ABSTRACT
“For all of us there is a twilight zone between history and memory” Saul Friedlander has written, quoting Eric Hobsbawm, “between the past as a generalized record which is open to relatively dispassionate inspection and the past as part of, or background to, one’s own life …” (1993: vii). But in a gentle departure from Hobsbawm and others, Friedlander has concluded that the opposition between memory and history is far from clear-cut. On the one hand, he concedes we must continue distinguishing between public memory and historiography, and that “the process involved in the molding of memory is, theoretically at least, antithetical to that involved in the writing of history. No poetic representation of a recent and relevant past has to be imagined as a continuum: the constructs of public-collective memory find their place at one pole, and the ‘dispassionate’ historical inquiries at the opposite pole. The closer one moves to the middle ground, that is, to an attempt at general interpretations of the group’s past, the more the two areas—distinct in their extreme forms—become intertwined and interrelated” (vii). Given his own personal history as so exquisitely wrought in When Memory Comes, this kind of historiographical positioning cannot come as a complete surprise. But until the first volume of his Nazi Germany and the Jews appeared, Friedlander had also kept the projects of personal memory and Holocaust history separate.
