Saul Friedländer
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Saul Friedländer (born 1932) is a French-Israeli historian. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Geneva in 1963.
Born in Prague, Czechoslovakia Friedländer grew up in France and survived the German Occupation of 1940-1944. From 1942 until 1944, Friedländer was hidden in a Catholic boarding school in the south of France posing as a Gentile. While in hiding, Friedländer suffered psychologically and for a time considered converting to Roman Catholicism. His parents attempted to flee to Switzerland, were arrested instead by Vichy French gendarmes, turned over to the Germans and were gassed at the Auschwitz death camp. Not until 1946 did Friedländer learn the fate of his parents. After 1946, Friedländer started to take pride in being a Jew and became a Zionist. In the late 1940s, Friedländer fought with the Irgun against the British and then the Arabs in the Israeli War of Independence. Late in the 1980s, Friedländer moved to the Left and was active in the Peace Now group.
Friedländer first rose to fame in the 1960s through biographies of Kurt Gerstein and Pope Pius XII. Friedländer sees Nazism as the negation of all life, and as a type of death cult. He has argued that the Holocaust is such a horrific event that its horror is almost impossible to put into normal language. Friedländer sees the anti-semitism of the Nazi Party as unique in history, as he maintains that Nazi Anti-Semitism was distinctive for being “redemptive anti-semitism”, namely a form of anti-semitism that could explain all in the world and offer a form of “redemption” for the anti-Semitic.
Friedländer is an Intentionalist on the origins of the Holocaust question. However, Friedländer rejects the extreme Intentionalist view that Adolf Hitler had a master plan going back to the time when he wrote Mein Kampf for the genocide of the Jewish people. Friedländer, through his research on the Third Reich, has reached the conclusion that there was no intention to exterminate the Jews of Europe before 1941. Friedländer's position might best be deemed moderate Intentionalist.
In the 1980s, Friedländer engaged in a spirited debate with the West German historian Martin Broszat over his call for the "historicization" of Nazi Germany. In Friedländer’s view, Nazi Germany was not and cannot be seen as a normal period of history. Friedländer’s 1997 book, Nazi Germany and the Jews was meant as a reply to Broszat’s work. Friedländer’s book is Alltagsgeschichte (history of everyday life), not of “Aryan” Germans nor of the Jewish community, but rather an Alltageschichte of the persecution of the Jewish community.
[edit] Work
- Pius XII and the Third Reich : A Documentation, New York : Knopf, 1966 trans. Charles Fullman, from the original Pie XII et le IIIe Reich, Documents, Paris: Editions du Seul, 1964.
- Prelude to downfall: Hitler and the United States 1939-1941, London, Chatto & Windus, 1967.
- Kurt Gerstein, the ambiguity of good, New York : Knopf, 1969.
- L'Antisémitisme nazi : histoire d'une psychose collective, Paris : Editions du Seuil, 1971.
- co-written with Mahmoud Hussein Arabs & Israelis : a Dialogue Moderated by Jean Lacouture, New York : Holmes & Meier Publishers, 1975.
- Some aspects of the historical significance of the Holocaust, Jerusalem : Institute of Contemporary Jewry, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1977.
- History and Psychoanalysis : an Inquiry Into the Possibilities and Limits of Psychohistory, New York : Holmes & Meier, 1978.
- When Memory Comes, New York : Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1979.
- Reflections of Nazism : an essay on Kitsch and death, New York : Harper & Row, 1984.
- Visions of apocalypse : end or rebirth?, New York : Holmes & Meier, 1985.
- Probing the limits of representation : Nazism and the "final solution", Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1992.
- Memory, history, and the extermination of the Jews of Europe, Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 1993
- Nazi Germany and the Jews, New York : HarperCollins, 1997.
[edit] References
- Baldwin, Peter Reworking the Past: Hitler, The Holocaust, and the Historians' Debate, Boston, 1990.
- Bauer, Yehuda Rethinking the Holocaust, New Haven [Conn.] ; London : Yale University Press, 2001.
