| Abstract | These kinds of insights formed an integral part of the dazzling correspondence [Saul Friedl]änder conducted with the German historian Martin Broszat. In this, perhaps the exemplary, document of a tough, entirely candid, post-Shoah German-Jewish dialogue (of which more later), there arose the question of bias entailed in the respective "German" and "Jewish" national and scholarly representations of the Holocaust. As Friedländer put it there: "This issue...has not been openly dealt with up to now and it is important for all that it be brought to the surface and clarified." Broszat had argued that, given its victim status and background, "Jewish" historiography and memory, must perforce be "mournful and accusatory...a mythical form of remembrance" that had little to do with the rational, scholarly, "scientific" enterprise.(24) It is interesting that in his reply Friedländer did not point out the dubiousness of relating to scholarship in terms of its national background, as "German" or "Jewish." Instead, while accepting the likelihood of some Jewish bias, he generalized his transferential insight. "Wouldn't you agree," he pointedly asked Broszat, "that this German context creates as many problems in the approach to the Nazi era as it does, differently, for the victims?... If we see things from your perspective, why, in your opinion, would historians belonging to the group of the perpetrators be able to distance themselves from their past, whereas those belonging to the group of the victims would not?"(25) "For us," he concluded, "a kind of purely scientific distancing from the past, that is, a passage from the realm of knowledge strongly influenced by personal memory, to that of some kind of `detached history', remains, in my opinion, a psychological and epistemological illusion."(26)
I would suggest that Friedländer's emphasis upon this meta-level, what he calls the "undefined but clearly felt limits to interpretation," the need for "a sense of self-restraint about the available repertoire"(86) derives less from methodological or even historiographical concerns than from essentially moral ones. Nothing disturbs him more than "the danger of breaking the barrier of the imagination that is [Auschwitz]."(87) His insistence upon radical singularity has entailed adopting a strategy of what can be dubbed (in almost Adornian terms) as a kind of "negative incommensurability," a built-in resistance to meaning and lesson-drawing. He underlines that there is nothing commensurable with the enormity of the event that this past can teach us. Despite the many tomes seeking to do so, it does not significantly instruct us about the nature of "industrial society" or "modernity": the "linkages are kept at such a level of generality that they are irrelevant or the contradictions become insuperable."(88) And while it is easy to draw a universally valid significance from the Shoah, the "difficulty appears when this statement is reversed. No universal lesson seems to require reference to the Shoah to be fully comprehended."(89)
"Paradoxically," Friedländer writes, the very exceptionality of the Final Solution makes it "inaccessible to all attempts at a significant representation and interpretation," perhaps rendering it "fundamentally irrelevant for the history of humanity and the understanding of the human condition'."(90) Again, paradoxically, this incapacity to yield meaning -- a judgment which Friedländer notes "applies also to my own work"(91) -- flows either from a "blankness" or from what he terms "an excess," defined approvingly in Lyotardian terms as "'something [that] remains to be phrased which is not, something which is not determined'."(92) When Friedländer quotes Maurice Blanchot to the effect that "working through" consists of the effort "to keep watch over absent meaning" he is, in effect, defining a crucial part of his own project.(93)
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