I have asserted that, for many if not most historians, to historicize means to contextualize. Certainly, historical understanding requires contextualization even if the latter is problematized in certain ways and seen as a necessary rather than sufficient condition of a self­critical historiography that acknowledges the importance of self­understanding in the attempt to make one’s assumptions explicit and to work critically through a relation to the past. In this respect, Mayer’s book presents the reader with a curious asymmetry: it attempts to explain the Holocaust through a superabundance of contextual information in support of a specific explanatory thesis about the past, but it makes no sustained attempt to contextualize itself by situating its argument in the contemporary controversy that reached a provisional climax in the so-called historians’ debate (Historikerstreit).

This asymmetry is itself highly significant. Mayer’s approach reinforces the view that the historian should write history and engage only in very limited ways in critical self-reflection about the way history is written. Critical self-reflection, especially when it is not restricted to the discrete “think piece” but included within a “proper” history, may be seen as narcissistically self-indulgent or symptomatic of a “descent into discourse.”2 My own view is that one must combine the roles of historian and critical theorist or at least see them as tensely interactive and, in the best of circumstances, mutually supportive. Indeed, this combination should improve the quality of both history and criticism. One debilitating binary opposition that has had widespread currency in professional historiography draws a decisive contrast between those who write history and those who write about writing it. The former are often seen as the “real” or “working” historians. The latter may at times be objects of a litany of aspersions ranging from the charge of succumbing to the dreaded wiles of meta­history to that of perpetrating something analogous to welfare chiseling. This view often assumes a truncated idea of history relying on further extreme oppositions (for example, between events and texts — as if texts were purely manipulable figments of the imagination and not themselves historical events intricately related to other events). It also may induce the charge that those who criticize certain assumptions are all relativists and proponents of the belief that “anything goes”—a charge that may attest to the accuser’s “anything goes” proclivity not to read carefully and distinguish between those lumped together and castigated under convenient but misleading labels.3

The concentration on past contexts in abstraction from their relation to present problems and debates has the function of enhancing a sense of pure objectivity in the representation and explanation of the past. This deceptive “objectivity-effect” should be distinguished from a defensible mode of objectivity achieved in and through an explicit, theoretically alert resistance to projective or wish-fulfilling tendencies and an attempt to engage critically the problem of one’s relation to the past. Indeed, an objectivity-effect may accompany a concealed tendency to enact projective or wish-fulfilling tendencies in the very way the past is objectified.

Concentrating on objectified and abstracted (or “split-off”) past contexts also confines understanding to a purely interpretive or contemplative role that blocks sustained consideration of the problem of the implication of the interpreter in both the object of interpretation and in contemporary discussions of it. Such dissociated concentration also functions to obviate the need to attend to the issue of the mediated relation between understanding and sociopolitical practice. Moreover, it restricts one’s exchange with the past to a monologue in which the “voices” or perspectives of those one studies function at best as mere illustrations or evidence for a thesis but cannot be made to challenge the interpretation or explanation one places on them. Finally, the diminished or virtually nonexistent sense of one’s implication in what one studies and in a contemporary context of circumstantial constraints and intellectual controversies obscures the problem of the subject-positions of the historian that relate his or her individual perspective or voice to social problems and possibilities. At most the problem of subjectivity is seen in excessively personal terms, confined to a paratext (for example, a preface or coda), and isolated from the narrative or argument of the principal text that furnishes the substantive account of the past. The result of these one-sided procedures seems so questionable in Mayer’s case that it may generate doubts about standard modes of objectivist contextualism in less controversial areas of research. It raises both the problem of the relation between the historian and the object of study and the question of how one should confront that relation in research that is both meticulously documented and responsibly self-critical.4

What are some salient components of the largely absent contemporary context in Mayer’s text? I have addressed dimensions of this context in the preceding chapter, and I shall not repeat here my argument on the historians’ debate. I shall simply remind the reader that I tried to raise the issue of how one should negotiate transferential relations to the object of study whereby processes active in it are repeated with more or less significant variations in the account of the historian. I also suggested that the Holocaust presents the historian with transference in the most traumatic and disconcerting form conceivable. Here I need simply reiterate that I am using the concept of transference in a broad and relatively nontechnical sense to refer to the problem of the at times extremely charged or “cathected” implication of the historian in the processes he or she studies. The specific feature of this implication that I insist upon is the tendency to displace—that is, to repeat in variable and often disguised form—aspects of those processes in one’s account of them. I think this broad sense of transference may be found in Freud’s texts, but in Freud and in subsequent psychoanalytic thinkers it is often overshadowed if not obscured by the restriction of transference to the one-on-one clinical relation of analyst and analysand as well as its explanation in terms of the Oedipal complex. The rethinking of the concept in a broader context and with less assured explanatory mechanisms may enable one to shed new light on historiographic debates that have tended to get bogged down in standard binary oppositions between objectivity and subjectivity, universalism and relativism. But the concept of transference is not in and of itself explanatory; it does not solve problems but indicates their presence, and the processes to which it points either happen blindly (even at times when they are denied) or are confronted with more or less critical vigilance and a measure of responsible control.

That transference and responses to it cannot be seen in narrowly psychological terms but always involve social and political issues is itself dramatically illustrated by recent developments. Indeed, the very understanding of psychoanalysis merely as a psychology of the individual is itself a profound misunderstanding that functions to conceal the interaction between transferential processes and sociopolitical problems. The effort of the early Frankfurt School to forge a link between Freud and Marx should itself be seen not as an idiosyncratic or dated project but as a specific, yet in certain respects paradigmatic, attempt to theorize the bond between psychoanalytic and sociopolitical processes. The disabling effects of not making this necessary attempt are nowhere more blatant than in the views of certain participants in the historians’ debate.5

Comments made during the Bitburg incident indicate how the historians’ debate is part of a broader attempt, especially prominent in neoconservative circles, to accentuate the positive in history or at least to have all parties derive some benefit from a potentially devastating past. Helmut Kohl and Ronald Reagan were at one in attempting to “emancipate” Germany from what they saw as a debilitating memory. In Reagan’s case, the notion of emancipation was tantamount to unearned, celebratory forgetting that invited the return of the repressed. It simply ignored the problems of public acknowledgment, mourning, and working-through. As Reagan put it when he tried to justify his initial decision not to visit a concentration camp during his trip to Germany commemorating the fortieth anniversary of the end of the war:

The grammatical double take in Reagan’s statement (“and the, they do, they have”) may attest to the enormity of a view that denies not only the existence of wartime participants and, by implication, of former Nazis in Germany but even the prevalence of a memory of events; it may also derive from the curious assumption that no German participants in the war had lived to be as old as Reagan himself and that very few Germans had memories better than his. More important, Reagan misconstrues the process whereby one can achieve a condition that allows one to let bygones be bygones, and he does not address the possibility that a viable and legitimate democracy cannot be based on celebratory oblivion but requires a critical attempt to come to terms with the past.

When news reports disclosed that Bitburg cemetery contained SS graves, Reagan still defended his decision to visit it: “I think that there is nothing wrong with visiting that cemetery where those young men are victims of Nazism also, even though they were fighting in German uniform, drafted into service to carry out the hateful wishes of the Nazis. They were victims, just as surely as the victims in the concentration camps.”7 The indiscriminate generalization of victimhood and the dissociation of the army and even of the SS from Nazism were carried even further by a comment of Reagan at Bergen­Belsen, which he finally decided to visit because of public pressure. Hitler not only became the sole source of all evil but was transformed into an unnamed stock figure who made all the world his victim. Reagan referred to “the awful evil started by one man — an evil that victimized all the world with its destruction. For year after year, until that man and his evil were destroyed, hell yawned forth its awful contents.”8 It is curious that a suspect appeal to demonology came from the great communicator of “positive” messages and the specialist in affirmative recognition scenes. It is even more daunting that a New York Times/CBS poll taken after the visit to Bitburg indicated that as many people in the United States (41 percent) approved of Reagan’s actions as disapproved of them.

Another dimension of the contemporary context, which has played a variable role in the historians’ debate, at least as a background factor, is the use of the Shoah as “symbolic capital” by Israel as well as the entire Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the marked (at times justified) opposition to Israeli policy, notably on the left and by Arab and other Third World states. Here one of course has an extremely complicated set of issues where one must be attentive to important differences within given groups or categories. There have been and continue to be significant debates over Israeli policy within Israel, and not all of those even on the far left are anti-Israeli. In his Personal Preface (which I discuss more fully later in this chapter), Mayer makes a brief allusion to these problems while commenting on his visit to Israel as a graduate student in 1950: “Without minimizing Israel’s security dilemma, both [Ernst] Simon and the far left of democratic Marxists took exception to the unbending policy of postindependence governments toward Israeli Arabs and the Arab states, which could only make Israel’s future more and more contingent on its American connection. During my second visit to Israel in 1954 I was struck by the wisdom and the precision of these apprehensions” (pp. xii–xiii).

Mayer does not inform us, even in his Personal Preface, about his views on these problems as they unfolded between 1954 and the publication of his book. Nor does he address directly the role of the Shoah as “symbolic capital.” It is difficult to know how to situate, in the recent past, the use of the Shoah to justify or sanction whatever Israel does to others on the grounds that what happened under the Nazis can “never again” be allowed to happen to Jews. At times it seems that this apologetic move is not so much explicitly made by defenders of certain questionable policies as somehow assumed as a diffuse possibility and often introduced by those who would proleptically reject its relevance. Indeed, this move may by now have come to exist as a brooding omnipresence and be so manifestly beside the point in certain cases as to make its explicit use unavailable or at least blatantly farfetched. Pierre Vidal-Naquet, whose expert knowledge in this matter as in other aspects of the revisionist controversy and the study of the Shoah far exceeds my own, has written that in Israel “the Shoah serves as a perpetual self-justification in all domains, in legitimizing the slightest border incident as marking a renewal of the massacre, in assimilating the Palestinians (toward whom the Israelis, all the same, are guilty of undeniable wrongs) to the SS. The result has been effective—even though the great majority of Israel’s inhabitants has had no direct experience of Nazi persecution—but some prefer to hear no more of those tragic days, and one can even find here and there in Israel a Faurisson disciple!”9

Vidal-Naquet’s own book is devoted largely to the more blatant revisionism of figures such as Robert Faurisson, Arthur Butz, and Paul Rassinier, but he also touches on broader issues, including the historians’ debate. He discusses, moreover, revisionist tendencies on the far left in France, notably in La Vieille Taupe and its founder (a former militant of Socialisme ou Barbarie) Pierre Guillaume. As Vidal-Naquet puts it: “In the view of La Vieille Taupe, there was no specificity to the Hitler experience among the gallery of modern tyrannies: the concentration camps could only be exploitation camps, in the economic sense of the word, and, as a result, the extermination camps could not have existed since, in all due logic, they should not have existed” (p. 118).

This extreme position is the absurd extension of the more general orthodox Marxist view of the economy and class conflict as the principal motors of history to which everything else must be subordinated. Hence, one has the idea that Nazism and fascism were somehow caused by capitalism (at least “in the last analysis”) and the belief that a focus on them, or what may be specific to them and not clearly derivable from capitalism, is diversionary for the revolutionary movement and obscures the truth about history. Moreover, one has the attendant belief that any pronounced attention to the Shoah must function in the present as pro-Israeli propaganda and go against revolutionary interests. Needless to say, a critical response to even these more modulated orthodox Marxist views does not entail a dismissal of the problem of the relation between Nazism and capitalism either structurally or in terms of group alliances. Nor does it imply a lack of concern with ideological uses of the Shoah. On the latter issue, Vidal-Naquet provides a concise and admirable statement: “The worst crimes that might be committed by Israel would not be justified by Treblinka, but conversely they do not change a single bit the totally criminal nature of Auschwitz and Treblinka” (p. 131).

I shall later allude to Mayer’s own leftist sympathies which, in their problematic relation to Jewish identity, may create unthematized and unexamined pressures on his argument. In The Assassins of Memory Vidal-Naquet refers appreciatively to Mayer’s book, for which he provided a blurb. (On the dust jacket he calls it “the most important effort ever made by a historian to think critically about the unthinkable.”) His preface to the French edition of Mayer’s book (published in 1990) is mixed, but in it he does rebuke Lucy Dawidowicz because of her criticism of Mayer for revisionist tendencies (in her review in Commentary, October 1989). In his interesting foreword to The Assassins of Memory, Jeffrey Mehlman brings out some of the complications of Vidal-Naquet’s own response to Mayer. He observes that Mayer “in no way denied the Nazi extermination of the Jews” and that Butz in his review of Mayer for the revisionist Journal of Historical Review denounced the book as “shoddy” (p. xvii). But he also notes that Mayer’s very inclusion of Butz and Rassinier in his bibliography was an “innovation” (p. 145n) in serious scholarship about the Holocaust. I would add that not only did this gesture seem to lend their work a certain standing if not legitimacy but that the indiscriminate character of Mayer’s bibliography had a leveling effect. In it hundreds of references simply appear seriatim with no sense of their relative importance or credibility. Mehlman also points out (p. xviii) that Robert Faurisson in his review for the Journal of Historical Review took a dig at Vidal-Naquet, who has been his greatest adversary, by “touting” Mayer as “Pierre Vidal-Naquet’s friend.” Faurisson picked up on passages in Mayer’s book that he believed served the revisionist cause. One of these (on p. 362–63 of Mayer) begins: “Sources for the study of gas chambers are at once rare and unreliable.” It includes the statement: “There is no denying the many contradictions, ambiguities, and errors in the existing sources.” (Mehlman points out that Vidal­Naquet, in his preface to the French edition of Mayer’s book, rejected the assertion that sources for the study of gas chambers are “rare and unreliable” [P. 145n]). Faurisson also highlighted Mayer’s argument that disease and exhaustion caused more deaths among Jews than...