Abstract
Alon Confino, Foundational Pasts: The Holocaust as Historical Understanding, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2012; 192 pp.; £15.99 pbk; ISBN 9780521736329.
Confino’s short Foundational Pasts is a masterpiece, a sublime and thought-provoking book which challenges us to think differently not just about the Holocaust but about the ways in which we conceptualize History. It is impossible for me to do justice to all of the different ideas and intersections that Confino highlights in the following review, so I will confine myself to describing the book and then thinking through its particular resonances for just one area of contemporary concern in Holocaust studies – the relationship between Holocaust history and historiography and the legacies of European colonialism. Confino begins from the premise that there are certain conceptual categories in Holocaust histories that have grown to such dominance that our ways of thinking about the Shoah have become a form of ‘interpretive common sense’. Holocaust studies has been defined, as we all know, by ritualized agonizing over the possibilities of representation alongside a bewildering growth in those historical representations that we fear are impossible. As a consequence, and especially with the (re)turn to the local in Holocaust studies, we accumulate more and more facts about the Holocaust in a process which Confino characterizes as ‘accompanied by diminishing interpretive return’ (41). The book is a call for new ways of thinking about the Holocaust, in particular within cultural history. The challenge here is to account for ‘what the Nazis thought was happening’ in their ‘millenarian battle against the Jew’ (44). That Confino has to ask this question 50 years after Raul Hilberg first published The Destruction of the European Jews suggests that his call to understand the Holocaust as lived experience remains unfulfilled.
At the same time as offering a vision of the future of Holocaust history and historiography, Confino also provides an acute analysis of their development thus far up to and including Saul Friedlander’s Years of Extermination. Confino reads the history of Holocaust historiography against another ‘Foundational Past’ in the French Revolution, noting the ‘intriguing similarity in their basic narrative framework’ (47). In this single observation Confino articulates simply and brilliantly the essential and unbreakable relationship between our efforts to understand the past and the act of writing History. This is a book that has much wider resonance than just for scholars of the Holocaust.
If the production of a manifesto for the future of Holocaust historiography and an interpretation of its development were not enough for one short book, Confino also manages to offer an interpretation of the Holocaust too. Fulfilling the call for the turn to cultural history, he suggests that we should concentrate on the creative destruction of the Holocaust (and the periods that preceded the Shoah) and the visions of a German world free of Jews that were constructed by and alongside National Socialism. The Holocaust was not in that sense a break from German history, but its product: ‘the Holocaust happened only because there were words, images and concepts to articulate and conceive of it’ (80). As such the Holocaust was not ‘unimaginable’ as we often rhetorically proclaim but ‘imaginable’ (emphasis added, 88).
Throughout Foundational Pasts then Confino wrestles with the question of the relationship between the Shoah and wider European history – both through its relationship with ‘modernity’ and with the colonial past. I don’t agree with his claim that the idea that the Holocaust is the consequence of modernity has become conventional wisdom – in part because it is so vociferously rejected by scholars within contemporary debates about the relationship between the Shoah and colonialism. Yet at the same time one can readily accept Confino’s warnings against ‘the perfect story’ that leads from the Enlightenment to the Holocaust, in the same way that one ought to be fearful of any metanarrative in historical causation.
Confino is absolutely correct to argue against the tendency to suggest that to locate the Holocaust inside the framework of European colonial history is to provide the key to its understanding. I accept entirely that the idea of Nazism as a colonial enterprise works for understanding Eastern Europe as a California in Europe but tells us very little about the desire and effort to deport Jews from Rome to Auschwitz. But at the same time I was struck throughout by the similarities between Confino’s designation of the Holocaust within cultural history and some aspects of European colonialism as cultural history.
Towards the end of Foundational Pasts Confino argues that Nazism was an act of radical creation: the destruction of the Jewish world in order to make way for a new Nazi world to come. As I have recently become a student of the destructiveness of the British Empire in Australia, I was struck by how such a conceptualization could help us understand that past too. That was also (although over a much longer period) an act of radical creation – the destruction of an indigenous world, replaced by a British future that offered redemption. This is of course not to say that this is the only way to understand the Holocaust but it is to represent my own personal journey through this Foundational Past. One is once again reminded that we cannot separate what we know about the past from the ways in which (we have got to) know it.
This is just how I read Foundational Pasts; you will and should read it differently. But most of all, you should read it.