Probing the Ethics of Holocaust Culture PDF
Preview Probing the Ethics of Holocaust Culture
PROBING THE ETHICS OF HOLOCAUST CULTURE PROBING THE ETHICS OF HOLOCAUST CULTURE Edited by CLAUDIO FOGU WULF KANSTEINER TODD PRESNER Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England 2016 Copyright © 2016 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of Amer i ca First printing Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data Names: Fogu, Claudio, 1963– editor. | Kansteiner, Wulf, editor. | Presner, Todd Samuel, editor. Title: Probing the ethics of Holocaust culture / edited by Claudio Fogu, Wulf Kansteiner, Todd Presner. Description: Cambridge, Mas sa chu setts : Harvard University Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifi ers: LCCN 2016013948 | ISBN 9780674970519 (hardcover : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945)— Moral and ethical aspects. | Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945)— Historiography. | Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945)— Public opinion. | Holocaust memorials. | Culture— Study and teaching— Moral and ethical aspects. Classifi cation: LCC D804.7.M67 P76 2016 | DDC 174/.994053186— dc23 LC rec ord available at https:// lccn . loc . gov / 2016013948 CONTENTS Introduction: The Field of Holocaust Studies and the Emergence of Global Holocaust Culture 1 Wulf Kansteiner and Todd Presner PART I: THE STAKES OF NARRATIVE 43 1. Historical Truth, Estrangement, and Disbelief 53 Hayden White 2. On “Historical Modernism”: A Response to Hayden White 72 Saul Friedländer 3. Sense and Sensibility: The Complicated Holocaust Realism of Christopher Browning 79 Wulf Kansteiner 4. A Reply to Wulf Kansteiner 104 Christopher R. Browning 5. Scales of Postmemory: Six of Six Million 113 Ann Rigney 6. Interview with Daniel Mendelsohn, Author of The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million 129 CONTENTS 7. The Death of the Witness; or, The Per sis tence of the Differend 141 Marc Nichanian PART II: REMEDIATIONS OF THE ARCHIVE 167 8. The Ethics of the Algorithm: Close and Distant Listening to the Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive 175 Todd Presner 9. On the Ethics of Technology and Testimony 203 Stephen D. Smith 10. A “Spatial Turn” in Holocaust Studies? 218 Claudio Fogu 11. Interview with Anne Knowles, Tim Cole, Alberto Giordano, and Paul B. Jaskot, Contributing Authors of Geographies of the Holocaust 240 12. Freeze- Framing: Temporality and the Archive in Forgács, Hersonski, and Friedländer 257 Nitzan Lebovic 13. Witnessing the Archive 277 Yael Hersonski 14. Deconstructivism and the Holocaust: Peter Eisenman’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Eur ope 283 Gavriel D. Rosenfeld 15. Berlin Memorial Redux 304 Peter Eisenman PART III: THE POLITICS OF EXCEPTIONALITY 309 16. The Holocaust as Genocide: Experiential Uniqueness and Integrated History 319 Omer Bartov vi CONTENTS 17. Anx i eties in Holocaust and Genocide Studies 332 A. Dirk Moses 18. The Witness as “World” Traveler: Multidirectional Memory and Holocaust Internationalism before Human Rights 355 Michael Rothberg 19. Fiction and Solicitude: Ethics and the Conditions for Survival 373 Judith Butler 20. Catastrophes: Afterlives of the Exceptionality Paradigm in Holocaust Studies 389 Elisabeth Weber Epilogue: Interview with Saul Friedländer 411 Notes 427 Acknowl edgments 496 Illustration Credits 497 Contributors 499 Index 504 vii Introduction The Field of Holocaust Studies and the Emergence of Global Holocaust Culture WULF KANSTEINER AND TODD PRESNER IN SPRING 1990, Saul Friedländer hosted a major conference at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), in which he asked a number of historians, phil os o phers, and literary scholars to refl ect on the limits of representing the Holocaust in fi ction and nonfi ction. The re- sulting volume, Probing the Limits of Repre sen ta tion, arguably defi ned the theoretical and historiographic contours of the fi eld of Holocaust studies for two and a half de cades.1 In 2012, UCLA hosted a second such conference, org a nized by the editors of this book. We brought together some of the original protagonists, such as Saul Friedländer and Hayden White, but changed the format of the conference and the scope of the investigation to probe the ethical stakes of Holocaust culture writ large. The conference addressed questions on the repre sen ta tion and mediation of the Holocaust, not only through the analogic media of history, lite r a ture, and fi lm but also the world of multimedia databases, digital archives, and geographic information systems. While we took up some of the original debates in Holocaust historiography, we did so in a more dialogical con- text through direct confrontations between critics and creators, involving a second generation of interlocutors using new methodologies, media, and critical works. The prese nt volume is not a sequel to the original one, but perhaps a bookend insofar as it attempts to take stock of the salient forms of repre- sen ta tion and the critical debates that have emerged in Holocaust studies in the intervening twenty-fi ve years. When the original Probing volume appeared in 1992, the fi eld of Holocaust studies was in the throes of 1
The list of books you might like
