Denying History: Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do They Say It?

Publication: CLIO

Publication Date: 22-JUN-01

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COPYRIGHT 2001 Indiana University, Purdue University of Fort Wayne

By Michael Shermer and Alex Grobman. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. xviii + 312 pages.

History can be defined both as what happened and as a description of what happened. The description is pieced together from testimonies, artefacts, and other detritus of events, material that is itself partial and in need of interpretation (though in some cases ultimately uninterpretable). Short of having been there ourselves, what is available of an event is--as they say about the phenomena that science takes as its object--at best an approximation, the best explanatory narrative available at the time. The more aspects of the event that narrative can account for, the better the narrative. But no narrative can account for every bit of detritus, and every narrative is missing those aspects of events that are not attached to material detritus: individual suffering, moments of elation, the small everyday events that are lost forever to memory.

Yet the complexity of history and its philosophy seems perversely abstract when confronted with the catastrophe, particularly the one that is the subject of Shermer and Grobman's book: the Shoah. It would seem to be unquestionable: it happened, and in its sweep and in the overwhelming numbers, the events that comprise it seem to have produced so much evidence--so much material detritus--that failures of memory or contradictory testimonies would pale in the face of the mountains of shoes or the fingernail scratches on the walls of the gas chambers. Yet it is this very complexity that is the focus of the deniers: because of the missing document, we cannot say for certain that the Final Solution was the systematic will of National Socialist Germany; because of the missing caption on a blueprint, we cannot say that the gas chambers were used for human extermination; because of disagreements about numbers and the causes of death, we cannot be certain that six million--or even six hundred thousand--were killed. The deniers--and there are many of them with many motives--see the complexity of history as the justification they need to make their case against the very historians whose job it is to make sure that, in Amos Funkenstein's words, "`reality,' whatever its definition, `shine[s] through [the narrative].'"

The authors of Denying History (Shermer is the founding editor of Skeptic magazine and adjunct professor of history at Occidental College; Grobman is an unaffiliated historian) have two tasks in mind: to collect in a single argument the historical facts--Funkenstein's "reality"--that may once and for all silence the deniers and show their lies for what...

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