Postmodernism And Holocaust Denial

Deborah Lipstadt claimed that David Irving was a Hitler partisan wearing blinkers bending and manipulating evidence: the most dangerous spokesperson for Holocaust denial. Irving sued her and her publishers in a high profile case and lost.

Explores the idea that the questions postmodernism asks of history and historians are in fact strong weapons in combating Holocaust denial.

This book is the first sustained inquiry into the ways in which postmodern thinkers have grappled with the historical bases, implications, and methodological problems of the Holocaust. The book examines the thinking of Arendt, Levinas, Foucault, Lyotard, and Derrida, all of whom have recognized the centrality of the Nazi genocide to the epoch in which we live. The essays written for this volume constitute a wide-ranging study of the efforts of postmodernism to articulate the Holocaust.

Robert Eaglestone argues that postmodernism is a response to the Holocaust. He offers a range of new perspectives, including new ways of looking at testimony and at and recent Holocaust fiction; explores controversies in Holocaust history; looks at the importance of the Holocaust for recent philosophy; and asks what the Holocaust means for reason, ethics, and for being human.

How to Write About the Holocaust is a contribution to ongoing debates in historiography and Holocaust studies. More specifically, it combines the theoretical framework that has developed in historiography in the last half a century with the demands of Holocaust representation. The first part of the book analyzes the newest trends in theory of history, focusing especially on postmodernism, starting from the works of the American historian and theorist Hayden White and tracing the genealogy of the postmodern influence in history both from an epistemological and from a political perspective. The second part continues by incorporating these theoretical developments into specific written examples on the Holocaust. By analyzing major works about it, including Saul Friedländer’s and Dan Stone’s histories of the Holocaust, the book attempts to answer questions like: what is the most appropriate way to write about the Holocaust and what can theory teach us about the practice of history? To conclude, the volume explores the connection between history and literature and asks if the distinction between fact and fiction has become outdated.

Robert Eaglestone argues that postmodernism, especially understood in the light of the work of Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida, is a response to the Holocaust. This way of thinking offers new perspectives on Holocaust testimony, literature, historiography, and post-Holocaust philosophy. While postmodernism is often derided for being either playful and superficial or obscure and elitist, Eaglestone argues and demonstrates its commitment both to the past and to ethics. Dealing with Holocaust testimony, including the work of Primo Levi and Eli Wiesel, with the memoirs of 'second generation' survivors and with recent Holocaust literature, including Anne Michael's Fugitive Pieces, Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything is Illuminated and the false memoir of Benjamin Wilkomirski, The Holocaust and the Postmodern proposes a new way of reading both Holocaust testimony and Holocaust fiction. Through an exploration of Holocaust historiography, the book offers a new approach to debates over truth and memory. Eaglestone argues for the central importance of the Holocaust in understanding the work of Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida, and goes on to explore what the Holocaust means for rationality, ethics, and for the idea of what it is to be human. Weaving together theory and practice, testimony, literature, history, philosophy, and Holocaust studies, this interdisciplinary book is the first to explore in detail the significance of the Holocaust for postmodernism, and the significance of postmodernism for understanding the Holocaust.

This is a highly accessible introductory survey of historians' views about the nature and purpose of their subject and discusses the traditional model of history as an account of the past 'as it was'.

Marta Tomczok presents all Polish postmodern novels about the Holocaust, starting with “The First Splendor” by Leopold Buczkowski and ending with “The Suspected Dybbuk” by Andrzej Bart. She also presents their rich relationships with selected foreign-language prose, which intensified especially at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries. The culmination of the entire trend is a discussion around two novels: “Tworki” by Marek Bieńczyk and “Fly Trap Factory” by Andrzej Bart, which reveals the aestheticizing and post-memorial profile of Polish postmodernization and its advantage over the historiosophical trend. This monograph is not only the first such collection of post-Holocaust postmodern novels, but also the first comprehensive study of postmodernism in the literature about the Holocaust, which, thanks to comparative analysis, tries to analyze and explain the circumstances of the appearance and later disappearance of this trend from cultural landscape of the world and Poland.