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The Politics of Memory: The Journey of a Holocaust Historian Paperback – January 4, 2002

by Raul Hilberg (Author)
4.6 4.6 out of 5 stars 25 ratings
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This is the poignant memoir of a man who has spent most of his lifetime immersed in the evidence of one of the great horrors in human history. It is both a record of how it affected him and a revelation of the surprising ways in which his monumental work was received by his contemporaries. Even after thirty-five years, Raul Hilberg’s The Destruction of the European Jews remains the most distinguished and comprehensive analysis of the Nazi destruction process. Yet at the time it was written, as Mr. Hilberg recounts in The Politics of Memory, both the manuscript and its subject matter were rejected by major publishers and university presses; and in the wake of publication the author faced a hostile reception from those who refused to believe that the Jews were less than heroic in their journey to the gas chambers. How his study was used and abused―especially by Hannah Arendt, Lucy Dawidowicz, and Nora Levin―draws Mr. Hilberg’s attention, as does the more admiring reception for Destruction in Europe than in America. The Politics of Memory brings full circle a scholarly enterprise that in many ways has been a terrible calling.
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  1. Print length
    208 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    Ivan R. Dee
  4. Publication date
    January 4, 2002
  5. Dimensions
    5.42 x 0.57 x 8.28 inches
  6. ISBN-10
    1566634288
  7. ISBN-13
    978-1566634281
  8. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

Review

I would never have thought that such an artless book would impress me so deeply -- Ralph Giordano ― Profil

Extraordinarily reserved... but under the surface it is seething. -- Christian Meier ― Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

Hilberg's memoirs allow the reader to fathom what sort of isolation awaits those who choose such a topic for their life's work. -- Hans-Martin Lohmann ― Frankfurter Rundschau

Much more than an autobiography...It is about academic ethos and political manipulation. -- Georg Rigele ― Die Presse

About the Author

Raul Hilberg is professor emeritus of history at the University of Vermont and author of The Destruction of the European Jews, Perpetrators Victims Bystanders, and Sources of Holocaust Research. He lives in Burlington, Vermont.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Ivan R. Dee; 1st edition (January 4, 2002)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 208 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1566634288
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1566634281
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 8 ounces
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.42 x 0.57 x 8.28 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.6 4.6 out of 5 stars 25 ratings

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Raul Hilberg

Raul Hilberg

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Customer reviews

4.6 out of 5 stars
25 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Karl Wecker
5.0 out of 5 stars A "must have" for admirers of Hilberg
Reviewed in the United States on May 21, 2022
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Raul Hilberg's work has been tremendously influential and, of course, controversial. "Politics of Memory" gives the reader considerable insight into the struggles of the author in the creation, and defense, of his work. The book's style can be a little 'dense' in spots, but Hilberg gives you your money's worth. Though he obviously cares deeply for the subject, he never sinks to back-biting or petulance in defense of his work. His arguments are well-reasoned and informative. Any admirer of Hilberg would do well to buy this book.
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C. B. Bergin
5.0 out of 5 stars Satisfied.
Reviewed in the United States on May 13, 2021
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Product delivered on time and as described.
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JLZ
5.0 out of 5 stars Mirror of a Holocaust historian.
Reviewed in the United States on June 2, 2017
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Extraordinary autobiography with the lights and shadows of the run of the most important historian of the Holocaust.
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Lea Nardo
4.0 out of 5 stars Really interesting musings of a top historian
Reviewed in the United States on October 18, 2013
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It shows what a breakthrough it was to study perpetrators and not just victims. Good for scholars and people interested in history.
3 people found this helpful
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professortruth
5.0 out of 5 stars It doesn't get any better than Hilberg's writing
Reviewed in the United States on February 19, 2017
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Raul Hilberg (whom I've met) is outstanding author on Jewish history and the Holocaust
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RGK
5.0 out of 5 stars I recommend this is anyone interested in WWII history
Reviewed in the United States on June 7, 2017
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It was a good read, not a happy one, but informative.
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Arthur Miller
5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
Reviewed in the United States on December 2, 2014
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A very profound work by one of the giants in Holocaust history.
2 people found this helpful
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James R. Gilbert
5.0 out of 5 stars My assessment of the book. Months after I read it.
Reviewed in the United States on March 15, 2017
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I don't remember.
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Top reviews from other countries

Heifetz Listener
5.0 out of 5 stars Private memoirs of the world's greatest authority on the Holocaust.
Reviewed in India on November 6, 2019
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Raul Hilberg was the foremost authority on the destruction of the European Jews. Anyone who has read his work should read this autobiographical work as well. It shows how it is not enough to produce a great work of scholarship. Many are not able to accept the truths it might unfold, particularly those in authority in the international Jewish community.
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Druth
5.0 out of 5 stars no surprises here
Reviewed in Canada on April 20, 2015
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I appreciated this book. It's not one that can be "enjoyed" because it is quite a dark reflection on what sounds like a thankless career.
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anon
5.0 out of 5 stars One of the great Western historians of all time writes a memoir
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 5, 2016
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One of the great Western historians of all time writes a memoir.

Its concise, elegaic, quite blunt, keeps the personal to a minimum. Its mainly the autobiography of an intellectual quest which continued over 40 or 50 years. There is a minimum of personal information or feeling about anything else. He marries at some point, but does not say to who, does not write about his family, and there is no account of any relationships which don't bear on his work. The curious will miss this, but it doesn't make the book any less interesting, its just a different interest from what one finds in the usual autobiography.

What motivated Hillberg was the drive (I first wrote 'desire' but it is far stronger than that) to understand and explain exactly how it was done. And to this everything else was subordinated, personal pride, expression of feeling, convenience. There are only a few occasions when he allows personal feeling to have influenced him - one in his reluctance to go to Germany, his account of being put up in rather wretched accommodation by his German publisher, who was himself living and working on an absolute shoe-string. When he meets with frustration and refusal of access to archives in Jerusalem.

He obviously feels a very deep anger about the Holocaust (a term he carefully avoids), and this led him to avoid Germany for many years. But when it comes to correcting his mistakes, having them pointed out to him by others, he simply seizes on this instantly. There is no holding on to points of view out of pride. There is a sense of anger or regret or irritation with himself for not having seen correctly to start with.

He is quite openly acerbic about some people who did not meet his standards - either because of their concealed complicity in the events, or because, like Arendt, of what he sees as their unwarranted assumption of superiority and their use of his work without giving proper credit or because of their reluctance to accept what he had discovered and written. Arendt, to be fair, and as he says, did give credit in her second edition.

He's also generous in his recognition of some others. The greatest praise he can give of another historian or reviewer is to say that they have read his work carefully and written a review which shows they have thought hard and objectively about it. For him, intellectual honesty and rigor are the qualities that really matter, at least in the sphere that he limits himself to in this memoir.

Get it and read it carefully. You need to read Hillberg slowly, because as he notes, the writing is very concise, the words chosen with great care. It is an odd experience, its like reading one of our great novelists in which there is a sort of double vision. The prose seems at first very flat, and yet one is always coming across sentences which demand to be read again, when they turn out to have implications that go beyond the simple facts they recount.

An example is his account in the Destruction first volume of how the Swiss close their borders, and he quotes their horrified explanation that the reason is they did not want to be swamped by Jews. As many as 47 had entered one day last week, an official writes. It is worthy of Swift.

At the end you might expect some summary or explanation of what he has learned, what he thinks the explanation is. You don't get it. He mentions Rwanda and clearly thinks it was the same sort of thing. The most striking thing however is in his story of giving talks in Germany. A young woman crystalises the question which is behind a lot of less concisely phrased questions on the same subject, asking him 'Why did we do it?'

He does not know. He knows how it was done, and who did what in it. But he is, as he might drily say, not a philosopher but an historian, and he doesn't make judgments on the human soul or its passions, he records what humans have done.

His work will be, like Gibbon, read three hundred years from now, and this memoir too will be read, like Gibbon's autobiography. How that extraordinary work came to being is something that will interest readers as long as Western civilisation exists.
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IntoTheDialectic
5.0 out of 5 stars If interested in Israel, Palestine and Finkelstein's early research, Hilberg is essential.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 25, 2011
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I became interested in Hilberg after he defended Norman Finkelstein's controversial studies of the exploitation of the Holocaust and the cynical manipulation of the Israel lobby in exaggerating charges of `anti Semitism' to deflect criticism of Israel.

Hilberg stood by Finkelstein when he was being vilified by large sections of the academic and publishing establishment in America and Europe. Hilberg gave Finkelstein the stamp of authenticity and respectability, when his research was being attacked as `scandalous' and `anti Semitic.'

When readers saw Hilberg supporting Finkelstein -- they knew that Finkelstein was also to be trusted and believed.

Hilberg's autobiography is sparingly written, with a disciplined, unsentimental and unadorned style, yet with hints of dark humour and undertones of skepticism and detachment.

The narrative and prose give the reader insight into the immigrants' experience, as Hilberg describes his life as a young man who clearly enjoyed `being American', but never fully seems to have integrated into society. Throughout, he appears as an outsider, looking in on American culture as well as that of the immigrant, and also looking at a rootless diaspora consciousness, a state of being he occasionally gently mocks, and occasionally empathises with and relates to.

Throughout, the reader senses Hilberg's deep yearning, and a deep sense of loss: loss for his European identity (destroyed by the Nazis), loss of his German culture, which he clearly respects (Goethe, Heine, Kant) but no longer feels he can entirely accept; loss of his family (his entire family identity and role was altered after the Holocaust), and perhaps, one may speculate, loss of a full sense of belonging on the earth.

We get very little insight into life with his wife and children, who are barely mentioned in the book ( he makes passing reference to his divorce in his 40's, and his children reading his texts before publication ), though he gives us a lot of information about the psychological state of his parents, and how that effected him.

Hilberg dismisses nearly all the Holocaust studies as shallow, derivative and of little value, though he does repeatedly praise the World War Two studies of the English historians, emphasising their scrupulous research. Browning and Hugh Trevor Roper are noted as producing worthy studies. Hannah Arendt is dismissed as shallow and derivative in her work , and Hilberg appears surprised at her appeal, which he puts down to a need after the war to view Nazism and Communism as being almost identical forms of evil, albeit appearing to be opposites. Hilberg states that Arendt filled a need in people who wanted to understand how such evil could have arisen amongst such cultured and sophisticated people, but he is not satisfied with her explanations, and dismisses Arendt's notion of the `banality of evil' as being wholly insufficient. Hilberg is also somewhat critical of the attitude of many of the Holocaust study and memorial centres in Israel, many of whom seem to take exception to Hilberg's theories, writings and ideas.

Hilberg emerges from these pages as a very solitary figure, a lonely man with a stoic attitude to his fleeting life as it unfolds, aware of transience and the passing nature of things, but also determined to steer his existence as best he can toward a state of quiet dignity, and to ensure his life's work is faithful to those who died at the hands of the Nazis.

Norman Finkelstein wrote the following in tribute to Hilberg when he died in 2007 :

"Whenever I ventured to write something on the Nazi holocaust I would again peruse all the volumes ( of Hilberg's first book) cover to cover. They provided the psychological security I needed before daring to render a judgment of my own. Wanting to stand on the firmest possible intellectual foundations I reflexively reached for Hilberg...
Character not ideology... is the better measure of a person...Primo Levi originally titled his memoir of Auschwitz If This is a Man. Of Raul Hilberg it might be said, There went a man."
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J. J. Bradshaw
5.0 out of 5 stars Beautifully melancholic
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 2, 2013
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This book was made a slightly odd impression on me as it is simultaneously sad and melancholic yet ultimately uplifting in its story of Hilberg's persistence in championing truth and integrity even when the personal cost was loneliness and rejection. The whole book is suffused with a deep sadness and throughout there is a sense that whilst Hilberg attained a mastery of the "what" and "how" of the holocaust he spent a lifetime searching for yet failing to discover the "why". A very personal book it shines a light onto the inner thoughts and anger of a historian whose greatest work is notable for its measured tones and neutral language. One of the uplifting aspects of the book is Hilberg's journey from an anger at Germany and Germans to coming to feel welcomed and appreciated there and his recognition of the inquisitive nature and openness to his ideas in the post war generations. Personal reasons for his anger is made plain when he gives the story of his own family and recounts those who were killed. The book goes from his early life, his journey to America and his memories of the steady erosion of Jewish freedoms in the Austria of his youth to a history of history. The story of his struggle to write and then publish his master work "The Destruction of the European Jews" is probably a story which should be read by anybody considering an academic career investigating subjects outside the academic mainstream and which are politically sensitive. The financial struggles, rejection and passions aroused when the book finally was published are both disappointing in terms of what they reveal of the attitudes of academia and the publishing houses yet also left me feeling a wonderful sense of admiration for Hilberg's tenacity and courage in persisting with a project which was clearly much, much more to him than simply writing about events of the past. He offers opinions on some of the other historians of the holocaust, some of which reveal the anger he still felt towards some of those who criticised and attacked his ideas. Of particular note are his opinions on Hannah Arrendt and her idea of the banality of evil which are rather negative. The book opens and closes with reflections on how his book "Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders", which both set the scene for what follows and finish by illustrating Hilberg's personal and professional journey through his life of studying the holocaust. The book is wonderfully written and at the end I was deeply saddened that I had reached the end, it is a book which anybody with an interest in the holocaust or who takes enjoyment in reading the thoughts and ideas of intelligent and articulate individuals should read.
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