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Empathy, Ethics, and Politics in Holocaust Historiography

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Empathy and its Limits

Abstract

As early as 3 February 1940, some five months after Warsaw had been occupied by the Nazis and some nine months before he was prisoned in the Warsaw ghetto, the Hebrew diarist Chaim Kaplan addressed the question of how Nazism could be understood and represented:

Descriptive literary accounts cannot suffice to clarify and emphasize its [Nazism’s] real quality. And moreover, no writer among the gentiles is qualified for this task. Even a Jewish writer who lives the life of his people, who feels their disgrace and suffers their agony, cannot find a true path here. Only one who feels the taste of Nazi rule in all his [body], only one who has bared his back to the lashes of his whips […] only such a writer, if he is a man of sensitivity […] might be able to give a true description of this pathological phenomenon called Nazism.1

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Notes

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Authors
  1. Amos Goldberg
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Konstanz, Germany

    Aleida Assmann  & Ines Detmers  & 

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© 2016 Amos Goldberg

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Goldberg, A. (2016). Empathy, Ethics, and Politics in Holocaust Historiography. In: Assmann, A., Detmers, I. (eds) Empathy and its Limits. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137552372_4

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