From History to Historical Remembrance in Holocaust Studies

Abstract

I explain how the study of the Holocaust of European Jews has shifted since the 1980s from its realities to its remembered legacies. I review a succession of issues about Holocaust memory from the Historians’ Dispute in Germany over the limits of its representation during the 1980s, to strategies of German statesmen to find a symbolic compromise in its official commemorations during the 1990s, to reflections on moral responsibility in the passing of living memory of the Holocaust into written history in our times. I close with discussion of recent work on the globalization of Holocaust remembrance as a historiographical reference in the campaign for human rights in our times.