| Abstract | In this essay, I would like to reflect narrowly on the ways [Saul Friedl]änder's integration of both the historian's and the survivor's voices into Holocaust historiography suggests the basis for an uncanny kind of history-telling in its own right: an anti-redemptory narrative that works through, yet never actually bridges, the gap between a survivor's "deep memory" and historical narrative.(6) For like Friedländer, I find that it may be the very idea of "deep memory" and its incompatibility with narrative that constitutes one of the central challenges to Holocaust historiography. Like Friedländer, I am also troubled by the near-blanket exclusion of the survivor's memory from normative histories of the Holocaust. This is why I ask here what can be done with what Friedländer has termed the "deep memory" of the survivor, that which remains essentially unrepresentable. Is it possible to write a history that includes some oblique reference to such deep memory, but which leaves it essentially intact, untouched and thereby deep? By extension, what role, if any, might the survivor's deep memory play in writing the history of the Shoah?
As an example of deep memory, Friedländer refers to the last frame of Art Spiegelman's so-called "comic book" of the Holocaust, Maus, in which the dying father addresses his son, Artic, with the name of Richieu, Artie's brother who died in the Holocaust before Artie was even born.8 The still apparently unassimilated trauma of his first son's death remains inarticulable -- and thereby deep -- and so is represented here only indirectly as a kind of manifest behavior. But this example is significant for Friedländer in other ways as well, coming as it does at the end of the survivor's life. For Friedländer wonders, profoundly I think, what will become of this deep memory after the survivors arc gone. "The question remains," he says, "whether at the collective level...an event such as the Shoah may, after all the survivors have disappeared, leave traces of a deep memory beyond individual recall, which will defy any attempts to give it meaning."(9) The implication is that, beyond the second generation's artistic and literary representations of it, such deep memory may be lost to history altogether.
The problem, according to Friedländer, is that "most historians approaching the subject have dealt either with descriptions of the background or with narrations of the Shoah, never, to my knowledge, with an integrated approach to both."(10) What seems to be missing is history-telling that includes both the voice of the historian and the memory of survivors, commentary and overt interpretation of events that deepen the historical record and resist "hasty ideological closure." In response to this perceived void in Holocaust historiography, Friedänder proposes a historiography whose narrative skein is disrupted by the sound of the historian's own, self-conscious voice, the introduction of what Friedländer calls "commentary" into the narrative. "Whether this commentary is built into the narrative structure of a history or developed as a separate, superimposed text is a matter of choice," he says, "but the voice of the commentator must be clearly heard." In most cases, this commentary will probably be that of the self-aware historian, and it will serve to "disrupt the facile linear progression of the narration, introduce alternative interpretations, question any partial conclusion, withstand the need for closure."(11) Unlike other historians who grow restive at the sound of their own voices, anxious that their implied subjectivity seems to undercut any sense of disinterested authority, Friedänder aims to mark just this interestedness. In so doing, he would restore the historian's reasons for writing such history to the historical record.
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