stories as well as the limitations of history and memory, in order to demonstrate the author’s purpose.
Through Baker’s representation of history and memory, The Fiftieth Gate communicates a collective need for experiences to be validated, and ultimately demonstrates …show more content…
The text uses ideas of Midrash in the sense that Baker contributes to an ongoing investigation seeking to bring the past into the present. Baker works off the assumption that the stories are not entirely self-evident, and searches for further meaning in his family history. He uses the investigation of his parents’ stories to express the limitations of both history and memory. In his father’s story, Baker struggles to consolidate his retelling with facts or collective memory, clear in the line “He says it was cold. Winter. But it was warm. Autumn.” Baker emphasises the fallibilities of memory itself by juxtaposing memory and fact. Yet his father’s line “you read. Books, books everywhere. But do you know how it feels,” epitomises the limitations of history through the idea of the representation of emotion in historical narrative. Baker chooses to represent both history and memory in his investigation of the past, and with the absence of an objective truth, he is forced to uncover a more complex …show more content…
Within the context of the lawsuit, Lipstadt chooses to emphasise the failings of both history and memory in order to prove the lack of a single truth. She represents the trial itself as a failure of history, inability to prove the objective existence of the Holocaust rendered the case reliant demonstrating Irving’s illegitimacy as a historian. With history constrained as a textual genre, the problem is not the illegitimacy of Irving’s belief, but his failure to adhere to the genre’s conventions. While Lipstadt wins the case, Irving having “significantly misrepresented what the evidence, objectively examined, reveals,” the occurrence of the trial itself presents the failures of history. To a further extent, she shows the limitations of memory in the absence of witness testimony in the court. She explains that they did not want to risk Irving “ridiculing the survivors,” and the constraints of personal perspectives are realised. By representing the failures of history and memory in a legal context, the text discusses the contested nature of historical truth, and the importance of understanding broader context in comprehending
Through Baker’s representation of history and memory, The Fiftieth Gate communicates a collective need for experiences to be validated, and ultimately demonstrates …show more content…
The text uses ideas of Midrash in the sense that Baker contributes to an ongoing investigation seeking to bring the past into the present. Baker works off the assumption that the stories are not entirely self-evident, and searches for further meaning in his family history. He uses the investigation of his parents’ stories to express the limitations of both history and memory. In his father’s story, Baker struggles to consolidate his retelling with facts or collective memory, clear in the line “He says it was cold. Winter. But it was warm. Autumn.” Baker emphasises the fallibilities of memory itself by juxtaposing memory and fact. Yet his father’s line “you read. Books, books everywhere. But do you know how it feels,” epitomises the limitations of history through the idea of the representation of emotion in historical narrative. Baker chooses to represent both history and memory in his investigation of the past, and with the absence of an objective truth, he is forced to uncover a more complex …show more content…
Within the context of the lawsuit, Lipstadt chooses to emphasise the failings of both history and memory in order to prove the lack of a single truth. She represents the trial itself as a failure of history, inability to prove the objective existence of the Holocaust rendered the case reliant demonstrating Irving’s illegitimacy as a historian. With history constrained as a textual genre, the problem is not the illegitimacy of Irving’s belief, but his failure to adhere to the genre’s conventions. While Lipstadt wins the case, Irving having “significantly misrepresented what the evidence, objectively examined, reveals,” the occurrence of the trial itself presents the failures of history. To a further extent, she shows the limitations of memory in the absence of witness testimony in the court. She explains that they did not want to risk Irving “ridiculing the survivors,” and the constraints of personal perspectives are realised. By representing the failures of history and memory in a legal context, the text discusses the contested nature of historical truth, and the importance of understanding broader context in comprehending