ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the development of Hayden White’s thought around the Holocaust beginning with his 1982 article “The Politics of Historical Interpretation”. This text is of the utmost importance both for understanding the development of White’s epistemological and political project and for connecting the postmodern thought with the Holocaust historiography. In it, White summarized his earlier conclusions on the evolution of historical thought and tested them on a sensitive moral and political subject, in order to prove that metahistorical considerations cannot lead to any form of denial of the historical truth. His ideas were challenged in praxis some years later by the Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg in a fierce academic debate that lasted three years. The exchange of opinions between these two significant historians is particularly interesting because, among other things, it highlighted the moral limits of too relativistic an approach and the danger of revisionism in the form of the Holocaust denial – a danger of which White was well aware. White has successfully defended his theories by developing his ideas on modernist writing and making clear the connections between the historical and the literary texts but had to compromise some of his more political views, concerning the freedom of historians and their role in constructing their narratives. His later debates with Saul Friedländer have been paradigmatic in the way his theoretical assumptions could be used in praxis, and, therefore, the chapter will end with an analysis of the latter’s work on the Holocaust and his Whitean influences.
