Joseph Wulf and the Path Not Taken: The Turn from Writing Jewish History in Yiddish to Writing Nazi History in German

Abstract:Before Joseph Wulf gained renown as a pioneering Holocaust historian in postwar Germany, he attempted to establish himself as a Holocaust historian in the Yiddish-speaking community of postwar France. In 1952, however, he left Paris and the world of his fellow survivors to settle in Berlin. Of the Holocaust survivors who turned to writing the Jewish history of the Holocaust in Yiddish immediately after World War II, only one—Wulf—turned yet again to become a German-language historian of the Nazis. The question is why. In addition to well-known personal factors, a close reading of Wulf's Yiddish writings from 1946 to 1952 reveals the scholarly impetus for his departure: his approach to writing Holocaust history diverged in every significant respect from the already evolving norms of Yiddish Holocaust historiography—and pointed instead toward the new beginning he created for himself in Berlin. This article proposes, for the first time, to recover and discuss Wulf's postwar Yiddish writings in the context of his contemporaries' historical works in Yiddish.