Vol. 23 · No. 2 · Issue 75 · Summer 2005

Eric Langenbacher

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Omer Bartov, Germany's War and the Holocaust: Disputed Histories (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003)
Eva Hoffman, After Such Knowledge: Memory, History and the Legacy of the Holocaust (New York: Public Affairs, 2004)
Dan Stone, Constructing the Holocaust: A Study in Historiography (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2003)

Over the six decades since the demise of the Nazi regime, thousands of pages have been written about the genocide of European Jews in almost every genre and intellectual forum. Eva Hoffman even concludes that "the Holocaust is the most documented event in history" (192). Nevertheless, the magnitude and complexity of the trauma and its aftereffects-on survivors, their descendents and the political cultures of many countries-left numerous lacunae and taboos that surrounded discourse and scholarship. Only relatively recently have more unconstrained questions been possible and various silences exposed. The three books examined in this review essay all contribute to the on-going quest for comprehension, delving expertly into previously unexamined issues, while revealing how much still remains to work through the defining event of the 20th century.