| Abstract | It was also in May (25, to be exact) 1945 that Madame Fraenkel came to visit Paul-Henri Ferland. "I began by asking her if she had had news of my parents. She said no...." "If, let's say, your parents didn't come back...would you like to stay here?" "I don't know," he answered, "If I don't have anybody...I'd rather be with my family, but there isn't anyone...." "That's right!" Mrs. Fraenkel confirmed.(3) On another "gloomy day" soon after, Paul-Henri had another rendezvous, this time with Father L. "Didn't your parents die at Auschwitz?" he asked. And so, in an undistinguished side chapel, in front of an "obscure Christ," the sound and smells of "Auschwitz, the trains, the gas chambers" marked the soul forever.(4) This "prehistory of the self" is no less an objective history of the past.
For Friedländer the modern historian "history," from that which is experienced to that which is scientifically consumed and digested, is realized within a social-moral and a personal perspective which both contain and create meaning. Hence, the discovery of a positional commitment and an acknowledged self-awareness is for him a precondition of historical knowledge. The inevitable presence of perspective must not necessarily yield a "partisan account," just as meaning is not perforce absent from an "impartial account." On the contrary, a "position" must be consciously assumed if a point of view is to be reflected convincingly.(40) [Saul Friedl]änder's position was formed on the "twisted road" from "Auschwitz," by the "long trail of persecutions and death," with "the image of our death"(41) Whose death? Friedlnder does not tell us. Yet, one may speculate that had he meant the Jewish victims only, he would have written "our dead." Rather, it seems that for him "Auschwitz" was "our death" as a civilization, and it is from this wider perspective of the demise of humanity that he has been asking how and why did it come to be.
(57). Among the reviews, see: Fritz Stern, "The Worst Was Yet to Come," New York Times Book Review, 23 Feb. 1997; Walter Laqueur, "The Turn of the Screw," Book Review/Los Angeles Times, 23 Feb. 1997; Yehuda Bauer, "History of the Awful Everyday," Sefarim (in Hebrew), 12 Mar. 1997; Richard Evans, "Beginning of the End," Sunday Telegraph, 6 Apr. 1997; David Cesarani, "A Wagnerian View of Nazism," Financial Times (London), 3 May 1997; Gordon A. Craig, "Becoming [Adolf Hitler]," New York Review of Books, 29 May 1997; Daniel Johnson, "The Stab in the Heart," Times, 29 May 1997; Istvan Deak, "The Beginning of the End," New Republic, 11 and 18 Aug. 1997; Robert S. Wistrich, "The Road to Auschwitz," Commentary, July 1997; Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, "L'holocaust au quotidien," Le Figaro littéraire, 28 Aug. 1997.
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