How can you create meaningful narrative out of a jumble of past events, especially if the events are unimaginably horrible, rooted deep in history and living memory, and yet influenced by passing political trends? Historians face such questions all the time -- particularly when the subject is the Holocaust.
Two noted scholars will discuss how they grapple with these issues in "Problems in the Narration of History" on Monday, March 31, at 4:30 p.m. in the Whitney Humanities Center auditorium, 53 Wall St. The featured speakers will be Saul Friedlander, professor of history at the University of California at Los Angeles and at Tel Aviv University; and Benjamin Harshav, the Jacob and Hilda Blaustein Professor of Hebrew Language and Literature and professor of comparative literature. The discussion will be moderated by Michael Holquist, professor of comparative literature and of Slavic languages and literature. The event, which is free and open to the public, is sponsored in part by the Woodward Lectures.
Professor Friedlander is considered one of the leading contemporary historians of the Holocaust. His recently published book, "Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution 1933- 1939," is the first volume in a two-part series. The second volume will focus on "The Years of Extermination." A native of Prague, Professor Friedlander was a child during the Holocaust and spent those years hiding under a false identity in a monastery in Nazi- occupied France. He is editor of the journal "History and Memory: Studies in Representation of the Past." His books include "History and Psychoanalysis: An Inquiry into the Possibilities and Limits of Psychoanalysis," "Reflections on Nazism: An Essay on Kitsch and Death," and a personal memoir, "When Memory Comes." Professor Friedlander is currently a member of the historical commission to investigate the role of Switzerland during World War II.
In volume one of his latest book, Professor Friedlander describes the steady increase of anti-Jewish measures in Germany after the Nazis' rise to power in 1933, suggesting that there was no master plan for the destruction of the Jews from the outset. He uses new documentation to provide insight into the mentality of the Nazi leadership and lower-ranking party functionaries; members of the intellectual and professional elites; leaders of the financial world and the church; and the Holocaust victims themselves.
Professor Harshav takes a somewhat different approach to Holocaust studies. He applies literary theory and methodology to his study of historical narrative, comparing and contrasting the Nazi era with other 20th-century totalitarian systems, each of them governed by a small, powerful avant-garde. A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Professor Harshav was founder and director of the Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics and editor of the international journal Poetics Today. He has written "Language in Time of Revolution" and "The End of Jerusalem of Lithuania," forthcoming from Yale University Press, an annotated edition of Herman Kruk's chronicles of life in the Vilna ghetto and concentration camps 1939-44.