A great historian crowns a lifetime of thought and research by answering a question that has haunted us for more than 50 years: How did one of the most industrially and culturally advanced nations in the world embark on and continue along the path leading to one of the most enormous criminal enterprises in history, the extermination of Europe's Jews? Giving considerable emphasis to a wealth of new archival findings, Saul Friedlander restores the voices of Jews who, after the 1933 Nazi accession to power, were engulfed in an increasingly horrifying reality. We hear from the persecutors themselves: the leaders of the Nazi party, the members of the Protestant and Catholic hierarchies, the university elites, and the heads of the business community. Most telling of all, perhaps, are the testimonies of ordinary German citizens, who in the main acquiesced to increasing waves of dismissals, segregation, humiliation, impoverishment, expulsion, and violence.
A Pulitzer Prize-winning historian's return to memoir, a tale of intellectual coming-of-age on three continents, published in tandem with his classic work of Holocaust literature, When Memory Comes Forty years after his acclaimed, poignant first memoir, Friedländer returns with WHEN MEMORY COMES: THE LATER YEARS, bridging the gap between the ordeals of his childhood and his present-day towering reputation in the field of Holocaust studies. After abandoning his youthful conversion to Catholicism, he rediscovers his Jewish roots as a teenager and builds a new life in Israeli politics. Friedländer's initial loyalty to Israel turns into a lifelong fascination with Jewish life and history. He struggles to process the ubiquitous effects of European anti-Semitism while searching for a more measured approach to the Zionism that surrounds him. Friedländer goes on to spend his adulthood shuttling between Israel, Europe, and the United States, armed with his talent for language and an expansive intellect. His prestige inevitably throws him up against other intellectual heavyweights. In his early years in Israel, he rubs shoulders with the architects of the fledgling state and brilliant minds such as Gershom Scholem and Carlo Ginzburg, among others. Most importantly, this memoir led Friedländer to reflect on the wrenching events that induced him to devote sixteen years of his life to writing his Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece, The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945.
This remarkable memoir, by a distinguished historian, grows out of the loose framework of a diary written in Israel during the tense last few months of 1977. In a series of flashbacks, Saul Friedlander evokes with painful clarity and candor his extraordinary childhood and adolescence, beginning in a comfortable, middle-class, assimilated Jewish home in the Prague of the 1930's, and extending through and beyond the harrowing, and permanent, separation from his parents in Nazi-dominated France. Though fascinating in themselves, on a deeper level the reminiscences raise questions about much more than one man's life. In forcing himself to go back and examine his past, to seek out reasons and feelings, Friedlander is asking what it is that motivates a Zionist. What does it mean to be a Jew in Israel now? Where are the roots of a people with a history of rootlessness? Pavel Friedlander, as he was then known, was seven when the family fled Czechoslovakia in 1939. Before they were herded away to desruction, his parents were able to leave their ten-year-old boy in a Catholic seminary. Baptized Paul-Henri, he excelled in his studies and was headed for the priesthood. In his unsentimental, delicate, and precise narrative, we see through the boy's eyes the seminary's chilly dormitories and the hot, dusty fields of a provincial French summer. Then comes the Liberation. Paul-Henri rediscovers his identity and in 1948, on the brink of his high-school graduation, runs away to Marseilles to board ship for the nascent state of Israel--one of the survivors on the ill-fated Altalena. He now takes his Hebrew name, Shaul. Thirty years later, in bringing the disparate threads of memories together, Friedlander unflinchingly expresses the dilemmas in which any thinking person must feel himself vis-a-vis Israel and the Jews. His doubts are unresolved and probably unresolvable. But in an entirely fresh and poignant way Saul Friedlander has given us a better understanding of them.
An abridged edition of Saul Friedlander's definitive two-volume history of the Holocaust: THE YEARS OF PERSECUTION and THE YEARS OF EXTERMINATION. Saul Friedlander's historical masterpiece is perhaps the richest examination of the Holocaust yet written, and, crucially, one that never loses sight of the experiences of individuals in its discussion of Nazi politics and the terrible statistics and technological and administrative sophistication of the Final Solution. The book's first part, dealing with the National Socialist campaign of oppression, restores the voices of Jews who were engulfed in an increasingly horrifying reality following the Nazi accession to power. Friedländer also provides the accounts of the persecutors themselves - and, perhaps most telling of all, the testimonies of ordinary German citizens. The second part covers the German extermination policies that resulted in the murder of six million European Jews.
Searching reflections on the crisis in Israel and Gaza by a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian of the Holocaust Diary of a Crisis explores the past tumultuous and traumatic year in Israel-Palestine. The eminent historian Saul Friedländer began a diary of Israeli politics in January 2023 as the country was convulsed by protests against Netanyahu’s attempt to overhaul the judiciary. Hundreds of thousands took to the streets to demonstrate against this threat to democracy. But the protests said nothing about the Palestinian question—the "elephant in the room," according to Friedländer, who resumed his diary after Hamas’s 7 October assault on southern Israel. Israel was facing one of the worst crises in its history, he observes, under the worst possible internal conditions. Friedländer weaves together profound reflections on a national history in which he has been an active participant. He describes how Prime Minister Golda Meir once flatly declared to him, "There is no Palestinian people." For Friedländer, on the other hand, the fight for democracy is inseparable from equality of treatment for Arab and Jewish citizens and an end to Israeli domination over Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. He argues that despite the continuing bloodshed, a two-state solution remains the only long-term answer to this most intractable of conflicts.
A classic of Holocaust literature, the eloquent, acclaimed memoir of childhood by a Pulitzer-winning historian, now reissued with a new introduction by Claire Messud Four months before Hitler came to power, Saul Friedländer was born in Prague to a middle-class Jewish family. In 1939, seven-year-old Saul and his family were forced to flee to France, where they lived through the German Occupation, until his parents' ill-fated attempt to flee to Switzerland. They were able to hide their son in a Roman Catholic seminary before being sent to Auschwitz where they were killed. After an imposed religious conversion, young Saul began training for priesthood. The birth of Israel prompted his discovery of his Jewish past and his true identity. Friedländer brings his story movingly to life, shifting between his Israeli present and his European past with grace and restraint. His keen eye spares nothing, not even himself, as he explores the ways in which the loss of his parents, his conversion to Catholicism, and his deep-seated Jewish roots combined to shape him into the man he is today. Friedländer's retrospective view of his journey of grief and self-discovery provides readers with a rare experience: a memoir of feeling with intellectual backbone, in equal measure tender and insightful.
Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1933-1945 is an abridged edition of Saul Friedländer's definitive Pulitzer Prize-winning two-volume history of the Holocaust: Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution, 1933-1939 and The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945. The book's first part, dealing with the National Socialist campaign of oppression, restores the voices of Jews who were engulfed in an increasingly horrifying reality following the Nazi accession to power. Friedländer also provides the accounts of the persecutors themselves—and, perhaps most telling of all, the testimonies of ordinary German citizens who, in general, stood silent and unmoved by the increasing waves of segregation, humiliation, impoverishment, and violence. The second part covers the German extermination policies that resulted in the murder of six million European Jews—an official program that depended upon the cooperation of local authorities and police departments, the passivity of the populations, and the willingness of the victims to submit in desperate hope of surviving long enough to escape the German vise. A monumental, multifaceted study now contained in a single volume, Saul Friedländer's Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1933-1945 is an essential study of a dark and complex history.
The second and concluding volume of the definitive two-volume account of the Holocaust With THE YEARS OF EXTERMINATION, Friedlander completes his work on Nazi Germany and the Jews. The book describes and interprets the history of the persecution and murder of the Jews throughout occupied Europe. The implementation of German extermination policies and measures depended on the submissiveness of political authorities, the assistance of local police forces and the passivity or co-operation of the populations, primarily of their political and spiritual elites. The implementation also depended on the readiness of the victimes to submit to orders, often with the hope of modifying them or surviving long enough to escape the German vice. This multifaceted representation - at all levels and in all different places - enhances the perception of the magnitude, complexity and interrelatedness of the multiple components of this history. Based on a vast variety of documents and an overwhelming choir of voices, Friedlander manages to avoid domesticating the memory of unparalleled and horrific events. The convergence of these various aspects gives THE YEARS OF EXTERMINATION its unique aulity. In this work the history of the Holocaust has found its definitive representation.
Himself a survivor, Friedlander has been a leading figure in 'Holocaust Studies' for decades and this book represents a definitive summing up of his research and that of hundreds of other historians. NAZI GERMANY AND THE JEWS: THE YEARS OF PERSECUTION is perhaps the richest examination of the subject yet written, and, crucially, one that never loses sight of the experiences of individuals in its discussion of Nazi politics and the terrible statistics and technological and administrative sophistication of the Final Soloution.
Establishes itself as the standard historical work on Nazi Germany’s mass murder of Europe’s Jews. . . . An account of unparalleled vividness and power that reads like a novel. . . . A masterpiece that will endure." — New York Times Book Review The Years of Extermination, the completion of Saul Friedländer's major historical opus on Nazi Germany and the Jews, explores the convergence of the various aspects of the Holocaust, the most systematic and sustained of modern genocides. The enactment of the German extermination policies that resulted in the murder of six million European Jews depended upon many factors, including the cooperation of local authorities and police departments, and the passivity of the populations, primarily of their political and spiritual elites. Necessary also was the victims' willingness to submit, often with the hope of surviving long enough to escape the German vise. In this unparalleled work—based on a vast array of documents and an overwhelming choir of voices from diaries, letters, and memoirs—the history of the Holocaust has found its definitive representation.
Named a Times Literary Supplement Best Book of the Year A Pulitzer Prize–winning historian revisits Marcel Proust’s masterpiece in this essay on literature and memory, exploring the question of identity—that of the novel’s narrator and Proust’s own. This engaging reexamination of In Search of Lost Time considers how the narrator defines himself, how this compares to what we know of Proust himself, and what the significance is of these various points of commonality and divergence. We know, for example, that the author did not hide his homosexuality, but the narrator did. Why the difference? We know that the narrator tried to marginalize his part-Jewish background. Does this reflect the author’s position, and how does the narrator handle what he tries, but does not manage, to dismiss? These are major questions raised by the text and reflected in the text, to which the author’s life doesn’t give obvious answers. The narrator’s reflections on time, on death, on memory, and on love are as many paths leading to the image of self that he projects. In Proustian Uncertainties, Saul Friedländer draws on his personal experience from a life spent investigating the ties between history and memory to offer a fresh perspective on the seminal work.
--Bulletin of the Arnold and Leora Finkler Institute of the Holocaust ResearchA world-famous scholar analyzes the historiography of the Nazi period, including conflicting interpretations of the Holocaust and the impact of German reunification.
A great historian crowns a lifetime of thought and research by answering a question that has haunted us for more than 50 years: How did one of the most industrially and culturally advanced nations in the world embark on and continue along the path leading to one of the most enormous criminal enterprises in history, the extermination of Europe's Jews? Giving considerable emphasis to a wealth of new archival findings, Saul Friedlander restores the voices of Jews who, after the 1933 Nazi accession to power, were engulfed in an increasingly horrifying reality. We hear from the persecutors themselves: the leaders of the Nazi party, the members of the Protestant and Catholic hierarchies, the university elites, and the heads of the business community. Most telling of all, perhaps, are the testimonies of ordinary German citizens, who in the main acquiesced to increasing waves of dismissals, segregation, humiliation, impoverishment, expulsion, and violence.
The enactment of the German extermination policies that resulted in the murder of six million European Jews depended upon many factors, including the cooperation of local authorities and police departments, and the passivity of the populations, primarily of their political and spiritual elites. Necessary also was the victims' willingness to submit, often with the hope of surviving long enough to escape the German vise. The Years of Extermination, the completion of Saul Friedländer's major historical opus on Nazi Germany and the Jews, explores the convergence of the various aspects of this most systematic and sustained of modern genocides. In this unparalleled work—based on a vast array of documents and an overwhelming choir of voices from diaries, letters, and memoirs—the history of the Holocaust has found its definitive representation.
This ePaper, History and Memory: lessons from the Holocaust, presents the original text of the Leçon inaugurale delivered by Professor Saul Friedländer on 23 September 2014 at the Maison de la Paix, which marked the opening of the academic year of the Graduate Institute, Geneva. The lecture highlights an original analysis of the evolution of German memory since the end of World War II and its consequences on the writing of history. Generations of historians have been particularly marked in a differentiated manner, depending on their personal proximity to the war, but also on collective representations conveyed by film and television in a globalised world. Saul Friedländer is Emeritus Professor at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA). He won numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize in 2008 for his book The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945. In 1963, he received his PhD from the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva, where he taught until 1988.
Looks at that major aspects of Kafka's life—family, Judaism, love and sex, writing, illness and despair—and argues that, when reinserted in Kafka's letters and diaries, deleted segments lift the mask of "sainthood" frequently attached to the writer. 12,000 first printing.
A great historian crowns a lifetime of thought and research by answering a question that has haunted us for more than 50 years: How did one of the most industrially and culturally advanced nations in the world embark on and continue along the path leading to one of the most enormous criminal enterprises in history, the extermination of Europe's Jews? Giving considerable emphasis to a wealth of new archival findings, Saul Friedlander restores the voices of Jews who, after the 1933 Nazi accession to power, were engulfed in an increasingly horrifying reality. We hear from the persecutors themselves: the leaders of the Nazi party, the members of the Protestant and Catholic hierarchies, the university elites, and the heads of the business community. Most telling of all, perhaps, are the testimonies of ordinary German citizens, who in the main acquiesced to increasing waves of dismissals, segregation, humiliation, impoverishment, expulsion, and violence.
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