The Historiography of the Holocaust

204 Jürgen Matthäus
bounds of the legally relevant against the encroachments of difficult memory’. 25
Represented by their defence lawyers and standing in the media limelight, the
accused received more attention than their erstwhile victims. The evidence
compiled by the courts on the day-to-day workings of genocide across Germandominated
Europe could not bridge the gulf between survivor memory and
legal procedure. In conjunction with the striking inadequacy of the verdicts (in
many cases, acquittals), court proceedings brought back long-repressed recollections
even to those survivors who were only observers, not witnesses to the
trials. Outside the courtroom, some survivors transformed their encounter with
the judiciary into pronouncements that were significantly to shape public perceptions
of the Holocaust. Peter Weiss, after attending a session of the Frankfurt
Auschwitz trial in March 1964, portrayed the proceedings in his famous play
‘The Investigation’. 26 After almost twenty years of silence, the same trial enticed
Jean Améry to write a series of essays that were to appear in book form for the first
time in 1966. From today’s perspective, it might be surprising to note that Améry
envisaged as his audience not his fellow survivors – ‘they know it already’ – but
the majority of Germans who ‘felt not or no longer concerned by the most
sinister and at the same time most characteristic deeds of the Third Reich’. 27
Similarly, Primo Levi stated prior to the publication of his famous If this is a Man
that ‘its true recipients, those against whom the book was aimed like a gun
were they, the Germans’. 28
The complex interrelation between perpetrator and survivor perspectives of
the Holocaust remains yet to be fully examined. It is evident, however, that
while the efforts of Weiss, Améry and Levi clearly reached a vast audience,
they had little direct impact on the professional keepers of memory. In the
scholarly debates of the 1970s and 1980s, the most prominent schools of
historians preferred to uphold fixed interpretations over empirical analysis of
documents or other sources, including survivor accounts. One group of historians
(the so-called ‘intentionalists’, e.g. Eberhard Jäckel) argued that Hitler’s
Weltanschauung (worldview) provided the blueprint for Nazi policy, thus perpetuating
the ‘superior order’ argument that had emerged at Nuremberg and
benefited those accused of mass murder. Their ‘functionalist’ opponents (e.g.
Martin Broszat) claimed that the Nazi system was characterized by a ‘weak
dictator’, who shied away from making decisions on most key issues and instead
left it to subordinates from different agencies to fight it out; the winner was
then rewarded by Hitler’s approval. While the Holocaust was originally not in
the forefront of the debate, it became prominent in the late 1970s after
German society’s willingness to confront the issue had grown following sociopolitical
changes that included the disappearance from public life of the older,
directly involved generation. Where the intentionalists saw a straight line
leading from the Führer’s headquarters to the murder sites, the functionalists
discovered an unmapped ‘twisted road to Auschwitz’ (Karl Schleunes) with