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Collected
Memories
Holocaust History and
Post-War Testimony
Christopher R. Browning
George L. Mosse Series in
Modern European Culture and Intellectual History
Steven E. Aschheim, Skye Doney, Mary Louise Roberts, and David J. Sorkin, Series Editors
How can historians best use problematic sources, flawed by human memory and trauma?
Christopher R. Browning addresses some
of the most heated controversies that have arisen from the use
of postwar testimony: Hannah Arendt's uncritical acceptance of
Adolf Eichmann's self-portrayal in Jerusalem; the conviction
of Ivan Demjanuk (accused of being Treblinka death camp guard
"Ivan the Terrible") on the basis of survivor testimony
and its subsequent reversal by the Israeli Supreme Court; the
debate in Poland sparked by Jan Gross's use of both survivor
and communist courtroom testimony in his book Neighbors;
and the conflict between Browning himself and Daniel Goldhagen,
author of Hitler's Willing Executioners, regarding methodology
and interpretation in the use of pre-trial testimony.
Despite these controversies and challenges, Browning delineates
the ways in which the critical use of such problematic sources
can provide telling evidence for writing Holocaust history. He
examines and discusses two starkly different sets of "collected
memories"—the voluminous testimonies of notorious Holocaust
perpetrator Adolf Eichmann and the testimonies of 175 survivors
of an obscure complex of factory slave labor camps in the Polish
town of Starachowice.
Christopher R. Browning is the Frank Porter Graham Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and author of many books, including Ordinary Men, The Path to Genocide, and Nazi Policy, Jewish Workers, German Killers. In 2002 he delivered at the University of Wisconsin–Madison the first of the George L. Mosse Lectures, upon which this book is based.
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November 2003
LC: 2003007237 D
120 pp. 6 x 9
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