Saul Friedländer's recent 'Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Extermination' offers a brilliant new literary mode for historical representation of extreme events such as the Holocaust. The article offers a comparative assessment of Friedländer's achievement with regard to the integration of Jewish sources into the historical account. It begins with a contextualization of Friedländer's book within a framework that compares the ways in which Jewish sources are addressed by different historiographical approaches. In the second part it seeks to contextualize analytically and critically Friedländer's concept of 'disbelief' - a concept by which he defines the role of the 'victims' voices' in his narrative. The article concludes by briefly suggesting some guidelines for an alternative approach to the study of contemporary Jewish Holocaust sources.
The article presents a profile of Bernard Mark (1908-1966), a Holocaust historian and the director of the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw. Mark's biography is based on various materials, both published and unpublished, from his pre-war involvement in the Communist Party of Poland, through the war years spent in the Soviet Union, to his various activities in post-war Poland: a researcher and socio-cultural activist, including his publications on the Holocaust.
JavaScript is turned off in your web browser. Turn it on to take full advantage of this site, then refresh the page.