An Arduous Affair: Some Remarks About the Holocaust in German Historiography and Memory

ABSTRACT The Germans' awareness of the murder of the European Jews began with the liberation of the concentration camps by the Allies. From there, a complicated history leads, via the judicial confrontation with the crime and the establishment of the new discipline of Zeitgeschichte (contemporary history), to the TV event ‘Holocaust’ (1979), which marked a caesura not only for the German public, but also for historical scholarship. Of great importance was the mere fact that ‘Holocaust’ established a globally understandable term for what in German had until then only been referred to in the language of the perpetrators Endlösung (Final Solution) or Judenvernichtung (extermination of the Jews), or in a metaphorical manner (‘Auschwitz’). The intensified public and historiographical examination of the destruction of the European Jewry that followed ‘Holocaust’ also provoked political and cultural counterforces, and led to heated debates in the 1980s. The term Zivilisationsbruch (breach of civilization) introduced by Dan Diner in the wake of the Historikerstreit (historians’ dispute) marked the singularity of the Jewish genocide and influenced both the development of Holocaust historiography and the evolution of Holocaust memory. The article seeks to explore this impact by going back into the German and European history of research on and remembrance of the fate of the Jews in Europe during World War II – from its beginnings in the late 1940s up to the Stockholm International Forum on the Holocaust in 2000 and the years thereafter.