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Explaining Auschwitz and Hiroshima: History Writing and the Second World War 1945-1990
by R. J. B. Bosworth
Review by: Chris Lorenz
History and Theory, Vol. 35, No. 2 (May, 1996), pp. 234-252
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the combination of determination and openness of action that arises from the
interplay of complex physiological, personal, and historical conditions? How
can we even conceive this sort of "mix"?Surprisingly, in Margolis's discussion,
the issue of causation in history does not even arise. But it must, as part of
the entire matter of how we embodied beings determine and are determined
in time. Much in how we understand historical events, and in how we understand
"radical history," will depend on what is learned, over the next years, by the
scores of folk, in the sciences and in philosophical psychology (and elsewhere),
who are intent on examining this question.
Joseph Margolis has given us a strikingly original and compelling book.
Clearly, no one expects that, at the present moment, any single person will
face, much less resolve, all the issues at the intersection of history and nature.
For all I know, with his remarkablephilosophical insight and prodigious energy,
Margolis has already dealt with some of them or is already at work on them
in his next book. My concern is, simply, that we see how crucial it is, in order
to complete the work of The Flux of History and the Flux of Science, that they
be addressed.
JOHN J. COMPTON
Vanderbilt University
Although historians usually claim to describe the past "as it really was," the
variety of their descriptions and their changes over time is one of the most
outstanding features of historiography. From the eighteenth century onwards
this feature of historiography has been explained by the variety of cultures
to which historians belong and their different and changing points of view.'
Huizinga's definition of history as "the mental form in which a culture accounts
for its past" catches this feature of pluriformity nicely.2
His definition is also useful because it focuses our attention on the plurifor-
mity of ways in which a culture can handle its past. In this respect Nietzsche's
distinction between the monumentalistic, the antiquarian, and the critical stance
vis a vis the past and the corresponding ways of accounting for it is still funda-
mental. His idea that all historiography is led by a mixture of these three impulses
1. Cf. R. Koselleck, "Standortbindung und Zeitlichkeit: Ein Beitrag zur historischen Erschlies-
sung der geschichtlichen Welt," in Vergangene Zukunft: Zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten
(Frankfurt am Main, 1979), 176-211.
2. J. Huizinga, Verzamelde Werken (The Hague, 1950), VII, 102.
3. E. Angehrn, Geschichte und Identitat (Berlin, 1985); J. Rfisen, Zeit und Sinn: Strategien
historischen Denkens (Frankfurt am Main, 1990); H. Nagl-Docekal, Die Objektivitat der
Geschichtswissenschaft: Systematische Studien zum wissenschaftlichen Status der Historie (Vienna
and Munich, 1982). Contrary to Nietzsche these authors never identified the perspectives on history
with history itself.
4. For the rudimentary state of comparative historiography see Grundlagen und Methoden der
Historiographiegeschichte, ed. J. Rilsen et al. (Frankfurt am Main, 1993), and I. Veit-Brause,
"Paradigms, Schools, Traditions: Conceptualizing Shifts and Changes in the History of Historiog-
raphy," in Storia delta Storiografia/Geschichte der Geschichtsschreibung 11 (1990), 50-65.
links the public resonance of the Fischerites in the late 1960s to the growing
power of the SPD and its new Ostpolitik (that initially infuriated so many
conservatives because of its acceptance of German partition and of Soviet he-
gemony in Eastern Europe). In the roaring 1970s conservative orthodoxy was
damaged beyond repair by the attacks of left-liberal and social-democratic
historians (inspired by Ralph Dahrendorf and led by the Bielefeld School).
According to them there had been a Prusso-German Sonderweg up until 1945,
whose cause had been the feudal, premodern character of German society in
general and the absence of modern political democracy in particular. They in
their turn came under attack in the 1980s by Anglo-Saxon neo-Marxists such
as Eley, Blackbourn and Evans, and Alltagshistoriker such as Detlev Peukert
and Lutz Niethammer who rejected their global diagnosis of "German feu-
dalism" and especially their exclusion of the perspective of "ordinary people."
In the aftermath of both controversies the orthodoxy gave way to a plurifor-
mity of perspectives and Bosworth makes no bones about the fact that he prefers
it that way, although he does not give this preference any philosophical defense.
Like the Dutch historian Pieter Geyl, he simply regards history as "an endless
discussion," although he is right to call attention to the fact that Geyl's practice
did not match his theory. Bosworth explains Geyl's inconsistency by the tension
between liberalism and nationalism that has manifested itself in historiog-
raphy -and not only within Dutch borders (14).
Bosworth devotes special attention to the influence of the Cold War on histo-
riographical developments in Germany and England - a war he aptly labels
"the Third World War," because in a meaningful sense it was a continuation
of the Second. For the Cold Warriorsin the West, the main ideological difference
between the Second and the Third World War was that in the Great Battle
between Democracy and Dictatorship, West Germany and Russia had changed
sides, putting communism back in its traditional place as Public Enemy Number
One. Bosworth interprets the "Historikerstreit" of 1986-1987 as conservative
German historians' last attempt to reanimate the Cold War in order to put
"Auschwitz" into perspective and to restore the German national past as a
historical monument. Germans, their argument ran, should be allowed to iden-
tify themselves again with their history and to "step out of Hitler's shadow."
National socialism was therefore again construed as the totalitarian twin of
communism, as it had been in the heyday of the Cold War. The major difference
between the "brown fascists" and the "red fascists" was that the latter were still
alive and kicking at the eastern gates of Europe. This "revival"of totalitarianism
in German historiography was part of the international conservative upsurge
of the Reagan/Thatcher era, though in Germany it also served the specific
German purpose of purging its traumatic past.
Although Bosworth is right to say that the conservative historiographical
offensive in Germany failed to achieve its direct objectives, it escapes his notice
that in hindsight it also can be regarded as a partial success. After the dust of
this struggle had settled, "Auschwitz" had lost much of its special status as an
In France and Italy, historiography after 1945 was more complex than in Ger-
many or England because it was not obvious whether Italy and France belonged
to the winners or the losers of the war. Next to De Gaulle's France there had
existed Vichy-France and next to Mussolini's Italy the Italy of The Resistance.
The end of the war had therefore been a complex affair, accompanied by civil
war just as in Yugoslavia and Greece. French and Italian historians long identi-
fied their countries with the victorious Allies, as did their political parties, from
right to left. (The French, of course, possessed the better credentials; France
had been allowed an occupation zone in Germany and a role in the Nuremberg
trials.) The reasons for this identification were the same reasons why Germans
collectively fled to their "refuge of amnesia" (183), their much-lamented Gesch-
ichtslosigkeit, that was to be legitimized by conservative intellectuals such as
Hermann LUibbein the 1980s as a necessary condition of postwar German
society. I"Rebuilding the national economy and society was simply much higher
on the postwar political agenda than historical truth and justice; even in 1995,
French President Mitterand's contacts with Chancellor Kohl still clung to this
priority. In France it was the 1970s before this identification - and the myth
of La Resistance could even be questioned. 12
It is not without significance for the societal role of the historical profession
that it was a filmmaker, not a professional historian, who broke the public
silence on this subject. Ophuls' film Le chagrin et la pitie (The Sorrow and the
Pity) portrayed the widespread French collaboration with Nazi Germany - a
collaboration that Gaullist France, too, preferred not to remember.'3 Neither
is it accidental that the two historians who documented the zeal of Vichy France
in carrying out German anti-Semitic policy- R. Paxton and M. Marrus- were
North-American and not French.
The French collective trauma that followed their unexpectedly rapid defeat
and the massive scale of their collaboration seemed to prevent French historians
from doing what Fischer and Taylor had done for their countries: to question
the national orthodoxy in historiography and to reflect on the painful issues
that had been repressed since 1945. Instead, the French intelligentsia developed
a conspicuous preference for la tongue duree in history and a striking aversion
towards political history as such (which was discredited as merely evenementiel
and inherently superficial). Bosworth convincingly interprets this French outil-
lage mentale as the intellectual repression of a national trauma, contributing
to the explanation of the miraculous success of the Annales approach in postwar
France. The same goes for the relativistic pose of postmodernism (with its
indifference to all moral differences), that more recent French success story of
postwar intellectual history. '4
11. H. Libbe, "Es ist nichts vergessen, aber einiges ausgeheilt," FrankfurterAllgemeine Zeitung
(January 14, 1983).
12. The remarkable consensus within the French political class to avoid conflicts on World
War II is also emphasized by Claus Leggewie in "Frankreichs kollektives Gedachtnis und der
Nationalsozialismus," in Diner, ed., Ist der Nationalsozialismus Geschichte?, 123-126. Even the
Dachau survivor Joseph Rovan and the Jewish politician Simone Veil, who had barely survived
the war, were part of this consensus.
13. Leggewie aptly labels the later capture of Klaus Barbie and his transport to France a Danaerg-
eschenk (a gift from the Greeks, like the one in ancient Troy) for the French political class, because
his trial forced them to confront their own conduct during World War II. It is no accident that
Barbie had not been pursued by the French state but by two French citizens, the Klarsfelds. Ophuils
thematized the Barbie trial in his fascinating and monumental documentary Hotel Terminus, but
this film falls outside the scope of Bosworth's study.
14. For a dispassionate analysis of postmodernism see E. Gellner, Postmodernism, Reason and
Religion (London, 1992).
15. According to another commentator, Italian historians offered more resistance to conserva-
tive revisionism than Bosworth acknowledges; cf. G. Rusconi, "Italienund der deutsche Historikers-
treit," in Diner, ed., Ist der Nationalsozialismus Geschichte?, 102-106.
16. The problematic relationship between understanding and judging the Nazi mass murder is
discussed by Martin Broszat and Saul Friedlander in "A Controversy about the Historicization of
National-Socialism," in Reworking the Past: Hitler, the Holocaust and the Historians'Controversy,
ed. P. Baldwin (Boston, 1990). See also S. Friedlinder, Memory, History and the Extermination
of the Jews of Europe (Bloomington, Ind., 1993), 64-102.
17. I. Buruma, The Wages of Guilt (London, 1994). Buruma gives a thorough analysis of the
ambivalent love-hate relationship between the Japanese Left and the US: although the Left was
thankful for the liberation from Japanese militarism, the US was at the same time blamed for
allowing the old elite to remain in political and economic power and for thwarting Japanese pacifism.
record. In contrast to Italy and Germany, Japan had known no fascist move-
ment, no fascist leader figure, no fascist takeover, no clear-cut fascist ideology,
and therefore no break with a pre-fascist past. Scrutinized more carefully the
most disquieting feature of Japan's modern history appeared to be the amazing
continuity of its authoritarian and nationalistic political system - before,
during, and after the war. The militaristic heritage was the only one not handed
down in the same form after 1945; Japan was no longer allowed an official army.
According to Bosworth it is this political continuity that explains why there
has been no clear "paradigm-shift" in the Japanese historiography of World
War II in contrast to England, Germany, France, and Italy. The dissenters
from the orthodoxy simply found (and still find) themselves more or less shut
out of the public sphere: they are only allowed to voice their "opinion" on
World War II in private or in the innocuous playgrounds of academe. Renewed
attempts in the 1980s by conservative politicians and historians to cleanse the
bloody spots of modern Japanese history -that even resulted in the unautho-
rized censoring of Bertolucci's film The Last Emperor, as Buruma describes -
have not therefore been effectively checked by a Japanese Historikerstreit, as
was the case in Germany.
earlier Russian wars against foreign intruders: this time, however, the Holy
Russian Fatherland was to save itself, guided by the genius of Stalin and the
Party.
According to Bosworth this interpretation of history is one of the two factors
that explain why the "long Second World War" lasted so much longer in the
USSR than anywhere else. It lasted so long because this undisputed image of
World War II history effected a legitimation of the Communist Party and State
that had a stronger hold on the people than the founding myth of The Revo-
lution and the rest of the Marxist-Leninist philosophy of history. This effective
legitimation was badly needed because the USSR harbored many very different
nations and different readings of history, every one of which embodied a poten-
tial source of conflict - especially because of the imperialistic origins and charac-
teristics of the immense state the Bolsheviks inherited from the Tsar. The history
of the former USSR territories since 1990 amply testifies to this fact.
The other explanatory factor of the length of the "long Second World War"
in the USSR is the immense trauma caused by this war. The sheer number
of Russian dead -estimated at 20 million, compared with 300,000 American
casualties - and the sheer scale of the destruction - some 1710 towns and 70,000
villages were completely destroyed by the Wehrmacht according to Soviet fig-
ures - reduced the western, southern, and Pacific fronts to "gentlemanlike side-
shows," as Bosworth so succinctly puts it (142). So the duree of the "long Second
World War" in the USSR had firm roots in actual events.
The only element of the official image of World War II that was subject to
change after Khrushchev's "thaw" of 1956 was the role Stalin had played, but
this discussion-in which Isaac Deutscher's Stalin biography (1949), Roy
Medvedev's Let History Judge (1971), and Solzhenitzyn's books on the Gulag
system played a major role-took place outside the USSR until perestroika
dislodged Stalin definitively. So in Soviet historiography, too, the actual ques-
tioning of historical orthodoxy was left to those outside the profession. Since
perestroika it has been unclear which interpretations of World War II history
will replace the old orthodoxy because chaos reigns supreme. The question of
how Stalin's war against his supposed internal enemies relates to the war against
his real, external enemies is, in any case, still waiting for answers.
Bosworth makes the interesting observation that perestroika reached histori-
ography comparatively late, long after novelists and filmmakers had taken the
lead. It confirms the international picture of the historical profession as predom-
inantly conservative in a very literal sense, that is, committed to the conservation
of the political status quo, whatever its color - brown, red, or purple. The
probable explanation for this inherent conservatism lies in the fact that most
professional historians are attached to, and fed by, the state. We ought not to
be too surprised that, to all historical appearances, such lofty intellectuals as
professional historians also obey the general rule of "Erst kommt das Fressen,
dann die Moral" (meals before morals)."8
18. For intellectual historians this should not come as a surprise anyway because in Europe
the institutionalization arid professionalization of history has gone hand in hand with the rise of
the nation-state and the nationalization of the masses through education in the nineteenth century.
The dependence of salaried intellectuals on the state was intended and recognized by the state.
Cf. F. Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins: The German Academic Community 1890-
1930 (Cambridge, Mass., 1969) for Germany, and P. den Boer, Geschiedenis als beroep: Deprofes-
sionalisering van de geschiedbeoefening in Frankrijk (1818-1914) (Nijmegen, 1987) for France.
19. The same criticism has been put forward against G. Iggers's famous New Directions in
European Ilistoriography (Middletown, Conn., 1975), which was also inspired by Kuhn.
20. The explanation for this surprising commonality is, again, to be found in Kuhn, whose
discontinuous conception of science has much in common with that of Bachelard and other French
historians of science. Cf. D. Lecourt, Pour une critique de l'e1pisteimologie
(Bachelard, Canguilhem,
Foucault) (Paris, 1974).
21. That Bosworth's explanation for the origins of the British welfare state in the war experience
has to be questioned on the basis of the international comparative record is another matter, not
addressed here. Cf. G. A. Ritter, Der Sozialstaat: Entstehung und Entwicklung im internationalen
Vergleich (Munich, 1991).
22. The most adequate recent treatment of comparative methodology is found in C. Ragin,
The ComparativeMethod: Moving beyond Qualitative and Quantitative Strategies (Berkeley, 1987).
is to locate the agents of change in their specific disciplinary fields and to analyze
their specific dynamics, as is the case in Pierre Bourdieu's sociology of science.23
To put it in a nutshell: the only way to locate the effects of politics on science
is to analyze the politics in science. And these two types of politics cannot be
reduced to one another because every field (economics, culture, science, or
politics) is characterized by its own set of rules or logic. Since Bourdieu's theory
of scientific fields specifies the basic rules of the game called science, including
a systematic explanation for the role of outsiders and "revolutionaries"in disci-
plines, this could help Bosworth to avoid the "incidentalistic"overtones of his
biographical approach. Although he is right to defend the importance of the
author vis a' vis postmodernism, his explanations would be strengthened, in
my opinion, if authors were systematically related to their positions in the
scientific field. Fritz Ringer's recent comparison of the German and French
academic communities could serve as an example of such a systematic inquiry,
including its use of Bourdieu's sociology of science.24
Another methodological problem is Bosworth's explanation of the historio-
graphical situation in a country -for instance, the hegemony of conservative
historians in Italy and Japan in the 1980s-by referring to the absence of a
factor that was present elsewhere (in this case, major historiographical contro-
versies, as in Germany).25This argument resembles the explanation of the
German Sonderweg by the absence of parliamentary democracy and can be
criticized on the same basis.26
23. P. Bourdieu, "The Specificity of the Scientific Field," in French Sociology: Rupture and
Renewal since 1968, ed. C. Lemert (New York, 1981).
24. F. Ringer, Fields of Knowledge: French Academic Culture in Comparative Perspective
1890-1920 (Cambridge, Eng., 1992).
25. With regard to Italy he suggests that there had been a "historians' quarrel," but that the
Right had won it, unlike in Germany. The explanandurn then is, of course, why the Right won
in Italy in contrast to Germany. With regard to Japan he simply observes the absence of controversies
A la Taylor and Fischer (184) and the absence of "paradigm-shifts" (186).
26. Cf. D. Blackbourn and G. Eley, The Peculiarities of German History: Bourgeois Society
and Politics in Nineteenth Century Germany (Oxford, 1989).
nizes that the end of the First World War can plausibly be interpreted as an
important origin of the Second, he prefers to locate the beginning of the "long
Second World War" for every country -outside the few parliamentary democ-
racies that functioned as such -"at that moment in which the various states
required their peoples' liberties be subordinate to their nationality" (6). His
apologies for the imprecise character of this definition do not obscure the fact
that this definition is based on the questionable premises that in the good old
prewar days "the people" were free, and the contradiction between nationality
and liberty was absent. One does not have to be a specialist in nationalism to
acknowledge that the principle of nationality, as it developed in the nineteenth
century from its cosmopolitan to its imperialist and xenophobic phase, had
everywhere been based on the exclusion of numerous ethnic and social groups.27
So although there undoubtedly is a marked difference between Italy before and
after 1922, and Germany before and after 1933, this difference should, in my
opinion, be characterized in terms other than those of a contradiction between
nationality and liberty, because nationalism had been illiberal for quite some
time.
27. Such diverse authors as Benedict Anderson and Eric Hobsbawm have stressed this "exclu-
sive" character of national communities. Cf. B. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on
the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London, 1991), and E. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism
since 1780 (Cambridge, Eng., 1990).
28. Cf. R. Vierhaus, "Rankes Begriff der historischen Objektivitdt," in Objektivitat und Partei-
lichkeit, ed. R. Koselleck et al. (Munich, 1977), 63-77.
29. This position has recently been elaborated by T. Ashplant and A. Wilson, "Present-centred
History and the Problem of Historical Knowledge," Historical Journal 31 (1988), 253-274.
argue against this view.33 One could question with Bosworth, for instance,
whether the "historicization" of World War II in Germany and Italy since the
1980s has not amounted to a victory for the conservative, "nihilistic" view
instead of a victory of scientific reason over the emotions of partisan contempo-
raries, as is usually suggested (137-141).
Bosworth's analysis of World War II historiography can also be used to
elucidate the pragmatic dimension of history. One could say that all history
of World War II is contemporary history because the primary interest of this
branch of history appears to be the presentation of acceptable historical identi-
ties. Moreover, the acceptability of historical identities related to World War
II appears to revolve around the moral question of guilt and responsibility, as
Bosworth has also noticed.34This relation between historical identity and ethics
explains why the questions of whether modern German history in general and
"Auschwitz" in particular were "unique"were so intensely debated in German
historiography; the same goes for the question why, in France and Italy, collabo-
ration with Nazi Germany was so long denied and why conservative Italian
historians were eager to dissociate fascism from Nazism (and thus from "Ausch-
witz"). At a more general level it explains why historians belonging to different
nationalities have produced such widely different reconstructions of World War
II and why so many foreign historians (such as Paxton and Marrus with regard
to France, and Smith in Italian historiography) have played a revolutionary
role in the Kuhnian sense. All these characteristics of World War II historiog-
raphy are explicable if we presuppose that the guiding principle of historians
is not truth per se, nor indeed the whole truth, but an acceptable truth.35
The limits of acceptability of statements, then, appear to be dictated not
only by factual considerations of an autonomous historical discourse, but also
by the normative considerations and expectations of the audiences addressed -
more specifically, of the expectations of the national political elites who "run"
the state and its education system. The crudest techniques for imposing a specific
"audience rule"36-direct censorship and appointments-can be observed in
Japan and the USSR, but the Germany, England, and France of the Cold War
also readily provide less crude (though no less effective) examples. Bosworth
33. According to Gadamer's Wahrheit und Methode (Tubingen 1960), partisan, "false" preju-
dices are filtered out over the passage of time. Therefore time is the carrierof truth and (as it was for
Hegel) time is productive of truth. Cf. C. von Bormann, "Die Zweideutigkeit der hermeneutischen
Erfahrung," in K-O. Apel et al., Hermeneutik und Ideologiekritik (Frankfurt am Main, 1973),
93-94. For Dutch historiography this historicist "standard view" is argued by J. C. H. Blom, In
de banvangoedenfout? Wetenschappelijke overde bezettingstijdin Nederland
geschiedschrijving
(Amsterdam, 1983).
34. Bosworth notes that the primary motor for historical revisionism in Germany and France
came from the postwar generation asking their fathers "What did you do in the war, Daddy?"
35. Cf. Appleby et al., Telling the Truth about History. I have analyzed this problem with
regard to modern German historiography in "Beyond Good and Evil? The German Empire of
1871 and Modern German Historiography," Journal of Contemporary History 30 (1995), 729-
765, and in "Einige Anmerkungen zum 'Historikerstreit'aus den Niederlanden," Zeichen 17 (1989),
8-12.
36. See my "Historical Knowledge and Historical Reality," 323-326.
has produced impressive historiographical evidence for the view that the open
competition of interpretations has been the only effective counterweight to this
practical problem of "doing history."
CHRIS LORENZ
Free University Amsterdam! University of Leiden
In fact, however, with the notable exception of Rosenstone in his essay about
filmed representations of the past, few contributors can be said to have moved
"outside their normal intellectual circuits"; and the diversity of "perspectives"
and "methods" is as evident in the questions posed and values asserted as in
the arguments developed and conclusions advanced. It follows that views about