Saul Friedländer’s momentous work, Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945: The Years of Extermination, asserts itself beyond contemporary historical boundaries of Holocaust analysis and representation, culminating his work and presents Friedländer as significantly influential within historical writing. Born into a Jewish family and experiencing the German Occupation within France Friedländer stands as unique amongst Holocaust scholars, whilst this also directly influencing his ground-breaking volumes of Nazi History, eminently contributing to Holocaust historiography. With its strength of appealing to both academic and layman, Friedländer’s cumulative Volume offers a powerful educational and emotional tool to understanding Shoah remembrance and
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Removing itself from the standard historiography of the time by highlighting piety as often stunting the ability to understand the Holocaust and perpetrator viewpoint, Friedländer incorporates victim and witness testimony as the core vein throughout his work. Historiography of the Holocaust has seen many evolving stages of scholarship, as expected in any academic field, from the Nuremberg Trials, where witness testimony was minimal, until the 1990s scholars kept themselves at a distance from the events, rather, linking the Shoah to other European contexts . Historians of the 1970s such as Hannah Arendt and Carl Friedrich shaped the totalitarian school of thought, yet by the 1980s historiography saw itself centralising around decision making structures of the Nazi regime, and characterised by the intentionalist versus functionalist debates. However, the commonality throughout the expanse of these decades remained the distance that historians kept from the events. As Omar Bartov stated commentators often saw the Holocaust through the “lens of a general interpretation of the crisis of European society and politics ” whilst perpetuating perpetrator perspectives with the “period of latency” continuing as it had for the previous two decades. This lack of victim interest can be seen in the number …show more content…
Pioneering studies by scholars such a Raul Hilberg and Leni Yahil in the Yad Vashem Institute in Jerusalem, show that by the 1960s Holocaust literature was rather substantial, albeit secularised as Polish, Israeli and Jewish niche history. The lack of significance suggests that there was a void in mainstream literature of the Holocaust of victim testimony. This continued until the end of the Cold War and, with it, the opening of previously unseen archives heralding a shift in Holocaust literature ; these decades of debates and access to new sources helped shape Friedländer’s integrated history. Key to his thesis, with the nature of integration taking centre stage, Friedlander incorporated this previously marginalised literature and with other scholars such as Claude Lanzmann in his 1985 film Shoah and Martin Broszat’s appeal for ‘historicization’, witness testimony was now a pronounced feature of Holocaust writings throughout the 1990s. Within this time of scholarly evolution, Friedländer’s first volume, Nazi Germany and the Jews: Volume 1: The Years of Persecution 1933-1939, re-introduced the fruitful nature of witness testimony as historical evidence whilst urging its ability to understand and experience through this perspective. However, the culmination of his research resulting in the subsequent 2007 book The Years of Extermination,
Removing itself from the standard historiography of the time by highlighting piety as often stunting the ability to understand the Holocaust and perpetrator viewpoint, Friedländer incorporates victim and witness testimony as the core vein throughout his work. Historiography of the Holocaust has seen many evolving stages of scholarship, as expected in any academic field, from the Nuremberg Trials, where witness testimony was minimal, until the 1990s scholars kept themselves at a distance from the events, rather, linking the Shoah to other European contexts . Historians of the 1970s such as Hannah Arendt and Carl Friedrich shaped the totalitarian school of thought, yet by the 1980s historiography saw itself centralising around decision making structures of the Nazi regime, and characterised by the intentionalist versus functionalist debates. However, the commonality throughout the expanse of these decades remained the distance that historians kept from the events. As Omar Bartov stated commentators often saw the Holocaust through the “lens of a general interpretation of the crisis of European society and politics ” whilst perpetuating perpetrator perspectives with the “period of latency” continuing as it had for the previous two decades. This lack of victim interest can be seen in the number …show more content…
Pioneering studies by scholars such a Raul Hilberg and Leni Yahil in the Yad Vashem Institute in Jerusalem, show that by the 1960s Holocaust literature was rather substantial, albeit secularised as Polish, Israeli and Jewish niche history. The lack of significance suggests that there was a void in mainstream literature of the Holocaust of victim testimony. This continued until the end of the Cold War and, with it, the opening of previously unseen archives heralding a shift in Holocaust literature ; these decades of debates and access to new sources helped shape Friedländer’s integrated history. Key to his thesis, with the nature of integration taking centre stage, Friedlander incorporated this previously marginalised literature and with other scholars such as Claude Lanzmann in his 1985 film Shoah and Martin Broszat’s appeal for ‘historicization’, witness testimony was now a pronounced feature of Holocaust writings throughout the 1990s. Within this time of scholarly evolution, Friedländer’s first volume, Nazi Germany and the Jews: Volume 1: The Years of Persecution 1933-1939, re-introduced the fruitful nature of witness testimony as historical evidence whilst urging its ability to understand and experience through this perspective. However, the culmination of his research resulting in the subsequent 2007 book The Years of Extermination,