Collected Memories: Holocaust History and Post-War Testimony (George L. Mosse Series in Modern European Cultural and Intellectual History) [Paperback]

Christopher R. Browning (Author)

Book Description

Series: George L. Mosse Series | Publication Date: November 15, 2003

Christopher R. Browning addresses some of the most heated controversies that have arisen from the use of postwar testimony: Hannah Arendt's uncritical acceptance of Adolf Eichmann's self-portrayal in Jerusalem; the conviction of Ivan Demjanuk (acc

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George L. Mosse Series in Modern European Culture and Intellectual History

About the Author

Christopher R. Browning is the Frank Porter Graham Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and author of many books, including Ordinary Men, The Path to Genocide, and Nazi Policy, Jewish Workers, German Killers. In 2002 he delivered at the University of Wisconsin-Madison the first of the George L. Mosse Lectures, upon which this book is based.

Product Details

• Paperback: 120 pages
• Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press; 1 edition (November 15, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0299189848
• ISBN-13: 978-0299189846
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 6.3 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #953,402 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Christopher R. Browning is the Frank Porter Graham Professor of History at the University of North Carolina and the author of Ordinary Men and other outstanding works of Holocaust history. He lives in Chapel Hill.

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4.0 out of 5 stars Questioning Holocaust-Perpetrator and Holocaust-Survivor Testimonies; Jan T. Gross Methodology Challenged, September 20, 2009

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Jan Peczkis "Scholar and Thinker" (Chicago IL, USA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Collected Memories: Holocaust History and Post-War Testimony (George L. Mosse Series in Modern European Cultural and Intellectual History) (Paperback)

Let's begin with the oft-repeated "banality of evil". Browning suggests that Eichmann's impersonal-passive-role self-portrayal had been nothing more than one of his self-serving lies. (p. 10).

Browning, after repudiating the Holocaust deniers and their summary rejection of Holocaust-survivor testimonies, cautions: "Paradoxically, perhaps the most serious challenge in the use of survivor testimony as historical evidence is posed not by those who are inherently hostile to it but by those who embrace it too uncritically and emotionally." (p. 40).

Pointedly, Browning explicitly rejects the methodology of Jan T. Gross, in which survivor testimony is afforded privileged status, and accepted as the default-correct one (pp. 42-44, 84). He concludes that: "They will merely discredit and undermine the reputation and integrity of Holocaust scholarship itself." (p. 44). Gross' other notion (that Jews wouldn't falsely blame Poles for German crimes) flies in the face of evidence that wrongs done by neighbors are more intensely remembered than those of faceless foreigners. (p. 43). [Browning doesn't go deep enough. Polish Jews had largely been Germanophiles for many generations, and not a few of them were more anti-Polish than anti-German. In addition, Gross' methodology begs the question about Jewish-survivor testimonies that repudiate his thesis. See Peczkis review of The Warriors: My Life As A Jewish Soviet Partisan (Religion, Theology, and the Holocaust), and the link from there.]

Browning shows how Holocaust survivors often internalize what they heard about the Holocaust, especially commonly-repeated themes, and graft into their memories events that they never personally experienced. (p. 67, 82-84). [How many Pole-accusing events in Holocaust testimonies are actually the products of self-implanted memories derived from Polonophobic archetypical themes that exist in the Jewish community?]

At the Starochowice factory slave labor work camp, Jews who fell ill were not shot; they were allowed to recover and return to work. (p. 51). The Germans could be divided into the "dangerous" (or cruel), the "corrupt", and the few "decent." (p. 54). Unlike accounts of "greedy" Poles unwilling to return Jewish properties, the local Poles returned Jewish valuables entrusted to them (p. 56, 58), enabling their use in the often-successful bribing of the "corrupt" Germans. Eight Jewish accounts of Polish partisans allegedly offering to help a local Jewish uprising were based entirely on hearsay. (pp. 70-71).

At Starochowice, there existed a Judenrat-equivalent group of privileged Jews consisting of the Wilczek coterie. (pp. 56-57). They enjoyed noticeably better food, clothing and housing than other Jews, were free to travel to nearby towns, sold borrowed Jewish goods to Poles on the black market, and perhaps helped the Germans choose who was to die. Later, while on the train to Auschwitz, members of the Wilczek coterie were killed by other Jews in a vendetta (pp. 78-81; which was ironic in the sense that the Jews on this transport were not gassed: p. 83).

Analyzing all this, Browning remarked: "One of the saddest `lessons' of the Holocaust is confirmation that terrible persecution does not ennoble victims. A few magnificent exceptions notwithstanding, persecution, enslavement, starvation, and mass murder do not make ordinary people into saints and heroic martyrs." (p. 85). [This exculpation of negative Jewish conduct against fellow Jews should be used consistently, exculpating negative Polish conduct against Jews. (Don't forget: Poles were also victims!)]