Panel III: Holocaust Research From the Archive to the Classroom
Professor Michael R. Marrus, University of Toronto, Canada
"Main point: Whatever else it is, and for whatever purposes we research and teach the Holocaust, some part of that work is about scholarship - by which I mean the systematic study of the subject in an academic setting, with the same rules of scholarship as we would devote to the Renaissance, the French Revolution, or the First World War."
"Contrary to widespread view, there's lots of disagreement, even among specialists, about the best approach and wider objectives of Holocaust education at all levels: What should be the balance of the universal/particular? To what degree should professional historians be defining lessons? What is the place of survivor testimony? What attention should there be to the sensibilities of Jews, non-Jews, other victim groups? Let me suggest one approach to some answers. That involves, as one of my old professors once put it defining the goal of all scholarly activity, `getting it right'. 'Getting it right' means framing questions to which we don't know the answers, wide-ranging reading, seeing documents in their original form, learning foreign languages, and studying the socio-cultural idioms of particular contexts. More often than not, it means visits to dreary, illappointed archives, sifting seemingly worthless papers for hours on end. And it requires plenty of 'Sitzfleisch'."
Professor Dr. Ulrich Herbert, Freiburg University, Germany
"Yet the conclusion we can draw from this is that in order to go along with, condone or even embrace the emerging National Socialist policy of murder and destruction, there was no real need for far-reaching ideological fanaticism, mass hysteria or an encompassing national project. Rather, the widespread disinterest, the pronounced lack of a system of values in which protection for minorities was enshrined as a central ethical norm for civilized society, the massive indifference, the blunting of sensibilities, the yoke of repression - all these proved to be more than enough as a basis. Yet this finding of mounting indifference as a hallmark of the popular attitude toward the Nazi policies of annihilation is in some respects far more alarming than to see German society as rabidly and thoroughly anti-Semitic, with anti-Jewish policies at the very heart of its expectations and demands. If it was not largely or solely a desire for murder that animated the German population in this era - but rather a melange of unconcern, apathy and a blatant lack of ethical norms, the current import of the genocide needs to be reinterpreted. Then the mass murder does not point solely to a historically defined situation and specific German society of the 1930s and 40s, but is significantly widened. It's contagion of indifference becomes an explosive topic, relevant in a deeply disturbing way to our present - not only in Germany, but there after all most of all."