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Beyond Helpless Victims and Survivor Trauma: New Historiography on Jews in the Age of the Holocaust
Review products
KateřinaČapková, Czechs, Germans, Jews? National Identity and the Jews of Bohemia (London: Berghahn, 2014), 298 pp., £22.00, ISBN 9781782386797.
RebekahKlein-Pejšová, Mapping Jewish Loyalties in Interwar Slovakia (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2015), 216 pp., $40.00, ISBN: 9780253015549.
AnnaCichopek-Gajraj, Beyond Violence. Jewish Survivors in Poland and Slovakia, 1944–1948 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 297 pp., $110.00, ISBN 9781107036666.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 March 2018
Extract
This review essay explores recent scholarship on the history of Jews in the post-Habsburg territories, before and after the Second World War. The impressive wave of scholarship that has emerged in recent decades on European Jewish history shortly before, during and, increasingly, after the Holocaust, has only made historians more aware of how much they have left to do to reconstruct, at least in text, the lives of European Jews – a multilingual and culturally, economically and politically heterogeneous group – that the Holocaust so systematically and brutally destroyed. Aiming to overcome reductionist attempts that either subsume the history of Jews under a national narrative or parcel it into separate national units without comparative or transnational agendas, a growing number of scholars aim to reconceptualise Jewish history as being crucial to European and global history.
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References
1 It is indicative of the significance of the emerging research into the post-war period of Jewish history in Europe that while in the second half of the 1990s the Leo Baeck Institute chose to close its four volumes on German-Jewish history in 1945 and only included a postscript on later decades, 2012 saw the addition of an unofficial fifth volume to the series covering the period from 1945 until the present. See Brenner, Michael, ed., Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland von 1945 bis zur Gegenwart: Politik, Kultur und Gesellschaft (München: C.H. Beck, 2012).Google Scholar
2 The largest project in the English language which has attempted to achieve this in recent years is titled Jewish Responses to Persecution which, as whole, has done less to find a new, more appropriate balance between various European macroregions than might have been hoped. See Matthäus, Jürgen and Roseman, Mark, eds., Jewish Responses to Persecution, Volume I, 1933–1938 (Lanham, Md.: AltaMira Press, 2010)Google Scholar; Garbarini, Alexandra with Kerenji, Emil, Lambertz, Jan and Patt, Avinoam, eds., Jewish Responses to Persecution, Volume II, 1938–1940, (Lanham, Md.: AltaMira Press, 2011)Google Scholar; Matthäus, Jürgen with Kerenji, Emil, Lambertz, Jan and Wolfson, Leah, eds., Jewish Responses to Persecution, Volume III, 1941–1942 (Lanham, Md.: AltaMira Press, 2013)Google Scholar; Kerenji, Emil, ed., Jewish Responses to Persecution, Volume IV, 1942–1943 (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015)Google Scholar; Wolfson, Leah, ed., Jewish Responses to Persecution, Volume V, 1944–1946 (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015)Google Scholar.
3 On this, see Stone, Dan, Histories of the Holocaust (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010)Google Scholar.
4 In a similar vein, Jeffrey Herf is correct to highlight in his new book the special moral odium of anti-Zionist politics in a German state after the Holocaust, but this should not make us overlook that the policies adopted by Eastern Germany were hardly nation specific. Herf, Jeffrey, Undeclared Wars with Israel. East Germany and the West German Far Left, 1967–1989 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).Google Scholar
5 The institute was partly based on the Warsaw Ghetto (Ringelblum) Archive and could also draw on Polish Jewish scholarly traditions from before the Holocaust. On the former, see Kassow, Samuel, Who Will Write Our History? Emanuel Ringelblum and the Oyneg Shabes Archive (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2007)Google Scholar. On the latter, see Natalia Aleksiun, Conscious History: Polish Jewish Historians before the Holocaust (forthcoming).
6 On dissident ‘counter history’ see Hallama, Peter and Stach, Stephan, eds., Gegengeschichte. Zweiter Weltkrieg und Holocaust im ostmitteleuropäischen Dissens (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2015).Google Scholar
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14 On the various lessons that have been drawn from the Holocaust, see Marrus, Michael, Lessons of the Holocaust (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015).Google Scholar
15 There are comparable examples in a wider context, such as Daniel Lee's recent book which emphasises the heterogeneity of Jewish communities and experiences in Vichy France. See Lee, Daniel, Pétain's Jewish Children (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, It might be worth clarifying here that in my new monograph I actually do the opposite in the sense that I centre the Jewish experiences of the period around the varied experiences of the Nazi genocide. However, I do attempt to reconstruct the conceptual universe of Hungarian Jews of the time and thereby aim to restore intellectual agency in a radical manner. See Laczó, Ferenc, Hungarian Jews in the Age of Genocide. An Intellectual History, 1929–1948 (Leiden: Brill, 2016)Google Scholar.
16 For a pioneering study of the interconnections between studies of the Holocaust and postcolonial thought, see Rothberg, Michael, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2009)Google Scholar.
17 Jockusch, Laura, Collect and Record! Jewish Holocaust Documentation in Early Postwar Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cesarani, David and Sundquist, Eric J., eds., After the Holocaust. Challenging the Myth of Silence (London: Routledge, 2012)Google Scholar. Once again, such newer studies on the early post-war years are not directly questioning the relevance and applicability of trauma discourses but can be seen as conscribing their reach by revealing important phenomena before and beyond it.
18 Stone, Dan, The Liberation of the Camps. The End of the Holocaust and Its Aftermath (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015)Google Scholar.
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24 See Kovács, Éva, Felemás asszimiláció. A kassai zsidóság a két világháború között (Somorja-Dunaszerdahely: Lilium Aurum, 2004)Google Scholar. In her book, Klein-Pejšová draws on Kovács's interview transcripts.
25 See, for example, Jelínek, Yeshayahu A., ‘In Search of Identity: Slovak Jewry and Nationalism, 1918–1938’, in Don, Yehuda and Karady, Victor, eds., A Social and Economic History of Central European Jewry (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1990), 207–28.Google Scholar
26 Her argument thus partly resonates with Alexander Maxwell's fundamental critique of Slovak national teleologies, see Maxwell, Alexander, Choosing Slovakia. Slavic Hungary, the Czechoslovak Language, and Accidental Nationalism (London: I.B.Tauris, 2009).Google Scholar
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29 For this, see the following (otherwise truly heterogeneous) recent publications: Wolfson, Leah, ed., Jewish Responses to Persecution, Volume V, 1944–1946 (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015)Google Scholar; Jockusch, Laura, Collect and Record! Jewish Holocaust Documentation in Early Postwar Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Stone, Dan, The Liberation of the Camps. The End of the Holocaust and its Aftermath (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015)Google Scholar; Cesarani, David, Final Solution: The Fate of the Jews 1933–1949 (London: Macmillan, 2015)Google Scholar; Snyder, Timothy, Bloodlands. Europe between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books, 2010)Google Scholar.
30 For a first attempt to explore these matters in depth, see Laczó, Ferenc and von Puttkamer, Joachim, eds., Catastrophe and Utopia. Jewish Intellectuals in Central and Eastern Europe in the 1930s and 1940s (Berlin: DeGruyter, 2017).CrossRefGoogle Scholar