Years of Persecution, Years of Extermination

This is a book about a book: Saul Friedländer’s The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945. Friedländer rightly commands enormous respect among scholars of the Holocaust. This volume, then, might have sunk to the level of hagiography. Fortunately, this is not the case; there are only a few excessively laudatory pieces, and they are the least interesting essays in the volume. Instead, this collection shows how some of today’s finest historians of the Holocaust grapple with the most significant elements of Friedländer’s work: his use of victim sources, his notion of ‘redemptive antisemitism’, and his claim to have written an ‘integrated history of the Holocaust’ (p. 21). The contributors show how critical engagement with the work of an acclaimed historian only raises the level of historical dialogue. Friedländer wrote his two-volume study of Nazi Germany and the Jews (The Years of Extermination is Volume II) after his now famous exchange with German historian Martin Broszat. In the late 1980s, Broszat argued for a ‘historicization of the Holocaust’, and claimed that victim testimony was ‘mythical memory’ that stood in the way of objective history. Friedländer, of course, thought otherwise. In The Years of Extermination, he argued that victim sources—particularly contemporary diary accounts—not only conveyed significant historical information, but they also served a narrative function crucial for writing the history of the Holocaust. In an oft-quoted passage, Friedländer wrote: ‘an individual voice suddenly arising in the course of an ordinary historical narrative of events ... can tear through seamless interpretation and pierce the (mostly involuntary) smugness of scholarly detachment and “objectivity”. Such a disruptive function would hardly be necessary in a history of the price of wheat on the eve of the French Revolution, but it is essential to the historical representation of mass extermination and other sequences of mass suffering that “business as usual historiography” necessarily domesticates and “flattens”‘ (The Years of Extermination, p. xxvi). For Friedländer, sustaining a sense of disbelief was absolutely essential—otherwise the Holocaust would be historicised and lose what he saw as its unique essence

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