BOOKS
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meaning over another." Ginzburg answers (in Friedlander's paraphrase)
"that even the voice of one single witness gives us some access to the
domain of historical reality, allows us to get nearer to some historical
truth." Carlo Ginzburg first seeks to taint White's argument with what he
regards as fascist theoretical antecedents, and he tries to sustain his attack
through a series of neological leaps, as unlikely as they are breathtaking. A
putative
coup de grace
comes with his conclusion that if taken to its logical
extension, White's argument would finally have to regard even the narra–
tive of Holocaust negationist Robert Faurisson as true. As deftly written
and rhetorically persuasive as it is, Ginzburg's essay is not a pretty thing to
behold.
Throughout his own illuminating essay, it becomes apparent that
Friedlander himself is torn between what he knows as an academic histo–
rian, as a critic of historical narrative, and what he feels must be made
explicitly clear: the absolute facti city of these events. He is torn between
the necessary breach dividing history as it happened and history as it is
told. Finally, he is also torn between his scholarly obligations to the rigor–
ously scientific, occasionally ponderous working-through of these issues
and his own strong impulse to de-mystify the Holocaust through lucid
and accessible narratives like
When Memory Comes.
While most essays that follow tend toward the ponderous side of this
equation, several of these are also elegantly written and conceived. The
contributions by Christopher Browning, John Felstiner, and Geoffrey
Hartman offer themselves as models oflucidity and brilliant insight, intel–
lectual rigor and accessibility. After introducing his essay with a chilling
description of events from the German Reserve Police Battalion 101's
bloody part in the Final Solution , Browning proceeds to examine how
and why he has told history this way , what consequences for understand–
ing this kind of history holds for us. To this end, he examines both the
necessity and repulsiveness of "perpetrator history," what it means to de–
scend into the psychologies and everyday lives of the killers - not as a sin–
gular alternative to the victims' history, but as a complement to it, all to–
ward a fuller history of events.
Likewise, the meditations by Felstiner and Hartman layout in clear–
eyed prose the daunting difficulties, the multiple ambiguities and com–
plexities of Felstiner's translation of Paul Celan's masterpiece,
"Todesfuge," and Hartman's attempt to add to the "Book of
Destruction." By walking us through the myriad choices a translator faces,
each one an interpretive act, Felstiner offers an eloquent model of critical
self-reflexivity, even as he makes and stands by his own choices.
Hartman's own essay on "The Book of Destruction" closes the volume
with an erudite and sparkling reflection on the very possibility of such
